I’m somewhat confused by the auto-title, the quote from the article is actually “They want to challenge - they want to do what Cyberpunk 2077 couldn’t, and stuff like that.” which I think means making a popular, dystopian sci-fi game? 🤷♂️
I just finished mankind divided and human revolution. Happy to see more of Adam Jensen or something new but I can imagine going with an open world game next time to make it contemporary.
I really hope they don’t do open world. I find open world mechanics are directly at odds with telling a good story. A story needs pacing and progression, and it’s really hard to do that effectively when the game is not guiding the player through the story. I find practically all open world games are really shallow and start feeling repetitive very quickly.
I don’t think that Open World mechanics are at odds with good story-telling, I just think that they are better suited to a different type of storytelling than the traditional linear video game story.
I think the problem is more that a lot of studios want to shoehorn a traditional linear narrative into an open world and usually what that ends up meaning is one of two things. Either you have certain places that the game tells you to go to get more story, and the rest of the world is really just sidequest land (looking at you, Ubisoft), or you wind up having a lot of exposition thrown at you while you’re moving from point A to point B (Rockstar…).
I think good story-telling in an open world is possible, but to effectively use the open world it needs to be different. Environmental storytelling is a lot more important in these types of games. I think Breath of the Wild did a pretty good job of this, although it wasn’t perfect. But I think the environment was put together in a way that you could really start to understand the backstory of the world without somebody lore dumping at you. The problem with BotW is that they didn’t trust the player to pick up on the story, so they still included the lore dump. I think Elden Ring also has some really good open world storytelling. It’s opaque but very evocative. You’re given a few details about the past, but the real heavy lifting is done through the environment and the items you find throughout the world.
I have yet to see an open world game that does this effectively. I had fun in the first area of Breath of the Wild that was pretty structured, but then I found it quickly got boring because it was just mostly doing the same thing over and over in different areas. Open world starts to feel like filler quickly.
The best compromise I’ve seen is using a hub structure the way Bioware likes to do where you have some freedom in the area, but each of these areas are structured into a bigger story that the game tells at its own pace.
Incidentally, recent Deux Ex games tend to follow a similar formula. You get to a hub, you can explore it, learn some lore, talk to people, but you also have a clear objective, and once it’s complete, you can move on to the next part of the story.
It could be just my personal preference of course, but I prefer having the game guide me through the story instead of just stumbling around an open world where I run into bits and pieces of lore now and then. I find the experience to be tedious and I don’t see what it adds in terms on enjoyment.
I think that’s probably the case here. I really enjoy environmental storytelling, and piecing together a story from bits of lore and clues scattered around a game world. It’s just a different way of telling a story than a more guided or linear narrative. It’s not objectively better or worse than more traditional story forms. I do think that it is a type of narrative that is easier to tell in a video game than it would be in another format, which is why it feels like such a novel experience to me.
I had a very different experience of Breath of the Wild from you, incidentally. Which I think just goes to show how strongly subjective these things are. I found BotW to be incredibly engrossing, and I’ve beat it at least three times, the last of which I cleared all shrines. I mostly didn’t approach the game as a checklist of things that needed to be done, though, or as something that needed to be progressed through in order to get to a particular point. It’s not really structured that way. If you want, as soon as you get off the starting plateau you can just go fight Ganon. There’s literally nothing stopping you other than a lack of health and good gear, and from watching speedruns it doesn’t actually take that long to get pretty passable gear anyway. I constantly found myself traversing huge portions of the map in that game just out of curiosity to see what was over the next hill, or around this mountain, and I felt that the game almost always rewarded that curiousity.
yet to see an open world game that does this effectively. I had
While I personally like narrative single player games (mass effect etc) I did think the witcher 3 did a good take on open world. Wandering around each village and the stories told in each location helped flesh out the world and peoples attitudes to one another and to witchers in general.
It does completely suck the forward momentum out of the game, nothing is urgent, but as long as you can progress the main story without having to grind open world missions I think its ok.
add more microtransactions? If you look at the latest Deus Ex Mankind Divided, they already tried some weird stuff…
I’m somewhat confused by the auto-title, the quote from the article is actually “They want to challenge - they want to do what Cyberpunk 2077 couldn’t, and stuff like that.” which I think means making a popular, dystopian sci-fi game? 🤷♂️
I just finished mankind divided and human revolution. Happy to see more of Adam Jensen or something new but I can imagine going with an open world game next time to make it contemporary.
I really hope they don’t do open world. I find open world mechanics are directly at odds with telling a good story. A story needs pacing and progression, and it’s really hard to do that effectively when the game is not guiding the player through the story. I find practically all open world games are really shallow and start feeling repetitive very quickly.
I don’t think that Open World mechanics are at odds with good story-telling, I just think that they are better suited to a different type of storytelling than the traditional linear video game story.
I think the problem is more that a lot of studios want to shoehorn a traditional linear narrative into an open world and usually what that ends up meaning is one of two things. Either you have certain places that the game tells you to go to get more story, and the rest of the world is really just sidequest land (looking at you, Ubisoft), or you wind up having a lot of exposition thrown at you while you’re moving from point A to point B (Rockstar…).
I think good story-telling in an open world is possible, but to effectively use the open world it needs to be different. Environmental storytelling is a lot more important in these types of games. I think Breath of the Wild did a pretty good job of this, although it wasn’t perfect. But I think the environment was put together in a way that you could really start to understand the backstory of the world without somebody lore dumping at you. The problem with BotW is that they didn’t trust the player to pick up on the story, so they still included the lore dump. I think Elden Ring also has some really good open world storytelling. It’s opaque but very evocative. You’re given a few details about the past, but the real heavy lifting is done through the environment and the items you find throughout the world.
I have yet to see an open world game that does this effectively. I had fun in the first area of Breath of the Wild that was pretty structured, but then I found it quickly got boring because it was just mostly doing the same thing over and over in different areas. Open world starts to feel like filler quickly.
The best compromise I’ve seen is using a hub structure the way Bioware likes to do where you have some freedom in the area, but each of these areas are structured into a bigger story that the game tells at its own pace.
Incidentally, recent Deux Ex games tend to follow a similar formula. You get to a hub, you can explore it, learn some lore, talk to people, but you also have a clear objective, and once it’s complete, you can move on to the next part of the story.
It could be just my personal preference of course, but I prefer having the game guide me through the story instead of just stumbling around an open world where I run into bits and pieces of lore now and then. I find the experience to be tedious and I don’t see what it adds in terms on enjoyment.
I think that’s probably the case here. I really enjoy environmental storytelling, and piecing together a story from bits of lore and clues scattered around a game world. It’s just a different way of telling a story than a more guided or linear narrative. It’s not objectively better or worse than more traditional story forms. I do think that it is a type of narrative that is easier to tell in a video game than it would be in another format, which is why it feels like such a novel experience to me. I had a very different experience of Breath of the Wild from you, incidentally. Which I think just goes to show how strongly subjective these things are. I found BotW to be incredibly engrossing, and I’ve beat it at least three times, the last of which I cleared all shrines. I mostly didn’t approach the game as a checklist of things that needed to be done, though, or as something that needed to be progressed through in order to get to a particular point. It’s not really structured that way. If you want, as soon as you get off the starting plateau you can just go fight Ganon. There’s literally nothing stopping you other than a lack of health and good gear, and from watching speedruns it doesn’t actually take that long to get pretty passable gear anyway. I constantly found myself traversing huge portions of the map in that game just out of curiosity to see what was over the next hill, or around this mountain, and I felt that the game almost always rewarded that curiousity.
I guess that’s why we have different kinds of games, different people like different stuff. :)
While I personally like narrative single player games (mass effect etc) I did think the witcher 3 did a good take on open world. Wandering around each village and the stories told in each location helped flesh out the world and peoples attitudes to one another and to witchers in general.
It does completely suck the forward momentum out of the game, nothing is urgent, but as long as you can progress the main story without having to grind open world missions I think its ok.
I would prefer Deus Ex to be narrative.
Yeah that’s basically how I feel as well.