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Equivilent Exchange: what would you be willing to give up for X?
Sorenson
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Check the TL;DR entry if you don't feel like reading all this
Being a lot who on the whole are extremily familier with games, their mechanics, and their history, we've seen a multitude of different takes on how certain aspects of games can be handled, giving rise to a diversity as broad as any particular analogical spectrum. We've seen and have gone from titles where we have broad-sensed and miniscule input to those where literily every action is under our control, where the world ranges from a selection of smaller areas connected by instantanious transit to vast openness where everything is to scale (and traveled to/explored in such), where whatever flavor of power the game offers you ranges from a finite resource good for only one or two spectacular uses to its integration into day-to-day living, and so on. And over the years, we've seen transitions from one paradigm to another, some for the better, some for the worse, and some which have deeply and bitterly divided the fanbase.
All of this makes one wonder what the general "worth" of these different paradigms are. The idea is, of course, absurd and in many cases easily defeated by the flaunting of the "subjectivity and opinions" card - but then again, the world itself, our pasttime/hobby/livlihood is based upon absurdity. You try telling someone with a completily straight face about the depth of a game in which two italian-american plumber brothers get transported to a world in which an evil dinosaur king has taken its princess captive and the two brothers save her by stomping on turtles, slithering down pipes, and noshing on mushrooms and plants to gain gigantic stature and pyrokinetic powers respectively.
I suggest, therefore, a nice little discussion in which we list and argue about paradigm changes we think would be balanced in a nice and satisfactory manner - sacrificing a particular aspect in exchange for another of a similar vein while ensuring that the new material neither robs the game/franchise in question nor is so tremendous in impact that it changes the very nature of the title.
For example: having gotten back into playing both Oblivion and Daggerfall recently, I find myself wondering what the more entertaining or providing of the overworld paradigms used by these two games is. In Oblivion's more modern corner, we have an intricately and painstakingly detailed world to explore, certainely full of beautiful sights, natural wonders, and deep, dark, dangerous secrets to unearth. With Daggerfall, however, the overworld is simply a vast, flat expanse that the actual things of interest are set upon: there's very little of particular interest to be gained from crawling about the overworld instead of using fast-travel, and indeed the sheer scale of it makes such extremily tedious: yet, by treating the overworld as it did, Bethesda was instead able to focus upon what some might find far more desireable to traipsing about the wilderness, the actual spelunking and exploration of dungeons and the looting of the plunder within (both a blessed and cursed experience due to the random generation of said dungeons).
But isn't that more or less the core of the game? Is it not the exploration and desecration of dungeons and tombs in the name of gold and glory that calls many of us to games like Daggerfall and Oblivion. I mean yes you've got other things like the quests and the storylines and what not, but is not the vast majority of these other things rooted in the aforementioned exploration and desecration? If that is the case, then why focus so many resources upon this massive, highly-detailed-but-low-density overworld when one could instead encapsulate the interesting elements of the overworld within their own temples/crupts/caves/what have you, thus freeing resources that would have been diverted to creating and detailing the filler terrain and allowing them to be invested in the development of more quests, towns, dungeons, and the other things that form the core of the game's interesting content?
And methinks that this is exactly what Bethesda should do with TESV/VI. While an overworld is certainely nice, the extrordinarily-high filler-to-content ratio makes me think that they'd be better off going back to the Daggerfall approach: make the explicit locales highly detailed and chock full of content and the overworld that place you have to go through for a few seconds in order to get to the interesting stuff.
TL;DR: ITT we discuss alternative paradigms about particular aspects of games while still providing the same general baseline experience offered by the title in question.
Being a lot who on the whole are extremily familier with games, their mechanics, and their history, we've seen a multitude of different takes on how certain aspects of games can be handled, giving rise to a diversity as broad as any particular analogical spectrum. We've seen and have gone from titles where we have broad-sensed and miniscule input to those where literily every action is under our control, where the world ranges from a selection of smaller areas connected by instantanious transit to vast openness where everything is to scale (and traveled to/explored in such), where whatever flavor of power the game offers you ranges from a finite resource good for only one or two spectacular uses to its integration into day-to-day living, and so on. And over the years, we've seen transitions from one paradigm to another, some for the better, some for the worse, and some which have deeply and bitterly divided the fanbase.
All of this makes one wonder what the general "worth" of these different paradigms are. The idea is, of course, absurd and in many cases easily defeated by the flaunting of the "subjectivity and opinions" card - but then again, the world itself, our pasttime/hobby/livlihood is based upon absurdity. You try telling someone with a completily straight face about the depth of a game in which two italian-american plumber brothers get transported to a world in which an evil dinosaur king has taken its princess captive and the two brothers save her by stomping on turtles, slithering down pipes, and noshing on mushrooms and plants to gain gigantic stature and pyrokinetic powers respectively.
I suggest, therefore, a nice little discussion in which we list and argue about paradigm changes we think would be balanced in a nice and satisfactory manner - sacrificing a particular aspect in exchange for another of a similar vein while ensuring that the new material neither robs the game/franchise in question nor is so tremendous in impact that it changes the very nature of the title.
For example: having gotten back into playing both Oblivion and Daggerfall recently, I find myself wondering what the more entertaining or providing of the overworld paradigms used by these two games is. In Oblivion's more modern corner, we have an intricately and painstakingly detailed world to explore, certainely full of beautiful sights, natural wonders, and deep, dark, dangerous secrets to unearth. With Daggerfall, however, the overworld is simply a vast, flat expanse that the actual things of interest are set upon: there's very little of particular interest to be gained from crawling about the overworld instead of using fast-travel, and indeed the sheer scale of it makes such extremily tedious: yet, by treating the overworld as it did, Bethesda was instead able to focus upon what some might find far more desireable to traipsing about the wilderness, the actual spelunking and exploration of dungeons and the looting of the plunder within (both a blessed and cursed experience due to the random generation of said dungeons).
But isn't that more or less the core of the game? Is it not the exploration and desecration of dungeons and tombs in the name of gold and glory that calls many of us to games like Daggerfall and Oblivion. I mean yes you've got other things like the quests and the storylines and what not, but is not the vast majority of these other things rooted in the aforementioned exploration and desecration? If that is the case, then why focus so many resources upon this massive, highly-detailed-but-low-density overworld when one could instead encapsulate the interesting elements of the overworld within their own temples/crupts/caves/what have you, thus freeing resources that would have been diverted to creating and detailing the filler terrain and allowing them to be invested in the development of more quests, towns, dungeons, and the other things that form the core of the game's interesting content?
And methinks that this is exactly what Bethesda should do with TESV/VI. While an overworld is certainely nice, the extrordinarily-high filler-to-content ratio makes me think that they'd be better off going back to the Daggerfall approach: make the explicit locales highly detailed and chock full of content and the overworld that place you have to go through for a few seconds in order to get to the interesting stuff.
TL;DR: ITT we discuss alternative paradigms about particular aspects of games while still providing the same general baseline experience offered by the title in question.
Sorenson on
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Posts
I don't think that this would work very well with modern, realistic graphics. The world has to be, how can I say, spatially coherent. You can just plop super detailed dungeons in "vast empty overworlds"... The amount of work necessary to flesh out the wilderness is too much to justify big empty places.
I did think Fallout overworld was better designed than Oblivion's. A few emptier parts balancing the more dense areas.
I find your OP verbose and impenetrable. I have no idea what you're talking about, but I see that it involves Daggerfall and Oblivion. This being as it may, I beg that you continue with smaller words and shorter sentences.
Anyway, I don't really have a problem with Oblivion's overworld. It should be more interesting, yes, but that's easily remedied. What I really hate are the small, dark, uninteresting nasty places. Yes; even in Zelda, I'd rather be wandering around above ground than plundering Yet Another Dungeon. I see no reason why some of the more interesting elements of dungeons cannot be transplanted into the sunlit lands.
What say you to that?
Edit: Beaten! What are the chances?
While valid, the problem is that you think of dungeons and locales of interest in terms of the proto-dungeon: darkened, underground structures and cooridors straight out of the collective vision of Dungeons and Dragons, whereas locales can include that but also a great variety of different environments. In fact, there is nothing that could stop some of the locales one could visit from being purely of an outdoor nature - the encroachment upon nature comes in the isolation of these interesting areas as their own seperate instances, much as cities were treated in Oblivion as compared to Morrowind, with the trimming and disposal of the less-interesting and content-lacking filler terrain - Pale Pass of Oblivion, for example, is an isolated and instanced external worldspace, and one could do any great number of different areas, as evidenced by the number of mods that introduce their own worldspaces and such.
Think, too, of the benifits of the removal of an interactive overworld - without having to load every single little detail, interesting and otherwise, one's hardware would have more resources available to ensure smooth operation.
Do take note that this whole overworld thing is just my own example, and to be honest I was more interested in seeing what other people would come up with than merely arguing my own viewpoint.
Or SD3 on the DS.
Or a couple of other things.
I would give up full voice acting in RPGs if it means I get more quests, dialogue options, and outcomes. Think Fallout 1&2 vs. Fallout 3. As far as the dialogue options and outcomes goes.