267 réponses à ce sujet

[Sylvius the Mad]

Oblivion and on no levitation. It's a big loss IMO. I want levitation, super jumps, climbing all back in elder scrolls 6. Allow me to go in the back door of a dungeon again.

Skyrim does allow that if you parkour up the mountains enough.

[MsKlaussen]

What's the actual problem with MP? I get that you don't like it, but I'm wholly indifferent to MP, and I don't see why I should feel otherwise.

 

The problem with multiplayer for me is that it introduces trollish asshats and their lame objectives, exploits, and grade school junk size contests in highly immersion breaking fashion to single player games that allow for a player to really sink into the experience.

 

Now, I am completely indifferent to them as well so long as its my choice whether or not to play them, such as with ESO, which is a completely different gameplay experience (a lesser experience in my view) than the SP games such as Skyrim. If they try to slam anything related to ESO into Elder Scrolls 6 it will be the end of my Elder Scrolls experience. I've no intention of playing a game that started out playable the way I saw fit with as much detail and focus on the storyline or lack thereof as I chose, that turns into a donnybrook between geeks and teens powered by a degraded graphics engine, littered with paid "powerups", arcade style "big head mode" additions griefers and exploits. I don't see any reason why a pristine SP game should be subjected to or diminished in any way by attempts to integrate an entirely different philosphical play style system and then making that system mandatory to "unlock" portions of a SP game I already paid in full for up front.

 

Others may feel different. That's my view.

[AlanC9]

I'll take your word for that. Never went near ESO since I've got no interest in MP, and I generally wait for TES games to be 75% off on Steam. But when you buy an MP game when you don't like MP, what do you expect?

Anyway, this really isn't too relevant to ME. ME:A will have MP which we can ignore, and if there's ever any sort of ME online game, we can ignore that too.

[In Exile]

ME2 had great characters.  But the story was cr*p.

 

It was actually embarrassing to see such interesting characters wasted on it.

 

The ME stories were always crap. The thing going for ME2 was that it had significantly better side quests on the whole, especially the companion vignettes. Sure, they ended up wasted on a dumb plot, but ME1 had a complete nonsense plot with worse characters. 

[Ahglock]

Skyrim does allow that if you parkour up the mountains enough.

 

You can get anwhere in the outerworld but many if not most back doors are locked and can only be opened from the inside.  There is nothing wrong in sneaking in the back door killing the boss, stealing his crap, ignroing everyone there or whatever fits your charcter and leaving without ever seeing the rest of the dungeon.  Too bad Bethesda forgot this oblivion on.  Aparently the power armor has a jet pack so i hope they are trending back to some of this for elder scrolls 6. (eagerly awaiting 12AM so I can play FO4)

[Applepie_Svk]

I believe that they already tried to do less story and more exploration, and they are doing it since the release of DA2, but story is happen to be somehow secondary to gameplay mechanisms and overall exploration and looks how it end up. 

 

I don´t mind exploration with good balance betwen story and to do stuff in it, but I do not like just empty exploration with meaningless fetchqests and big areas which are either empty or repetitive. It´s exactly what is in a problem of both ME3 and DA:I, balance betwen freedom to explore and choice of progress thru campaign.  

 

While ME3 was filled with repetitive quests and those fetchqests, its overall exploration and freedom of progress was limited, even when most of the side quests were properly made and executed.

But DA:I was exactly opposite, it had this big zones, with some freedom of progress, but some of these zones lacked any other importance to game than loot, they were just big empty MMO-ish zones with lot of trash to slain and some fetch quests to do. 

 

On the other hand, games that did it good or great from story perspective were ME1, ME2 and DA:O. These games managed to add to each area or planet some story, there was something to explore and not just by the exploration itself but conversations and story progression aswell. 

[wolfhowwl]

The ME stories were always crap. The thing going for ME2 was that it had significantly better side quests on the whole, especially the companion vignettes. Sure, they ended up wasted on a dumb plot, but ME1 had a complete nonsense plot with worse characters. 

 

DELETE THIS

[Seraphim24]

The ME stories were always crap. The thing going for ME2 was that it had significantly better side quests on the whole, especially the companion vignettes. Sure, they ended up wasted on a dumb plot, but ME1 had a complete nonsense plot with worse characters. 

 

ME2 had significantly worse side quests in every way, can't remember a single one actually for the most part. They were much more stereotypical and just standardized artistically and game wise.

 

Honestly if you just change 1 and 2 everywhere then your statements work

[Sylvius the Mad]

But DA:I was exactly opposite, it had this big zones, with some freedom of progress, but some of these zones lacked any other importance to game than loot, they were just big empty MMO-ish zones with lot of trash to slain and some fetch quests to do.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Not every area should be plot relevant. Not every area should give you a reason to go there.

[Seraphim24]

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Not every area should be plot relevant. Not every area should give you a reason to go there.

 

Well, I would say at a minimum, it shouldn't be like "There is a guy around the corner that has your quest item," it should just be like here's an alley or something and the theif was known to frequent alleys and you kind of connect the dots or something.

[In Exile]

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Not every area should be plot relevant. Not every area should give you a reason to go there.

 

But every area should have a plot. The problem with open world games, often, is that their world doesn't make sense as a world. New Vegas is a good counter-example, because it tries very hard to make sense as a world, existing independently of the player. 

[Seraphim24]

Ah ok this is one thing I meant to put down somewhere, this works

 

So Wasteland 2, I got this game being unfamiliar with the series, thinking it was kind of like a Fallout or something, and so expectations were a bit high. The beginning went all right but was surprised all your characters are basically created by you with the exception of Angela Deth who was in the original apparently.

 

So I bust out of the tutorial and bam, immediately get 2 directed quests through the wasteland, you don't even wander out to get the "oh my god the desert" feeling, it's just, wam bam there you go, and not only that all the other side objectives and quests are clustered around those 2 major points, and not only that doing the main quest in one area precludes doing it in the other. So what you really have is a cluster clump main quest with side bonus objectives, in practice.

 

Moreover, this continues on to the next phases, you get the main quest to find.. er... can't recall specifically, anyway you end up in the Canyon of the whatevers, which isn't even an open world map, it's a tiny zone but it has lots of possibilities within it. You can ally with 2 separate factions, you can complete side objectives on the way in and out, you have small bonuses here and there, etc, etc.

 

Yet once again, back to the world map, next phase is just the robot town, in total there are essentially 3 major hubs with side objectives, even though it's supposed to be kind of a big open Fallout sort of experience. I'm not going to knock the game too hard or something, it was still fun, but on closer inspection you can sort of see these things not being quite what they appear.

 

I mean on closer inspection, you can find side things like to the west there is a bonus treasure thing behind the mountains, and more of those are scattered around, but in practice, it wasn't really a big world or anything.

 

The second half dropped a bit of the pretenses but was more engaging in some ways like having the Mannerites and those jokes and so on, but overall the experience is quite linear despite the trappings. There were also the crazed killer nuns which was quite a challenging fight in many ways, wasn't realkly used to that, it's certainly a more hardcore game than most.

 

Anyway, I also haven't tried Pillars so I'm not saying the same thing, but again this is something that kind of plays up it's "CRPG open world" roots but that doesn't always translate. In practice, I didn't really enjoy Wasteland 2 all that much although it did have it's moments, and it's nice that the people who made it offered a CRPG experience of a kind. I don't regret having bought and played it at all, and actually I'm still kind of interested in Numenera, but it's important to be wary that these labels don't necessarily translate 1 to 1 to "open world" experience, regardless of what engine you are using, whether your game looks like early Fallout or Wasteland or Dragon Age or whatever.

 

With things like Skyrim, they go far max space but that doesn't necessarily make it anymore meaningful, it has to depend on a number of factors.

 

I think the main point here is just, "less story more exploration like Skyrim" is not really... in general this particular company seems to resist making the big open huge mega thing because they seem acutely aware that it's not as simple as just making a big world.

 

Or take roguelikes/Minecraft, once again, the infinite possibilities become very limited, in practice your goals in Minecraft are hyper, almost zealously linear, make money make goods gain power. No one would properly describe Minecraft as a power fantasy but if you ignore the marketing material it's basically just that, the open world makes decisions meaningless, ergo, it's a hyper linear even cinematic experience, just of a typical subject matter.

 

It's kind of like in dungeons how you just will randomly come across 2 possible paths and you have no way at all of knowing which way is which? The only way to resolve that situation is to develop a rule like "always go left" which means the gameplay possibility of being able to meet an objective is reduced and instead of having open gameplay it's actually just a constrained linear path since choice became random.

 

So, that awareness this company has in their trepidation in making a mega Skyrim like big world (not necessarily open mind you, but big) is good, it's good for them to think that way, that's an appropriate thing. Actually, inExile's Wasteland 2 is the same way in many respects, but my point is it's not like the engine or the concept that will make or break the experience, it's like I said, dependent on many factors.

 

Bioware (and honestly even inExile and Obsidan also) should stop buying into the labels that their games are cinematic and the others are open world. The other games are big and often continuously interactive, but that is not the same thing. When Half Life touted it's seamless experience, it ignores that the difference between an official cutscene and standing there and having a guy talk at you with a few limited movement options is practically the same thing.

 

Conversely, as I stated earlier, obviously Dragon Age has a lot of cutscenes but you consider the actual worlds they tend to have more meaningful differences in the world itself, and thus constitute the feeling of an actual open world.

 

Ahem, there we go.

[ZipZap2000]

I had a feeling this thread would deliver.

[AlanC9]

ME2 had significantly worse side quests in every way, can't remember a single one actually for the most part. They were much more stereotypical and just standardized artistically and game wise.

Not every way. ME2 had individually designed maps instead of ME1's cookie cutter prefabs, and Shepard can actually land where he wants to go.

[Sidney]

But every area should have a plot. The problem with open world games, often, is that their world doesn't make sense as a world. New Vegas is a good counter-example, because it tries very hard to make sense as a world, existing independently of the player.

Few of them really make much sense at all. The worlds are always too small, too congested and clogged with trash. The Deathclaws are closer to most settlements than my kitchen is to my bedroom. Skyrim and the recent Fallouts both suffer from the same there is another horrible monster/dungeon every 10 feet. Toss in that settlements are always orders of magnitude too small and they feel bad. New Vegas Does at least try and pretend that the world exists as something other than your personal murderfest setting.

ME1 worlds actually do make sense because these are sparsely populated borderlands the problem remains that finding rocks, writing and insignias isn't any more interesting than finding shards in DAI -- they are both chores not quests.

[Applepie_Svk]

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Not every area should be plot relevant. Not every area should give you a reason to go there.

not at all, but zones with size like Exalted plains - Emprise du Lion etc., i would pressume that there is rather some importance and story to it, like every bigger zone back in DAO . You´ve had side story behind an elven woods, dwarven caves aswell the mointain parts of game which were somehow connected into plot.

While you´ve had a chance to explore these zones, you´ve had also chance too experience some of the side stories which were great, these areas tried to tell some story connected to world at every possible inch, which made world more believable and alive. 

The problem of these big zones in the Inquisition was that they were somehow without interactive backstory to it, you´ve had some diary explanation of what happened there, but other than that those zones were more like some WoW zones, filled with fetchquests and enemy, and even Blizzard managed with WoW locations secure more story for them. World of Warcraft on the other hand was trying since the release of LK to imput some interactive story, places that were important to lore and stuff like that all over the game. And even BioWare´s SW MMO has a backstories to every zone, those were more interesting than going thru most of the DA:I zones.

[Catastrophy]

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Not every area should be plot relevant. Not every area should give you a reason to go there.

But it should have something in there I'd like to see. Like from afar. And then I undertake my journey to get there. Devious Perils lie ahead. Such as Asari settlements e.g.

[Selene Moonsong]

Lets see... ME 1 Exploration: It was okay, sometimes interesting, and sometimes rather fun, but only so much that can be done with it without having something to do with an overall story line to help drive it along. 

 

Finding creatures and killing them for whatever they drop has limited appeal. Finding new beings and becoming allies and or friends, gives more reason to explore than just to see what's there and  kill anything that gets in your way.

 

Exploration without reasons or motivations through story arcs based on various interactions characters and beings can result in nothing more than being feeling more like glorified arcade game style shooter than an adventure IMHO.

[Hoge]

I'm sure it's been stated many times so I'll keep it brief; more story AND more exploration. It's a Bioware game, it's going to have a damn story.

[Satele-Shan87]

Less Story ? I hope it won't be true, Mass Effect's strong point is its story

[UnspeakableCat]

Open world is okay.

 

BUT.

IT.

HAS.

TO.

BE.

DONE.

THE.

RIGHT.

WAY.

 

Not like in Inquisition. I HATE to play Inquisition, I love the story and the characters but exploration sessions are unbearably boring. I don't give a damn about fighting random dragons (why the heck should I kill them?! They're beautiful, majestic creatues, I refuse to take them down just for the loot and because 'it feels like Skyrim') I hope that Bioware will learn from their mistakes and give us a galaxy filled with interesting quests WITH OPENING AND IN-BETWEEN CINEMATICS, real rewards for our efforts, secrets to uncover and things to do for a clear purpose, not just because 'skyrim did it too'.

 

/sighs

[Sylvius the Mad]

But every area should have a plot. The problem with open world games, often, is that their world doesn't make sense as a world. New Vegas is a good counter-example, because it tries very hard to make sense as a world, existing independently of the player.

The sense shouldn't always be visible, though. It isn't IRL. Yes, I'm aware the real world makes sense; I just can't always perceive how.

My character's experience is similar.

[Sylvius the Mad]

But it should have something in there I'd like to see. Like from afar. And then I undertake my journey to get there. Devious Perils lie ahead. Such as Asari settlements e.g.

There are parts of the real world I don't want to visit. Why should the game world be any different?

Perhaps my next character will want to go there.

[PhroXenGold]

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Not every area should be plot relevant. Not every area should give you a reason to go there.

 

I think that depends on the plot. If the plot implies the kind of time constraints most games do (i.e. the big bad is going to conquer/destroy the world/galaxy, you have to stop them now), then having large amounts of non-plot relevant areas makes little sense if your character goes of doing non-plot relevant stuff, the time wasted doing such things risks letting the big bad win. In the absence of negative consequences for ignoring the story (something I would love but admit is very unlikely to appear in games like Bioware's, as "you spent too long pissing about, the evil guy won" would likely annoy too much of their fanbase), having this content makes no sense given the plot.

 

ME1 suffered horribly from this. You're in a race against time to stop Saren (hell, the quest is even called that...) and you always have a good lead on his activities. There's no reason to visit the uncharted worlds. Even if you consider the Council's information to be somewhat dodgy, at least it's something, and a far better starting point than wandering off into the unknown without the slightest idea where you might find information you need. So why is this content even in the game?

 

Of course, the best solution is to write the story of the game keeping this issue in mind - likely such that there are times when you have to act immediately, and times when you don't have clear cut objectives and have the time to go and do non-plot content. ME2 did this reasonably well - when the collectors were, say, attacking Horizon, you had to go and deal with it now, but after that then you had a certain period of time (represented by a fixed number of missions) before the next bit of information on how to stop them emerged in which you were free to do what you want. But if BW don't do it this way, if they continue with a story that implies constant time constraints, I'd rather see no significant non-plot content (side content you can do while advancing the main plot is fine) that have the stupidity of the ME1 method of simply stopping time for everyone else while you go and potter around some barren uninhabited planet.

[Sylvius the Mad]

I think that depends on the plot. If the plot implies the kind of time constraints most games do (i.e. the big bad is going to conquer/destroy the world/galaxy, you have to stop them now), then having large amounts of non-plot relevant areas makes little sense if your character goes of doing non-plot relevant stuff, the time wasted doing such things risks letting the big bad win. In the absence of negative consequences for ignoring the story (something I would love but admit is very unlikely to appear in games like Bioware's, as "you spent too long pissing about, the evil guy won" would likely annoy too much of their fanbase), having this content makes no sense given the plot.

They don't get to decide what the plot is.

ME1 suffered horribly from this. You're in a race against time to stop Saren (hell, the quest is even called that...) and you always have a good lead on his activities. There's no reason to visit the uncharted worlds.

There were rumours of Geth activity. Investigating them made sense. Also, the council doesn't think Saren's responsible; why would Shepard?

Even if you consider the Council's information to be somewhat dodgy, at least it's something, and a far better starting point than wandering off into the unknown without the slightest idea where you might find information you need. So why is this content even in the game?

To make the game world believable. There's more going on in the galaxy than just your quest (assuming you even want to pursue it).

Remember, they're not making a game. They're making a world; the game is what we do with that world.