That's one thing that has always stuck out to me about Fallout 3. The critical path in that story is only like 4 hours long. You can blitz the entire story in an afternoon.
But Fallout 3 is a 60 hour game. 4 of that is critical path story and can be done right away with no barriers of entry. And 56 of that is everything else. That's the way side content should be done in games.
And I fully agree about Valhalla, and that's why I've never finished the game, despite having an insane amount of playtime on it. It's because there's so much content locked behind side stuff, and so much player power locked behind "optional" content, that progressing the main story is impossible without doing countless hours of meandering side stuff. Right now my main story quest is just "do all of the zones." And I have probably another 20 hours (or more) of grinding out content in each of the major regions.
I think a lot of developers/publishers/etc don’t really like optional content. A WOW designer was talking about that after Legion, people really liked the class content and someone asked why they didn’t do more of that, and the designer said it was really controversial in development because they were worried they were making content for each class that 90% of people wouldn’t see (a big plus for this they mentioned in the long run was it made people make alts to replay the content, but that wasn’t really anticipated at the time).
The thought is basically “if we make 10 optional quests or “lock-out” story branches that are each 10 hours and people only play one of them, they only get 10 hours of content, but if we make them all required and accessible during a single play-through players get 100 hours of content”.
No one wants to advertise “this is a 15 hour game you can replay 10 times”, they want to say “this is a 100 hour game”. So unless you have someone like Todd Howard in a position of power pushing it robust side content gets downplayed. I have seen multiple devs give this as a reason for “why don’t games have more side content/branching paths/etc”. Marketing wants long games, managers don’t want to spend money on things every player isn’t going to see, and “lets just make all the content required” seems like an easy fix to both problems.
It's understandable they feel that way when you see things like Mass Effect stats from the original trilogy release. How many players took the default appearance male Soldier Shepherd? That's just embarrassing, they mashed through "how would you like to engage with the ENTIRE GAME" like it was a boring intro cutscene they didn't want to watch.
It's understandable they feel that way when you see things like Mass Effect stats from the original trilogy release. How many players took the default appearance male Soldier Shepherd? That's just embarrassing, they mashed through "how would you like to engage with the ENTIRE GAME" like it was a boring intro cutscene they didn't want to watch.
I am probably terrible, but I have to say I’m this a lot of times in games with voiced, canon characters that allow you to change appearances.
If you have a game where I am rolling my own character from scratch like BG3 I will spend hours at character creation, but if I am playing “Captain John Smith, voiced by That Actor You Recognize” I probably just am going to go with the default canon look too.
If they had robust character customization options for Eivie and Kassandra beyond clothes and hair I.. probably wouldn’t engage with that at all, because Eivior and Kassandra are Eivor and Kassandra.
I feel like a pretty big Mass Effect fan and consider myself to have fully engaged with the experience for both of my full playthroughs of the trilogy.
None of my memories of that experience involve the appearance of my character.
It's understandable they feel that way when you see things like Mass Effect stats from the original trilogy release. How many players took the default appearance male Soldier Shepherd? That's just embarrassing, they mashed through "how would you like to engage with the ENTIRE GAME" like it was a boring intro cutscene they didn't want to watch.
Yeah that's me (except the female default). I do not give a single tiny shit about character creators. I do not care about customizing a character one iota.
It's understandable they feel that way when you see things like Mass Effect stats from the original trilogy release. How many players took the default appearance male Soldier Shepherd? That's just embarrassing, they mashed through "how would you like to engage with the ENTIRE GAME" like it was a boring intro cutscene they didn't want to watch.
Yeah that's me (except the female default). I do not give a single tiny shit about character creators. I do not care about customizing a character one iota.
Not caring what the character looks like is one thing, but not caring how the game plays is much worse and probably made a lot of people think Mass Effect was a fairly basic third person shooter.
You'd have a point except that Soldier is really fun in Mass Effect.
I think it was good in 2... and none of the other games. 1 has the worst shooting, so being all in on shooting sucks. 2 adds slow mo and restricts weapon use from other classes, so it is pretty good. 3 gives everyone else really fun new abilities... and Soldiers mainly get grenades, which I generally think are bad. I also think Sentinel lost out in the transition to 3.
It's understandable they feel that way when you see things like Mass Effect stats from the original trilogy release. How many players took the default appearance male Soldier Shepherd? That's just embarrassing, they mashed through "how would you like to engage with the ENTIRE GAME" like it was a boring intro cutscene they didn't want to watch.
Yeah that's me (except the female default). I do not give a single tiny shit about character creators. I do not care about customizing a character one iota.
I just go for "Old Lady with Eyepatch" and move on
My choices will largely be obscured by camera angles or outfit choices most of the time anyway; I've spent 90% of my Elden Ring run wearing a gargoyle head, for example, so the only character choice that's had an impact on my game is the voice option
You'd have a point except that Soldier is really fun in Mass Effect.
Also, how is someone playing the game for the first time supposed to know how each class plays? There's no reason for someone going in blind to assume that Soldier sucks.
The solve for things like that is to make it a radial menu, so you have to pick a direction to choose anything, and nothing gets moved to the top of a list. No mashing A to select a default.
If you did that, I honestly wonder how the class selection ratio would turn out for new players.
If the side content is fun and if it has compelling writing, people will want to do it even if it isn't required for critical path completion. The problem is, Ubisoft goes for quantity over quality in all of their singleplayer open world games. Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Watch Dogs, Immortals Fenix Rising, every singleplayer game they have made in the past 10-15 years has been stuffed to the brim with bloat and filler content that nobody remembers, because none of it is particularly engaging.
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I think a lot of developers/publishers/etc don’t really like optional content. A WOW designer was talking about that after Legion, people really liked the class content and someone asked why they didn’t do more of that, and the designer said it was really controversial in development because they were worried they were making content for each class that 90% of people wouldn’t see (a big plus for this they mentioned in the long run was it made people make alts to replay the content, but that wasn’t really anticipated at the time).
The thought is basically “if we make 10 optional quests or “lock-out” story branches that are each 10 hours and people only play one of them, they only get 10 hours of content, but if we make them all required and accessible during a single play-through players get 100 hours of content”.
No one wants to advertise “this is a 15 hour game you can replay 10 times”, they want to say “this is a 100 hour game”. So unless you have someone like Todd Howard in a position of power pushing it robust side content gets downplayed. I have seen multiple devs give this as a reason for “why don’t games have more side content/branching paths/etc”. Marketing wants long games, managers don’t want to spend money on things every player isn’t going to see, and “lets just make all the content required” seems like an easy fix to both problems.
I am probably terrible, but I have to say I’m this a lot of times in games with voiced, canon characters that allow you to change appearances.
If you have a game where I am rolling my own character from scratch like BG3 I will spend hours at character creation, but if I am playing “Captain John Smith, voiced by That Actor You Recognize” I probably just am going to go with the default canon look too.
If they had robust character customization options for Eivie and Kassandra beyond clothes and hair I.. probably wouldn’t engage with that at all, because Eivior and Kassandra are Eivor and Kassandra.
None of my memories of that experience involve the appearance of my character.
Yeah that's me (except the female default). I do not give a single tiny shit about character creators. I do not care about customizing a character one iota.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
Not caring what the character looks like is one thing, but not caring how the game plays is much worse and probably made a lot of people think Mass Effect was a fairly basic third person shooter.
I think it was good in 2... and none of the other games. 1 has the worst shooting, so being all in on shooting sucks. 2 adds slow mo and restricts weapon use from other classes, so it is pretty good. 3 gives everyone else really fun new abilities... and Soldiers mainly get grenades, which I generally think are bad. I also think Sentinel lost out in the transition to 3.
I just go for "Old Lady with Eyepatch" and move on
My choices will largely be obscured by camera angles or outfit choices most of the time anyway; I've spent 90% of my Elden Ring run wearing a gargoyle head, for example, so the only character choice that's had an impact on my game is the voice option
Also, how is someone playing the game for the first time supposed to know how each class plays? There's no reason for someone going in blind to assume that Soldier sucks.
If you did that, I honestly wonder how the class selection ratio would turn out for new players.
All the "go to place to collect and/or kill things" side stuff just felt the same after a while; I wasn't even engaging with the dialogue
They had some good cat petting animations