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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9306634" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>I really hope we see a bit of a move away from "huge open worlds" in RPGs. Even BG3 was impacted by it, because the reason the devs abandoned a ton of more exotic locations (the Astral plane, Candlekeep, etc.) was that they wanted to focus on larger more open-world-like areas. I think we'd be looking at an even better game if they hadn't done that (especially as they lost so much work in the process).</p><p></p><p>But if you look at RPGs over the last 15+ years, many of the most persuasive and effective have been those which didn't go for "huge open worlds", and several games with supposedly huge open worlds very clearly showed up how empty and pointless those can seem - SF RPGs particularly. For example, Mass Effect Andromeda - the few bits of the game which were genuinely good (and there were some) - were all tight, indoor segments like the classic ME games. Most of the big zones were just tiring and empty-feeling. The Outer Worlds was similar - the open world there didn't really enhance the game - it wasn't well-used like Fallout:NV to provide a really complex and engaging playground that directed you towards interesting stuff, it was a big empty space full of nothing. And the we have the ultimate big empty space full of nothing game - Starfield - 1000 planets, 99.5% of them completely bland and empty of anything but extremely repetitive and limited procedural generation content that makes No Man's Sky look alien hypertech by comparison. Similarly DAI - it was a vast overreaction to criticisms of DA2 - and so we ended up with tons of huge zones, most of which was just full of the world's most boring "pick up the items" quests, and indeed one beautiful, amazing, high-effort-feeling, wild zone - the Hissing Wastes - which doesn't even really feature in the story and has like one brief companion quest in it! Just pure wasted effort.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 9306634, member: 18"] I really hope we see a bit of a move away from "huge open worlds" in RPGs. Even BG3 was impacted by it, because the reason the devs abandoned a ton of more exotic locations (the Astral plane, Candlekeep, etc.) was that they wanted to focus on larger more open-world-like areas. I think we'd be looking at an even better game if they hadn't done that (especially as they lost so much work in the process). But if you look at RPGs over the last 15+ years, many of the most persuasive and effective have been those which didn't go for "huge open worlds", and several games with supposedly huge open worlds very clearly showed up how empty and pointless those can seem - SF RPGs particularly. For example, Mass Effect Andromeda - the few bits of the game which were genuinely good (and there were some) - were all tight, indoor segments like the classic ME games. Most of the big zones were just tiring and empty-feeling. The Outer Worlds was similar - the open world there didn't really enhance the game - it wasn't well-used like Fallout:NV to provide a really complex and engaging playground that directed you towards interesting stuff, it was a big empty space full of nothing. And the we have the ultimate big empty space full of nothing game - Starfield - 1000 planets, 99.5% of them completely bland and empty of anything but extremely repetitive and limited procedural generation content that makes No Man's Sky look alien hypertech by comparison. Similarly DAI - it was a vast overreaction to criticisms of DA2 - and so we ended up with tons of huge zones, most of which was just full of the world's most boring "pick up the items" quests, and indeed one beautiful, amazing, high-effort-feeling, wild zone - the Hissing Wastes - which doesn't even really feature in the story and has like one brief companion quest in it! Just pure wasted effort. [/QUOTE]
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