This is a cross post from another forum, but thought it might spur some good discussion here as well.
One of the reviews of ELEX praised the game for its “density” in the sense that there’s something to do that’s interesting around every corner.
However, I would rather see these interesting things spread out over a larger geographic area. Let’s say, 5 interesting things per square mile instead of 50. (Without lowering the total number of interesting things to do, of course.)
This is one of my criticisms of Divinity: OS and to a lesser degree Fallout: NV. You were tripping over encounter after encounter in these games because there were so many of them in close proximity to each other. I never felt this way about the original Fallouts or other isometric RPGs from that era, though I guess they all “faked” the true size of the world by using a dedicated world map in combination with more abstracted methods of travel.
Somewhat relatedly, I find the reduced scale of the world in Euro Truck Simulator 2 also annoying, especially when a large metropolitan area is reduced to three or four city blocks. But in this case, a more realistic scale would mean a huge number of extra development dollars, might result in a game that is no longer fun, and possibly would not affect the game’s “density” (stuff per square mile) at all!
Lastly, I am curious about Breath of the Wild, because I have read criticism that the game is not dense enough. (I.e. There is too much traveling from place to place.)
I find the topic interesting: in older games, where imagination had to fill in most of the game’s world, I was very fond of large and large space and worlds, in the vain of Sid Meier’s Pirates or Elite 2: Frontier, or more recently UnReal World.
In the modern gaming where the sights are to be seen, I much prefer tight space, to the extreme, like in Gothic 2 - maybe, as you said, because actually designing large space and making them interesting to the eye is not economically viable, and thus games that attempt that end up looking very dry - to not say “ugly”. The ETS and ATS example is a great one, as I’d love for the world to be expanded in scale, but I wouldn’t appreciate it if it was just copy pasting of town patterns, like what you can find in a bunch of the other “Something Simulator” games out there.
Now that I think about it, the only recent wide space I can think of that I really enjoyed was Shadow of the Colossus.
I also think a low density would require alternate means of transport, such as a horse, dirt bike or automobile. But I don’t think this is a negative. And I don’t think GTA would be nearly so popular if you were limited to traveling on foot.
10 times less dense games?
And what am I supposed to do while I go from PoI A to PoI B, sight seeing? That’s only interesting for the first minute or two.
I used to refer to this as giving the player a little room to breathe. I thought Skyrim was good at this, but I might think differently if I played it again.
That’s a good metaphor. Sometimes I feel developers are trying to shove content into my face. I’ve never played Skyrim, but Morrowind was kind of borderline in this regard. Disabling fog and increasing the draw distance via a mod just made this feeling of being crowded even worse.
It worked really well for me in Just Cause 2. Of course I hated it in FUEL, which made the world too damn big and basically made it all meaningless. But I thought Just Cause 2 was the perfect balance of making a beautiful world that’s fun to explore moment to moment, just watching the scenery go by as you float past it or drive past it or fly past it. There was snow capped mountains, lush river valleys, a dense urban city, remote buddhist villages, beautiful archipelagos, a dry arid desert, tropical beach areas, and many more diverse landscapes.
The other end of the spectrum that I loved was Arkham City. It packed everything into a tiny dense area completely filled to the brim with stuff to do. Areas that you kept exploring over and over, and as the story progressed, that kept changing that area to the demands of the story as well.
So I like both approaches. When designed well, they’re both really good.
Have you played final fantasy 15? The game is the definition of spread out content. Large areas of nothing combined with spending 3 to 5 minutes DRIVING to the next quest.
I think it helps to have good core gameplay. The Crew really nailed this for me. The arcade driving experience was good enough that the long stretches of road gave me an opportunity to fool around and set goals for myself like “go as fast as possible” or “drift through this turn”, while the actual scored challenge spots were dense enough to give me something interesting to do every few miles.
The Witcher 3 had great world spacing. The world the devs made gave the illusion of being much larger and being more spaced out than it really was thanks to smart terrain and logical points of interest. Run down swampy villages next to muddy battlefields, demolished hovels near haunted woods, prosperous farming communities on the outskirts of large cities. The details helped build the illusion of a complete world. When you looked at the map with all the icons enabled, it was easy to see how densely packed and artificial it all was, but while in the world, it was pretty much flawless.
Breath of the Wild nailed the density, in my opinion, by really varying the density of stuff to find. There were areas where you would practically trip over interesting things and there were areas that were really very empty and gave you a good sense of space/distance. What really helped it feel good to me was that climbing or exploring a feature that looked like it should be interesting almost always resulted in finding something. Even if that something wasn’t much, it at least always felt like there was some kind of reward for doing it.
The Witcher 3 is a great example of a large, interesting world that is absolutely stuffed with pointless filler combat. I love just about everything about this game except that you can’t go twentybfeet without encountering wolves or mad dogs or thieves or something. And as much care as they obviously spent in designing the world’s layout they’d do stuff like put a wraith tomb a hundred feet from a bustling village. There may have been too much going on in that game.
I didn’t think of it but I like the reference to GTA. I love those games and I think one reason is they don’t stuff it with all these random combat encounters. You can seek them out, rampages and the like, but you won’t get randomly mugged by some guy, for instance. Unless you’re playing GTA Online in which case god help you.
I also think the density in BoW is absolutely perfect for my taste, perhaps the best part of the game. The density nails the distinction between feeling like you’re tripping over stuff and feeling like you’re discovering things.
However, I think that sparseness puts more intensity of the novelty of the discovery. It was kind of disappointing in BoW to feel like you’d found a really cool secret only to discover it was just another seed or nut or whatever it was.
And it interacts with how the player moves around. Players who fast travel a lot probably have a different experience from people who are on foot, which is different again from having a jetpack.
Space games have similar issues. How do you make space interesting. Then how do you make hyperspace interesting :/
I think IWar 2 did the outer space environment really well. I don’t know how realistic the scale was, but planets were arranged in concentric orbital circles around suns, moons around planets, stations around moons, etc. etc. And I liked the non-wormhole style of travel, because you could watch as planets, nebulae and even suns zipped by you. It was more a lot more interesting than wormhole travel, IMO. Here’s a short video:
I think in an open world the ideal solution are “nodes” that are very dense with encounters coupled with less density between nodes. This mimics the urban/rural feel of real life. Ideally this falling off of encounter density would look like patrols from bad guy bases, maybe traders, small farms, etc.
Skyrim did a pretty good job of this, as did Just Cause 3 with patrols actually fighting each other as you pushed into enemy territory,
This can be hand crafted or procedural, or a bit of both.
After some consideration this might be the reason why I like the PB Games aka Gothic/Risen/Elex so much. I felt the density in Witcher 3 was far too busy, the same way @divedivedive did. Mass Effect Andromeda was almost too much. I think what I like about the PB Games is there is a bunch to do see and fight the first time around but respawn is super slow and you usually have more then enough space to navigate around encounters. Still the world is not so sparse you have to walk 5 mins to find something to do.
I thought Gothic 2 was a little bit too dense, but it was still an awesome game. The fact that you couldn’t go places at early levels without getting powned made the different areas feel more distinct and separated. But enlarging the draw distance would also make the nearness of different areas seem more obvious.
