I am an open world fan, and in the ARPG space, I think Sacred 2 got it right… except for one thing… respawn rate IMO big open explorable areas are kinda ruined in that game by the fact that a zillion irritating kobolds that respawn every few seconds makes moving around them quite annoying. You probably need SOME respawns, but IMO an area you’ve cleared should never refill to where it was the first time through, and not so fast that going across a field to do a quest and then back again to turn it in, you have to kill all the same critters again.
As a player, I prefer the sort of game where I can go anywhere I want, but I’m kept away from the more advanced areas by monster level rather than by artificial barriers. Mostly… of course there will be the occasional gate where you have to solve a quest to get the key, and so on. But I should be able to stumble into an area I’m not ready for yet and have my butt handed to me.
As for how to help the player keep from getting lost in a big world, this is where a really good mapping system comes in. Sacred 2 did a great job on this too: the world map showed ALL quest locations, and you could activate a sidequest (and make a minimap arrow point to it) by clicking that quest’s icon on the world map, which meant you could efficiently clear out several quests in the same area, using the map rather than the quest log.
I recently tried replaying Dungeon Siege 2, and remembered that what drove me NUTS in that game was the really, really bad in-game map. You had one the one hand a tiny minimap that showed the actual terrain, and on the other hand an “artistic” worldmap that had very little relationship to what you saw as you played. I wound up playing with a fan-made game map constantly open on my second monitor
So, yeah… TLDR, open = good, provided it’s supported by the mapping
The question is, if you have an open world, or at least a vast area, how can you balance the monsters?
The oblivion way was weird: all monsters are always on your level (the level being determined by all sorts of repeated actions, not necessarily combat), which kind of neutered the feeling of progression completely.
Then there’s the TQ (or sacred to a certain extend) way: monster have a level range per area and adapt to the player level should he be in this range. If above or below the monsters hit their max-or min cap of that particular area.
Then there are games were monsters just have their fixed levels and end of story.
The last solution doesn’t really work in an open world because the player will sooner or later see monsters that are all but his own level. Either boring or too hard. Its inevitable.
The second works very well in games like TQ that are basically a tunnel. If you progress too quickly you will hit a wall and you know that a little back are the monsters at your range. So you have a choice to grind a little and come back or fight the hard monsters to progress.
But in open world you have the problem that the players direction might not be towards the harder areas at all. Maybe the player is constantly moving “sideways” through the low-level areas. Therefore he won’t have the feeling of progression. He will soon level up and be surrounded by low-level monsters. And when he finally arrives at the more advanced monsters he will still be underwhelmed. Basically it makes the game boring for explorers and too hard to rushers.
There are this little workarounds, like for instance champions that will spawn only when the player is too high to this particular area etc. But all in all there is no good solution known to me.
With this in mind, the more tunnel-like level design has a huge motivation-curve advantage. (rant: E.g. Torchlight is basically one huge tunnel and therefore they don’t have to deal with this sort of problem at all. If the player hits a wall (concerning the strength of monsters), he just needs to grind a little by going back and forth to get a couple of level-ups and he’s good to go. But it’s so easy to balance this sort of game that the monsters can always be just right because the game can assume you have killed anything on your way up to the point where you are now.)
This problem, btw, begins as soon as you open up the levels. So, even if the world is a variety of bigger and smaller maps, the bigger map will automatically divide the players into rushers and explorers and create a balance issue.
It’s very good to have concerns about the openness of the map.
I would like to see the world less lineair than in TQ; truth be told though, in TQ I never explored the ‘extra’ caves and such. Mostly because there wasn’t a reward to do so.
One thing to keep in mind while making big maps is showing the players a clear way to navigate around the main storyline. In L4D, they explain how they guided the players through the grim apocalyptic zombieworld with burnings and other lighter areas, as playtesting proved that players would generally navigate towards the direction of the light (this may be correlated to the dark atmosphere). Playtesting also showed that players would explore small rooms and such - so they decided to place rewards there.
tldr; 1. Big maps need clear visual guidelines that shows players where to go (lights seem to work well, but I guess tracks and such may work as well).
2. Exploration should be rewarded.
But most caves didn’t have secret bosses; a quick search on titanquest.net turned out wether I should look for more secret bosses or not (apparantly I somehow missed the Hydra…). Turned out I shouldn’t. Secret bosses, chests with modifiers/loot you won’t find elsewhere, huge currency bonus (again, provided currency is useful), random quests, precious crafting material… something to reward the player. In TQ, exploring would yield less loot than continuing the game (because you had to walk back to the place you came from, doing nothing - and exploring generally takes more time than following the fixed route), plus you get less experience.
I agree that an open world can be very nice and fun to play.
But as being said, there should be a reward, not just: ah I have seen another dark cave with 10 spiders and a wooden chest.
The Manticore cave in TQ is a good example, if you kill it, the exploration of that particulair cave is rewarding. Make it like that but with a certain amount of randomness in it.
Add hiden areas etc, but don’t create 10 squire miles of open lands, there should be some sort of linear path in it.
Giving proper rewards is easier said than done though
In L4D, you could find more medkits, pills and weaponry if you strayed off the beaten path (or you could find jack shit and get raped by more zombies). L4D offered a decent trade-off (although I feel that speeding through the area was easier than exploring). L4D has completely different reward mechanisms than a loot-em-up though. This is a more general problem with farming, but still;
You can’t give players precisely enough reward (besides it being a balancing nightmare), one character will clear a specific area faster than another, while that other character is faster in other areas.
Giving players too much reward will result in them being overpowered as well as in them grinding that same area over and over - because grinding other areas is not as rewarding.
Giving them too little reward will result in an unsatisfying feeling or they’ll just skip exploring altogether.
Giving them specific rewards they won’t get elsewhere is only interesting if they have need of those specific rewards.
Specific bossmonsters (like the Manticore), besides that it will suffer from the loot dilemma described above, also costs a lot of money to make. Ofcourse it’s a reward in itself to fight those monsters.
I’m thinking about a (possibly invisible) loot multiplier to discourage grinding the same area over and over, but to encourage players to explore and see more of the game in a single game session. I’ll write my thoughts about that in another topic.
L4D doesn’t need grinding. The goal is to finish the level alive, whereas an ARPG hasn’t really got a direct goal. If there would be a goal it would be to finish the game with as much loot as possible.
Next thing that needs to be cleared up is:
You can run through the game, not straying off of the clear paths
You could walk off of the paths and make every part of every map show up on the map, no ‘fog of war’
You could grind/farm, which means you repetitively do things to get better loot.
Those 3 ways of playing get mixed up very often on this board. Then there’s what the makers want. From what i read, it’s the walking of the paths, a little exploring, to conquer normal mode. But full exploration and a little grinding to beat epic, and a whole lot of grinding to beat legendary.
I think what you can conclude from that, is that it’s really hard to (as a gamer, playing the game to beat every level) finish the games 3 full times. I explore the worlds completely, in normal mode too, so i’ve never gotten to Legendary because it just takes to long.
What they could do is make the game smaller, but keep the story intact for normal playthrough, but the reward for playing and completing epic, is that you get a lot more maps, vistas… Like it’s really a more rewarding journey on higher levels.
I agree with 3B0L4, having a bigger world to explore, and really anything that adds some additional flavor to higher difficulty levels would be much appreciated. I thought the bonus bosses in Titan Quest were a nice touch, and I think the theme of adding new content to higher difficulties should be continued.
I also agree that normal mode should be a bit more clear cut with perhaps just a few opportunities to wander off the beaten path to participate in optional side quests. Having too many empty caves or pointless areas just makes the world seem artificially large. Since most casual arpg players, and likely game reviewers as well, are going to only play through normal mode and then quit or start over, you don’t want to make the normal mode experience too long or drawn out. I’ve read comments on a lot of sites about TQ and there were a lot of complaints about how long Greece was and how many satyrs you had to kill. I’m certain medierra is aware of those complaints, so I trust that mistake will not be made in Grim Dawn.
By making the ‘normal’ difficulty smaller would make reviewers complain about the amount of gameplay… We should think up things that make the Epic and Legendary difficulty levels intergrated with the gameplay, not as just extra difficulty settings.
By actually making it 3 different experiences, they add up to the initial gameplay (besides replay value), which would - without a doubt - give GD better scores in reviews.
Myeah, and walking through 3 difficulties while doing all quests can become a drag. There might be too much freedom for casual players and too much easy ‘chores’ for hardcore players who generally rush to the highest difficulties and start grinding and exploring there.
Plus unlocking more areas in higher difficulties means higher difficulties mean more than ‘just’ an increase in difficulty and equipment quality.
The downside would be that the game could feel restricted on normal difficulty for a specific audience.
I don’t know that a shorter length would actually make reviewers complain. We have to remember Grim Dawn is scheduled to be a relatively budget priced download, unlike most AAA releases. Torchlight did not have a tremendous amount of depth, I mean it actually had no outerworld at all and also no multiplayer, yet it scored remarkably well with the critics and public in general.
I also felt that Torchlight’s higher difficulty option, the endless dungeon, was very boring.
True, but you can’t stop reviewers from comparing this to TQ. If the story in the normal difficulty was really short, I can imagine the reviewers to say
“The story’s too short, but then again, it’s only €15-20. If price is a point though, I recommend TQ, with more gameplay and is available through steam for even less.”
it is a good idea though to reward people for completing higher difficulties, though. If i say so myself
If we modify the idea so that you aren’t locking content away for later play but instead made it the further off the path you wandered in earlier difficulties the quicker the enemies out ranked you.
to explain, as you left the main story path you would hit a very sharp increase in monster level / difficulty, in a way forcing you to stick to the path, as you unlocked each difficulty only the main path monsters would upgrade and your character would then be able to push further off the path.
Having whole smaller areas only populated with legendary strength creatures would stop pre-exploration in earlier difficulties without locking content away.
Just a thought.
Edit, you could allso lock side quests off in these harder areas so you would only descover them in later playthroughs
I like the idea with extra areas on higher difficulties. As long as the story or sidequests in normal mode aren’t ending in cliffhangers, no harm is done.
It wouldn’t even need to be a lot.
The extra bosses in TQ already had a huge impact, even though they were few in numbers compared to the whole game.
But it’s yet another topic.
The harder monsters at the outer rims of the levels pose a balancing problem: players who accept the challenge will level up too fast and will not have fun in the following sections of the game.
Somewhere else i suggested that the hard monsters at the outer rims give less xp than the easy monsters at the main path, so that both the casual player and the explorer level-up at the same rate, more or less. That would help i guess.
Still those things are not really related to wide or narrow areas.
IMO big open explorable areas are kinda ruined in that game by the fact that a zillion irritating kobolds that respawn every few seconds makes moving around them quite annoying. You probably need SOME respawns, but IMO an area you’ve cleared should never refill to where it was the first time through, and not so fast that going across a field to do a quest and then back again to turn it in, you have to kill all the same critters again.
