Sea of Thieves is honestly great. There have been many times where I’ve been on the way to an objective and I’ll find random loot floating in the water, or something skinny catches my eyes on a passing beach, or I’ll get attacked by a pirate ship or even a megalodon.
Comment on Shower thought, traversal in open world games have turned from game mechanics to loading screens
Katana314@lemmy.world 2 months ago
From what I understand, things like squeezing through walls were supposed to go away with the PS5. But, Ragnarok is still available on PS4 to cater to mass audiences, so they need that extra bit of time for loading.
Ironically, one game that’s handled open worlds a bit better is on a console less capable of handling them. Breath of the Wild uses it to promote exploring towards vantage points and then interesting sights.
Sea of Thieves does something similar. You start a session, and want treasure, so you take a basic and boring assignment with a treasure map. BUT, you spy a bunch of interesting happenings throughout the ocean and beaches on your way, and so your adventure becomes more complex. Coming across those at random feels a lot more fun than picking them as a targeted assignment on an objective board.
To be fair, even if the open world is not well used, it can provide a sense of connection for the world. It can be more fun than just having a mission select screen.
Zahille7@lemmy.world 2 months ago
mox@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
This is even more interesting when we consider that BotW was not developed for the Switch, but for an even less capable console: the Wii U.
Hardware limitations haven’t been a real barrier to open world continuity for a long time, if ever. (Seven Cities of Gold allowed you to sail from Europe to the New World, and explore it over land, with no loading screens along the way. That was on 8-bit computers with 48KiB of RAM, loading data from some of the slowest floppy drives ever, back in 1984.) Doing it on lower-end machines does require some planning ahead, but the effort is worthwhile, IMHO.
Not only that, but to incorporate verticality into the game mechanics. Reaching things that are surrounded by hazards, or taming especially wild horses by gliding to them from a cliff, for example.
Die4Ever@programming.dev 2 months ago
Yeah anyone who thinks 3D games without loading screens are only possible on SSDs needs to go back and play Dungeon Siege or Asheron’s Call. GTA3 mostly didn’t have loading screens either. The Witcher 3 wasn’t even that long ago and it didn’t need loading screens on HDDs. (I guess traveling between the main big areas did, but I guess that’s more because they didn’t have an animation of Geralt taking a boat or something, everything else streamed fine)