Do you miss actual "exploration" in RPGs ?

[jinha]

Hey guys!

I have been a fan of the RPG-genre for pretty much over 25 years now. When I think back of those "old-school-rpgs" they actually came with a lot of exploration that you were pretty much "forced" to do, because you needed to find your next hint to a quest, some important location, some weird dude living in the woods or what ever.

But for years now, RPGs are dumbed down to a simple "arrow" (or something alike) that guides you directly to your next important point of interest. I'm aware, that some games have actually implemented some options to disable that feature, but still - That makes me feel like "exploration" isn't very relevant in RPGs anymore. I try to avoid those questmarkers and explore the worlds I play in, but I think most people like to be guided (but then miss out on a lot of stuff to explore).

So which one do you prefer and why - questmarker or exploration ?!

Cheers

[Batcathat]

I'm rather split on the issue. Exploring/investigating without any sort of artificial guidance can be fun, but it can also be quite a pain in the ass. Part of it is whether it's designed well or poorly, but I don't think that's the entire explanation. I guess my ideal would be a game that sensed what I was in the mood for this particular time. :smalltongue:

It's similar to fast travel (or lack there of), in that both the presence and absence of it can annoy me in equal measure.

[Triaxx]

I think Skyrim/Fallout 4 have sort of the right idea, giving you an option, even if it's buried in setup files, to turn off quest markers. And both have alternate 'where am I going' options. But I'll quite frequently untrack quests in both so I can find them naturally.

[GloatingSwine]

Thing is, quest markers aren't a replacement for exploring, they're a replacement for directions. Older RPGs usually gave you some kind of directions to the place you needed to go, and that's what's really disappeared from modern design. Directions and references to landmarks.

I've been playing Fallout 4 again recently with the quest markers all turned off, and the number of times where you just don't get good directions that you can refer back to because you're expected to have the quest marker is too damn high.

[BaronOfHell]

Something similar is with the game diablo II. There you usually get a quest by speaking to an NPC (after completing some previous quest), and more often than not, the information which gets written in your quest log is shorter, yet more informative, than the NPC dialogue.
Heck, some of the times, if it was your first playthrough and for some reason you didn't have a quest log, but had to rely on the information actually given by the NPC's, some quests would lack essential information about where to go.

[Gnoman]

Something similar is with the game diablo II. There you usually get a quest by speaking to an NPC (after completing some previous quest), and more often than not, the information which gets written in your quest log is shorter, yet more informative, than the NPC dialogue.
Heck, some of the times, if it was your first playthrough and for some reason you didn't have a quest log, but had to rely on the information actually given by the NPC's, some quests would lack essential information about where to go.

Nah. In Diablo II you could solve anything by just finding the place where you hadn't killed everybody yet.

[Anonymouswizard]

It's not so much that I miss having to find quest targets as much as I appreciate it when it's done well. I never had to spend too long to find the right NPC or location in Pillars of Eternity (except for one quest where, admittedly, I was being a bit of an idiot). But I also don't have a problem with Dragon Age having quest markers on explored maps. What I do have an issue with is when the journal skimps on relevant information. I had an issue in Morrowind where I finished the tutorial, stepped out of the building, and immediately forgot where I was supposed to go to or who I was supposed to see

There's also the fact that world's are getting both bigger and more detailed. We haven't had any subsequent game that went as large as Daggerfall, but as I understand it most of Daggerfall's map isn't actually used. In a well designed classic RPG you never had to search a realistically sized market place for the one correct beggar.

[Lord Raziere]

I'm rather split on the issue. Exploring/investigating without any sort of artificial guidance can be fun, but it can also be quite a pain in the ass. Part of it is whether it's designed well or poorly, but I don't think that's the entire explanation. I guess my ideal would be a game that sensed what I was in the mood for this particular time. :smalltongue:

It's similar to fast travel (or lack there of), in that both the presence and absence of it can annoy me in equal measure.

Indeed.

While exploring without guidance can be fun, if you need to actually complete a quest you better hope to the game design gods that the developers actually made hints that you can follow and figure out where a thing is in a logical fashion. I've seen mods that just drop in quests where your expected to explore without any clues, I know the existence of moon logic puzzles where you'd never be able to figure out what your supposed to do if you don't read a guide, things like that, at some point you just wish for the arrow of guidance to grant you mercy from trying to read the game dev's mind across time and space.

[BaronOfHell]

Nah. In Diablo II you could solve anything by just finding the place where you hadn't killed everybody yet.

It's one of the better examples of poor directions then, if one has to resort to go through every location.

[warty goblin]

I like quest arrows or other forms of very powerful navigational aid. Being lost sucks and is annoying, that's the whole reason we invented GPS and maps. I don't want to spend my leisure time recreating the experience circa 2004 of trying to get to a friend's house using only a couple directions scrawled on the back of an envelope. And while rural Iowa, where I grew up, was not the most developed of areas, one was not attacked by bandits or homicidal wildlife every 50 feet, which makes getting lost even more of a hassle.

Now sure you might say that just means the game needs good directions. Yeah, sure. Games should also have good inventories, but here we are, still sorting through vast heaps of vendor trash to check if the new sword swords 2% harder than the old sword.

Bottom line, unless there's an actual gameplay mechanic built around navigation via star or landmark, I want a map I can check that says both you are here and you are trying to go there. Doesn't need to point exactly to the person or thing, I don't mind searching an area I know is right, doesn't have to be an actual arrow on the HUD compass, but it needs to be there.

[Imbalance]

It's a matter I waver about, but I do appreciate when the option exists. By default, I desire to explore the world, travel between locations in person and discover things on my own. This is play. But do I really need to search behind every waterfall or break every clay pot or spend an hour and a half trying to survive a walk to Morthal? Sometimes - often, in fact - I just want to get a sidequest done and over with and don't mind having my hand held on the way there or jumping instantaneously to the target. I'll get the immersion back afterwards, when it matters more, and most importantly when real life allows.

[KillianHawkeye]

Sometimes it's fine, but I'm currently playing Final Fantasy 5 remaster and I pretty much had to travel around the whole world to find out what happened to Cid and Mid after Galuf leaves the party and the rest decide to follow him. There's literally only one clue to their location which you have to find yourself and can be easily missed.

[Volthawk]

I'm mixed about it. Sure, more modern ways can feel a bit simple, but I don't miss the times where things just weren't clear and you have the opposite problem of just wandering around trying to figure out if you missed something, it was a case of the game was being vague, you had to go somewhere else first and eventually loop around to where you thought you were going, or the information you were given was just wrong for some reason or another.

For example, I'm currently playing through the first Deus Ex, because when I was a kid it was a game I started a few times but never finished. At one point in the game, you're told that a researcher for the megacorp you're currently dealing with got caught in a tunnel collapse, and it's suggested you go find them to get what they were carrying (an upgrade canister). After looking around everywhere that felt logical and getting nowhere - the non-collapsed part of the tunnel (where you need to go to progress the main mission, but not this side goal) and swimming around the rest of the canals (closest you get is an area blocked off by pipes to the place you want to get to) - and deciding I'd spent enough time randomly searching the rest of the area, I looked it up. Turns out the solution was to go to a small bar in a side area without much else going on at this point in the story and not particularly close to the tunnel, go into the bar's freezer and, instead of walking through it to get to another water area, climb up the boxes there (which all have good old slidey ice physics, joy), into a non-particularly obvious vent, and then down a long roundabout walk to eventually get to the water leading to the collapsed tunnel.

[Batcathat]

For example, I'm currently playing through the first Deus Ex, because when I was a kid it was a game I started a few times but never finished. At one point in the game, you're told that a researcher for the megacorp you're currently dealing with got caught in a tunnel collapse, and it's suggested you go find them to get what they were carrying (an upgrade canister). After looking around everywhere that felt logical and getting nowhere - the non-collapsed part of the tunnel (where you need to go to progress the main mission, but not this side goal) and swimming around the rest of the canals (closest you get is an area blocked off by pipes to the place you want to get to) - and deciding I'd spent enough time randomly searching the rest of the area, I looked it up. Turns out the solution was to go to a small bar in a side area without much else going on at this point in the story and not particularly close to the tunnel, go into the bar's freezer and, instead of walking through it to get to another water area, climb up the boxes there (which all have good old slidey ice physics, joy), into a non-particularly obvious vent, and then down a long roundabout walk to eventually get to the water leading to the collapsed tunnel.

Oh, I remember that part so well. I must've spent hours swimming in those damn canals. I think I only ended up finding where it actually was by pure chance.

[MCerberus]

Oddly a recent game that gave a good mix of directed and free-form exploration was Pokemon Arceus. Most of the game is 'pokegod sent you through a wormhole. catch the mons' where you're just out exploring. There's a plot and some quests have markers but there's also a lot of 'go to the lake during a full moon and see what the clefairys are up to'.

Someone will ask you to get them a geodude, and it's up to you to find out where they live most of the time. There was really only one unmarked moon puzzle I can remember, thanks Manaphy.

[Zevox]

Stumbling upon random things while unsure of where to find your next objective is a strange way to define "actual" exploration to my mind. I would think that "actual" exploration would be looking around for the sake of seeing what you find - "I've not been over there, maybe there's loot/tough enemies/new quests/etc." Not "well, the cryptic old man told me to go towards the rising sun to find the mcguffin, so I guess I'm going east... and that's about all I've got. Maybe I'll at least find some other cool stuff along the way?"

Quest/map markers are strictly a good thing as far as I'm concerned. They let you stay focused on just your current task if that's what you want, while still leaving the option to go off and do other things if that's what you want.

[Eldan]

One of the more impressive games I played in the last however many years (holy eff, ten years, actually) was Miasmata. Small indie game. The conceit is that you're stranded on a large tropical island and dying of some horrifying fever and you need to find 9 special plants and brew a cure before you die. In that game, you didn't have a map to start out. Instead, you had a compass and a ruler and had to find vantage points, from which you could triangulate your position using other vantage points. Doing so would fill in a small bit of map around you. I loved that game.

Or in other words, I love the feeling of getting lost in games and I want more of it.

[veti]

Thing is, quest markers aren't a replacement for exploring, they're a replacement for directions. Older RPGs usually gave you some kind of directions to the place you needed to go, and that's what's really disappeared from modern design. Directions and references to landmarks.

Casualty of voiced dialogue. Imagine if Skyrim gave you the same detail in directions as Morrowind did. Not only would you have to sit through another 60 seconds of probably tedious voice acting, the journal entry would be five times longer, and the voice files would take another 20Gb of disc space. To say nothing of the added dev cost of recording all that verbiage in the first place.

Instead, "I'll mark it on your map". Handy.

A decent compromise, I think, would be to have a mark on the map, but no HUD compass or arrows. So you still actually need to look at the map and the land.

[GloatingSwine]

It could be done with voiced dialogue. "Look for such and such landmark and head south" is the easy way.

It's a feedback cycle where the designers assume the player has map markers and a permanent objective marker and doesn't bother putting in an alternative.

Even though it's actually quite easy, simple direction in the dialogue, more detailed one in the quest journal.

[Starwulf]

It's one of the better examples of poor directions then, if one has to resort to go through every location.

Nah, diablo 2 had a map overlay that showed you where you'd been on the map, if you hadn't been to a spot, it wouldn't be filled in, so it was always obvious where you hadn't gone. D2 is just a poor example of this over-all. The zones are all small, and unless you're rushing the map(in which case, you already know where everything is and what to do), you'll be clearing everything out anyways in the hopes of better loot.

[Ortho]

Yeah, I have to play Morrowind with the wiki open in the background. I wouldn't call that a good example of exploration. The draw distance being like 20ft doesn't help, either.

I'm not sure if Breath of the Wild counts as an RPG, but it does nail the exploration part really darn well. That game is designed so that you always want to see what's over the next hill. And the map is literally just a topographical map, so you still have to actually explore the area to see what's there.

[Eldan]

Breath of the Wild absolutely didn't work for me. It felt like there wasn't actually much to find. Just however many puzzles that resulted in the same seed and however many different temples that had the same few rewards. Breath of the Wild felt extremely repetitive.

[Alcore]

So which one do you prefer and why - questmarker or exploration ?!Depends...

RPG, to me at least, doesn't mean 'exploration'. Most generally have something like it though.


Typically I prefer questmarkers when my time is limited. I need to get there. To pick on skyrim the questmarker at least tells me which direction I need to go and nothing else; it expects you to use fast travel. It's 'map' is pathetic as a map (what with the cloud cover making large amounts of it unreadable) as it is more of a fast travel location selector.


On the other hand exploration can get quite fun without any markers. In Space Engineers, for instance, I often spend hours trying to find Cobalt. It is the forth most common ore; I typically have magnesium and either platinium or uranium (the two rarest) first. Morrowind doesn't have modern fast travel but does have RP versions and a poster that serves as a better map than Skyrim. Morrowind has no markers and Space Engineers they can be made but someone has make them by visiting it once (button presses go with that).

[Alcore]

It's one of the better examples of poor directions then, if one has to resort to go through every location.

Trust me in Diablo II you want to go to every place; without system mastery you're going to be hurting for Levels. When hurting for levels the bosses will easily benchpress you.


While I enjoyed exploiting the game until my skeletons could tank Diablo's fire nova and keep going (he actually needed to whip out his lightning inferno to kill them all) the game can get quite punishing.


But yeah... no directions. It was assumed you would stumble upon them. They gave the field they spawned on but that was it. Getting to the arcane sanctuary was... troubling. As it was located one level above the bottom level of the palace; the quest giver never says where the door it. The rough "under the palace" works well in a game that expects full exploration (which isn't exploration but killing everything not you).

[tyckspoon]

Nah, diablo 2 had a map overlay that showed you where you'd been on the map, if you hadn't been to a spot, it wouldn't be filled in, so it was always obvious where you hadn't gone. D2 is just a poor example of this over-all. The zones are all small, and unless you're rushing the map(in which case, you already know where everything is and what to do), you'll be clearing everything out anyways in the hopes of better loot.

Diablo 2 is also fundamentally linear in almost all areas - the area maps on a large scale are basically dungeon rooms with an entrance, an exit, and maybe one side path to a more compact sub-dungeon. Go in one side, travel to the other side, enter next room, repeat until boss.

.. And probably noteworthy that the two areas that most notably diverge from the 'big room, entrance is North exit is (south/west/east), go that way to advance' design - Act 3's swamps and the Durance of Hate - are also the most generally despised by the player base, which suggests that at least the people who play Diablo 2 don't really *want* to 'explore.'

[Velaryon]

Ah yes, the days when knowing where to go next in the game required your choice of:
A) figuring it out based on a hint from a bit of dialogue you had to hope was well translated from the original Japanese, so that it wasn't useless gobbledygook,
B) looking up an FAQ or walkthrough online to figure out where the heck you were supposed to go,
C) consulting a map printed in Nintendo Power or some other similar magazine to figure out where you were supposed to go next.

I'll never forget the Game Boy Color port of Dragon Warrior 2, where a random NPC told you that you needed to find something at the "Flame Shrine." Turns out the "Flame Shrine" was an unmarked building that was basically just a hub of teleportation gates for quickly navigating around the overworld map. There was no sign proclaiming this as any sort of shrine, no NPC to tell you where you were. The only clue was that this particular otherwise featureless building with three teleport gates had torches on the wall, unlike the other ones. That was the only clue.

I mean, not all RPGs were that egregiously bad at telling you where to go, but it was still a bit of a problem. Especially if you happened to put the game down for a while and come back later, when you didn't remember all the details of the main quest and side quests you were working on. To this day I still haven't finished Final Fantasy IX because I took a break for like a month when some other game caught my attention, and when I came back I couldn't remember which side quest I was working on or where I was even supposed to go to get back to the main story, and the game wasn't engaging enough for me to want to start over.

[Spore]

It has to be done expertly or a game looses not only the appeal of sidequesting but also the main quest to me.

See I am incredibly easily confused enough to not even know where I am, where I was or were I am going. Call it undiagnosed ADHD, but sometimes I have the attention span of a goldfish crossed with a gnat. If there is an epic main story that I want to follow but the next story twist is delayed by HOURS because I just cannot find the way or am distracted enough by other ****, I loose interest.

But boy, when the side stuff is interesting enough the game is for me. Also the reason why I prefer BG 1 over 2 nowadays. The game is just more open, a better world and more grounded (due to lower levels mostly). BG 2 has an epic main story, and several great areas, but the tiny details, the miniquests in BG 1 are just feeling more like a world. I like to compare the Windspear Hills and Beregost for that.

Beregost is a small town. Its smithy can create Ankheg armor from monsters from another map. No major quest, just loads of cash and an unspoiled monster bug shell needed. The temple is after an evil cleric summoning undead to the west who is a good fight and drops awesome stuff. In town there is a gem dealer and thespian type who wants protection. There is a man whose house is infested by giant spiders (not so much a cellar of rats, huh?). There is an evil dwarf mercenary who joins your party for a job and then some. The Flaming Fist captain pays handsomely for bandit scalps. There is a mage nearby selling goods. EE even has Thayan Wizards try to capture their teen slave mage. It's quest hooks in every direction, with enough stuff to make even aimless trips worthwhile. Counter that with the Slum district in BG 2. You have the Copper Coronet which has prostitution and an illegal fighting pit. You have a mage sphere stuck in some buildings. You have your contact that requires a hefty amount of money to continue the quest. There is a lord that wants his land rid of some monsters. Someone who needs you to purge some undead from the graveyard. But that is it largely. There is no mini quests (also owed to the fact that a 9th level wizard wouldnt save some puppies from a bear or similar), little hammy overacting voice actors for micro roles. Everything's pretty bleak, serious and epic.

[KillianHawkeye]

Not to pick on Final Fantasy 5 again, but I'm nearing the end of the game and had to visit four dungeons to get some stone tablets for a quest. Each dungeon had like a two-line description of where to find it, from this book of prophecies.

Except the third one was supposed to be "surrounded by a ring of fire at the ocean's floor" or something, and guess what there's no fire on the ocean's floor anywhere. The dungeon actually ended up being inside an undersea trench that was surrounded by a circle of like 12 pink coral, in the ocean in the middle of nowhere. I literally had to drive my submarine around at random until I found something with different graphics, because there's literally no sign of anything unusual above the water's surface.

WTF, GAME? Coral isn't FIRE! The other three dungeon clues at least described something I could see while flying around on the airship! :smallsigh:

[BaronOfHell]

Trust me in Diablo II you want to go to every place; without system mastery you're going to be hurting for Levels. When hurting for levels the bosses will easily benchpress you.


Nah, diablo 2 had a map overlay that showed you where you'd been on the map, if you hadn't been to a spot, it wouldn't be filled in, so it was always obvious where you hadn't gone. D2 is just a poor example of this over-all.

The example was of the directions given from an NPC, if the player didn't consult the quest log, and didn't already know where to go from previous playthroughs.

Say... the search for Cain. NPC information is touch the Cairn Stones in the correct order, which is written on the Tree of Inifuss, to go to Tristram and rescure Cain. In the quest log it says where the tree is, no other place within the game is this information given.

Perhaps irrelevant to the point, but I think the first thing many of us did was to try every combination on the Cairn Stones, if we happened to find them in Stony Fields, which the far majority did because it is always next to the road.
Since most players realize quickly the roads connects zones, many people will follow the roads while the going is easy, which it is in act 1. The tree, however, is not on the road.

After every combination didn't work, we'd have to wander across the Dark Woods to find a place which is easy to miss, and it is also easy to be fooled by the map thinking you had already been at said spot.
The developers made it easier to find the tree by placing an extra fast unique monster at its location, which would see the player before the player saw them, and make the player aware of something important in the area.
This however only applies if the player decided to comb through the dark woods, which they only would do if they looked at their quest log.
If the NPC's had informed us that the tree was in Dark Wood, the example wouldn't hold true, but otherwise, without the quest log, the player could go through the entire first act without ever finding the tree, as the first real problems on a first playthrough usually only arises at the very end of act 1.
To me, it is very saying that they decided to include the exact location of the tree in the quest log despite the information not being told to the player. I won't be surprised if many players would otherwise had missed it, and went all the way down the Catacombs, reaching act 2, and not being able to complete the quest anymore.

The part about searching for loot or levels is more about playing style, and since that is subjective it doesn't really contradict what I am saying, only that it doesn't apply to everyone, but if someone is going full clear anyway, why would they need directions then?
Finally I'd like to point out, related to levels and loot, that both of these are gained most efficiently at specific targets, and not by going full clear. These targets does sometimes overlap with sub-quest locations, but that depends on ones current level or exactly what loot one is looking for.
I know it doesn't weight heavily, because again, it is a matter of taste, and if someone enjoys doing full clears and stumbles upon quests like that, that is their prerogative, but on open fields the map only marks visited borders, hence it is still easy to miss a quest location, even when knowing where to look, I for sure have done so many times in various acts.


Diablo 2 is also fundamentally linear in almost all areas - the area maps on a large scale are basically dungeon rooms with an entrance, an exit, and maybe one side path to a more compact sub-dungeon. Go in one side, travel to the other side, enter next room, repeat until boss.

You can do that, and you're likely to miss some of the sub-quests. The only explicit direction of the location of out of the way quests is in the quest log, while it would make more sense if it was also in the NPC dialogue, since the quest log, by its name, should only contain information gathered.


While I enjoyed exploiting the game until my skeletons could tank Diablo's fire nova and keep going (he actually needed to whip out his lightning inferno to kill them all) the game can get quite punishing.

In mid 00's diablo 2 had a huge overhaul as it went from v. 1.09 to v. 1.10. Now the skill Summon Skeleton of the necromantic summoning school was a viable skill to build your character around. It even got too powerful, and I suspect as a balancing act they made it so that unless the Necromancer had access to summon resist, a level 24 skill, the skeletons which so far had breezed through almost the entire game, would be obliterated by the otherwise low damage AoE Fire Nova of Diablo.
To me it looked more like a lesson in not to put all eggs in one basket, rather than a case of the game punishing a character for being under leveled.
Also this only applied on the normal difficulty, and while it sucked to be stopped cold like that, I remember many years ago I enjoyed trying to come up with ways of how to defeat this boss for exactly this type of necromancer without having to level further than I normally would, or being slowed down to a bore.

[Cespenar]

It's an iffy subject. Markerfree exploration in games like Morrowind or Kingdom Come works because they are designed with exploration as one of the main pillars of the game. If you approach such games with, "lets kill stuff, get s*** done, and get out -- I have work to do at home" mentality, you'll be missing stuff. And missing stuff is the worst thing that can happen to someone in 2022.

I wouldn't want markerlessness in a Bioware game, however, since their games obviously are divided into mainly combat and roleplayey bits and cutscenes.

However, given how 99% of the games are designed with markers in the first place, that trains the player's mind so that markerless exploration becomes even less stomachable for everyone -- myself included unfortunately.

[Vinyadan]

For example, I'm currently playing through the first Deus Ex, because when I was a kid it was a game I started a few times but never finished. At one point in the game, you're told that a researcher for the megacorp you're currently dealing with got caught in a tunnel collapse, and it's suggested you go find them to get what they were carrying (an upgrade canister). After looking around everywhere that felt logical and getting nowhere - the non-collapsed part of the tunnel (where you need to go to progress the main mission, but not this side goal) and swimming around the rest of the canals (closest you get is an area blocked off by pipes to the place you want to get to) - and deciding I'd spent enough time randomly searching the rest of the area, I looked it up. Turns out the solution was to go to a small bar in a side area without much else going on at this point in the story and not particularly close to the tunnel, go into the bar's freezer and, instead of walking through it to get to another water area, climb up the boxes there (which all have good old slidey ice physics, joy), into a non-particularly obvious vent, and then down a long roundabout walk to eventually get to the water leading to the collapsed tunnel.

In that case, I think, the game would have been better off not telling you about the canister at all. If you randomly found it, that's cool (and the devs could have added a document explaining who that guy is and a dialogue option to inform people from his organisation, so it doesn't feel detached from the rest of the game). If you didn't find it, you didn't know about it, and nothing is lost. As it is, you likely will look for him, but it's almost impossible to find the scientist without reading outside material, and that disrupts the flow.

[Rodin]

In mid 00's diablo 2 had a huge overhaul as it went from v. 1.09 to v. 1.10. Now the skill Summon Skeleton of the necromantic summoning school was a viable skill to build your character around. It even got too powerful, and I suspect as a balancing act they made it so that unless the Necromancer had access to summon resist, a level 24 skill, the skeletons which so far had breezed through almost the entire game, would be obliterated by the otherwise low damage AoE Fire Nova of Diablo.
To me it looked more like a lesson in not to put all eggs in one basket, rather than a case of the game punishing a character for being under leveled.
Also this only applied on the normal difficulty, and while it sucked to be stopped cold like that, I remember many years ago I enjoyed trying to come up with ways of how to defeat this boss for exactly this type of necromancer without having to level further than I normally would, or being slowed down to a bore.

It wasn't a balancing change. End of Act Bosses did 10x damage to Summons even from version 1.00.

I know this because I got D2 on its midnight release and my first D2 character was a Summoner Necro. It was perfectly viable up until Diablo's full screen flame nova. I wound up having to kill Diablo with the level 1 Bone Spear spell and one hell of a lot of dying.

It almost certainly an exploit prevention thing to stop people from just using a Mercenary or a powerful minion like a Golem or Valkyrie from just whittling him down. It just so happened to brutalize Summoner Necros, and despite the many changes that particular bit of unfairness was never addressed.

[KillianHawkeye]

Okay but the actual worst thing in Diablo 2 was that the dumb Act 2 mercs didn't just turn their auras on immediately. :smallamused:

[tyckspoon]

Not to pick on Final Fantasy 5 again, but I'm nearing the end of the game and had to visit four dungeons to get some stone tablets for a quest. Each dungeon had like a two-line description of where to find it, from this book of prophecies.

Except the third one was supposed to be "surrounded by a ring of fire at the ocean's floor" or something, and guess what there's no fire on the ocean's floor anywhere. The dungeon actually ended up being inside an undersea trench that was surrounded by a circle of like 12 pink coral, in the ocean in the middle of nowhere. I literally had to drive my submarine around at random until I found something with different graphics, because there's literally no sign of anything unusual above the water's surface.

WTF, GAME? Coral isn't FIRE! The other three dungeon clues at least described something I could see while flying around on the airship! :smallsigh:

FWIW most of those dungeons are actually optional - the tablets unlock a few more selections of the 'ultimate weapons' and clearing some of the dungeons gets you access to the high end attack spells, but they aren't required for progression. Most players are not going to be terribly fussed about only having access to 9/12 weapons when the remaining three are hyper specific weapon categories used by only 1 job that isn't even very good (the Geomancer Bell, Ranger Bow, Berserker Axe..)

Really good example of bad directions, tho. At least there are no random encounters underwater in that game so you can scroll around every part of the seafloor map in peace.

[Radar]

In a sense I do, but there are games now that focus on the exploration aspect and they do not have to be RPG for this to work, so if I had time I could always dive into it.

For this kind of exploration to make sense, wandering around has to be rewarding in of its own and not just a delay in finding the next quest goal. This requires that there are interesting things to find, sights to be seen etc.

One of the games I spent a whole lot of time on was Wizardry 7. No guide or any other source of information - just trial and error with the game itself. For most of the time I played it like a sandbox game and was having a lot of fun with it: finding things hidden in some forest, learning swimming and climbing skills to reach new areas, building up mapping skill to make better use of the map kit available in the game, endangering local wildlife with extinction for XP. Big part of it was also figuring out how the game itself worked, which tangentially reminds me of how fascinating it was to tinker with Civilization game without any instructions or playing anything remotely similar to it before.

[Spore]

WTF, GAME? Coral isn't FIRE!

Red corals are vaguely flame-shaped though. I think that puzzle is neat, but as always, puzzles in games need more than just one hint. Otherwise you cannot combine, you either understand or you don't.

[Eldan]

Also circular coral reefs often grow on old volcano craters.

[Resileaf]

If exploration is inherently rewarding, then it's fun to explore around a place to find its secrets. I would say the issue with exploration today is that games are enormous. Every open world game attempts to outdo the previous open world by being ever bigger and it's impossible then to put rewards in such a large world that don't feel like a chore to find since they're going to be extremely few and far between and will require a guide or a radar system telling you where to find them, at which point it's just tedium.

[KillianHawkeye]

FWIW most of those dungeons are actually optional - the tablets unlock a few more selections of the 'ultimate weapons' and clearing some of the dungeons gets you access to the high end attack spells, but they aren't required for progression. Most players are not going to be terribly fussed about only having access to 9/12 weapons when the remaining three are hyper specific weapon categories used by only 1 job that isn't even very good (the Geomancer Bell, Ranger Bow, Berserker Axe..)

Yeah, except I didn't really realize how it worked and I ended up getting all four of the tablets AND all the bonus dungeon rewards before going to unseal the super weapons.


Red corals are vaguely flame-shaped though. I think that puzzle is neat, but as always, puzzles in games need more than just one hint. Otherwise you cannot combine, you either understand or you don't.

They did not look at all flame-like to me. But yes, an extra clue might have helped me that time.


Also circular coral reefs often grow on old volcano craters.

Interesting, since that's exactly what it was. Unfortunately, I did not know this bit of trivia. :smallfrown:

[Delicious Taffy]

As handy as a quest marker can be, sometimes I really do wish they weren't required to find things. What I'd absolutely love is for more RPGs to have a handy-dandy journal that holds reminders for my objectives, and for those reminders to be clear and concise. I had the same problem mentioned elsewhere in the thread with Final Fantasy 9, where I took a break for a few weeks (FF14 had just dropped new content) and when I came back, I had absolutely no earthly idea what to do or what I did last, because I made the rookie mistake of saving on the overworld. So now I have to restart completely, for the third time.

I will say, more RPGs could take a lesson from Skyrim in the map department. That game is jam-packed with landmarks and the aesthetic of almost every region is different enough that even back when it came out, I could easily guess about where I was at. Oh, there's Dwemer pillars and tall cliffs everywhere? Guess I'm near Markarth. Autumn-style trees and slopey roads? Riften is afoot. Oh hey, there's that glowing tree and giant camp, Whiterun can't be far now.

Breath of the Wild too, even if I agree that it could have been slightly fuller of goodies in... well, most places. It has fun enough base gameplay to sorta make up for that, at least to my tastes. I'll often just pop the game in to go horse-riding until I find a suitably nifty thingy to climb or fight, then move on to the next until I feel like doing something else.

To really wrangle what a game needs to have for me to like the exploration in it, I think it boils down to three things: Landmarks, clear instructions (in a journal or even just dialogue), and solid base gameplay. If I can tell where I am at a glance, remind myself what to do in-game without using an external guide, or at the very least just have enough fun tooling around that I don't mind being a little lost for a while, the game is 100% gonna be better (for me) than most of its peers.

[The Glyphstone]

I always adored the Exile series of games for how it was absolutely crammed full of stuff to find and explore, all over the map in basically every area - Avernum not so much, going isometric cost a lot of flexibility.

[Erloas]

I don't miss it at all. Most of my memories of older quest\map systems was trying to figure out vague directions and spending countless hours searching for some basic thing that wasn't ever meant to be hidden, it was just poorly described or very easy to overlook.

Also struggling with some area and looking up tips and it will be something like "use this very powerful item hidden in some random corner early on in game" which you've inevitable already missed.

Which is completely different from having open world events and objects to find that are at most trivial side quests of world building.

[Gnoman]

I had the same problem mentioned elsewhere in the thread with Final Fantasy 9, where I took a break for a few weeks (FF14 had just dropped new content) and when I came back, I had absolutely no earthly idea what to do or what I did last, because I made the rookie mistake of saving on the overworld. So now I have to restart completely, for the third time.


I had that exact experience many years ago, except I made it worse - I didn't just save on the overworld, I saved in the middle of the ocean. So I didn't even have the "well, I'm near Lindblum, that must either be where I was going or where I was leaving" aid.

[Grim Portent]

I'm reminded of the old Summoner games. Hours of running around trying to find things with minimal information to go on.

In particular in the first game there was a dockworker who asked you to find a ring he lost, spent ages scouring the world for it. Turned out it was in the boss room of one of the late game bosses, and by the time you could get it and return the reward (a two handed sword) was basically worthless understatted garbage.

Or things like the Perfect Orange that you had to offer to the shrine of a sun god for a reward. Never did find some of the items for the other shrines.

[Cespenar]

I always adored the Exile series of games for how it was absolutely crammed full of stuff to find and explore, all over the map in basically every area - Avernum not so much, going isometric cost a lot of flexibility.

Yeah, didn't even mind bumping into walls to check secret passages -- you tended to find a lot of nifty hand placed secrets in the original Exile map.

[The Glyphstone]

Secret passages and doors, stuff hidden behind broken walls for Move Mountains, even stuff if you cast Flight and went wandering up lava tunnels or across the ocean. The maps were simply loaded with little goodies to stumble across.

[Alcore]

In mid 00's diablo 2 had a huge overhaul as it went from v. 1.09 to v. 1.10. Now the skill Summon Skeleton of the necromantic summoning school was a viable skill to build your character around. It even got too powerful, and I suspect as a balancing act they made it so that unless the Necromancer had access to summon resist, a level 24 skill, the skeletons which so far had breezed through almost the entire game, would be obliterated by the otherwise low damage AoE Fire Nova of Diablo.
Thank you... for making huge sweeping assumptions on how and when I play... :smallannoyed:

I actually found the original skeletons to be made of tissue. Using them in act II require such an investment of points that was almost the defining skill of said necro. Unless you don't mind replacing most of them every room; in which case they work better than bone armor and can deprive corpse using enemies from using corpses.


Some skills, like teeth, were still next to useless even with large synergies placed on them.


To me it looked more like a lesson in not to put all eggs in one basket, rather than a case of the game punishing a character for being under leveled.A lesson I learned before my first Golem. Having already completed Diablo I saw losing combinations quite quickly.

And... you completely misunderstand what I meant by under leveled. A recurring theme in the quotes of me and you I didn't touch.

[BaronOfHell]

My apologies, that is what I thought you meant by the phrase, hurting for levels, I didn't intend to be rude.

The quoted part is more of a general knowledge thing I enjoyed sharing.


It wasn't a balancing change. End of Act Bosses did 10x damage to Summons even from version 1.00.

The reason I made the assumption is because when the overhaul version came out, skeletons did well against anything on the first two difficulties even without the need of Corpse Explosions, except Diablo on the lowest difficulty. That is still 9 final boss fights they were capable of.

On the highest difficulty, their tankiness wasn't the issue either, it was the damage output against various mobs.

[Alcore]

I would miss exploration more if there was actually something to explore or a reward to get.


Get halfway through Skyrim main quest and you've seen 99% of all appearances with all locations being recycled. DLC helps add more content but storytelling is not Bethesda's strong suite. By mid game you grab loot just to get gold as even mighty artifacts pale in comparison to what you can make yourself.

Mass Effect 1 you find an ancient crashed probe with... a modern, if not cutting edge, sniper rifle in it. Instead of a puzzle or a side quest or even a footnote of why and when I'm given something I have so much of that I likely won't blink at tossing; unless I won the 99.9% loot lottery what I already have is as good as or better even if the new rifle might be a few more levels above. Or, at least, synergies better with how I play.

Subnautica (which is new enough that I won't go into detail) I am never sure what it wants to be but exploration is definitely part of it. Except there isn't much to find after the first four biomes the 'depth' of the game starts decreasing. Each new biome is divided like a theme park and the A.I. goes downhill. The big Reaper Leviathan is simple; it goes from point A to point B. I found this out when I discovered they won't attack camera drones. (Though I never got in the way) There is a nice mystery and RP but by the time you get to it most of the glamor of exploring a strange new world is replaced by "what dangers does this 'level' have?"



- - - * - - -

The legend of Dragoon... made in 1995? and I can walk into a library, point my character at a bookshelf and get trivia. Pointless? Kinda, it is nothing (much like skyrim books) but helps round of the world. Tiny little things like that are becoming more rare.

Subnautica has the stalker (likely the first predator to take a nibble of you) which I was excited to explore the A.I. of. Far ranging for shiny metals I have watched them group up and bother the gas pods, hunt for food and you can feed them yourself (not pieces of yourself but fish you grab). They have more personality than any leviathan.

[Resileaf]

I would miss exploration more if there was actually something to explore or a reward to get.


Get halfway through Skyrim main quest and you've seen 99% of all appearances with all locations being recycled. DLC helps add more content but storytelling is not Bethesda's strong suite. By mid game you grab loot just to get gold as even mighty artifacts pale in comparison to what you can make yourself.


Bethesda dropped the ball heavily with exploration rewards after Morrowind. It was incredible fun in Morrowind to explore a dungeon and find an actual artifact by chance. The loss of specific loot replaced with random drops reduced the enjoyment of exploration by a lot in Oblivion.

[WritersBlock]

Not an RPG but the first 2 Serious Sam games (First and Second Encounter) have better exploration than some RPG's.
As far as exploration in rpg's goes, I prefer to have a nice middle ground whenever possible.

[Triaxx]

There are still a handful of randomly placed pieces of loot in Oblivion including a few it's likely you'd never find without a file dump.

[Cespenar]

Bethesda dropped the ball heavily with exploration rewards after Morrowind. It was incredible fun in Morrowind to explore a dungeon and find an actual artifact by chance. The loss of specific loot replaced with random drops reduced the enjoyment of exploration by a lot in Oblivion.

Morrowind was a masterclass in exploration, but in retrospect, what they did there can't be feasible for every company.

Though even a third of that effort would be more than enough quality for any modern game.

[Alcore]

Bethesda dropped the ball heavily with exploration rewards after Morrowind. It was incredible fun in Morrowind to explore a dungeon and find an actual artifact by chance. The loss of specific loot replaced with random drops reduced the enjoyment of exploration by a lot in Oblivion.
There is exploration in Skyrim. If you are interested visit the Youtuber Camelworks's Curating Curious Curiosities who finds them and strings a story together (one video for each hold). 95-99% of these are unmarked and by the time I realized they were even there I had spent well over 100 hours and I knew the payoff wasn't going to be enough.

The reason I believed they dropped the ball was because they train you from the get go to follow the marker and find landmarks; you actually have no need for compass points but it is nice that they are placed. It would of been nice for an actual map.

What would be a good map? Fallout 3 and New Vegas. New Vegas in particular has the roads nice and cleanly marked; you can follow them for a... 'safe' route that doesn't put a surprise mountain between you and the landmark you're trying to reach. A problem I often had with The Reach in Skyrim.

Morrowind was a masterclass in exploration, but in retrospect, what they did there can't be feasible for every company.

Though even a third of that effort would be more than enough quality for any modern game.

Indeed. The majority of the caves, ruins and forts had something in them or something to do with the world around them. Skyrim (sort of) does it but it is a pale shallow reflection of its ancestor.

[Murk]

I'm so glad most RPG's dropped "exploration" in favor of good maps and quest markers. For me "exploration" generally meant getting lost and frustrated and not achieving anything.

For the longest time I only played RPG's together with my brother so I could rely on him to tell me where to go. Which... isn't the point of exploration, I assume.

Turns out that once you know where to go and what to do rather than running circles through the same stupid forest or hallway for hours, RPG's can actually be fun!

[Vinyadan]

Indeed. The majority of the caves, ruins and forts had something in them or something to do with the world around them. Skyrim (sort of) does it but it is a pale shallow reflection of its ancestor.

I believe Morrowind was made with the design idea that not everyone needs to see everything. Later games instead assumed that content the player didn't see was content developed in vain. In practice, you could play Morrowind without noticing the various dialogue lines that connected the dungeons to the rest of the world, but they were there.

Thinking of Morrowind, it's pretty surprising that places like Pelagiad or the Caldera mine (the actual mining area) exist. They're large areas, but they have very few quests in there, and they seem to mostly exist to flesh out the world.

[BRC]

Elden Ring had pretty good exploration, the guidance was a very vague "Go in that direction", and there were enough interesting things around that you were encouraged to poke around in the scenery. The use of Runes and Smithing Stones meant that it was easy to encourage exploration by handing out those always useful items, and the setting design was good enough that you'd see something interesting in the distance and go "Hey, I want to see what that is!"


Main problem was that the writing style meant lots of the sidequests were incomprehensible, so there was little narrative reward for exploration. Mostly you just found a new place with some enemies to kill. It was pretty rare that I felt properly excited about exploring.

Breath of the Wild did a great job of exploration due to it's movement mechanics and not filling the map up with quest markers, probably the best recent Exploration experience I'd had, I feel like they could have been a bit shinier with the rewards for exploration.


The Horizon games have absolutely beautiful landscapes and, especially Forbidden West, fun movement mechanics, plus I think my favorite take on fast travel (Fast traveling from a non-fast travel point takes a consumable item that, while not hard to get, isn't trivial either, encouraging you to actually traverse the map a bit rather than just jumping between fast travel points constantly, while still allowing you to plunge off into the unknown without fearing that you'll need to trudge back to the fast travel network if you don't find anything interesting). The rewards for exploration are generally pretty cool as well.

Of course, they do commit two crimes of exploration based gameplay. First by filling your map with objective markers that generally remove the actual fun of exploring, and second by having some of those objective markers be, effectively, boxes that you can't open until you progress far enough in the story. At least they have the decency to tell you "Hey, you can't open this yet", but it means that the "Intended" gameplay is to progress through the story, then backtrack to go press the button at all those boxes. It would be one thing if you were unlocking proper movement mechanics that would let you interact with old areas in new ways, but it's just "Here's a door you can't open yet. We'll give you the key later".

[Delicious Taffy]

The legend of Dragoon... made in 1995? and I can walk into a library, point my character at a bookshelf and get trivia. Pointless? Kinda, it is nothing (much like skyrim books) but helps round of the world. Tiny little things like that are becoming more rare.
1999(JP), 2000(NA), even.
Now that's a friggin' RPG. Corny as all hell, but the atmosphere and heart are immaculate. My own game is taking a ton of inspiration from it, which I can't say for even my favorites in the Final Fantasy series, just because we need more games like it.

[Spore]

Morrowind was a masterclass in exploration, but in retrospect, what they did there can't be feasible for every company.

Though even a third of that effort would be more than enough quality for any modern game.

I mean, it kind of is. But they let the lore writer have their way with the world, too. We still pull established lore from books from Morrowind because the dude has written so much stuff. And best part of it was, that it was never a straight lore dump, but written how an author in the world would see it. There are books that disagree on stuff, creating dispute that can even be the basis for a religious conflict ingame. There are books that could not be more wrong, there are extremely accurate books.

And the best thing? The power of CHIM made all revolve around the player. They are some of the few people in the world with truly free will and the ability to alter the world. It goes so far that between games the world will warp (based on the canonical actions of the player) but this does not mean YOUR character's world has changed that way necessarily. But for "map exploration" Morrowind was not an awesome game honestly. I do not recall many hidden details in that game aside from NPC dialogue and books. The lore was heavy, but the map exploration was not.

[Triaxx]

I love Legend of Dragoon. Even as hard to master as it's combat system was. (Seriously screw you Lavitz/Albert and your cherry blossom nonsense) It took every RPG cliche and made them work.