Weekly Topic Open World Game Design

Yeah, I agree with you but you would be surprised what people refuse to "believe in". I always tell them, you can not believe if you want, but it is going to happen anyway. Kinda like some things happening in nature...

 

Then you should look at Ultima Regum Ratio which is aiming to do just that:
http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=22176.840
He also have plenty talk at youtube in many conferance on the subjects.

At a lesser extant look at versu (the research paper), though it's tangential, it great for character and simulating social setting.

People didn't believe we could fly until we did, things are hardly set

 

For sufficiently limited values of "just that." It's like a dancing bear; yeah, the bear dances, but not well.

 

There is more that meet the eyes there but whatever, I just shared that pointer

 

Where do you think open world games succeed?
Commodore 64 paperboy modification where you can explore the town. Then 1987 ELITE. Example Condor Glider simulator. StarCityzen.
Large world with hi level of diversity. Where energy is not infinite and time, space and money must be conquered. When there is a hot spot with hi density of players competing or exchanging.

Where have you seen them fall flat?
When you understand how is made (fractals spawn pattern). If is multiplayer, when there is no spot place with hi concentration of players and interaction. When there is nothing to do. When the developers do not update them. Cheating: example Counter Strike

What are some of the user pain points you’ve discovered in these games?
Time spending with no progress improvement or when the player is not learning a new thing. If the game is not useful in real life. When the story do not tell a new story. When world is the same all around and you discover how is it build. When you discover that other cheats.

 

I'd like to hear more about this. In what ways do you want or expect open world games to be useful in real life?

I have some notion of what you might be saying, but I don't want to affect your answer.

 

Can you give an example or two of some of the things we automatically filter out? Not completely sure what you mean.

 

It's been years since I saw that.

 

A lot of things. Just walk down along in your local mall and consider how many people you didn't even look at, even though you kind of knew they were there. And the people you did look at, it was for a reason, they stood out in some meaningful way, and you only realized that after you had actually turned your head and focused both eyes.

Why can you be sitting in a busy place without paying attention to any of the sounds, and then suddenly you realize that you had heard someone say "XYZ"? But why didn't you 'realize' you'd heard anything else?

One of the things I find pretty fascinating is how much information discarded before it reaches conscious awareness. Imagine if you had to be consciously aware of twenty different conversations at a party at the same time? Your head would explode.

The difference with games is that we expect everything to be already distilled, already filtered. If we hear an npc say something that sounds vaguely specific (i.e., not an "arrow to the knee" type comment), we expect that it is meaningful to the game story, and probably essential to know.

It's also the same with environments. If you go bushwalking, you can see a lot of boring stuff, and it takes a long time to get from one interesting point to the next. And that's fine, you just sort of keep 'one eye open' (consciously speaking) as you walk along until something interesting grabs you.

However in a game, the moment you step into a forest, you want to feel magic. And you expect to move from one scenic location to the next very quickly.

The point is that natural or realistic processes produce a huge amount of boring noise, and most of the job of someone developing a procedural algorithm is to integrate a filter, such that the time between high-quality outputs (from the point of view of the player) is minimal. The easiest way to do this in my opinion, is to keep a certain level of artistic input, and build the fully procedural stuff around the crafted content, and that's what I see procedural tools in professional settings, such as those in Horizon Zero Dawn, doing.

 

I can definitely understand what you're saying, though I'm a little different. I look at almost everyone I pass if I can. Additionally, in situations where there are a number of people around I have to consciously focus in on one conversation. Occasionally I'll kind of fall "out of place" and become aware of all of the different conversations going on around me and find it very hard to focus in and block out all of that stuff.

I think we need to move to the place where players accept that not all content is meaningful. As an RPG player, this is something I'm relatively familiar with.

 

Military or martial arts training, perhaps? It's really hard to turn off situational awareness, once you develop it. The rest of the world starts to look downright oblivious.

 

Why though? I think that having more ability to shape the content of games should mean having less meaningless content.

And as games grow bigger and more detailed, I think it's worth reducing wasted time and attention as much as possible. I can justify wasting time in reality, but not in a game setting. The only reason I play games is because they give me an experience that reality can't, at least not anywhere near continuously. And I want to get that experience quickly.

I'm sort of the same way, or at least I used to be. I don't consider it to be really a good thing. What's the benefit to me? Is it good for me to know what my Vastus Lateralis muscle is doing while I'm walking down the street? I'd rather focus only on what deserves conscious thought.

If you're disposed toward hyper-vigilance, it can be a very pleasant state to achieve a sort of 'meditative hyper-awareness' where you are aware of a lot of things but they don't trigger your emotions much. But no matter what state I happen to be in, I think it's worth removing as much noise and meaninglessness as possible from conscious awareness, since it ultimately doesn't give me anything and wastes my time. That's why in games, with everything from level design to graphics, what I pursue is not hyper-realism, but hyper-cinematic-realism.

 

How much of the room around you right now is meaningful?

I mean, right now, I have an empty Coke bottle on my desk. Later, I am going to rinse it out and toss it in the recycle bin.

I am not going to carry it around for three days in case I end up on a desert island and need to send a message in a bottle, which some RPGs would totally think was a Good Idea.

Sometimes the random trash scattered around the room is just random trash, and not a puzzle.

 

Not sure what your point is, but that's exactly what I don't like about reality. I would hardly want to bring that trash into a game setting.

Sometimes it's useful to provide a contrast to high-value moments in the game by reducing the impact of the experience momentarily, but that's an intentional and controlled thing.

 

No, nothing like that. And it's not all the time. It's just sometimes that I realize that kind of stuff and have to make an effort to immerse myself again. Couldn't really say why it happens, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's related the my occasional communication difficulties and difficulty with eye contact.

I think it's valuable because it allows a user to find meaning in the not-so-meaningful. It allows for a "milleu" approach where that background may be boring, but it builds up an environment or immersive effect which the player can experience.

It may be common to play games for a specific experience, but it's also possible to play them for a sense of escapism (not in the derogatory sense), or to experience a world unlike your own. It doesn't change the main experience of the main plot of Mass Effect to run around talking to people on the Citadel, but it's world-building that allows me to better appreciate the world Bioware crafted.

And in one sense, if you can insert more non-meaningful (I hesitate to call it "meaningless") content into a game, it's easier to hide the meaningful content if you're trying to do a twist or something.

And I agree, it's really distracting in a sense when it happens. but I've learned to deal with it.

 

The point is that in early RPGs, every single thing that could be picked up, should be picked up - because it was going to be an important part of a puzzle's solution later.

That in and of itself made the simple existence of an object into a clue. The presence of a bottle on my desk does not imply that I will need a bottle sometime this week. I do not need to approach every problem with the mindset of "maybe I need the bottle for this." I am not going to need the bottle. It is not a clue or a tool or a piece of a puzzle. I do not need to give or sell it to anyone. Nobody I meet tomorrow is going to be a crazy bottle collector who is so desperate to own this inexplicably-rare bottle that he will let me into the secret passage behind the library.

It is just a bottle.

Look at Fallout 4. Players actually complained that in Fallout 3, they could pick up all this junk, but there was nothing to do with it. Now there is something to do with it. But has that made anything better? I remember gradually and painfully learning in Fallout 3 that if I didn't collect all 23 coffee cups from the diner, that was fine, because I was never going to use them anyway. But then came New Vegas, and suddenly I had to give coffee cups to Muggy because of reasons. Now in Fallout 4 I have to run around like a vagabond junk dealer carrying a buttload of aluminium fans and duct tape.

It's good for things to be meaningless. A world where everything has meaning is probably what some breed of psychotic suffers.

 

See that's the thing, even the not-so-meaningful parts are actually etremely meaningful compared to reality. How many high-status individuals did you just go and strike up a conversation with today, knowing that you'd get very positive feedback? Even the most boring parts of a game eclipse the best of what reality has to offer on a daily basis (if you go by a simple function of value - of course real people in your life are going to mean much more than any npc, by virtue of being real and much more interesting/complex!).

 

The whole point is that a game experience is inherently different from reality. It means different things to me. I don't drink water and coffee for the same reason. I don't play games to embrace noise, I play them to escape it.

Fair enough if you like the game world to be only partly meaningful, and I think that as a universal rule in games there is a certain small amount of meaninglessness that helps to keep the highs high, but I think in general, people are not looking for an extension of reality in a game - at least not an extension in which they have the same limits and boundaries in their experiences, or suffer anywhere near the same amount of cognitive 'shelf-stacking' (i.e. boring work in extracting high-value from low-value information).

 

I suppose it depends on the criteria for meaningful. What that NPC says has no bearing on the plot. It has no bearing on any subquest or on any action the player can "take" in the world. But in a sense you might call it meaningful because it reinforces the fiction.

To use cdarklock's example, even the junk in Fallout 3 might be called "meaningful" because it reinforces the fiction of the world.

In Dragon Age 2, the player inventory had a "junk" category where random stuff would get put after looting a dead bandit or something (and where it would remain until sold for a pittance--there was no use for it). Some players complained: if it's going straight into the junk to be sold, why is it even here? So it wasn't meaningful. At the same time, other players pointed out some of the inconsistencies of the things that go in the junk folder--how a spider drops a broken dagger, or something like that. So...it actually was meaningful enough for those people to notice what was going on.

It's a floating target, but on some basic background level everything is meaningful. But I think it's okay to have stuff that isn't meaningful with regards to the "main goals" of a game.

You call it boring, but in some situations, such as a puzzle, it might actually be enjoyable. Not to the extent you and I were speaking of with regards to ourselves, but don't discount all of it.

 

The crucial thing here is that as you say, it either reinforces the fiction, or creates a puzzle. However in reality, very little of what we experience as noise, will ever reinforce anything meaningful or create a puzzle of any kind.

I think we basically agree, but are describing things from different 'starting points'. For example, in my space game, I'm very, very focused on creating atmosphere in the game. That means that I want lots of 'meaningless' freighters, which you can follow through jump gates if that's your thing, as well as radio chatter and (at least I plan to) have the ability to hail anyone and get a bit of random text-based chitchat.

The whole point is that it's essential for creating a background to the game, it's necessary in order to tell the player "Yes, you are really in this place that you're imagining". But that's as far as it goes. Nothing about the overall aesthetic will be boring, nothing about the game mechanics will be boring, nothing about the missions themselves will be boring. In fact the biggest problem is designing the mechanics to be as streamlined as possible while still alluding to something the player can imagine momentarily to be 'real' in some sense.

That's what I mean by having a small amount of controlled 'mundane-ness'. Just enough to provide the right context for anchoring the player in the atmosphere you want them to feel, but never requiring them to interact with things that are inherently meaningless.

 

It's worth noting that our examples so far have all been large-scale open world fantasy games. The design criteria for those are clearly not the same as for, say, a metroidvania or a hidden object game.

 

I understand what you mean. You have a point. Though I still suspect a big part of it is what the player determines is meaningful or not.

 

In my experience, games with meaningless freighters get some feedback from the playerbase that they want to do something with the freighters. Like trade with them, or pirate them, or get missions from them, that sort of thing.

But to move from Fallout and Dragon Age to something more like this, have you played Astrox and Rebel Galaxy?

Because here's a thing. Astrox, on the one hand, has very little extraneous traffic. You almost never see other ships, and when you do, they are shooting at you. And on the other, when you go to an asteroid field, every single asteroid is mineable.

Rebel Galaxy, on the other hand, is full of other ships. Seriously, it annoys the hell out of me when I jump into hyperspace and after a little while my ship drops out of warp because I'm too close to another ship which is also going where I'm going. Now I have to drive at freakin' highway speed next to some dork. It's like getting on the interstate and ending up behind some eighty year old Asian woman. And when you go to an asteroid field, you're lucky if a dozen of these two hundred asteroids are productively mineable.

Which of those do you think sounds more fun? If you've played them, which one is more fun?

 

Put it this way: I think anything that the player is either required to do, or to interact with, should have some amount of utility in terms of reward (either in terms of feedback, or game credits, or whatever).

I was watching a video of Eve Online (I like to do this rather than play it, since I feel more able to see it from the 'outside') where the player did nothing but 'space trucking' for an hour. Is space trucking mundane? Yes, somewhat. But it still is a vehicle for receiving feedback of some kind. The feeling of being a long-distance space pilot, crossing vast distances of space in the blink of an eye, is inherently meaningful. And you get credits, skills whatever at the end.

Is it boring to collect cabbages in Skyrim? Yes, somewhat. But it is (slightly) valuable, you can still use them for things that are part of the core game experience. And by their low value, they provide relative value to more 'condensed' foods. They operate usefully as part of the game.

That's what I think not-so-meaningful content should ideally do - it should still be useful to the player as a way to progress or receive feedback, but relatively less than certain other things that are the main objectives.

And when you can combine content that is primarily designed for developing the background/atmosphere, with content that's designed to provide the player with a low-value means of progression in the game, I think that's when you hit an efficient way of constructing the game world.

 

Arguably, the ability to interact with a thing is utility. I have an awful lot of fun in Dragon's Dogma just kicking Fournival's daughter down the stairs. Every time I do it, I get arrested and have to bribe my way out, but I think it's hilarious. Similarly, sometimes I pick someone up and stand on a high ledge so when they struggle free they fall to their death. In Oblivion, I used to collect skulls and drop them down mountains. If you drop WAY too many of them, they overload the physics engine and start getting stuck in midair. You can jump on top of them if you try hard enough.

It's almost impossible to place limits on what someone else considers "play." I mean, it's not up to us. I can decide how I play and you can decide how you play, but neither of us can point at the other and say "that's not playing."

 

I haven't played either of them. In fact I don't play games all that often.

My main experience with this sort of thing was X2 The Threat, quite some time ago. Even though trading is really not all that exciting, and the economy not very well balanced, I became literally obsessed with the atmosphere of trading. I'm still not sure why, but I became hooked on it. Flying from one system to another, looking for cheap goods, the music, my comrades flying along on their own trade routes, the atmosphere just swallowed me. I even looked forward to the dry welcome messages when I docked at a station.

It's a good thing that my experience was never interrupted by the other ships in the game, and that certainly wouldn't have been a good thing. But having them around, sometimes hailing them to ask where to find some place, was really great for immersion.

I even almost got hooked on Eve Online not too long ago, but very early on I decided that I didn't want to spend the amount of time that was required to master it and I quit playing. But it's an extremely immersive game because of all this background content, this feeling of huge inter-galactic swathes of civilization.

But anyway, I think background content should never interfere with the core game experience. It should remain around the periphery, where the player can go if they want to, but otherwise it would simply remain as a signal of the depth of the game universe.

 

OK I think we're sort of talking about different things. What I think is not good for a game are boring procedural environments simply driven by a single-minded 'realism' formula, or a game world where something interesting only happens every couple of hours. Or something where interesting things are camouflaged in huge amounts of noise. Because that's what reality is.

Giving the player multiple ways to enjoy themselves in the game, which are not part of the main plotline, is not a problem or anything I disagree with.

 

But how do you quantify "boring" and "interesting" in the first place? I mean, look at this:

That is literally all a hidden object game is. The camouflage is the game.

Are hidden object games bad games?

I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything, I'm just digging for the meat of this because I'm sure there's something juicy to chew on down there.

 

I still think we're talking about two different things. A puzzle is not random, it's a designed experience. There are rules that the player must figure out, and there are clear paths to figuring them out. If those rules are arbitrary or change randomly, at least to me it's no longer really enjoyable.

Imagine if someone just buried something valuable in the sand in the middle of a beach, and you had to look for it. It would be boring, difficult and annoying. It could be anywhere.

But if someone hid it in a forest somewhere, with a trail of clues which told some kind of story as you picked them up, that's starting to be interesting.

Camouflage in a game must be designed, it can't be random. Ideally, a high-value path is camouflaged in a series of low-value paths, so that the player is sure to get some kind of reward while they're looking for it. And not only that, but there should be signs, and some sort of self-consistent logic to finding the high-value path.

How many games have you played where you went "OK this is just boring" and then thought "But wait a minute, maybe there's something hidden in there and I'm just not finding it"? Probably not too often. A game that is not boring, is not boring because it's designed to be that way. Even in a wildly open-ended game like minecraft, there are plenty of balancing issues and rules that the player operates within, that would leave the game boring and unenjoyable if they weren't there.

The only reason that reality is not always boring for us, is not because reality is inherently interesting, but because we were designed for reality. What we enjoy or dislike is not an accident or universal. You can't create a random language, because our brains are designed around specific linguistic patterns. You can't (usually) make someone enjoy something that is illogical and random, because we are built to enjoy specific things that are useful to us. Artistic rules and game design rules, like any emotional rules, are not arbitrary, we must find the ones that we specifically as human beings respond to, and utilize them in whatever procedural algorithms we use.

 

Have you seen hidden object games?



Look on the top of the refrigerator. That is a balloon whisk behind a pinecone behind a teapot. There's a rolling pin pretending to be the refrigerator door handle, a compact disc hanging from a thermometer, and on the second shelf there is a hurricane lamp. The clock has an apple on it, and there's a pyramid hanging upside down from the ceiling. The radio speaker grille is a dartboard. The car's headlight is a colander.

The "game" is that you have twenty minutes to find 28 specific items in this mess. Some of the items are in the form of crossword clues, like "symbol of France" which is of course the fleur de lis on the car's bonnet. You know, above the vinyl LP and the coat hanger. Well, unless the Eiffel tower is somewhere in this image, which it totally could be. Or a French flag.

These games are insanely popular.

Regardless of how ridiculous you or I might think they are, Big Fish Games reports that throughout the fourteen hidden object games in the Mystery Case Files series, over a hundred million players have at least sampled the trial version.

If you turn around and look at how many of these games there are from how many publishers, that's a whole hell of a lot more people than are playing Minecraft.

And yet, by all appearances, you seem to be saying these are somehow bad games.

 

That's an extremely tiny 'mess', and you know all the objects are there and what exactly you're looking for. It's a specific, narrow and contrived environment where the player will probably not have a break from positive feedback for more than twenty seconds.

Or are you saying that you could do the same thing with the Skyrim map and objectives, and the game would become insanely popular?

The only reason why it's acceptable (and useful) in that game to have an apparent illogicality to the environment is because you know that the objects you're trying to find are literally in front of your eyes, and that you will be able to identify them (since you know what they are). The high randomness to the environment is offset by everything being in plain sight, and the game is balanced. Not to mention that the idea that something is staring you in the face, but that you cannot see it, is very compelling to a player.

In a different context, this sort of randomness would be annoying and ruin the game. There's always design, always balance, in any popular game.

 

Well, since all you're doing is making excuses, I'm tired of digging.

 

OK, give me a couple of examples of how the principle you showed in that game above, would apply to a procedurally generated version of an openworld game similar to Skyrim?

 

Indeed it's better, it also needs lot of people, look at 18:30
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SziO5PILARM

 

Ugh, I'm reminded why I don't like those games. Why aren't simple adventure games more popular?

Don't mind me, carry on.

Edit: I suppose adventure games are a type of example too, though it's more focused.

 

No.

I have already explained that meaningless environmental objects are an important part of games like Skyrim. You made a bunch of excuses for how they're not really meaningless. I pulled out hidden object games to demonstrate that your excuses don't hold up outside of that case. You made new excuses.

I understand you want to be right. Of course you do; who wants to be wrong? But you're not being right, you're being not-wrong. I keep asking questions:

Which of these sounds more fun?
How do you quantify "boring" and "interesting" in the first place?
Are hidden object games bad games?
Have you seen hidden object games?​

And you keep not answering them.

I'm tired of it. Sure, I get that you think we're talking about different things.

What things are you talking about?

The only real information I've gotten from you is that you don't play games all that often, which rather begs the question of why you are trying to have an opinion about them in the first place.

 

That's the problem all these question are relative to person, while his reasoning is good (and not mere excuse) they just don't apply if you aren't interested, so unless you know someone is interested you can't rationalized why it works, so it's after the fact justification, it's not predictive (the quality missing for a generalized conclusion). For example the equivalent of hidden objects game for open world would be hardcore survival game like RUST and DayZ, their full of nothing and meaningless elements, totally imbalanced, and that's the draw of it because it's totally the experience of a post apocalyptic world, aka when teh world revert to unfairness and power grabbing through resource camping.

 

That's not a problem. You and I may like different games, but we can talk productively about the differences between those kinds of games - if you tell me what your games are.

If you say "this kind of game is bad," and I say "here is a very popular example of that kind of game, is it bad?" - explaining why it is popular does not answer the question.

Is the game bad?

That carries all kinds of information with it. Do you believe a bad game cannot be popular? If this one is bad, then the answer is yes. Do you believe a popular game is necessarily not bad? Then you have to say this one is not bad, because it is popular. Answering the question means things.

Running the other way and saying this game doesn't count means things, too. Primarily, it means you don't care about having any kind of meaningful discussion.

 

How does that have anything to do with a randomness which is an integral part of the level design and game mechanics, such as with hidden object games?

The problem is that you pulled out a very specific corner case where randomness is essential to the gameplay, which has little or nothing to do with whether a crappy procedural algorithm, producing loads of random garbage, is going to enhance your openworld rpg game.

It's irrelevant whether I like hidden object games. If a hundred million players wanted to try out someone's implementation of it, it's pretty well established that it's a good type of game.

The problem is that we are talking about different things. This path of discussion began around whether or not having a lot of randomness in a procedural algorithm for an openworld rpg was a good thing. I totally don't think it is. And now you're trying to say that because hidden object games work with random junk on the screen, you can apply this principle anywhere.

And now you're trying to say I'm coming up with excuses, while refusing to answer my simple question: how does hidden object mechanics apply to randomness in a procedural generation algorithm for an openworld rpg?

If you're going to derail this thread by trying to discredit my moivations rather than rationalize why you think my arguments are wrong, I'm outta here.

 

It's still designed though. It's not just random.

 

That's also a corner case.

- Open world
- RPG
- procedural algorithm
- loads of random garbage

And there we hit the problem.

What does "loads" mean? What does "random" mean? What does "garbage" mean?

I know you mean "too much stuff that I don't like placed for reasons I don't understand," but what does that mean? Where's the line between the cases?

The only reason we're talking about different things is that you won't tell me what you want to talk about.

 

Here there is more. Is nice how a simple formula can trigger an Open World. Hope this inspires new ones...

 

Oh, great. Someone else who won't answer questions, this time using the "it's in this 90 minute video" trick.

 

Don't be too presumptuous, the tone of their comment along with "English isn't my native tongue" imply that they misunderstood you.

 

If there's one thing we learned in this thread, it's to never make a weekly discussion thread about Open Worlds!
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More constructive recommendation: maybe the weekly discussion should focus more on specifics. Like specific Unity games that were recently released?

I'd love to see discussion on the newest unity game releases rather than super open ended discussion on stuff that goes nowhere.

 

Discussion in what sense? What would one discuss?

 

I'd love to see like "Here's some of the features of new Unity game: [great game built on Unity] - how would you guys design these kinds of features?" or something. "How do you think they did it?" or "how would you approach something similar?"

 

Hi there, interesting topic here.

Is it just me, or it's decidedly harder to create an open world game in Unity than in CryEngine or UE4?.. I'm trying to get an urban open worlder off the ground, but it's an endless stream of hardships in U5.5.
(By the way, Sectr Stream/Vis appear rather useless for this cause, and I haven't tried World Streamer yet, but its manual seems super confusing.)

 

CryEngine only supports one terrain, there is no tile terrain streaming support.
If you call one big terrain open world, any 3D engine is able to do open world games.