/games/ - Games

Super Metroid is a precursor to open world games.

Awesome, they should add crafting and maybe some roguelike elements

Do people actually dislike open worlds? When I was a kid I thought all games should be open world, and got mad whenever I reached an invisible wall or arbitrary boundary.

>>44268
They've gotten sort of played out since it's mostly just empty space filled with busy work

>>44268
There's nothing inherently bad about open worlds, they are just usually implemented in a very lazy way so they can slap on another buzzword for marketing purposes. Also players are usually more forgiving for bugs when the map is huge compared to when every square meter is intentionally designed, so it gives you the excuse to save on QA and testing. They are usually just full of copypasted content and make things take longer to give the impression the world is bigger. And if you look at the screenshot the open world seems pretty empty.

An open world really seems like it's anathema to a series like Metroid in particular. The whole point of open worlds is that you can go basically anywhere from the start while the core structure of a metroidvania is that you have to unlock routes piece by piece as you progress. You could hypothetically try to combine the two but they're basically polar opposites in terms of structure. You can make it work with Zelda because that was always more a game about exploring a large world and occasionally finding secrets with your special items. With Metroid pretty much the whole meat of the game is navigating the world like a maze. If you're doing an open world game with the series it pretty much amounts to a genre shift.

If I was instructed to make an open world map I'd just make it a metroidvania but with chunk-based level loading. Like that seems like the instinctual appeal of Big Map anyway. The good parts of Satisfactory's map have some sorta progression gating.

>>44271
Not really. The appeal of Big Map is you can go from point A to point B however you want. Whereas the appeal of a metroidvania is that you have to solve the puzzle of how to naviaget from point A to point B. There may be more than one valid route but the routes are constrained by the level design and importantly they're gated by obstacles tied to progression. Open worlds sometimes try to guide progression, but usually do that by having leveled areas that you probably won't survive if you're too early in the progression.

Personally I'm not in love with Samus's new suit. It doesn't look bad, but something about it just feels wrong.

>>44272
I think TOTK kind of illustrates some problems with the "open world" design, where being able to go just about anywhere from go leads to a flattening of experiences, and yeah, leads to a big map that's often empty except for cookie cutter content like korok seed shit. Totk especially suffered from a lot of the side content being boring and skippable because rewards were generally lackluster and inherently non essential.

I was just thinking the other day about how the metroidvania method of gating progression/exploration with essential equipment might have helped mitigate this problem somewhat. It would be nice to find a happy medium between the two. Maybe something akin to the old megaman games where you can pick any order to do the stages in, but having certain equipment makes subsequent stages easier.

They need to make more crafting like minecraft so I can build a house for Samus

>>44272
Maybe that new metroid will be a mix of both like Gothic

>>44270
>>44262
OP I’ll add to say what he is saying. Yeah, having an open world isn’t necessarily bad level designing wise, just look at Elden ring or botw. Coincidentally, linear level design comes with a lot of its own caveats—just look at how much praise castlevania, thief, and early soulsborne games get for having linear levels with plenty of connections and shortcuts between stages that make each level feel open.