If there's one thing that annoys me though it's the crowded world it presents. Unlike World of Warcraft for example, which is a great exampleMy main problem is the repetitiveness of the side missions just to fill
of building a world that is both small but looks big, this one grates my suspension of disbelief almost immediately. It's all ok when you are on
the tiny island at the start, but once you find an Athens where the walled passage to Piraeus is a 100 meter wall section, and where you can see the houses on Salamis from the port... yeah. Everything's a bit... small.
Am 13.08.24 um 15:29 schrieb kyonshi:
If there's one thing that annoys me though it's the crowded world itMy main problem is the repetitiveness of the side missions just to fill
presents. Unlike World of Warcraft for example, which is a great example
of building a world that is both small but looks big, this one grates my
suspension of disbelief almost immediately. It's all ok when you are on
the tiny island at the start, but once you find an Athens where the
walled
passage to Piraeus is a 100 meter wall section, and where you can see the
houses on Salamis from the port... yeah. Everything's a bit... small.
the world, less would have been more for this game. It would have been
an excellent game if they just focused on the main story and added a
little bit of fluff and reduce the open world to semi open!
But basically you go into every town and every town has the same 5-10 soulless side missions which partially you have to perform to get the
stats ramped up until you can continue the main mission. Thats the
reason why I only play this game in chunks, I usually get bored by it
after 5-10 hours. Also given that I live in Europe and have been to
Greece several times, the setting is historic for me but not exotic!
On 9/2/2024 8:20 AM, Werner P. wrote:
Am 13.08.24 um 15:29 schrieb kyonshi:
If there's one thing that annoys me though it's the crowded world itMy main problem is the repetitiveness of the side missions just to fill
presents. Unlike World of Warcraft for example, which is a great example >>> of building a world that is both small but looks big, this one grates my >>> suspension of disbelief almost immediately. It's all ok when you are on
the tiny island at the start, but once you find an Athens where the
walled
passage to Piraeus is a 100 meter wall section, and where you can see the >>> houses on Salamis from the port... yeah. Everything's a bit... small.
the world, less would have been more for this game. It would have been
an excellent game if they just focused on the main story and added a
little bit of fluff and reduce the open world to semi open!
But basically you go into every town and every town has the same 5-10
soulless side missions which partially you have to perform to get the
stats ramped up until you can continue the main mission. Thats the
reason why I only play this game in chunks, I usually get bored by it
after 5-10 hours. Also given that I live in Europe and have been to
Greece several times, the setting is historic for me but not exotic!
Well, I live in Europe as well, and it's quite nice to see an
approximation of what the world looked back in the day.
Still. It's just an approximation. A theme park version.
On Tue, 3 Sep 2024 12:35:41 +0200, Kyonshi <gmkeros@gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/2/2024 8:20 AM, Werner P. wrote:
Am 13.08.24 um 15:29 schrieb kyonshi:
If there's one thing that annoys me though it's the crowded world itMy main problem is the repetitiveness of the side missions just to fill
presents. Unlike World of Warcraft for example, which is a great example >>>> of building a world that is both small but looks big, this one grates my >>>> suspension of disbelief almost immediately. It's all ok when you are on >>>> the tiny island at the start, but once you find an Athens where the
walled
passage to Piraeus is a 100 meter wall section, and where you can see the >>>> houses on Salamis from the port... yeah. Everything's a bit... small.
the world, less would have been more for this game. It would have been
an excellent game if they just focused on the main story and added a
little bit of fluff and reduce the open world to semi open!
But basically you go into every town and every town has the same 5-10
soulless side missions which partially you have to perform to get the
stats ramped up until you can continue the main mission. Thats the
reason why I only play this game in chunks, I usually get bored by it
after 5-10 hours. Also given that I live in Europe and have been to
Greece several times, the setting is historic for me but not exotic!
Well, I live in Europe as well, and it's quite nice to see an
approximation of what the world looked back in the day.
Still. It's just an approximation. A theme park version.
I mean, that's true of pretty much every game placed in a 'real world' setting. Manhattan in "The Division" isn't really like the real New
York at all. The Tokyo in "Ghostwire" isn't the same as its real-life counterpart either. Paris in "The Saboteur" was completely different.
They're _all_ theme-park versions of the real thing.
But I get what you're saying. These something secretly joyful about
roaming streets you know, seeing sights _mostly_ familiar, and having fantastic adventures in those locales.
The only game I can think of to truly nail the real-world look is "MS
Flight Simulator 20202"... and even then it's a bit theme-parky at
times. But at least the geography is (more or less) correct. ;-)
On 9/5/2024 2:14 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
On Tue, 3 Sep 2024 12:35:41 +0200, Kyonshi <gmkeros@gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/2/2024 8:20 AM, Werner P. wrote:
Am 13.08.24 um 15:29 schrieb kyonshi:
If there's one thing that annoys me though it's the crowded world it >>>>> presents. Unlike World of Warcraft for example, which is a great example >>>>> of building a world that is both small but looks big, this one grates my >>>>> suspension of disbelief almost immediately. It's all ok when you are on >>>>> the tiny island at the start, but once you find an Athens where thelittle bit of fluff and reduce the open world to semi open!
walled
passage to Piraeus is a 100 meter wall section, and where you can see the >>>>> houses on Salamis from the port... yeah. Everything's a bit... small. >>>> My main problem is the repetitiveness of the side missions just to fill >>>> the world, less would have been more for this game. It would have been >>>> an excellent game if they just focused on the main story and added a
But basically you go into every town and every town has the same 5-10
soulless side missions which partially you have to perform to get the
stats ramped up until you can continue the main mission. Thats the
reason why I only play this game in chunks, I usually get bored by it
after 5-10 hours. Also given that I live in Europe and have been to
Greece several times, the setting is historic for me but not exotic!
Well, I live in Europe as well, and it's quite nice to see an
approximation of what the world looked back in the day.
Still. It's just an approximation. A theme park version.
I mean, that's true of pretty much every game placed in a 'real world'
setting. Manhattan in "The Division" isn't really like the real New
York at all. The Tokyo in "Ghostwire" isn't the same as its real-life
counterpart either. Paris in "The Saboteur" was completely different.
They're _all_ theme-park versions of the real thing.
But I get what you're saying. These something secretly joyful about
roaming streets you know, seeing sights _mostly_ familiar, and having
fantastic adventures in those locales.
The only game I can think of to truly nail the real-world look is "MS
Flight Simulator 20202"... and even then it's a bit theme-parky at
times. But at least the geography is (more or less) correct. ;-)
My main issue is that AC:O it just is a bit too small. In a lot of ways
it doesn't keep you from seeing the next region. You are aware that
there is a region right next door in a lot of cases (because a lot of it
is set on the open sea).
World of Warcraft (at least the Vanilla regions) is really good about
that. Sure, it still isn't big, but when you are in any region, except
maybe at the edges, you can easily forget that this is just a small
area. AC:O on the other hand puts a lot of important scenes and
locations at the edges, which means you see the next region constantly,
even though otherwise the areas are likely much larger.
On Fri, 6 Sep 2024 10:13:39 +0200, Kyonshi <gmkeros@gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/5/2024 2:14 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
On Tue, 3 Sep 2024 12:35:41 +0200, Kyonshi <gmkeros@gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/2/2024 8:20 AM, Werner P. wrote:
Am 13.08.24 um 15:29 schrieb kyonshi:
If there's one thing that annoys me though it's the crowded world it >>>>>> presents. Unlike World of Warcraft for example, which is a great example >>>>>> of building a world that is both small but looks big, this one grates my >>>>>> suspension of disbelief almost immediately. It's all ok when you are on >>>>>> the tiny island at the start, but once you find an Athens where the >>>>>> walledBut basically you go into every town and every town has the same 5-10 >>>>> soulless side missions which partially you have to perform to get the >>>>> stats ramped up until you can continue the main mission. Thats the
passage to Piraeus is a 100 meter wall section, and where you can see the
houses on Salamis from the port... yeah. Everything's a bit... small. >>>>> My main problem is the repetitiveness of the side missions just to fill >>>>> the world, less would have been more for this game. It would have been >>>>> an excellent game if they just focused on the main story and added a >>>>> little bit of fluff and reduce the open world to semi open!
reason why I only play this game in chunks, I usually get bored by it >>>>> after 5-10 hours. Also given that I live in Europe and have been to
Greece several times, the setting is historic for me but not exotic! >>>>>
Well, I live in Europe as well, and it's quite nice to see an
approximation of what the world looked back in the day.
Still. It's just an approximation. A theme park version.
I mean, that's true of pretty much every game placed in a 'real world'
setting. Manhattan in "The Division" isn't really like the real New
York at all. The Tokyo in "Ghostwire" isn't the same as its real-life
counterpart either. Paris in "The Saboteur" was completely different.
They're _all_ theme-park versions of the real thing.
But I get what you're saying. These something secretly joyful about
roaming streets you know, seeing sights _mostly_ familiar, and having
fantastic adventures in those locales.
The only game I can think of to truly nail the real-world look is "MS
Flight Simulator 20202"... and even then it's a bit theme-parky at
times. But at least the geography is (more or less) correct. ;-)
My main issue is that AC:O it just is a bit too small. In a lot of ways
it doesn't keep you from seeing the next region. You are aware that
there is a region right next door in a lot of cases (because a lot of it
is set on the open sea).
World of Warcraft (at least the Vanilla regions) is really good about
that. Sure, it still isn't big, but when you are in any region, except
maybe at the edges, you can easily forget that this is just a small
area. AC:O on the other hand puts a lot of important scenes and
locations at the edges, which means you see the next region constantly,
even though otherwise the areas are likely much larger.
That's a problem with a lot of games. On the one hand, they want to
appear huge and open... so make a big map with long sight-lines. But
actually creating huge worlds is really expensive, and traversing them
is often quite dull. So you need to find a balance: make the world
small enough that you can afford to populate it with enough things
that it's actually fun to wander through, and still make the game FEEL
large.
It's a balancing act. Create a world too big and people complain about
how annoying it is to cross. Make it too small and people bitch about
that too. Tighten the sight-lines with mountains and hills that
obstruct the view, and the world feels claustrophobic. Make it so you
can see for miles and you destroy the illusion you're trying to
create.
Some games do it better than others. But the falsity of those worlds
is often easy to see.
Some games go overboard with their size. "Fuel" (a racing game from
2009) gave players a map roughly the size of Denmark (or the US state
of Maryland) and it was endless swathes of nothing. "Grand Theft Auto
5" had a map roughly 80 square kilometers and -while it was plenty
diverse and had a surprising amount of interactivity- after twenty or
thirty hours you started running out of things to do. "Assassins Creed
4: Black Flag" had an even bigger map... but much of that was ocean,
and even then you sometimes felt like cities were just next door.
[One of my favorite games is the original "Gothic" game,
released way back in 2001. And one of the reasons I like
it so much is because how it dealt with the size issue.
Like most CRPGs, it wanted to have multiple regions with
different cities and 'cultures'... but the technology of
the time only allowed them to create a fairly tiny map
(~3 square kilometers). So instead of pretending this
tiny region was a whole huge world, they put the whole
thing into a small isolated valley and created a fiction
that explained the diversity. (Sadly, by the time of
"Gothic 3", they reverted to the old standard of
creating a 20x20 km map and expecting us to believe it
was a huge continent ;-)]
But in the end, it's all illusion, and it rarely takes too much prying
to see the edges of the fakery.
It's probably better to err on the side of "too big." I played Zelda: >Breath of Life and found it about right. I ended up going to a website
to discover the location of two shrines I was missing in running over
the area. Breath of Life did it really well, but that is about as AAA a >game as you can find, being Zelda. You know they did some research on
the matter.
On Fri, 6 Sep 2024 11:49:17 -0500, Altered Beast <j63480576@gmail.com>
wrote:
It's probably better to err on the side of "too big." I played Zelda:
Breath of Life and found it about right. I ended up going to a website
to discover the location of two shrines I was missing in running over
the area. Breath of Life did it really well, but that is about as AAA a
game as you can find, being Zelda. You know they did some research on
the matter.
YMMV. I've grown increasingly tired of all these huge-for-the-sake- of-being-huge games. Partly because I just don't want to dedicate 500
hours to exploring every nook and cranny. But also because -in order
to fill out all these aforementioned nooks and crannies- developers
are increasingly turning towards procedural generation and the result
is just boring grind. I'd much rather a smaller, better paced
adventure.
But that's just me. The nice thing about modern video gaming is
there's a game to suit EVERYBODY'S taste these days. ;-)
On Fri, 6 Sep 2024 11:49:17 -0500, Altered Beast <j63480576@gmail.com>
wrote:
It's probably better to err on the side of "too big." I played Zelda:
Breath of Life and found it about right. I ended up going to a website
to discover the location of two shrines I was missing in running over
the area. Breath of Life did it really well, but that is about as AAA a
game as you can find, being Zelda. You know they did some research on
the matter.
YMMV. I've grown increasingly tired of all these huge-for-the-sake- of-being-huge games. Partly because I just don't want to dedicate 500
hours to exploring every nook and cranny. But also because -in order
to fill out all these aforementioned nooks and crannies- developers
are increasingly turning towards procedural generation and the result
is just boring grind. I'd much rather a smaller, better paced
adventure.
But that's just me. The nice thing about modern video gaming is
there's a game to suit EVERYBODY'S taste these days. ;-)
On 9/7/2024 9:16 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
On Fri, 6 Sep 2024 11:49:17 -0500, Altered Beast <j63480576@gmail.com>And some that suit nobody's taste but the one person who created it.
wrote:
It's probably better to err on the side of "too big." I played Zelda:
Breath of Life and found it about right. I ended up going to a website >>> to discover the location of two shrines I was missing in running over
the area. Breath of Life did it really well, but that is about as AAA a >>> game as you can find, being Zelda. You know they did some research on
the matter.
YMMV. I've grown increasingly tired of all these huge-for-the-sake-
of-being-huge games. Partly because I just don't want to dedicate 500
hours to exploring every nook and cranny. But also because -in order
to fill out all these aforementioned nooks and crannies- developers
are increasingly turning towards procedural generation and the result
is just boring grind. I'd much rather a smaller, better paced
adventure.
But that's just me. The nice thing about modern video gaming is
there's a game to suit EVERYBODY'S taste these days. ;-)
On 9/7/2024 9:35 PM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
On 9/7/2024 9:16 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
But that's just me. The nice thing about modern video gaming isAnd some that suit nobody's taste but the one person who created it.
there's a game to suit EVERYBODY'S taste these days. ;-)
Well, but there were examples of that before. Anyone remember
Battlecruiser 3000AD?
On Sun, 8 Sep 2024 12:02:56 +0200, Kyonshi <gmkeros@gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/7/2024 9:35 PM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
On 9/7/2024 9:16 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
But that's just me. The nice thing about modern video gaming isAnd some that suit nobody's taste but the one person who created it.
there's a game to suit EVERYBODY'S taste these days. ;-)
Well, but there were examples of that before. Anyone remember
Battlecruiser 3000AD?
Shhhh! Not so loud! HE is still around, lurking, just waiting for
somebody to say his name. Do not let him loose again. It took us long
enough to bind him the first time. ;-)
Was that project ever actually released?
On 9/8/2024 7:07 PM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
Was that project ever actually released?
I got it on a magazine cover disc back in the days when PC magazines
still had cover discs. I never was able to get it running though, so I
don't have a clue if it actually worked.
I get you. Some of those games are just too damn large and not
interesting enough. I even count Skyrim to that, which I have started
twice and never finished because I keep losing interest.
But of course Elder Scrolls always had that procedural generation stuff down, I remember Arena and it's endlessly boring randomly generated areas.
Well, but there were examples of that before. Anyone rememberShhhh! Not so loud! HE is still around, lurking, just waiting for
Battlecruiser 3000AD?
somebody to say his name. Do not let him loose again. It took us long
enough to bind him the first time. 😉
yes buggy as hell, but it was quite impressive for a one person project,Shhhh! Not so loud! HE is still around, lurking, just waiting forWas that project ever actually released?
somebody to say his name. Do not let him loose again. It took us long
enough to bind him the first time. 😉
While the Unnamed-Demon-Spirit-of-Usenet wasn't up to the task ofVery likely but the question is whether he ever had the finances for
creating such a game, but he definitely had vision. Ten years later
(and with a skilled team) the game might actually have been worth
playing.
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