Instead, the world should change in a permanent way. it shouldn't happen six hundred more times. And in a game like Skyrim, once that interesting thing happens. At a choke point where a player should expect something interesting to happen, something interesting should happen, not a billionth wolf attack. I shouldn't be able to go to a specific mountain and anticipate a random encounter (that's an oxymoron!) such behavior takes the surprise out of it to begin with. Not just in rate of appearance, but in number of appearances outright the literal locations at which they spawn should become much more randomized, occurring at potentially every square inch of the map (well, environments permitting), not at eight predetermined locations. I should not think "ugh, another dragon" when one appears, even after many hours I should think, "dear God almighty, a dragon!" Part of this means making those encounters less frequent. Pointless, irritating combat adds nothing to my experience traveling the map. Not that the mechanic itself is bad, because that's not necessarily true, but scattering these encounters around the game world as carelessly as developers are wont to gives those worlds a false appearance of detail, when in fact they're mostly clutter. My burning hot take: the indication of a poorly designed open world map (read: basically every single one ever made) is having more than a handful of generic random encounters. (But even then, by splitting the game into two separate regions, they also split their attention, so it's not perfect.) Anyway, Skyrim actually sort of does do this with strategically placed roads and bandit camps-there's one in the Pale in particular that always gets me-but fails to compensate for its size with remotely interesting combat. By not bothering to fill literally every square inch of the map with some piece of nonsense, the developers could focus resources on designing game mechanics leading the player to emergent gameplay techniques-I can attack the same guard post in six different ways and not get bored. While you're given a certain amount of berth in many areas, you're channeled into specific choke points in others, requiring you to actually understand the geography around you in order to get past. One of the reasons that I enjoyed Metal Gear Solid V was the way in which you're prevented from traveling through literally 100% of the map. Scope is the open world genre's Achilles' heel. The cities in ESO are likewise relatively large, and fairly navigable, but I've always felt that they each share a generic undertone. ![]() It’s substantially more memorable than The Witcher 3's, but even so, most of the settlements lack character, with Diamond City, the robot one south of Sanctuary, and those hot rod goons on the southeastern coast being exceptions that come to mind. The map in Fallout 4 is a worse offender than that in Skyrim. The company likes like to boast about their maps being "four times bigger than anything before" or whatever (as is the case in Fallout 4), or something like "16 times bigger" (for Fallout 76, if I'm not mistaken), but I fail to see how this actually contributes to the game turning out better. ![]() ![]() I suspect this was all done to get to an 11/11/11 release date they bit off more than they could chew. Bethesda already struggles with making their games too large and not detailed enough for marketing reasons-four entire holds in Skyrim are almost devoid of interesting locations, certainly cities, and at least two questlines are notably unfinished. Obviously there's a middle ground between "staggeringly huge" and "disappointingly small," but it's a narrow precipice once you start sacrificing any level of detail for any level of scale, it's challenging not to slide all the way to the other side. In Deus Ex: Human Revolution you can at least be guaranteed an interesting quest for any person who you can seriously interact with, with the city otherwise feeling like an actual city. ![]() They're boring to explore, every building looks identical, and the sense of scale that they're supposed to offer is dwarfed by the sheer lack of depth in any subsection. The cities in The Witcher 3 are a much more "realistic" size and are utterly impossible to navigate. However, I'm very glad that they didn't make it bigger. You're not alone in holding that opinion.
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