I love discussions of open world games, as they are my current primary gaming preference. The more open, the better for me.
I love Witcher 3 but I feel it is a very different style game than Skyrim or Fallout. Very story focused, even the side quests are often interesting stories, all clearly hand crafted.
As I said previously, I haven’t played F4 yet (played F:NV and F3, and lived in Skyrim for a LONG time.) But on the debate about main quest quality vs. open world exploration mode, I would hope they would max the open world exploration experience. I get it, you HAVE to have a main quest because that is the “game” that you can “win.” Me, I could not care less, as noted, I remember very little about the main story in Skyrim.
But if I owned Bethesda and could direct their development team, I’d have them focus on maxxing out the open world exploration experience. Fill the world with really interesting places and things to discover. Plant a ton of backstory items that the player can discover and discern what has happened. Have some that aren’t “quests” but lead you to more exploration and perhaps some fascinating location/action (for example, a hidden stash of something cool, or the bones of the failed mission from the backstory discoveries, a hostage, etc.) I want to find some out of the way weird/out of place looking piece of wood, that I can move and it leads to a tunnel that perhaps most people might miss; go into it, have it open into cave and looking at a wall see “help me!” scraped on that wall, go deeper into the cave and have something develop that leads to something else. Let me find an out of the way house, abandoned, signs of a man, a woman, a nursery, a book that I pick up and read that talks about a legend of a huge buried treasure under a weirdly shaped huge tree, and a picture of it. No quest that pops up and tells me where to go, etc. But then at sometime in my exploring, if I see that tree, I can investigate. And be surprised. Or horrified. Or amused.
Fill the world with things to discover that make the world feel alive. That make me feel like they would occur if I was there or not. Bandits robbing travelers on the roads or in their homes. Walking through a field, and off in the distance seeing someone fighting off a huge bear, getting close and seeing that his family is behind him, cowering in fear. There must be a million “situations” that could fill the world, things that would occur in a living, huge world. But I don’t want to see that same guy fighting of the bear and his family behind him 100 times. Or even 5 times. Or even twice.
Let me just wander far off the beaten path, work to get to a remote location, and find a sign warning of falling rocks next to the rocky mountain next to me. And then if I can find a way to make a rock-fall (shoot a loud gun in the air, climb the side of the mountain and find a rock that I can push over the side that creates a rock avalanche, etc.) let me discover that it opens up a previously unaccessible cave. And then find something very cool/funny/frightening/jaw dropping inside.
Make a radiant quest generator that generates truly interesting and varied quests. No “go to this spot and get my saddle and bring it back to me.” Surely one of these can generate interesting quests. You don’t have to have 20,000 completely different quests, but work hard to avoid the kind of mind numbing repetition people are talking about. For example, in a Fallout 4 world, it might be common that people would want a brave explorer to go out and find a missing relative. But surely there are numerous parameters you could use to vary these. Finding lost relatives is a legit need in this world, surely lots of people got separated from their son/daughter/husband/wife/best friend/etc. during the chaos. And as you try to find them, they could have been killed or died in some manner, have set up happily somewhere else and also wonder what happened to the person who is looking for them, be totally lost and in some abandoned house or cave trying to stay alive, be held prisoner or held hostage, have turned into a bad guy of some kind, etc. You just have no idea. My ideal would be that it wouldn’t turn so much into a “guided” quest as much be organic to the game. I.e. I don’t want to have the steps laid out for me. For example, a man tells you that he got separated from his wife a couple of years ago, they were trying to find some kind of civilization, were attacked by a some raiders, he told her to run while he tried to hold them off. He was successful but was unable to find her after that. She’s got bright red hair, is very tall, has a favorite hat that has a big blue feather in it. She had a sister in (whereever) and her mother used to live in (whereever.) That’s it. In your wanderings you keep an eye out for a woman that looks like that. If you ever find her, then there can be a lot of potential outcomes. You might even find someone else with her hat on you can question. Simple radiant quest, feels organic to the world, enough parameters to make each one a little different.
And on and on. I don’t need a main quest, I just want a huge living world that is filled with cool things to discover, one that interacts with me in very interesting ways.
