Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN APRIL 2025?

On Tue, 6 May 2025 14:24:47 -0700, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
wrote:

On 5/3/2025 11:21 AM, JAB wrote:

On 03/05/2025 18:42, Zaghadka wrote:

Another example: One of the urban quests in BG3 is a mass murder
plot/conspiracy/mystery, and it's basically just an endless series of
fetch quests, where you're fetching things for*yourself*. Mostly
evidence. And they're spread out all over the place. Even with the warp
point system there's a whole lotta clickity-walking involved, and the
background activities in the city wear out quickly when you walk past the
same colorful script for the 50th time. This could have been tightened
up.
>
You can break that thread up with other things, but I would say the main
problem here is a) writing, and/or b) CRPGs are just not good at this
kind of thing.

 
Oh I agree with b), one of the nice things about TT RPG's is that you
can cut out all that fluff without breaking immersion. You want to go
all the way across town to investigate where you think someone lives.
Well five seconds of narration and you arrive there and the story
carries on.

>
You could cut all that out, and a lot of games do by allowing you to
teleport to places you've been before.  Or in the old, old days of
random encounters on a map allowing you to cover a lot of distance and
if anything interesting happens it just takes you to that particular set
piece (thinking of fallout 1 & 2) which is my favorite way to handle that.
>
Apperently there's a lot of weird people who like just tooling through
everywhere repeatedly as evidenced by the GTAs and Cyberpunk though.
Although generally it's a lot faster in a car.

It's going back a bit, but one of my favorite things to do in "Mafia"
(the 2002 open-world crime game) was walk from the lighthouse, through
the suburbs, across the skyscraper business district and into the
downtown where the character's 'main base' was located. I'd just walk
the roads (and sidewalks, when available. It being America, that
wasn't a guaranteed option) looking in the storefronts and watching
the AI idle about. For its time, the game was quite impressive
visually, and the AI and soundscape did a great job of creating the
atmosphere of 1920s Americana.

I got similar joys wandering around Skyrim too. The autumnal forests
around Riften were particular favorites. I got similar -but not as
intense- joy from the Grand Theft Auto games; GTA4 in particular had
lots of nifty nooks and crannies to discover, and I loved comparing
its representation of NYC with my memories of the real thing.

I don't get that experience from all open-world games; for instance,
Ubisoft games all feel to generic, seemingly made of cut-n-paste
locations and once you've seen a little bit of the map, you've pretty
much seen it all. (and seen it for the next five games to boot). But
the joy of wandering open worlds obviously isn't unique to me alone; a
lot of 'walking sims' are essentially nothing BUT that joy,
encapsulated in a single game.