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>Metroid Prime 4 is open world with a motorcycle
Literally everything is open world slop now. Even a series that named the genre where you explore intricate interconnected levels.

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.

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>>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.

>>44268
I dislike most games with them because they're designed like linear games but now there's a map that takes triple the time to traverse with a bunch of chores littering the map.

>>44273
I didn't even finish TOTK because yeah, there's so much stuff but it's all so pointless and not that interesting. I should have just rushed the main story but couldn't even be bothered to do that.

>>44274
Don't even get me started on how many games have shoved pointless base building shit into them.

>>44275
Huh, I never actualy realised how much Gothic has in common with metroidvania world design.

Nintendo is out of ideas.
>Mario Kart has an open world
>Metroid has an open world
>Zelda has an open world
>Next Fire Emblem will probably also be open world
The only good thing about this is by the end of Switch 2's lifespan every Nintendie will be so fatigued from open world that the next console will have linear games again.

>>44282
I sometimes wonder if gaming companies purposely shit their IPs for a while when the formula that made them stand out to begin with runs out, only to make a triumphant comeback later "going back to the roots".
Or maybe it's just the natural consequence of corporate demand for constant releases dragging the general quality of any franchise down.

>>44273
>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.
I personally dislike this kind of game design philosophy where the game gets easier with time due to power creep. I remember doing Pokemon Scarlet out of order while underleveled and it was super fun, until I had to steamroll the other gyms that I was too overleveled to have a challenge in. But doing the game in order would've been too easy anyway.

>>44276
I feel like botw isn't a great general example because a lot of what works in botw's case doesn't work elsewhere, even it's own sequel.

>>44273
>>44279
TotK made a really weird decision to reuse the overworld with relatively minor changes but to actually gimp the climbing mechanic to actively disincentivize you from the type of traversal the world was designed for. So it's not just player laziness causing people to make hover bikes. That's intended by the developers lol.

>>44275
You could hypothetically do that but it seems not very likely IMO. But it would definitely be interesting to have like an open overworld with a sprawling metroidvania dungeon under it.

>>44286 (Me)
>>44278
>>44277
posting bug ate my video embed lol

>>44286
Part of me wants to dig into what got cut and why in totk because it seems like there's evidence of lots of other intended changes that didn't end up happening. Like I remember being psyched because it seemed like rebuilding the kingdom was going to feature in the game somehow, and there are resource piles in the ruins of castle town right beside foundations which seemed like they were made to accept them. But rebuilding settlements only factors into one side quest and that's it.

I enjoyed totk for the most part but overall it's a pretty big disappointment on a lot of fronts.

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>>44282
>>44283
Hate to valorize a porky but Nintendo products seemed to get markedly worse after Iwata died, the last company president who had actually worked as a developer. The trajectory has been more toward mainstream trends since around that time.

>>44289
>But rebuilding settlements only factors into one side quest and that's it.
Yeah and the fact that they had this at all probably means they went through some development process for those mechanics. The side quest is basically 100% scripted rather than using any kind of dedicated mechanics though which makes me think they weren't able to get any of the associated crafting/building mechanics to work. Given that the game got delayed an extra year (supposedly to polish it) I suspect they pivoted late in development toward the zonai devices away from other systems.

Some kind of crafting system was an obvious progression of the systems in BotW. You already have cooking and armor upgrades to build on. You already have crafting materials to work with that drop from sources in the world. And there's also the whole house building side quest followed by the town building one. It also just makes sense in terms of the story to have Link rebuilding Hyrule. They probably had an interest in going that route from the start with TotK especially since they announced it so quickly after BotW's release.

So why not do that? Other games have done similar things with base buliding and TotK does generally have some really technically impressive elements, so it's probably not because the team couldn't manage it. It's probably either due to technical limits of the switch or corporate meddling, or both.

As far as tech limits go, the switch already struggles with the game as is, even having some problems running BotW (most infamously the deku tree area). Even though TotK actually got ported to a whole new engine, there are still going to be limits on what you can run on switch hardware, especially at the scale of these games. It's enough of a feat to be able to handle an open world with persistent terrain and features that you can see from so far away. If there was some game mechanics that allowed you to alter the landscape, that would mean the whole LOD system for rendering simpler things at a distance would have to be implemented to be dynamic and reflect whatever changes you make.

It might seem simple, but it would mean that to run with decent performance they'd need a way to "bake" the terrain and building data in a way that could be readily referenced, only updated when you make changes. It's not something you could ever pre-bake during development simply because of the complexity with the number of settlements and amount of building that happened. And that's assuming each settlement has a pre-determined path for what you can build.

Given the way that the systems in the game work they probably tried to set up base building to work with custom-made buildings. Picture constructing buildings with the ultra-hand ability and how many variations on that you could have. Imagine how complicated it would be to try to build a system that could dynamically create low poly representations of custom buildings to render at a distance. Or how much additional space it would take for the game to save all your custom builds at each settlement as part of your save file. The ability to build your own house outside Tarry Town is the closest the game gets to this, and it's pretty limited despite only being a single building in one specific area. That might tell us something about how much the switch could actually handle. And consider how much the ultra-hand ability slows down frame rates in the current version of the game. Probably part of the reason they rereleased it for switch 2 was to be able to get a large volume of performance data from players to test if they could do anything like that for a sequel. They have probably abandoned these ideas though, since they are supposedly moving on from the botw/totk world in future Zeldas.

Another possible explanation is corporate meddling, and this seems to have played at least some role in the direction the game took. A lot of people have remarked how out of place the zonai devices feel in terms of the overall design of the game, and my suspicion is that the extra year of development was spent pivoting to that and massively expanding those features to compensate for the lack of base building (which would also mean losing out on other content tied to bases). A common criticism of the zonai devices is how shallow and gimmicky they tend to be, which makes sense for a hasty implementation. They have also been accused of being designed specifically so people can farm clips on short form video sites like tiktok and youtube shorts, which was known to boost interest in BotW. Part of the support for that argument is the short lifetime of some devices as well as the gimmicky nature of building. Lots of people pointed out how there seems to be a direct line from the fast travel bugs in botw (picrel) to the zonai devices in totk being used for traveling.

It's also possibly a combination of both of these reasons (and maybe others). The game was already taking longer than expected based on announcing the start of development so early. Rather than let the devs continue trying to solve what would have been an extremely difficult problem, the execs may have simply decided they better go ahead and get the game ready to release before switch 2, which was announced about 6 months after totk released and itself was released just 2 years later (originally planned for just 1.5 years). If they tried to release simultaneously on both systems that would have cut into sales (considering how many people bought two copies), and if they had to release on both systems they'd still be held back by the switch 1's limits. They probably wouldn't want to gamble on only releasing it on switch 2 as a console seller since it was already announced as a switch 1 title and they already planned to use it as an intermediate step in the price hike from 60 to 80/90 dollars. My guess is it's this combination of factors specifically that cause the game to take the direction it did, because to me it seems very likely they tried the other direction.

>>44290
>Given that the game got delayed an extra year (supposedly to polish it)

It's hard for me to buy that considering how dogshit many essential mechanics are, like weapon fusing and the menu system, and the fact that you have amiibo shit from the first game copy/pasted into totk.

>My guess is it's this combination of factors specifically that cause the game to take the direction it did, because to me it seems very likely they tried the other direction.


That makes sense. One of the most flummoxing aspects of the game is the underworld tbh. It was really exciting at first until you find out there's basically nothing at all down there except enemies, yiga, zonaite, and amiibo crap. With the skislands being a nothingburger I figured that's where the real meat would be, but it was a boring slog as well.

>>44291
>like weapon fusing and the menu system
Yeah it's kind of incredible that the shitty linear pop-up menu that they slapped on botw after losing out on the wii u controller as a second screen was just not improved upon at all in an entire second game.

>>44293
It but only wasn't improved, it was made even worse. Like why would you dump hundreds of fusable items into a single fucking pile? And then make the player scroll through them all? Every time??? WHAT WERE THEY THINKING???

>>44294
I'm guessing it had to be a fairly late change to making arrows work that way or else they would have come up with a better solution to it. If they had a different crafting system you might have had to craft the arrows separately, giving you a much shorter list to scroll. Implementing some other more sophisticated system would have taken more effort. Even a favorites system would be a bit more effort which reinforces the idea it was a late change. The autobuild menu has favorites but still suffers from the infinite scrolling issue so that further reinforces a late change that meant they didn't have time to implement an improvement.

>>44268
Open worlds are sadly too much work for gamedevs.
It was already terribly hard to keep devs motivated enough to hide some secrets behind a staircase or waterfall, because most players wouldn't find and experience it, so they thought: Why bother? But now its 100x worse, with the average player experiencing only 20% of the content. Thats why most open world maps are filled with, well, low quality filler quests that are probably randomly generated, because the gamedevs just don't bother with the quality, most players will never experience all the content anyway. Think the radio tower missions of Far Cry, or the collectibles from Assassin's Creed, but as generic quest, over and over again.
Remember MGSV? Where you had to enter the same mission area over and over again?
The other option is to have a completely empty open world that looks big by square area, or to bite the bullet and either make a smaller open world (that you can't market) or to just go back to linear maps.

Thats not fun, its a huge headache for the industry.

Huge open worlds work perfectly with sandboxes, but everything else, meh.

>>44283
To recycle old franchises is a safer bet financially. Thats why theres so many remasters, remakes, sequels, prequels instead of new IPs.

>>44262
>literally full of sand
I though we reached peak Ubisoft open world with Mad Max game, but that was a decade ago (Jesus Christ it actually was a decade, time to pick my gravestone) and it just keeps going.
Personaly I feel semi-open word design is underutilised, smaller games use it to deal with budget constrain, and it often works far better than full open world, you have the sense of exploration and discovery while keeping it contend dense.

>>44266
Zelda arguably

>>44272
The PS2 GTA games were open world but used bridge bombings (III), hurricanes (Vice City), and police monitoring (San Andreas) to restrict player movement early on

>>44331
Yeah, to a certain extent both are.

>>44332
True those are hard-gated but they more or less gate smaller open worlds within the whole one, not the maze like structure of a metroidvania.

< open world with interconnected levels that tie in unexpected ways that only reveal themselves through player progression
not that i have any faith nintendo will ever nail it, but elden ring did manage to do it

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>>44298
peak open world slop is No Man's Sky (the original version)
Can't get more empty than literal space lol
>Personaly I feel semi-open word design is underutilised
AKA "open zone" akin to like 3D mario games. Also allows you to have your more structured world map with specific paths connecting the zones. Super Mario Eclipse (mod for sunshine) does this pretty well, where on top of adding new levels it allows you to travel between adjacent levels on the island.

>>44355
>peak open world slop is No Man's Sky (the original version)
hbomberguy is that you

>>44355
No Man's Sky pissed me off so hard
People said that it was so good after they added more stuff to it but when I tried it on gamepass shit sucked
The epitome of a mile wide and an inch deep

>>44355
funny because NMS had still nothing to offer ,even after it became a "real" game,unless you specifically like exploring randomly generated content,with all the planets all having more or less the same materials,which is still the case to this day btw,the new world generation was like one year ago at best.

I'm gonna blame the weirdos who said actually Wind Waker's ocean was good.


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