It is funny that after attempting to diversify the games as a result of the Ubigame meme, they do now seem to be reverting to type again.
None taken, though I disagree with you. It’s not, to me, an alibi, it is simply me stating that I actually prefer this type of open world game, as long as the combat systems are good, to a more narrative-driven, quest-driven system with detailed or meaningful interactions. I don’t want meaning in these types of games, I want action exploration, and loot. I fully admit that most of these games are not GOTY material, from a critical POV. No argument there. But these are games I will pay for, while I never got beyond the first hour in The Witcher 3 (largely due to the PC combat, which I suck at).
Thanks for the idea of watching Youtube to find out how the Fate of Atlantis DLC ends. I just could not play the game any more. Atlantis is such a boring place.
I enjoyed the game for most of it, but it could be half as long and I wasn’t doing all of the many side quests and daily/weekly quests.
I completed that quest! But didn’t make it much further afterward. Elysium sucks.
Yeah, I gave up after ~20 hours or so in Elysium. The prior 100 or so hours were pretty fun, though.
I am not sure why you are acting as if it was either/or.
Good writing and varied, memorable quest design does not preclude having good combat/stealth systems (though I would argue AC games aren’t great there either) or action exploration or conquerable bases and detailed loot systems.
I do, in fact, think it is something of an either/or situation, for two reasons (again, just my thoughts, and certainly not any sort of cosmic law). One reason is philosophical. We’re talking about two very different types of games. One is built around systems, and repeated activities that are common in their essential structure, with just enough variation to offer some different contexts in which those systems can operate. There is narrative, yes, but it’s more the narrative that grows from the repetition of the same actions within different contexts (location, gear, enemies, etc.) rather than from actual story lines. The other is built around stories, for which the systems serve as mechanics through which players can advance the narrative. Narrative here is built explicitly as story telling of the more classical sort, and while systems can be quite important to the overall experience, they are not central to it. In the former, you can take away the story line entirely and still have a game; in the latter, one could argue, you could take away the systems/mechanics and still have a strong narrative (though I’m overstating it a bit here probably). An example of the first type of game is Diablo III. The narrative is utterly inconsequential to the narrative of character development, which is accomplished via repetition of combat in differing arenas with differing foes and differing gear sets, but all within a fairly narrow band of variation. An example of the latter would be something like Kingdom Come: Deliverance, at least in my opinion. There, you experience a story centered on your character, where the game mechanics get their meaning from how they define your character, not from their intrinsic fun. The story is essentially fixed, in the macro sense, and you are creating your own place in that narrative. If you were just grinding stuff and fighting hordes of faceless opponents to get more loot, it would simply not fit. Likewise, in a game like Diablo 3, having a bunch of really detailed and hand-crafted quests would probably just make most players cranky, as the point is to fight hordes of faceless enemies.
The second reason I think you can argue that it is an either/or situation is practicality. The sheer volume of stuff you need for a game intended to be played ad nauseum, repeating the same basic actions again and again in a kill-loot-level cycle, I think generally precludes doing anything other than cookie cutter repetition. It can be done well, or not so well, but when the point of the game is huge amounts of stuff to kill and loot, again and again, there’s a hard limit to how much you can hand craft things. There’s always going to be a trade-off between volume of content and the degree to which that content is closely directed and crafted. To create custom, thoughtful content for a game where that content is ground through at prodigious rates seems unrealistic.
But again, just my thoughts. I like both types of games for different reasons. I just don’t see a need to have both archetypes squeezed into a single game.
That’s a good point. The combat in Kingdom Come is kind of fun in a Mount and Blade sort of way - but it suffers from the same awkwardness of swing timing, strange hit boxes (it’s actually very hard for me to see distance KC combat when it’s a matter of inches) and honestly a huge amount of old school grind that sort of wants you to spend hours of real time training.
For someone who lives in Scandinavia, your view of the Vikings is rather limited :). They ranged from Russia (known at the Rus there) to England to France (Normandy) to Constantinople (Varangian Guard), to Iceland and Greenland. I really doubt that the game will be limited to just Scandinavia. I actually suspect that a large part will take place in England during the Viking invasions. There you would have plenty of factions - various Viking groups, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, etc. but this is just a total guess on my part. But there’s no reason a Viking AC has to take place solely in the cold north and just in stone forts (depending upon the time frame, there might not even be many stone forts at all).
@Grifman I never said Vikings where only in Scandinavia, just that I’d like to see a great game set in Scandinavia.
Not that Russia or England are any less grey, cold and muddy.
I mean seriously. England? The greyest of countries throughout history. And Russia? Known for having the least colorful food in the world.
Interesting post overall, even if it’s going to be one of those “agree to disagree” things, I guess.
Even a game like Diablo can be written well or poorly. Even in such actionfest-first type of game is a space for some good writing. Same with ACO, which is much closer to Witcher 3 in style than to Diablo.
Regarding your point
Odyssey would have been lot better game overall - and in my humble opinion even better received by its playerbase - if it had less overall content but more meaningful one.
Of course, CDP with TW3 proved that you can have that amount of content and higher quality still anyway.
I love open world games, but I really dislike games that are too verbose. I just want to travel a massive world, experience differens areas, walk in the night rain, level up, combat enemies and just have fun exploring a massive world.
I didn’t get very far in Witcher 3, because I thought there was way too much story leading me on, in a very specific direction constantly. (Somewhere after the bath club scene I think I quit.).
The AC games are perfect for me, even though the last, which is gorgerous, also has a lot of copy paste content.
If I had to choose, I enjoy the writing in Bethesda’s games more, since they are pretty great at enviromental storytelling. Telling names “Hamaes shame”, short interesting locales (A cave with a small letter and a corpse with some gadget) or the Lighthouse…OH man, the lighthouse.
THAT is the kind of enviromental storytelling I absolutely adore - You enter a small house with a lighthouse, and suddenly you are delving into subeterannian caves with old, blind elves, and after that, a massive dwarven city underneath that.
Its a lot more epic fantasy, than say Witcher 3, which is more grounded in realism. I’m a lot more interested in high epic fantasy, than gritty realism. That is probably also why I bounced hard off of Kingdom Come.
The above is of course entirely my opinion, and not an invalidation of anyone elses preferences.
That post makes me think about how much more interesting Odyssey would have been if the fort takeovers fed into a meta-layer (instead of just gating a meaningless battle that changes fuck-all in a conflict it’s not interested in exploring).
Basically, strip out more story, but lean into a Mount and Blade direction.
I liked the game and story just fine. Course, I also really liked Bayek and the story in Origins, so what do I know.
Can’t disagree with you on this, really; though I loved the 100 or so hours I put into Odyssey, even I found it bloated by the end. Trimming down some of the fat would have kept the general spirit but made it more digestible.
Yeah, the big disappointment was that they had the whole war layer but did jack all with it. I would not have minded if it had not been there, but once it’s there, I think it should be, you know, used. They could still have had a ton of random-esque battles but had them feed into some sort of tug of war between Athens and Sparta. But that wasn’t, clearly, part of their ludicrous AC narrative. Still, it was sort of goofy fun to fight those big battles, meaningless as they were.
Ugh I was hoping the Atlantis dlcs would be a good tight narrative experience that flesh out the main character more, like how Origins dlc’s were for Bayek.
And here everyone is saying they are boring and too long. D:
I only got through part of the Elysium stuff. It was MOTS, and fun enough in some ways, but by that point I was burning out on it all. And it seemed, well, narratively pointless, which normally I don’t care about, but this was particularly egregiously bland.
I loved the game, and I even love the First Blades DLC, but I dropped out during the first chapter of Elysium/Atlantis. I preferred the “real world” rather than the fantasy one, and as others have noted, it was just too much MOTS. It really felt bloated, and the story just wasn’t as interesting.
I actually liked the second one (Odyssey’s version of Hell), since you get to interact with some of the characters from the main game. One character in particular.
I always meant to go back and see if something happened if you helped one side take over the entire map. By the time I was ready to consider that I was pretty done with the game though. It doesn’t do anything special, does it? Someone out there must have tried it.