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Comment by dexwiz | Hacker News Reader

Open world games are notoriously disappointing. "What is this game supposed to be?" is a great question. Are you trying to explore? collect resources and upgrade grind? build things? combat (ground or space)? By being all these things, they became nothing. All encompassing space games (for example EVE) take years to build, usually in the form of updates after release.

As for the UI. It looks like its designed so the PC and consoles have similar UIs. Also they are inspired by context menus, which sacrifice UX for flexibility. (Pretend the inventory is a file system).

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If you want strong direction, then open world is the wrong end of the spectrum. Give me a large world with lots of complexity and I'll entertain myself for hundreds of hours. Give me a directed plot and I'll probably stop caring in about 4 hours.

It seems to me there are two very different views of story telling in games. One camp wants games to be strongly directed minimal choice stories with a very specific narrative and it's entirely ok to curtail player agency to tell that story.

Another camp thinks the opposite: player agency always comes first and there is no set narrative but the one that players create for themselves. This comes with the potential that said narrative can be dumb.

I don't think either camp is wrong, just different ways to tell a story. I really favor the later, and I really hate when my agency is abridged as a player because some writer wants to tell a story I don't care about. At the same time, I'm sure plenty of folks have the opposite viewpoint.

This is a false dichotomy.

Skyrim, for example, is absolutely both of these things, offering a strongly directed central narrative and lots of open world exploration opportunities.

Skyrim is definitely a gem of a game. I wouldn't however call it "directed" or "central". I've had several playthroughs of it as just a hunter or a spelunker and totally ignored the main story of dragonborn/background war (which is a strength of the game, not a fault).

I would consider Fallout 4 to be much more directed. You have to be the survivor, you have to save the patriots, you have to ultimately destroy one of the three powers. Sure you can ignore the plot for a bit, but you can't advance any storyline. You can't play PI or explore vaults unless you've advanced the story.

"Give me a large world with lots of complexity and I'll entertain myself for hundreds of hours."

Personally I'd say one of the problems is that No Man's Sky never had "lots of complexity" (not that you are necessarily claiming it did or tried to). Maybe I just know too much, but I can see through the algorithms generating all the pretty pictures pretty easily, and from there it's not hard to notice that the preconditions those algorithms have is going to make it so that pretty much nothing of any other complexity is possible. So you have all of these very beautiful worlds, where all you can do is point at things and shoot them with one of a couple of different types of beams. That was pretty much written in stone as soon as the data structures that make up the world were written down; there's not much more you can do with those data structures other than what the game offers you.

Contrast with Minecraft, which is built for interaction from the get go. It's a very different data structure.

Come to think of it, you could do worse than take an early Minecraft as your base and build No Man's Sky on top of it. (Modern Minecraft would be more like what particular worlds would look like; it's now a bit too detailed to build something like this on.) Another thing you'd get out of that is that you can build things that actually interact with the environment, the way villagers (who may not actually build their villages, but they do farm) and creepers ("boom") do in minecraft. Worlds could not just look superficially different, but actually have different behaviors in them, this world filled with creatures that aren't violent, that world filled with things that destroy everything you do as soon as you look at them, etc. If one was clever and could make those world rich in resources, perhaps even resources the peaceful worlds entirely lack, you might even be able to get some "game" going like having to land with a party to defend you while you put up an obsidian shelter or something.

Man. Suddenly I wish I had a few million dollars spare lying around because this sounds like with some care it could be hella fun. Make it an MMORPG somehow (biggest challenge: What game mechanism can you use to prevent too many people from being in the same chunks at the same time? Solve that and you're a great deal of the way there, since Minecraft itself pretty much proves out the rest) and you could have an Eve killer.

Oh man come join me in modded minecraft. I need someone to help me build my new elevator system and work up a mining system to amass and process ores for the fusion reactor I want to build.

Open world games are great for me. I can't stand it when a game locks me into a pattern.

Totally agree. Elder Scrolls and Fallout and Ultima are some of the best games ever.

Sure, but every open world game includes a gameplay loop of some kind.

Virtually every open world game has the same basic loop: collect, craft/buy/sell, build.

After that, it's just a question of how you motivate players to go through the loop: quests (Elder Scrolls), randomly generated threats (Minecraft, Terraria), multiplayer PC threats (WoW, EVE), etc.

Sounds like this author feels NMS fails to justify itself in this way.

> randomly generated threats (Minecraft, Terraria)

Maybe that's just me, but Minecraft is totally not about randomly generated threats. Sure, you have a certain set of milestones related to combat (e.g. loot a nether fortress, defeat the Ender dragon), but 99% of what motivates me about Minecraft is building stuff.

Yeah, that's fair, I left that out and only noticed it later.

Of course, AFAIK, NMS only added "building stuff" (e.g. bases) to the list of things you could do after the initial release.

> Virtually every open world game has the same basic loop: collect, craft/buy/sell, build.

That is a massive loop though, huge, world size, not confined to a specific path. I choose my path through the world.

> After that, it's just a question of how you motivate players to go through the loop

Open World is about ... openness. The player gets to decide, specific motivation not required; the journey is the motivation.

The player gets to decide, specific motivation not required; the journey is the motivation.

But you still need gameplay mechanics to support the user's activities.

If the user is motivated by quests, you need good quests.

If the user is motivated by conflict, then you need good fighting mechanics, etc.

If the user is motivated by building/construction, you need strong mechanics to support that.

Unfortunately, I suspect you'll find very few user's who are motivated over the long term by just wandering around seeing cool stuff.

"just wandering around seeing cool stuff."

I think of journey as see, do, explore. Perhaps there's a better word than journey I could use. I'm not defending NMS, I'm defending Open World.

"Myst" was basically all about wandering around seeing cool stuff, and it was so wildly popular that it held the "best-selling PC game" title for nine years.

So you're just going to ignore the highly regarded puzzle solving component of Myst that formed the core gameplay element that drove people to it?

Heck, if you're gonna argue this way, I'm surprised you didn't pick Super Mario Bros. After all, Mario Bros. is just wandering around and seeing cool stuff. You just to have to jump over things every now and then...

> Open world games are notoriously disappointing.

Its true that many are. Especially many Ubisoft ones. They follow a rather particular formula of lots-of-very-shallow-content and they get repetitive and boring rather quickly.

Not all open world games are like this! The Witcher 3 is a huge open world game which is full or interesting environments and content and many of the easily-missable side quests are actually just as interesting and compelling as the main quest.

Then there's Horizon: Zero Dawn, which, when I started playing, I had to double check that it wasn't a Ubisoft game. It had all of the Ubisoft open-world feel: towers to uncover map regions, the skill tree, inventory and menu's looked directly ripped from Far Cry. Resource collection.. so much of the game screamed Far Cry or Ubisoft and I was afraid that it would soon get dull, repetitive and boring. Yet it never happened! I put about 60 hours into the game and loved every moment of it. I would have played longer too, but was starting to run low on content (I didn't do all of the side stuff, but most of it) and am eagerly awaiting the DLC. This shows that even the oh-so-shallow Ubisoft formula can be compelling and work really well!

Games like Elder Scrolls are similar in that they have enough stuff to do before you have to settle for the repetitive/randomly-generated stuff, plus the world building and lore is interesting enough to make you want to explore and discover.

Compare and contrast No Man's Sky with Elite: Dangerous. Elite has a lot more defined and fleshed out "roles" to play that have tradeoffs, but they aren't working against each other. The author indicates that this very thing is lacking in No Man's Sky.

Yeah - the author said "no other game is offering this!", and my first thought was "but Elite: Dangerous offers large swaths of this stuff and has for some time."

Granted, it doesn't do everything No Man's Sky does, and it has its own gameplay issues (mainly a lack of depth to the universe resulting in boredom). But No Man's Sky doesn't exist in a vaccuum. There are lots of other games at least trying to do what it does, and in some cases, succeeding.

Star Citizen, if it is not vaporware, may become another good example.

>>Open world games are notoriously disappointing.

You should play Witcher 3. It's an open-world game that gives you tremendous freedom in a very large, detailed world while also driving you forward with a long, well-written story.

It definitely became the gold standard for open-world games for me. Easily the best game I've played in over a decade.

It's not just an openworld, it's "randomly" generated (from what I understand, the idea was to fix random generator's seed based on space coordinates, so that the same coordinates always produce the same planets). I can get that adding a story of even simple missions could be a challenge when doing so.

Breath of the Wild wasn't, at least IMO. That and Witcher 3 pulled off open world quite well.

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