Coming back to a western open world game H:FW after Elden Ring is a massive whiplash

Comments

• simple@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I had exactly the same experience. I played Ghosts of Tsushima after Elden Ring and Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, I was surprised how shallow the mainstream open world games are. I don’t hate them, but the gameplay really boils down to:

  • Walk slowly while characters talk to eachother for 5 minutes

  • Open the map, click on where you need to go, then walk in a straight line to your objective

  • Trail an enemy without being seen

  • Liberate an enemy camp (kill the same 3 enemies and collect the 5000 twinkly useless items in the area)

  The Elden Ring withdrawal is really hitting me.

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  • odium@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If you want good exploration, I would recommend witcher 3 and hollow Knight (very different genre, but great exploration with no hints)

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    • esc27@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I liked Gensin Impact for the first few years, but last time I played it, that game was the worst example of this.

      Teleport to location. Chat with npc for 5 minutes. Teleport to next location. Chat with another npc rehashing the first conversation for 5 minutes. Quick fight with trivial enemies. Teleport back to first npc Chat about random crap, slow walk to another npc, rehash the earlier conversation again, walk back to starting location, receive the most basic of rewards.

      The game is 90% dialog of which very little is relevant or meaningful and none can be skipped. There is an auto advance option for conversations, but so many meaningless dialog prompts (with options are always the same semanticly) that it doesn’t work.

      Of course this is all by design as the real goal is to sell you characters, not play a game.

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    • zenharbinger@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I think Witcher 3 falls into the same problems listed.

      • Witcher Sense
      • Busy HUD
      • Fetch Quests
      • Given direction to go w/ mini-map
      • Talks to self

      I mean, I loved the game, but it’s not minimalist. It’s like playing a movie.

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    • littlebluespark@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Also, Witcher has some heart-punch right-in-the-feels moments in side quests, FFS. 😶 Even when you’re purposely avoiding what you know is gonna be an emotional wringer in a prominent quest line, they cut ya while you’re wandering around? Genius. Damn. 🤌🏾🙇🏽‍♂️

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I haven’t played Forbidden West yet, but I had a very different experience from most with Zero Dawn. I think a lot of people view these games as Ubisoft style open world checklists, but if you turn the difficulty up a few notches, it really force you to engage with the mechanics. A game where you used to just charge headlong into a fight you were surely going to win changes into one where you need to pay attention to weaknesses, lay traps, and pick off their deadliest weapons. Plus, you end up actively hunting certain machines for their upgrade parts, because those upgrades become more crucial to your own success.

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    • stallmer@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I agree with you here. While turning up the difficulty means it takes me quite a bit longer to finish as I have limited time to play these days, I tend to enjoy the time more as I learn the mechanics.

      Elden Ring and the other Souls games are just different in that there isn’t a difficulty setting so you have to do this from the get go. I prefer this style, but it’s possible to get a more enjoyable experience in other games.

      In my opinion, easy games aren’t as fun and I lose interest much more quickly.

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    • intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Speaking of this, I hate the fact that farcry just stuck with the farcry 3 format.

      Farcry 2 had none of this “tag an enemy to make them always visible” bullshit. But then they did 3, and that was just their settled format from there on out.

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  • SuperSaiyanSwag@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Really surprised on your take on Tears of Kingdom, that’s one of the few games that does open world really well and doesn’t do any of the things that OP mentioned. Sense of exploration in ToTK is even better than Elden Ring imo with some really clever environmental puzzles and multiple ways to tackle them.

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  • Xenny@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Im so glad the minimap genre is dying. Fucking killed gaming there for a moment.

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• cobysev@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I may be in the minority, but I kinda enjoy hearing Aloy muttering to herself throughout the game. Partly because I catch myself doing it all the time, so I don’t feel alone in the practice.

  But also because I know the voice actress for Aloy (Ashly Burch) as Ash in the YouTube series, Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’? and to this day, it’s still amazing to me to hear her speaking so deadpan seriously. I’m used to her Ash character basically being an animated, loudmouthed wildcard, not this dramatic, serious character. And I kind of enjoy knowing that Ashly has a bit of range to her acting; she’s not some kid who repeats the same YouTube personality she became famous for; she can actually act.

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  • detinu@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Omg same. I talk to myself constantly when I need to plan something or do whatever. Might be because I have undiagnosed ADHD/ADD.

    I quite enjoyed the game, I did not feel irritated by it.

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• De_Narm@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I had a similar experience of first finishing the DLC and then going into God of War (2018). While not open world, it’s the same type of AAA soup you get from most big studios. There are so many baffling design decisions, I cannot fathom why people love the game so much - the constant barrage of stories and small talk is the most engaging thing in there.

  The combat is utterly boring. Increasing the difficulty only results in spongy enemies. Their move sets are boring at best and annoying at worst. They are all but helpless if you just keep them at a distance and throw your axe.

  Upgrades are meaningless. Early on, you unlock a smith. I got my axe from 5 to 40 damage. Guess what? The very next enemy took the same amount of hits as the same type of enemy did before.

  Traversing is mechanically boring. Climbing just means you gotta follow the yellow markings - press in the right direction or do the indicated button press. You literally cannot fall. Everything else is just walking from combat area to combat area.

  The game throws an endless barrage of puzzles at you, none of which are engaging. They are so watered down, there’s barely much more thinking involved than in climbing.

  Even worse, major upgrades are placed in “puzzle” chests. The puzzle? Well, just walk around and rotate your camera for several minutes until you’ve found all three runes.

  The game basically just feels like a very long cutscene with a lot of padding so you can press some buttons. You can play it just fine, but they removed everything that could make any one system interesting in favor of having nothing in there a player could be stuck at. I like the characters, but I’m better served just watching a cutscene compilation for the second one.

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• bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Just bought Forza Horizons 4 on Steam, which meant none of my 100+ hours of progress on the Windows Store version carried over. Apparently in those many hours I forgot how absolutely grueling the beginning of the game is.

  I’m two hours in, and after basically everything I, do down to even opening the menu, I get the controls yanked away from me, and a plucky zoomer talks at me for 30 seconds about shit I absolutely don’t need explained. One of those was literally, not even joking, to explain to me how to buy items, and that adding multiple items to my cart would equal a higher total price.

  It’s like they expect their players to have absolutely no agency or intuition. All I want is to boot a game up, customize a car, and chuck it around. At most I’d be fine with a quick blurb saying “here are the different types of events, here’s your home base. Now go explore.”

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  • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If you thought Forza Horizon 4 was bad, don’t even bother with NFS Unbound.

    The gameplay is literally:

    • Be subjected to the worst soundtrack imaginable, with so much cursing even I, who is an auto mechanic in real life, was looking for a way to turn it off

    • Click “Play” in a safehouse, and click an item on the map

    • Suffer as your character makes the most cringe inducing, horrible attempts at dialogue readoffs imagineable (seriously, I hate literally every character in the game, cept the old black mechanic guy, he’s alright)

    • Get trapped in your car the entire drive to whatever you clicked on with the other characters in your car so they can virtue signal and talk about how evil tech corps and evil politicians are ruining the city (which is hilarious because all these characters are illegal street racers that regularly cause millions of damage in the city and multiple fatalities each race)

    • Then when you finally get to actually race, the physics feel like they were designed for touchscreen controls, same feeling of every NFS game since NFS 2015

    All of this in the first hour.

    The game is really not enjoyable. Whoever is at EA that keeps approving that physics model and forcing their virtue signalling into the game, stop it. Please. Its tone deaf, and nobody cares because it is a racing game. Racing has nothing to do with all that garbage.

    The customization options aren’t even good. The only good thing about the game is the graphics and the fidelity of the sound effects. Thats it.

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    • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah I only got into NFS since the 2015 entry. I have some nostalgia for that game even though it was pretty bad, but every game since has just been painful in every way except for car customization.

      That’s why I love Forza Horizons. It’s got everything I want in a racing game, it just doesn’t subscribe to the idea of “show don’t tell”.

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    • JimboDHimbo@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’m actually enjoying Unbound rn, but I like rap and Latin music with explicit language. I do agree the story dialogue is trash though. Rydell is definitely the most tolerable character. I thought the Lake being named Lake Virgil was a nice memorial to Virgil Abloh.

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• brsrklf@jlai.lu ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’ve not played Forbidden West, but I’ve played all of Zero Dawn. I’ll just say, as much as I like the game (I do, quite a bit), it’s bad at being open-world.

  Most narrow paths are only related to quests, and if you try exploring them before you need to go there the game punishes you by making it a chore to go and to leave. Also, the terrible message “you’re out of bound, turn back now or we reset to your last save” is one of the worst failure at world design ever. It pops up constantly if you’re just trying to explore.

  And yes, I tried playing HUD-free for a bit (I had a great experience doing that on Breath of the Wild). As you said it’s almost impossible, the environment, while looking good, is way too messy to spot the small details you’re supposed to… Unless you turn on the magic compass and GPS.

  In other games, paths and important items are highlighted with lighting and clear and functional visual cues. Beside the infamous yellow paint, HZD does almost none of that efficiently.

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• pastel_de_airfryer@lemmy.eco.br ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I recommend checking out Dread Delusion. It’s an indie open world game inspired by Morrowind.

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  • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Morrowind? I thought the inspiration was mostly from King’s Field, no?

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    • pastel_de_airfryer@lemmy.eco.br ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You must be confusing it with Lunacid

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• therealjcdenton@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s when games aren’t talented enough to give you the info you need from environmental story telling, so they just tell you what’s happening

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• callouscomic@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  They made Aloy worse in the sequel. She literally gives away puzzles and ruins things and won’t shut up. I swear she wasn’t as bad in the first game. I lost interest quickly in the sequel.

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• Cybersteel@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Zelda and ER open world does feel like a separate genre from the Ubisoft style open world we see even in non Ubisoft games like Horizon. That said, I enjoyed my time in Days Gone even if it’s similar to the formula. Facing your first horde in the game was truly spectacular. Also it being connected to Syphon Filter helps too lol.

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