Slashdot Mirror
Building a Successful "Open" Game World
M3rk sends an excerpt from an opinion piece on Gametopius discussing what it takes for an open game world to be successful. Interesting stories and characters are important, but they must be balanced by varied and entertaining gameplay. The lack of either will be a limiting factor in how many people return to play once the primary plot is completed. Quoting:
"A game like GTA IV takes itself and its fiction very seriously. It spends a lot of time, effort, and gameplay resources convincing you that the world you are traveling through is the same world that the story and cutscenes take place in. It may not be a game that allows you to own or control property to the degree seen in Burnout Paradise or Saints Row II, but it wants its world to be cohesive, not divided. ... While GTA IV's game systems almost serve its plot, Saints Row II and Burnout Paradise live for their game mechanics. Sure, these worlds are fun to look at and explore, but any exploration and discovery that the player enjoys merely drives them to these games' raison d'être: fun systems to play with."
An open game world should have an open content: An achievement in the game should allow you to add to the world's history. Then other players should validate it to become part of the world's lore. (First post BTW)
Many games, open world games in particular, put you in the place of the protagonist. Or, at the very least, you play the persona of an observer in the game world.
This type of storytelling seems to me to be an unnecessary restriction on story telling in this type of game format. When watching a movie, or reading a book, the same limitations can occur, but there are many variations.
Having a story in a movie be about many characters never bothers me, at least not in the sense that I'm wondering who is holding the camera that allows me to see the story. As a disembodied observer, the story unfolds itself just as convincingly as it would from the point of view of some of the characters. The game can focus on manipulating the game world, changing the rules or even just tracking several characters in an interesting way, effectively playing 'director' of an interactive movie.
I don't know. I find Fable II is more entertaining than GTA IV. Itâ(TM)s enjoyable visually and story-wise whereas GTA is just kindof bleh. The problem comes when these kind of dynamic world games spread themselves too thin and try to have a huge world but they don't actually have enough developers to pull it off. A game like Oblivion loses an element of personality and depth in its quest because it tries way too hard to be huge.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
Saints Row II and Burnout Paradise aren't open game worlds! They don't even run on Linux!
(ducks and runs away)
A game like GTA IV takes itself and its fiction very seriously. It spends a lot of time, effort, and gameplay resources convincing you that the world you are traveling through is the same world that the story and cutscenes take place in. It may not be a game that allows you to own or control property to the degree seen in Burnout Paradise or Saints Row II, but it wants its world to be cohesive, not divided.
Burnout Paradise? Is that a typo? Of his five or so examples of open world games, I'd say that's the ONLY one with less control over the game world - particularly in the sense of controlling "property" - than GTAIV.
I loved the plots of Grand Theft Auto IV and Final Fantasy X, and that you could do a myriad of side activities within the game world before completing the story mode (and in the case of GTAIV continue playing the game free roam) but ultimately as a narrative experience you are bound to the plot.
In Grand Theft Auto IV if you want to unlock the other islands etc. you must progress through the story, so the world is only open (from the start) so much. In Final Fantasy X you are limited very much where you can travel until you have progressed up to a significant point in the story where you are finally given the option of roaming the world at your own leisure.
Fallout III actually had a more correct approach to giving the player a true open world choice in that the entire landscape was available to be explored the moment you exile yourself from the vault. And every sidequest and other task is available to be completed as the player's own judgment and they can go in any direction and order. You can even choose your character's name, gender, race, and some facial features.
But what all three of these games have in common is that no matter how open the worlds are at any point, in order to complete the game, at least as the developers designed, is to conform to the character's pre-written closed world and isolated story.
In GTAIV, you cannot become a cop or a taxi driver, or a motorcycle racer, you must find the military men who betrayed you back home to find closure for your character. But the game, once you have beaten it, gives you the brilliant option of playing the conquered world completely freely including finishing the side tasks. Though to unlock this complete sandbox you've had to assume the scripted and not open-ended role of the main character. The story is GTAIV is excellent, but the focus and enticement of having a large sandbox to explore and fiddle with, is usually the driving force for people to complete the game.
In Final Fantasy X, once you beat the game, that's it, it goes to the final cut scenes and wraps up the story. The only way to replay it is to either start a new game, or to load an older save file. Of course this is the way the developers planned the game, you are meant to finish the game, there is a story and it is the main focus of the game despite you being in a sandbox world at one point the developers are pushing you to finish the story, the game. FFX had such a tragic ending and fans screamed so loudly and furiously for more story, and therefore more gameplay, that Square (who makes the FF games) created FFX-2, or the first true sequel to any FF game in history. So even though at some point the game was open-ended, once you are done doing every side-task, all that is left is the story. But completing the game 100% is no small task.
Fallout III, you get the entire world open from the beginning, you can lead a good karma life, a neutral karma life, or a bad karma life. But no matter how good, indifferent, or neutral you are, your world is always the same, the quest is always the same, The Waters Of Life. In Fallout III they give the character the choice of being whoever they want. In GTAIV you are Niko the insane immigrant seeking vengeance and retribution at all costs. In FFX you are Tidus and company ridding the world of the giant monster Sin. In Fallout III you can be whoever you want in terms of looks, and even karma, but no matter who you think you may be...you are forced into the Waters Of Life Quest.
Even if the Waters Of Life Quest can be ended in different ways, the developers force you to help your father in a task that has little emotional connection to you the main character. You have to join project purity. You could blow up Megaton, enslave children, kill the ghouls, enslave the replicant, and become the devil of the wasteland...but when daddy says he needs help with the water filter and fuse box running the generator guess who has to become a handy man taking time off from savagely raping and brutalizing the world. I could understand if
A bit OT but it would help a lot to have a sort of new github/launchpad dedicated to game development, where people cannot just share source code but also artwork, 3D models, maps, sound effects, blueprints and game plots, translations... Easy enough for non developers to be able to contribute, and well organized so that new projects can easily pull resources (and knowledge) from other projects.
I have to agree really, I don't think GTA4 lived up to the hype in all honesty. It was a good game, but only as good as the majority of other games out there but personally I felt, not as good as Saints Row 2.
Saints Row 2's more open world style, it's coop mode and so on made for such a better game. The minigames were just more funny too- seriously, the escort one, driving round at high speed avoiding TV crews and the IRS whilst your mate is in the back performing the "Brown Twister" or whatever on an old granny, hours of amusement! It just had so many semi-hidden elements too from streaking to the suicide guy to the zombie killing section.
But Saints Row 2 wasn't unique in beating GTA4 as an open world game I felt, Mercenairies 2 was rather fantastic, from getting your first chopper through to continuing to play the game after you'd completed it and getting to actually calling nuclear strikes that would whipe out half a city.
I think coop matters as much as anything for these types of games though, Crackdown clearly wasn't as good as GTA4 single player but slap coop mode on and you could have much more fun. Even then coop isn't the be all and end all though because as you say, Fable 2 was more fun, even though it's coop mode was pretty crap. IIRC GTA4 actually has a coop mode but it's just a crappy sub-game.
Whilst we have our Resident Evils, our Rainbow Sixs, our Gears of Wars and that that do have coop modes, there's nothing I look forward to more on release calendars than open world games with good coop modes. One in particular I'm holding out my hopes for is Just Cause 2, I quite enjoyed the first one and if the next one will have coop then it should make for fun times.
Interesting stories and characters are important, but they must be balanced by varied and entertaining gameplay. The lack of either will be a limiting factor in how many people return to play once the primary plot is completed.
Neither of the factor is a must for a game to be a success. World of Warcraft for example. It has no story, weak characters and gameplay which been obsolete for about 10 years. Halo is another example.
All it takes is to target the right market at the right time and have a huge marketing budget. Everything else is optional
GTA is not an RPG. Never was. Comparing it with Fable makes no sense whatsoever.
Clearly you've missed out on Bethesda's previous titles, and haven't experienced the true freedom that is Tamriel...
On second thought, let's not go to the internet. 'Tis a silly place.
Really open game world should be procedurally generated IMHO, like roguelike games and their derivatives (diablo etc). The problem is that such world often look sterile and artificial, and need content created by designer to become more alive. I think the solution could be - after creating random seed world it should evolve for several hundreds generations. That way disbalances would die out, factions will have history of relationship, artifacts and places of power would have some logic in their placement. Kind of genetic algorithm for game content.
Noone ever said GTA was an RPG, thats a rather pedantic point to make. Sure they're not the same genre... but both are games, both released around the same time, and both are open world style.
Sure you can't compare the genre conventions of them, but you can compare their fun, their replayability, their success, etc.
While GTA IV's game systems almost serve its plot, Saints Row II and Burnout Paradise live for their game mechanics. Sure, these worlds are fun to look at and explore, but any exploration and discovery that the player enjoys merely drives them to these games' raison d'Ãtre: fun systems to play with."
I have a hard time taking game advice for someone who thinks "fun to play" is an unworthy or insufficient goal.
Sorry, GTAIV sucks. The play is alright, but their attempt to make the world "realistic" at the expense of fun makes the game a chore. I don't WANT to have to take every character in the game out for an ice cream cone between missions. I'm surprised they stopped short of making you do your taxes in-game.
You are correct. I was actually disappointed that in Fallout 3 the game stopped after completing the main quest, but also that most side quests are closely related to the main quest. In the previous Bethesda games you could actually ignore the whole main quest and still play a round with a world where the main quest didn't bother. Ignoring the main quest in fallout 3 could lead to an instant jump in the main quest progress, which is actually very annoying.
Bethesda's Daggerfall featured a very open world. Of course the quests eventually became nothing but grind. But you could do pretty much whatever you wanted. You could go into the trading business, busing and selling houses. Or join one of the various guilds/cults.
Grandparent:
Parent:
I'm sorry, but one or other of you appears to have posted in the wrong thread.
May the Maths Be with you!
I am a great fan of open games - like Crossfire or Mana World, but I find that I invariably get bored with a game after a relatively short while because it is too much of just one of two things. Perhaps the problem is that it is relatively easy to implement "killing" as the basic way to advance, whereas almost any other concept is difficult by comparison.
To be really long-term successful, I think an online game should cater for a wider variation of interests, like teaching, construction and exploration. I don't think graphics is all that important, as you can tell from my interests above; but a fantasy-universe where you can nurture several interests and styles of play would certainly catch my interest.
I'm really sick of having to "explore" my way to every event and challenge. Burnout Paradise is a game where its "cohesiveness" really gets in the way of fun gameplay. It could benefit a lot from a little less cohesion and a little more "easy UI".
- "Retry previous race" would be nice
- "Reverse previous race" would be a more-"cohesive" way to do the same thing - get back to where you were, but have some fun doing it.
- "Jump to location" would be a less-cohesive but more what you actually want
- "Custom Race" would be the more-cohesive variant of that. Just define a point to race to, and do it.
- "Invincible mode" (or at least a way to enable Burnout: Revenge style "anything but head-on is fine" crashes) would instantly make all the "get from point a to point b before you can do a race" stuff a lot more enjoyable.
- ability to disable the slow-motion crash cam (at least for driveaways) would make the whole thing more fun
Burnout: Paradise is NOT a good example of the game's "cohesion" taking a back seat to the goal of fun.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
When I was a student, Psygnosis came to the university on a recruitment drive and spoke about their games.
Aside from that being cool in itself, what did stick in my memory was a comment about what made a game good - getting enjoyment from the playing itself, not just from completing goals.
But this was way before Half-life and putting a story into gaming. Can't beat a good story.
So really the best solution has to encompass both, bit of a story and development, and a nice environment to explore complete with side quests.
GTA IV manages it quite nicely, so it is possible, and clearly successfully appeals to a wide audience.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
It's pretty obvious to me exactly where games should be heading, and 'open world' games, regardless of type - (shooter/RPG etc.) - are no exception.
The first step, is something certain games are now starting to really get into:
Dynamic content. I.e. game worlds/objects/characters etc. that react to the player and each other in as many ways as possible. Of course, this means stuff like destructible scenery, aswell as dynamic plot generation etc..
The second step is something most RPG's have really taken steps towards, but there's an awful lot of room left to explore:
Dynamic Game-play. (I.e. the accompaniment to dynamic content - not the 'generic' dynamic game-play tag you tend to see on most games these days. Again, it means giving the player some power over the type of game-play options aswell as any and maybe all of the development thereof. Though of course there's no reason why any of this has to all be in the players domain, and remain completely separate from the content or reliant on the basic game-play....
The third step is also something a few types of games have done, but again, usually in a very limited and similar fashion. It's usually used as a way of providing different difficulty settings, but elements have also been used in a couple of other games, though rarely under the power or influence of the player:
Dynamic Game-play Mechanics. This is the one area I feel with the most amount of room left to explore, simply because games so far have done so little with it. Even if we take a similar route to the way difficulty settings operate - (generally going from simple/easy to complex/hard), there's no reason why for certain types of game, where player skill isn't as influential, where those two options could be balanced out and made to work in the same game without any overall penalties/advantages - (though probably balanced out by generalist/specialist settings would be best, rather than difficulty). again, though, this is merely scratching the surface of what's possible. Imagine a game where the player could influence the game-play mechanics of both entities under his own control, AND those under the players in different ways...
Okay, so now you've read all that, (and hopefully understood it), NOW imagine a game with all three - (the 'holy' trinity, if you like ;) ):
Dynamic content, game-play AND game-play mechanics, IN THE SAME GAME...
Down side? We'll probably have to wait another 10-20 years before it all gets worked out... :(
(I'm thinking about doing an article about all this for somewhere - (Like gamasutra or something?) - anyone think it's worthwhile?).
'Stupidity is an often fatal disease' - R. A. Heinlein
Really? I would think a novel about getting a steady flow of peons running between your gold mine and base, followed by a massive raid on the humans would be rather boring. Or, to put it in other words, more swobuh than zogzog.
I've found Oblivion Elder Scrolls to be pretty open for a game world. Not only can you drop off and pick up the main story line as much as you want, but after you complete it you can still mess around in the game world dungeon diving and all other kinds of fun things.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Not necessarily, I've had it happen to me too. Threads get mixed up now & then. I *think* it has something to do with :
* post message
* have message replied to
* original message gets modded down
* reply suddenly find itself attach to other parent !!
If there is one thing to be learned on slashdot, it has to be sarcasm.
You could go into the trading business, busing and selling houses.
Busing houses only became practical with a high-strength character though.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the definition of an "Open" game--and a very well executed one at that. Once you get through the very first area, you have the entire world available. The whole thing. You can do whatever you want. There are a lot of different "quests," and each quest has its own plot. The player can spend hours upon hours just exploring the huge, beautifully rendered world and not even touch the plot.
I have a bad feeling about this...
It's become part of the buzzword bingo of the games industry, and on the whole the concept has become tarnished by publishers and developers trying to lift what they can from GTA3 (the free-roaming, side quest and hidden stuff laden setting) into their games as a shortcut to their own success. Why not relabel the entire RPG genre as "open world" games? The only effective difference between GTA3 and Fallout 2, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII, or WoW is the combat system and camera angle (and even the latter isn't the case anymore). What is the real, effective difference between missions in GTA-and-friends, and quests from any console or PC RPG? What's the effective difference between hunting down all the sidequests and extra easter eggs in and hunting down all the hidden items and stunts in GTA3 and its children?
So why don't we just call them action RPGs, because that's really what they are when you boil it down. Very good and interesting twists on the action RPG concept, certainly, but not all that different really. So if you want to make a good action RPG we know what works and what doesn't. Good story and dialogue, even if there isn't much of it. Responsive controls. Lots to do. There are lots of examples out there. Zelda: A Link to the Past. Sid Meier's Pirates!. Secret of Mana. The Dark Alliance console games. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Most of the pack of so-called open world games have few if any of that. Crackdown was an entirely plot free collection of street races, roof races, and scavenger hunts. Assassin's Creed was a gigantic scavenger hunt and parkour simulator set in the time if the Crusades, with an absolutely horrible story. The "True Crime" games were bad action games stuck in an utterly pointless virtual real-life cityscape. Anything with a really big room you can run around in for a bit is called an "open world" which is ludicrous.
In the previous Bethesda games you could actually ignore the whole main quest and still play a round with a world where the main quest didn't bother.
I did that with Morrowind. Spent weeks running around the countryside, taking every mission I could that wasn't the main quest. By the time I actually wanted to pursue the main quest, I had already found and lost an essential item to finish the game.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The Elder Scrolls games (also Bethesda's) are more open then Fallout 3 in that sense -- you can ignore the main quest easier, and even when you complete it, the game continues on.
By the way, Fallout 3's third mini-expansion will change the ending and allow you to continue playing once you complete the main quest. Why they didn't think to do that right away confuses me, since they could have just looked to their Elder Scrolls games from the get-go.
I like basketball!!1!
Depending on the item, you could re-acquire it. If it was the Wraithguard, there was an alternate (pretty cool and non-cheating, actually) way to get it, and it went on your other hand. People that went a little psycho and decided to off Vivec himself ended up having to go this route.
I like basketball!!1!
reply suddenly find itself attach to other parent
Note that the reply also shares the same subject like as the original "troll" post, complete with the added "Re:". So this isn't simply a case of misthreading - either the bug is more complex than that, or there isn't a bug at all and he just replied to the first post in an attempt to get his post near the top.
I loved Oblivion *and* Morrowind. I love all three Fallout games. Never understood the existence of hate camps for some of these games against the others. It's gaming, folks. Games. Fun. Remember fun?
What's funny is going to gaming message boards and seeing what people expected out of some of these games, or their ideas for improvements. They always fail to explain where I'm going to get the supercomputing cluster to run their version of the game.
I'd have to say that in order for a world to be both open ended and free without being tedious and bland, someone would have to come up with a procedural generation method that would also appear to be organic in a ways. Perhaps having the parameters of later areas effected by the player's actions. And also making it consistent for areas already visited if it involves people. A procedural Oblivion would be without a solid main plot just a series of higher level goals and perhaps missions that may or may not be impossible if the character comes at them with the wrong skills. As for the landscape it would have to be generated within certain constraints just so it looks like earth but to allow different climates, different weather systems and the like and have the people who are produced therein act as though they come from that area or have traveled from another. Also in order to accompany voices someone would have to make a vocal synthesizer that would account for variations between people, different conversations and emotions. And rather than having no voice allow the person to design their character's voice which carries as many if not more facets than the face...A lot of work. A long lot of work.
iburnaga.blogspot.com
Especially Ultima VI, but also Ultima VII had a vast world that can be explored freely. You can even harvest crops and bake bread if you like or drift across the sea in a raft...
I still fondly remember the exploration of Britannia and it took me at least a month to realize there was a storyline I could follow (I only had about 1 year of english at school at that time and game-information was heavily text-driven...)
Fallout III actually had a more correct approach to giving the player a true open world choice in that the entire landscape was available to be explored the moment you exile yourself from the vault. And every sidequest and other task is available to be completed as the player's own judgment and they can go in any direction and order. You can even choose your character's name, gender, race, and some facial features.
Choosing your name, gender, race and some facial features isn't really that impressive in terms of "truly open world", IMHO.
What bugged me about Fallout 3 is how many of what are supposed to be "roleplaying perks" did not actually do much for roleplaying at all. I'm talking about the "Kid at heart" and "Seducer/Seductress" perks (not sure if that's the exact name, I'm reciting this from memory). The opportunity to use these perks were extremely rare, and even then only for "one-off" situations. Never actually molded the full story.
Plus the "Karma" system in Fallout 3 removed any and all moral ambiguity. They specifically showed which actions were "good" and which were "bad". There were no dilemma to go through, no self-examination or personal growth.
PLEASE, for the love of God, STOP TYPING. No-one needs to know your views to such a degree, with so many minute, repetitive details. We all got the point four paragraphs in. Hire an editor or something. Jesus.
Did anyone else read the summary as "open source Game world"?
Bad soulskill. You should've used "open-ended"! Not "Open"!
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
Open game worlds are overrated. There has been an ongoing trend towards every game moving from closed areas and scripted events toward wide-open spaces. "Open environment" is a feature added to any game in order to make it more modern and easy to sell. But adding that feature doesn't necessarily lead to a better game.
Open worlds were fascinating at first because they were new and full of possibilities. The game levels became vast playgrounds to explore. There was an undeniable appeal to running around in GTA III for the first time and just firing rockets in various directions to see what would happen.
However, the novelty of this is wearing off. There's only so much of interest to do in these open spaces. My real life town is a big open space, but that doesn't mean I wander around the various streets with my mouth agape. I'm finding that I spend too much time in these open world games getting to the interesting bits, rather than moving directly from one interesting challenge to the next.
I want scripted events. I want a game to be well written and entertaining, and for all the time I spend with it to feel satisfying. I'm hoping the pendulum will swing back towards careful design, even at the expense of openness.
Freelancer, was the first game that really pushed that I could do whatever I wanted. The game was fun as hell too.
EVE online is very similar, and the only mmo I know of where you can really do whatever you want.
"In GTAIV, you cannot become a cop or a taxi driver"
Ever steal a cop car or taxi cab in the game? They've had taxi driver and vigilante missions as far back as GTA3, and this one is no different.
I think it was Sunder. I'd have been happy to cheat to get it back, but I was playing the Xbox version.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
And the guys that have made oolite the fun and free game it is today. The basic game is as dry as the original, but the additions expansion packs make it an exceptionally entertaining game. And what's more open than eight galaxies? /answer: nine galaxies.
I would also like to remind of Arcanum. True, there you couldn't play past the ending, but you could also ignore the main quest, and roam at will. It is also the only game I know which had map of the entire world (a large continent) available for exploration from the very beginning, and you could actually go to any point of it and find what was there (i.e. if there's a city or a camp that you do not know about, you could still stumble into it by walking.
How is it different from TES and Fallout? In one simple way: the map of the world was true to scale. You could truly walk the entire continent from end to end, but that would require weeks of in-game time and hours of your time, watching your character journey through the land, and an occasional random encounter with some hostiles.
Of course, the whole thing was procedurally generated, outside from special locations such as cities, dungeons etc, so there wasn't much point in travelling around like that... but the very fact that you could do it somehow improved immersion.
On a side note, it's also the only CRPG I know of where you could kill every single living creature you meet, and still finish the plot - none of that silly unkillable NPCs a la Oblivion (and so many others), or "the thread of fate is severed - maybe you'd like to load the last save?" of Morrowind.
Second sentence, re: first sentence ;) No, seriously, it's a smart (but dick) move on their part, make people pay to eliminate something they actually had to do more work to program into the game (or at least would have been monumentally trivial to do). Package it up with a few extra morsels and the crowd, especially the console crowd who thinks this kind of open world RPGing is somehow revolutionary and new, will be throwing money at them shortly thereafter.
And this is why so many companies are reluctant to have really open worlds, like how WoW still doesn't have player-created cities and other content while other (less successful) MMORPGs do; the less leeway you give the players, and the more tightly you control the extent of their experience, the more you can dole it out in costly chunks. That's the sad part about the system, that it encourages that instead of encouraging what the technology could actually allow.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Excellent points regarding Fallout 3. While I loved the game, I was disappointed in the options regarding the main quest. I haven't even started an evil character but I can see the problems that would exist. My main problem is that there are so few solutions to problems and characters seem not to respond to a variety of things as you play the game.
My biggest problem with the main story was having to find my father. I'm introduced to him in through about 20 minutes of gameplay and then I have to find him. And my only option for beating the game is to help him with Project Purity? To me, your father is on the same level as a deadbeat dad that leaves the family. I realize that the main gameplay is more important than the child aspect but at some point, you need to want to find him. What about players who don't care about their dad or helping him? What if you want to agree to go hunt your father down and bring him back to 101? Possibilities are endless.
My dream open game world would be something like Thief and set in a similar time frame. You take missions freely and based on what missions you take, different outcomes will happen. Start it in a large city with surrounding areas and progress to other cities and areas similar to the Bethesda approach. Train in weapons and skills, make connections and fences, bribe officials and security, elude security and investigators, etc. And instead of a major story arc, there are mission arcs that can overlap into a unique story experience.
Sadly I'm not a software guy so making these things a reality are outside my skill sets. I imagine I could think of some of the major challenges involved but it would be more interesting to get others perspectives on them.
I have to take issue with this, WoW has little to no story. Now, there are volumes of drivel that have been published outside the game, but the game's ideas about plot are one paragraph quest descriptions. You can get the idea of a story, but angsty teenager poetry has more depth than the in game quests....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Saints Row 2 reminded me of the old GTA spirit. Co-op was a blast. Missions were fun. Loads of stuff to do.
The general feel of the game wasn't to constrain you as well. The garage would let you store as many cars as you liked, you could save midgame without having to run off to some apartment. The health-regen meant you could have extended firefights with police....
I felt it was completely let down by the horrible driving physics. Cars had an apparant weight of 10kg - causing mayhem on the road just wasn't as satisfying as in GTA4. Driving was let down further by the horrible keyboard controls on the PC port :/
The graphics were worse than GTA4 which I found irrelevant.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
Not impossible off course, but that's not what happened to me ...
I can't vouch for the subject, maybe it changed, maybe it didn't... but I'm pretty sure that my post (and one of the replies) was originally on a different post.
=> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1139773&cid=26981295
If there is one thing to be learned on slashdot, it has to be sarcasm.
Somehow I suspected this is known since Monkey Island.
The whole research went like this:
scientist 1: Oh let's research about open games. So what do we know actually ?
scientist 2: Open games are games with a huge world.
scientist 2: Yes.
scientist 1: Then my conclusion is clear. Interesting stories and characters are important, but they must be balanced by varied and entertaining gameplay.
You should really not comment on a game you've obviously not played for more than 15 minutes.
main 80, w/ multiple 70+ alts, full t7.5 epics, 50+ mounts, 5k+ achievement points, 4500+ dps currently, cleared all heroic raid instances in WoTLC by December. Guild is #5 on server for progression, based on completion dates. Started raiding when MC, BWL, and Ony were progression raids.
Now, as I was saying dumbass, the writing in WoW sucks.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!