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I really wish I could teach gamers that they THINK they want a huge open world but what they REALLY want is a well designed AREA of a city, culture, and NPCs.
Open worlds with 100 empty streets and 100 acres of empty hills to run fetch quests will never compare.
@kaimatten middle ground: procedurally generated but strongly limited in scope and size. control duplication of assets by permutation of duplicated lists; e.g. if you want any particular enemy to only appear five times in the entire world, put all enemy kinds in a list, duplicate it five times then shuffle it. 10 unique enemy kinds then means you can't have more than 50 enemies total in the world. tldr: less random, more shuffle.
@lritter I am both fascinated by procedural worlds and also not into them. Even in the Rogue-Like I make now, I try to keep as much very strictly designed as possible (but with a lot of branches to the choices).
I think procedural is way better, and can be good, but I always tend to like really designed feels, especially with things like towns.
Absolutely agree. I've 2 points to make.
I've said for a long time that I'd rather have a small but dense town over a county sized game world that's just a bunch of fields. "Oh your game is 500 square kilometers? Great, but like, is there anything ***IN*** it?". One of the issues I had with BOTW was that a lot of it was just traveling. I think it would have been much better if it was a quarter of the size with all of the same stuff, just squeezed together more. TOTK seems better.
Point, the second: Never listen to a god damn thing gamers ask for. They demand size, length, realism, ultra high res graphics. And yet what gets popular? Retro shooters, where you can finish the game in one or two sittings, where you fight nonsense baddies for stupid, contrived reasons and you can count the pixels. Toon shaded games, chill games, cozy games, all popular right now.
Gamers are told what they want by console makers, gpu companies, and AAA studios and they parrot it like good little consumers. Gamers are fickle and don't even know what they actually want so never listen when they make demands.