Open world games- something that great in concept, usually flawed in execution. How do we fix them Sup Forums...

Open world games- something that great in concept, usually flawed in execution. How do we fix them Sup Forums? First suggestions: end the map size dick waving competition. And nuke Ubisoft.

The first is stopping the map size race

World get simply too large to design them properly or fill them with meaningful content

I dream of an open world game with huge world, so big that there would be several cities and travelling from one to another would take, for example, 2 real hours. No fast travel.

>boring
No if you do something more than hold W. 2 irl hours would translate to, for example, 4 days in game, so one in game day is 30 min. You would only travel for 15 minutes, then stop, spend five minutes making camp, hunting, cooking etc. and the last 10 minutes you wouldn't have to play because that would be sleep and the game would skip it. Plus you would meet monsters to kill, some other encounters, people to talk. Companions would accompany you in travelling and tell you their stories otlr the lore of the world, or they would sing songs in camp beside the fire before sleep.

That would be the pinnacle of comfy.

I recommend focusing on hubs instead of a seamless map.

Witcher 3 did this. Now we need something with good gameplay.

Sounds like you want Nomadic Hobo Simulator.

I'd also want devs to focus on not making more generic modern city maps.

Stop memeing. Travelling would be a minor activity in a game, most of the time you would spend in cities/dungeons doing quests, and only travel after clearing the area. It's just travel wouldn't be meaningless like in most (all?) open world games

No, I was actually pretty serious. It would be in a sense a survival game. Hell it could be a proper evolution of crap games like Rust.

Open world that exists in real time. Perfect example is Space Rangers series. Economy grows independently from you, technology grows, enemies grow in level and strength, if you jerk around doing meaningless shit you'll find yourself hoplessly left behind as a weakest shit in entire game world.
Another solution is simply time limit Fallout 1 style.
Basically, you have to give the player a sense of urgency, because if not an open world game simply turns into autistic sandbox with samey menial tasks sprinkled here and there.

The problem with most open world games is the lack of game mechanics to improve the experience of an open world.
Imagine an open world RPG where you have to carry food supplies so you don't starve on your travels, having clothes for the weather so you don't freeze and carrying hunting gear in case you run out of food. Having a sleep mechanic that restores your max stamina. All these mechanics balanced with each other and the scale of the map to create a world you can immerse yourself in, instead of the Disney theme parks we have today.

That is a dream of mine as well.

>Imagine an open world RPG where you have to carry food supplies so you don't starve on your travels, having clothes for the weather so you don't freeze and carrying hunting gear in case you run out of food. Having a sleep mechanic that restores your max stamina.
user, shitty survival games exist by hundreds on steam. I'm not sure why you want even more annoying routine in your open world games, but have a blast.

Open world only works in game genres where traveling across the world in and of itself is the core gameplay. Racing games, platformers and so on work well as open world. Things like RPGs rarely do because traveling is what you do in between the gameplay, so making it open world just increases the delay between actual gameplay, which makes it boring.

Outside of that, devs needs to focus on quality over quantity. Massive worlds full of fuck-all suck, but open world can still function in a smaller, more tightly developed area.

>That Witcher 3 map

Jesus fucking christ, and I thought Breath of the Wild was too big. How big is Xenoblade X for comparison?

>shitty survival games

You just said it, they are shitty.

Frostfall in Skyrim was on the right track. You needed proper clothing for the area, water made you cold as fuck etc.

The only thing it lacked was permanent damage to the character instead of this instant death shit. For example I was like 15 feet from a settlement and died, on my only save. Was stupid.

Nuking ubishit is a pretty good start to any attempt to approve video games in general.

Why do you people think that adding real life shit in videogames makes them better?
Yeah, lets have a game where you backpack from city to city for 5 hours in real time occasionally running innawoods to take a shit. Sounds like pure fun to me.

Sane opinion.

Sounds like you just want to play The Long Dark.

Some people enjoy more "simulator" style games. It's okay if you don't, it's just a difference in tastes. I like arcade-style racing games, but I'm not going to shit on people who like simulator-style racing games.

I will say this though: if a game is going to include an open world then it needs to have a fucking point to it. Open world does benefit simulator-style games more, therefore open world games should have more realistic survival elements to appeal to the niche that enjoys that type of gameplay. If an open world is not going to have an actual point conductive to gameplay then the devs should just eliminate it in favor of a map screen.

The main problem with open world games is the blandness, fetch quests and feeling of purposelessness. Yes, exploring this huge world full of possibilities sounds great in theory. But the minute you're stuck with the gameplay constraints offered by most open world games you just kinda 'meh' through it all.

>How do we fix them Sup Forums?
Serious Answer(TM): There is no way to do this like you probably mean OP. This is 100% purely a matter of effort, of the difference between idea and implementation, full stop. There is no formula or business method or whatever, it's just a matter of how good devs are and how much effort/budget they've can put into it. If they're good enough and lucky enough to have a solid budget and time line then it can work really well, but that's not a hard factor. All we can do is buy good games and not buy bad ones.

In MMOs there is a bit of an exception because a really good sandbox design can help with this. But almost zero devs are interested in this and it's a super niche in today's environment which is centered around F2P themeparks, so it's not a question worth exploring.

Get rid of towers. Using towers is a cheap way of revealing the map and discourages exploration. If you have to absolutely have to have towers or watchpoints in your open-world game, do it like Zelda where only the topography is revealed.