(By game size he means scope of the game and huge open world maps, not game install size)
Here’s hoping! Not only has it ruined a lot of once-smaller games, but it’s also largely responsible for ballooning development budgets, so let’s get that down to something sustainable.
One of the most egregious cases for me was Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. There was stuff for 40 hours aplenty, yet I spent most of those 40 hours killing the same goons over and over but with a different number over their heads, which meant I needed to spent more time in doing so.
If they had just aimed at making a memorable 30 or so hours, it would have been way better. This experience made me stop playing any Assassin’s whatever games.
Opposite to this, there was “Still Wakes the Deep”, which is a rather short but plentiful game.
I haven’t played Still Wakes the Deep, but Indika was that smaller game for me this year, and I’d highly recommend it.
“Indika, a nun looking to adjust to a monastic life. The twist in the tale comes in the form of her companion: she has a connection with the Devil himself”
Oh wow, with that summary count me in!
You have no idea. The opening moments of that game are surprising, even with that blurb and my recommendation, lol.
Well, the clue is in the name I guess !
That said, I never got bored of odyssey. It was was just a beautiful place to hang out. The game engine was amazing. With NPCs going about their business etc.
I wish someone would just use that engine for more stuff .
I meant it that I really enjoyed the setting, the characters and some game mechanisms. I just hated this need of making the game seemingly endless by repetition, and I wished I didn’t have to be level X to be able to do Y, because the only way to level up was churning (for me that’s a no bueno).
That game was soooo good!
God of war and Jedi have done great jobs of finally showing AAA they can make a smaller game and still have a great following. I’m so sick of giant Ubisoft worlds that have nothing to do in them. They’re boring.
I haven’t played the Jedi games, but it’s crazy that the new God of War games are somehow a demonstration of restraint, as that one from 2018 is probably twice as long as I would have liked, and Ragnarok is longer still, according to How Long to Beat.
Compare it to a game like AC Valhalla and you’ll think it’s smaller
Ha, you think this is to lower the budget or the price? Come on!
I know this is a cynical critique of capitalism, but even so, capitalists love lowering budgets and charging the same amount. Quite frankly, I’d happily pay the same or more to get a game with less bloat in a lot of cases.
I’d rejoice, but I’ll believe it when I see it happening consistently. I want smaller, denser, and richer worlds. Not giant, sprawling, and barren. It doesn’t add anything to a game for me if I have to walk or drive 10 minutes to get to my next location and it’s just empty in between.
What we’ll probably get (from Bethesda) is a combination of both. Smaller, barren, and procedurally generated
I don’t get why open worlds have to be so big. 95% of the time, they have next to nothing in them.
To be able to say “our map is 100x100km!” The only games where it is worth it to have a huge map like that, is army simulators and RTS. Anything else could probably be better off with polish in some other place, rather than a huge map.
One of the notorious examples in PS3 gen era that’s now can’t be purchased at all. It’s a derpy offroad racing game in what looks like a procedurally generated world emptier than ash deserts in Morrowind.
Well they gotta have the right balance, otherwise they’d end up be “open small town” instead of “open world”
I would say that map size never was “most important”, at least not to the players, they’ve been complaining about huge but empty maps for years (the poster child of this, AC Odyssey was released in 2018, six years ago). It was just something devs and publishers pushed to one up each other in some kind of “bigger = better” way.
One another wound Minecraft opened in CEOs vision of gaming. Another one is everything should have some crafting.
I’m so sick of action rpgs including crafting or an endless list of slightly different weapons. Give me a small mix of situational weapons at most and let the gameplay be how difficulty works.
They don’t need to work on difficulties that long if you can just craft over it lol.
I feel like Fantasy Life did this the best though. I absolutely loved this game and wish it would get a port to PC.
I’m burnt out on open world games. Some are good with dense rich areas that are interesting and make you want to explore but most these days are just bland, overly large and filled with generic quests.
Games need to stop being open world for the stake of being open world. I think for a lot of games, having multiple open-ended areas can work much better.
I’ve been mulling over this the past few years, having finally kicked the WoW habit in the second year of Shadowlands (approaching ~3 years now)…
…but how often are quests/missions/objectives etc. just a combination of go to x, collect x of y, kill x of y? At a certain point, all of these become generic - right?
Definitely one of the reasons I absolutely love the original Borderlands. Large world, but broken into a lot smaller chunks/maps. More games doing stuff like that would be absolutely perfect.
I hope so. I want an era of gameplay first again…
I mean I love open worlds with day/night cycles and other sorta living breathing feels. background views you can’t interact with though. meh.
It’d be nice if JRPGs would go back to the old school overworld design like in Star Ocean 2. It’s a good compromise between sense of scale and interactivity with the world.
Infinite Wealth was deffo a bigger map and set thereof then its predecessors (Like a Dragon was also substantially larger, as was Lost Judgment in comparison to its predecessor), but it did absolute numbers, so I dunno about that.
I think it comes down more to if it feels appropriately sized and filled. Prior Yakuzas were bursting at the seems with shit to do everywhere in their smaller maps. Breath of the Wild had new and interesting shit going on everywhere too.
I’ve gotta disagree on BotW. I love Zelda games and the mechanics of that game were an amazing shift in the franchise. But that open world was so boring. The same like 4-5 enemies, even the harder variants didn’t have different movesets. TotK was even worse with the depths and a majority of sky islands being empty and devoid of content.
But the e gameplay is so fun it’s a lot easier to forgive them than say AC Odyssey.
I’ve been saying this since it released. Cool mechanics, but boring world and gameplay. I’m still a bit salty about the loss of real dungeons, nothing in BOTW or TOTK feel as memorable as the previous games.
2 of the 3 maps in infinite wealth were re-used anyways. I really like that they get good mileage from reusing assets they make.
Weird. In the West, we’ve been welcoming small(er) but interesting, unique or otherwise impactful games regardless of its size. Complaining about Warzone taking up 250GB on your hard drive and stuff. And that was 2020.
Not so much the size it takes up on your drive, he’s referring to the breadth and scope of the game itself.
You right, my thoughts trailed and I added that last bit even though it didn’t have to do with it, idk why.
I’m struggling to find space on my 500gb Deck and can relate to that
I realized this idea long, long ago, when Rare made Banjo-Tooie.
Banjo-Kazooie was a fun game. You unlock worlds, go to the world, collect 100% of all there is to collect, then continue.
Banjo-Tooie, its sequel, wanted to be bigger and better in every way. Sprawling open world hub, much larger worlds with more sub-zones, interconnectivity between worlds, more things to unlock, more things to do, etc. etc.
And I think, despite having so much more, it was a worse game for it. You go to a new world but find there’s a lot you can’t do yet because you didn’t unlock an ability that comes later on. You push a button in one world and then something happens in another, but now you have to backtrack through the sprawling overworld and large world maps to get there.
And this was just a pair of games made for the Nintendo 64, before the concept of “open world” had really even taken off.
But it demonstrated to me that bigger was not always better, and having more to do did not make it a better game if it wasn’t as enjoyable.
Early open world games were fairly small, and the natural desire for people who have seen everything becomes “I wish there was more,” but in practice it ends up typically being that they take the same amount of stuff and divide it up over a larger area, or they fill the world with tedium just for the sake of having something to do.
When looking at the collectibles and activities on a world map like Genshin Impact, it’s basically sensory overload with how much there is to do.
But almost all of that is garbage. And this is just a fraction of one region among several. Go here, do this time trial, shoot these balloons, follow this spirit, solve this logic puzzle, and then loot your pittance of gatcha currency so you can try to win your next waifu or husbando before time runs out.
And don’t forget to do your dailies!
If a game has a large world, it needs to act in service to its design. It needs to be fun to exist in and travel through, not tedious. It needs to have enough stuff to do that keep it from feeling empty, but not so much stuff that it makes it hard to find anything worthwhile. And it needs to give enough ability for the player to make their own fun, to act as the balance on that tightrope walk between not-enough and too-much.
Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the most recent games that seemed to properly scratch an open world itch for me. While they weren’t perfect, the way they managed to really incorporate the open world as its own sort of puzzle to solve, in ways that Genshin Impact failed to properly emulate, made them more enjoyable as an open world than most other games in that genre I’ve played in recent memory.
So that’s why install size grew so much!
/s
Well then why did the newer LaD games have larger maps than Yakuza 0-6? I feel like Kamurocho was the perfect size for a game that’s always on foot, and while I enjoyed LaD 7, I think the map was too large and I had to rely on taxis much more than I did in older games. What they should’ve done is add the underground and interior stuff to Kamurocho instead of switching to a different map.
He was hired by Tencent after they launched LAD iirc, I remember some news but can’t tell when it happened in the post-covid era.
But I do find small, almost theatrical worldmaps or even sets of locations as a thing writers and designers can use to achieve greater effect. Y5 had Taiga Saejima’s town and mountain locations with vibes very different to what Haruka sees in Sotenboru, and it makes more sense and gives more space for gamedevs to customize these experiences than a gameworld where these are all interconnected walkable locations.
I was excited by Tears of the Kingdom but when I opened up the underground area I passed. That game is the biggest open world I have not experienced.
I would absolutely love it if games started going back to the original Borderlands 1 style maps/areas. The type of maps that were more small-medium sized area that were completely self-contained sections of a larger world.
