Advancing out of order: Games with fewer walls

[Togath]

So after playing several games with more linear plots and world, as well as several where you can do stuff like reach a dungeon three plot arcs ahead of when you would be told by the plot to go there, I got curious...
What do people here think of the two styles? Do you favour one or the other? Any fun stories about especially good uses of a less constrained world?*

*the above example comes from Dragon Quest VIII, where you can in theory explore the majority of the area used for the next three plot arcs as soon as you defeat the second boss(and even fight one of the future ones, if you are willing to try it while underleveled and with one less party member than you are supposed to have)

[Rodin]

I tend to really enjoy "linearish with alternate paths". That is to say, there is a direct progression that most players are expected to take...but if you really want to, you can do stuff out of order. Big sandbox games like Fallout 3 and 4 tend to leave me lost, because they just throw you out there and there's too many different directions to go. Show me a direct path, and I knock through that on the first playthrough. Then on subsequent playthroughs, I use my knowledge of the game to pick the lock on that gate outside the starting area and take off for the 5th boss instead of the first.

To return to your analogy from the title, I like my games to have walls...but with convenient crates you can push up against them to leap over them should the mood strike you.

[Togath]

That's generally what I tend to prefer too.
Like, my dragon quest example does have a standard defined jrpg story... But there are places where you can potentially mix up the order(and beating one boss before you are supposed does apply a minor change to the story) if you look hard enough or know what might be coming.

[Forbiddenwar]

Depends on my mood. Sometimes I enjoy a well placed defined story arc, a la, half life or doom or Deus ex. Sometimes I love sandbox, go discover, the plot can wait (Skyrim). And sometimes i like a mix, a la darksouls.

[Winthur]

Might & Magic 3 is interesting, because it's a tile-based open world with lots of ways to skip around at leisure. You can get Waterwalk as a spell very early on to get to places you otherwise wouldn't be able to reach, or Teleport or Etherealize around places you wouldn't figure out. Each town has a portal, you can tell a codephrase to it and it will transport you into different places, with some replay-game knowledge you can get some endgame content at the very start. That same portal is also abusable for quasi-cheat codes where it can teleport you to huge piles of gold or quest items. There's a ship that takes you to a swamp town which is pretty tough to clear for low level parties, but if you do clear it out you get some pretty decent spells and stores out of the deal. If you couldn't answer some puzzles then you can find answers for all of them in an end-game area. Some dungeons are only accessible through keys findable in other dungeons, but some hirable mercenaries carry their own copy of the key, so you can hire them, take their keys and kick them out to bypass a dungeon. An exploit you can do is teleport to a place your level 1 party will get completely ruined in, get some freebies and then use Wizard Mode which penalizes you by taking your XP but summons you back to the starting town (you use it to stop being stuck), but you have 0 XP so you don't lose a thing.

That said, when I play games with huge open worlds, I tend to get kinda swamped and overwhelmed if they only offer a vast area. In the end, I prefer my gaming experiences to be a tad smaller, more compact; in terms of pacing, Fallout 1 certainly beats Fallout 2. Most stealth games are amazing in packing a lot of content and possibility into a fairly confined area, particularly Hitman. Some of the most memorable and allowing Hitman levels are, in fact, the small ones, like A New Life.

Or the way BG1 is way less replayable for me, but it does offer an interesting early game for meta-gamers in that you can really explore away from the tract into many areas and find something interesting. Like going Basilisk hunting with petrification-immune ghoul Korax, or a free 2000 XP from finding Melicamp early. BG2 is far less divided.

The first two Gothic games have some amazing exploration, even if their gameworlds aren't the biggest, what with the massive protective barrier around the prison realm. But still, in Gothic, if you go out of your way into a dangerous area, you will find something good.

[Douglas]

Does it count if the sequence breaking is a bug? There are some crazy things you can do with Final Fantasy VI (http://lparchive.org/Breaking-Final-Fantasy-VI/).

[factotum]

If there are walls in a game, I like them to be ones that are formed by monsters too tough for you to beat. Might and Magic VI is a good example; you could theoretically travel anywhere you wanted right at the start of the game, but you would rapidly get killed if you moved on to an area you weren't high enough level for.

(MM6 also had a hidden teleport in the starting village which would teleport you to a shrine in the middle of Dragonsand, a very high-level area. If you could get there, and survive long enough to click on the wall of the shrine while in turn-based combat mode, you'd get teleported to the secret NWC Dungeon which was based on the offices of New World Computing, the game's developer--I always liked that little secret).

[Triaxx]

I find it kind of odd that some people get lost in true sand boxes. You can go anywhere and do anything, and so you go nowhere and do nothing because no one is telling you you must? That confuses me. I tend to wander away from people telling me what I should do, and go off on my own path. I fired up Skyrim for the first time, saw the guy telling me to head to Whiterun, said nope, and disappeared into the wilderness heading off towards Riften. Tell me to do something and I tend to want to go find out what you're not telling me about.

That said, I prefer terrain walls. Sacred was great because there were places you could see, but not quite reach. Water was impassible for most characters, without a specific ability, or a bridge. But the Wizard could teleport across rivers, the Daemon could fly, and two of the melee types could use their leap attack to cross the river. On the other side? Stupendously much higher level enemies. But if you could survive? Great XP. Make me wait to reach a normal passage, but give me the option to skip over it other ways if I think about it.

[Rakaydos]

No mention of Super Metroid or Metroid Prime? Those games are amazing with sequence breaking.

[Rodin]

I find it kind of odd that some people get lost in true sand boxes. You can go anywhere and do anything, and so you go nowhere and do nothing because no one is telling you you must? That confuses me. I tend to wander away from people telling me what I should do, and go off on my own path. I fired up Skyrim for the first time, saw the guy telling me to head to Whiterun, said nope, and disappeared into the wilderness heading off towards Riften. Tell me to do something and I tend to want to go find out what you're not telling me about.

That said, I prefer terrain walls. Sacred was great because there were places you could see, but not quite reach. Water was impassible for most characters, without a specific ability, or a bridge. But the Wizard could teleport across rivers, the Daemon could fly, and two of the melee types could use their leap attack to cross the river. On the other side? Stupendously much higher level enemies. But if you could survive? Great XP. Make me wait to reach a normal passage, but give me the option to skip over it other ways if I think about it.

It isn't a case of "go nowhere do nothing" but rather "go everywhere, start everything, finish nothing", also know as "Ooh! Shiny!" syndrome.

That thing with Whiterun you mentioned is exactly the problem. The game tells you to go to Riverwood, but there's a bandit camp on that there hill. After a bit of wandering, I eventually am forced to go to Riverwood to sell stuff, so I go there and get a ton of quests. As I start to mosey off to do them...is that a fort over there? At the fort, those look like interesting ruins...and so on until I'm in Riften, where I go and talk to everyone and get another ton of quests. I go to do those, and...hey, there's a dragon flying over there! I'ma go fight it!

After a day or two of playing, I have 500 quests in my quest log and I've made exactly zero progress in the game. The best term I've heard for it is "quicksand-box game". There's so much to do that you just get overwhelmed.

Of course, the opposite can also happen. If they separate the game into zones but don't force you to move on or continue the plot, completionist folks start having really trouble. Dragon Age Inquisition made the Hinterlands, an absurdly large zone that you could practically get to max level in it seemed like. It's so big that you can spend many, many hours working on clearing it...and by doing so, you wind up missing out on the rest of the game because by the time you're through with that one zone you're sick of the gameplay and ready to play something else.

I've eventually come to prefer smaller, more contained experiences. Shadowrun Returns does it well, particularly the Dragonfall and Hong Kong expansions. After a couple "get you on your feet" missions, you generally have a choice of 3-4 missions to go on. Those individual missions are self-contained and you can do them in any order, and as you move through the game more missions show up. You always have a choice of where to go and how to resolve the mission, but they are doled out to you at a reasonable rate. They could theoretically have had a grand open city with questgivers scattered about for you to find, but I don't think that would have worked as well as what they wound up doing.

[Triaxx]

That's the best part, is finding so much stuff worth doing that you forget there even is a main quest. I pay $60 for a game and expect 40 hours of entertainment. Skyrim? I didn't get bored until nearly 400 hours. I was still finding new things to do almost 300 hours in. I'd you listen through the intro you hear someone telling a kid to run. 300 hours later, I wander into a shack to find the kid now living with his grandfather. The grandfather gave me a quest. I'd have missed that if I'd just done the main quest and moved on.

[Lord Raziere]

I tried Skyrim. did the main quest, completed said quest at like, level 20, spent 20 more levels trying to do other things but nothing felt quite as epic, and when I got around to the Stomcloak vs. Imperial questline, I defeated everyone so easily then beat the Stormcloak leader in like one hit, and I was like "well that was anticlimactic"

so after that, I just quit it because it was clear there was nothing more challenging or worth doing after the main quest. *shrug*

Guess I'm not good with nonlinear stuff? I like having a challenge, progressing in a manner where I can feel my journey coming to an end in a climactic manner.

[Triaxx]

Skyrim is a game begging to be modded. And the Civil War campaign sucks. Some of the best bits are the role-playing. Play the master thief, stealing from everyone. The mighty Paladin, bashing his way through the evils plaguing Skyrim. A mighty Wizard explaining the follies of annoying magic users.

Half the fun I have, is restarting and then looking for new quests to solve, or going back and doing ones I liked before in a new way. There's a quest in Solitude that requires you to eventually enter a cave full of bandits, and kill them all to reach their leaders. Nothing like sneaking up and wiping them out one at a time.

There's Wolfskull cave, and being the noble knight, protecting the terrified villagers.

Or the mighty wizard, bending space and time to your will and setting right what once went wrong in Arkngthamz.

[Rakaydos]

How about different kinds of sandbox?

Kerbal space program entertains plenty of people who never go beyond minmus, but theres an entire solar system of easter eggs to find, with no guidance other than the map, the tuturials, and the wiki.

You could play it for the explosions, forthe aircraft, even for boats or submarines with enough planning.
You could decide that you want to landon the mun, and after trial and error you land a kerbal on the mun, with a very resl sence of accomplishment, beating physics Itself. Then you start planning how to get him home. Then you look at the other 14 destinations (not cointing asteroids) and next you know ypur trying to design an Eve Return Vehical... because its there.

[BeerMug Paladin]

In theory, I like games that have fewer walls, but realistically I rarely beat them. Something about them tends to make them less engaging, and so I usually get too distracted doing anything but the main story quest.

So I think I prefer more generally linear games. Because I usually complete those.

I've been playing Xenoblade Chronicles X lately. During my time with it, I have been switching between times of randomly exploring the map and returning to the home city to undertake some more quests. I think having virtually all the quests given in one place in the world kind of helps minimize the usual distraction, so that might be the kind of open world game that would stand the best chance of me actually completing.

[Avaris]

I like games with fewer walls, but think that the one's I've played often go about it wrong. Games like Skyrim combine open world with a levelling system which means the end player is many times more powerful than the starting player. This means that if done out of order things which should feel epic feel mediocre. It also means that developers feel obliged to up power levels in certain locations to meet the feel they want, even if this is detrimental to players who want to explore an area with freedom (I remain bitter about the Point Lookout dlc for Fallout 3, which gave a static bonus to damage to the enemies to artificially boost their power to match the developer expectations of who would be going there, when I wanted to explore anew with a relatively fresh character).

In my opinion, a game with fewer walls needs to be designed to ensure that it is not giving itself reason for those walls. If you want an open world, you need to be ready for players to encounter it both earlier and later than expected. Having a levelling system which awards great boosts in character power works against this.

[Ashen Lilies]

Skyrim is a game begging to be modded. And the Civil War campaign sucks. Some of the best bits are the role-playing. Play the master thief, stealing from everyone. The mighty Paladin, bashing his way through the evils plaguing Skyrim. A mighty Wizard explaining the follies of annoying magic users.

Half the fun I have, is restarting and then looking for new quests to solve, or going back and doing ones I liked before in a new way. There's a quest in Solitude that requires you to eventually enter a cave full of bandits, and kill them all to reach their leaders. Nothing like sneaking up and wiping them out one at a time.

There's Wolfskull cave, and being the noble knight, protecting the terrified villagers.

Or the mighty wizard, bending space and time to your will and setting right what once went wrong in Arkngthamz.


Wait, you mean to say that there are ways to play Skyrim besides the Stealth Archer? :smalltongue:

[Aotrs Commander]

I will take unhesitatingly a linear with a stronger story than one with fewer walls.

I played a lot or Morrowind - basically ignoring the main plot and working my way up through the guilds... But eventually I sort of hit a plateau were my character was pretty much not going to get any better (and I'd modded in some gear I could actually put serious enchantments on)... And I just got bored, especially of fighting cliffwhatevers every few yards.

I played Oblivion even less, and Fallout 3 even less before the "go here, do this" just totally lost my interest.

So I have not given any of the later games so much as a glance - if I feel like playing a sandbox, I'll reinstall Morrowind and maybe even look at starting one the quests for the main or two side-expansions...

Planescape: Torment I have replayed like, four times (which is a record for an RPG for me) and I wouldn't care to gues how many times I've replayed C&C or DungeonKeeper 1.

Even strats (e.g. Civ) often only make one or two playthrough with me (notable exceptions for Civ II and Civ IV and SotS 1 and 2).



I think it basically boils down to no matter how much they try, sandboxes cannot really deliver the same experience as real exploration and walking through the countryside; they just can't provide the level of detail or idiosyncrasy of the real world.

(Interesting question, actually. Do any sandboxes have weather? Are any of those weather systems more than "occasionally it rains?" Do any of them have variable winds, different levels of rain, clouds in the sky that give you different lighting levels? I don't think I ever heard anyone talk about that sort of thing before. Maybe it's just because I'm English, and therefore automatically disposed towards weather, but that, to me, is sort of one of the most fundemental parts of sight-seeing exploration.)

Further, the scaling issue. If you let people tackle everything in whatever order, you somehow have to balance that with a) not making every monster scale exactly with you so that the least bandit wears daedric armour (Oblivion) and b) so that you don't level cap out a halfway through the game content (Morrowind (to an extent), Fallout 3). None of the aforementioned did very well in that regard, though I obviously don't know how well the likes of Skyrim of Witcher 3 did it.



In general, then, my first criterion is either a) story or b) building a thing (city, empire etc). Walls and lack thereof come second; some choice of where to go is nice, but much prefer smaller, main-quest-event-gated sections than a full open world. For me, Torment (et al)/Mass Effect of Witcher 1/2 were about right in that regard, a good mix.

[Triaxx]

I have to admit, I'm nothing sure what Bethesda was thinking with regards to Point Lookout. That bit of bonus completely ruined what would otherwise be one of the most atmospherically delightful DLC in the game.

Stealth Archer in Skyrim is very strong. But for sheer stupid damage potential? Bog vanilla Dark Brotherhood Dagger Orc is unbeatable. 15x Dagger sneak attack? Sneak attack doubling gloves? Berserker Rage doubling damage? And it all stacks. One-shotting a Legendary Dragon with an iron dagger? Yes, I can.

The others are all equally viable though.

[factotum]

I like games with fewer walls, but think that the one's I've played often go about it wrong. Games like Skyrim combine open world with a levelling system which means the end player is many times more powerful than the starting player. This means that if done out of order things which should feel epic feel mediocre.

Yeah--I'm not a big fan of level scaling in RPGs, because it takes away what, to my mind, is one of the biggest draws of the genre--your character progressing from a weak doofus who dies if a housecat jumps on them the wrong way, to a superhuman badass who can kill Gods. (Slight exaggeration, but you get what I mean :smallwink:). In RPGs without level scaling I always have the option to go away and grind up a couple of levels to make a fight easier, and if, by some massive fluke, I actually manage to beat the fight at too low a level, the achievement feels all the better.

[Triaxx]

Level scaling feels most out of place when you're always fighting the same type of enemy. In Skyrim/Oblivion for example, since most enemies are bandits they have to scale up. The trouble comes when the challenge doesn't change. When you solve the bandits and succeed by the very skin of your teeth the first time it's epic. When you come back ten levels later, and it's still just by the skin of your teeth, it's annoying because it should have been easier the second time around.

On the other hand, Fallout manages it because the variety of enemies means you're seeing less repetition. So you might fight a million bandits, but they're broken up with a few thousand Super Mutants and Robots in between. The varied strengths of those disparate groups better disguises the level scaling. IE: once you can confidently deal with raiders you feel able to deal with the spongy Super Mutants. And then you're used to the Muties absorbing huge numbers of bullets, it's less surprising when Raiders suddenly can.

[Knaight]

I tend to favor genuine sequential levels with as little continuity between them as possible. You do this level, then you do this level, then you do this level. Mixing it up a bit regarding what gets done when is fine - if it's get through these three in any order, then these three in any order, then these three in any order I'm completely on board - but I tend to like the bonafide separate stages. Small nods to continuity are fine if the game actually calls for them, such as the persistent armies of Fire Emblem or the persistent heroes of Age of Wonders III, or even the party leveling up in an RPG which carries from one bit to another. Similarly, I'm totally fine with the structure of discrete levels being merged a bit into something like a Metroidvania, where there is a particular progression, but it doesn't actually involve defined and specific levels. I'll also play a truly open world game if it has enough other things going for it, but the open world is a mark against it and turns into a bigger mark against it the bigger it gets - Mount and Blade cleared that bar, but it's about the only thing which did.

[factotum]

I'll also play a truly open world game if it has enough other things going for it, but the open world is a mark against it and turns into a bigger mark against it the bigger it gets - Mount and Blade cleared that bar, but it's about the only thing which did.

I wouldn't go so far as to say an open world is an automatic demerit for a game. Things like Far Cry 3 and Just Cause 3 are totally open worlds (well, split into two sections gated by a plot event in FC3's case), and the reason they work is because they give you enough different stuff to do that things don't get dull. They both also give some structure to your journey by having a plot that requires you to move through the world. I actually prefer that to Mount and Blade, which is totally open and doesn't restrict you at all--that sort of game tends to leave me spinning my wheels, undecided as to what to do next.

[Knaight]

I wouldn't go so far as to say an open world is an automatic demerit for a game. Things like Far Cry 3 and Just Cause 3 are totally open worlds (well, split into two sections gated by a plot event in FC3's case), and the reason they work is because they give you enough different stuff to do that things don't get dull. They both also give some structure to your journey by having a plot that requires you to move through the world. I actually prefer that to Mount and Blade, which is totally open and doesn't restrict you at all--that sort of game tends to leave me spinning my wheels, undecided as to what to do next.

I'm not calling it a demerit, I'm calling it a demerit for me. There's a reason I've only played Far Cry 1 to any real extent, as Far Cry 2 got really boring really quickly for me due to being open world.

[factotum]

Are you sure you disliked Far Cry 2 due to it being open world, rather than because it's rubbish? Far Cry 3 is a much better game, IMHO. :smallsmile:

[Knaight]

Are you sure you disliked Far Cry 2 due to it being open world, rather than because it's rubbish? Far Cry 3 is a much better game, IMHO. :smallsmile:

I'm pretty sure it is, and I suspect I would dislike Far Cry 3 too. Like I said, I really like honest to god sequential levels in games, or at least things over on that end of the spectrum.

[Psyren]

In Chrono Trigger, you can go and take on the final boss at almost any time. It may not be a good idea, but you can!