Comment on Open World Games: yay or nay?
apotheotic@beehaw.org 4 days ago
I love an open world game that is done well - Horizon: Zero Dawn, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. But so often it is just done because thats what they think is the hot thing, and it does not work
brsrklf@jlai.lu 3 days ago
It’s a bit awkward, because I liked HZD, I completed it, DLC and all, but I don’t consider it a good open world. I learned after a few hours that exploring is almost never rewarded, and you’d way better follow the few very obvious threads the game is setting up for you.
Going into a hidden path before you’re sent there by a quest is just wasting time, you’re going to struggle a lot, you’ll get nothing at the end and you’ll often even have to go back the way you came. Going outright off-road, even a little, spams you with “turn back now or I reload your save” messages. Which is baffling, I’ve never seen a game trying such a bad way to keep you inside the playing area. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game border that’s such a mess.
Great story, great characters, fun battle mechanics. But as an open-world game, I don’t think it works.
mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Yeah, Horizon’s big issue is that it only rewarded exploration with materials. The only reason to actually explore was to gather more crafting materials. Which is fine in a game like Minecraft or Terraria, where the game is heavily focused on crafting… Materials unlock new things to craft. But HZD isn’t heavily focused on crafting; You simply need to find increasingly obscure parts to be able to make stronger end-game weapons, which largely do the exact same thing as your current weapons, but slightly better. And once you have the better weapon, there’s no reason to continue gathering those materials. Which means there’s no reason to continue exploring.
There were only a few quests which could actually be discovered through exploration… And even those were just short fetch quests, kill quests, or were close enough to the main story’s locations that you reasonably would have stumbled across them during normal gameplay anyways.
The issue with HZD is that virtually all of your exploration-related unlockables happen via the main story. It means you can unlock every single new shiny exploration aid without actually exploring.