Waypoint markers and fast travel are the cancer that killed open-world games. Instead of having to find your way around the world using directions/your map/quest info, you just snap to 30 feet away from your destination and walk to the marker. It's doesn't matter where you are in the game's world, or the geography of the map or anything. You have no perspective on how big the world is or where things are in relation to one another, the whole thing might as well take place on a single city block.
Waypoint markers and fast travel are the cancer that killed open-world games...
Robert Murphy
Other urls found in this thread:
Tyler Wood
Yeah, but with waypoint markers, you don't have to give any directions.
I'm not saying you're wrong.
Oliver Smith
But I want to be given directions. I want the quest giver to tell me where something is, and if I don't know how to find it, I ask someone for directions. That alone is so much more engaging than following a magic beacon.
John Turner
>Waypoint markers and fast travel are the cancer that killed open-world games
No, busywork missions/tasks did.
Brody Russell
that's just how games are nowadays. convenience > everything. developers aren't targeting the niche audience of hardcore gamers anymore, they want the non gamer audience who don't have the patience for that kind of shit. not to mention, it's a million times easier to make a quest thats like "go get this thing", and give the player a marker than it is to write out a bible of text telling you where to go and what to do. it's sad, but that's reality.
Matthew Kelly
I agree with you. Even something as basic as asking random civilians for directions makes things more rewarding because it requires the player to engage with the game on at least a simple level. You could also have quest solutions involving looking through a person's journal to see where they hide a key or using physical landmarks to navigate. Not only do quest markers fail to offer engaging gameplay on even the most simple level, but they take many other potential forms of engagement off the table.
Xavier Foster
Then turn off the mini-map and don't fast travel. The game's not forcing you to do it
Thomas Foster
By that logic, Golden Sun 2 trumps most open-world games in design
Nathan Phillips
Related
Charles Anderson
I could recreate most of the locations in Morrowind from memory but hardly any from Oblivion and Skyrim. Quest markers numb your brain.
Jack Morris
open-world games were cancer to begin with.
David Howard
They're not actually to avoid given directions, user.
They're to avoid players getting off track and confused.
Think of most Japanese based open world games - Zelda, for example is a puzzle based one that allows you to back adn explore with new abilities.
Western open world games tend not to do that and want you to have the whole worl available, outside of specific story related instances.
So to avoid players getting lost and confused and screaming "this game sucks it's too hard" during beta testing, they invented arrows because after all, you can't get lost if you follow a fucking magical arrow.
Wyatt Foster
Waypoints are toggleable and you're not forced to use fast travel.
Shit thread
Ryan Hall
If you turn off waypoints you'll have no idea where to go, the game doesn't give you any other indication.
Colton Martinez
Actually it is because modern quest design is based on the assumption that you'll be following the marker so there's no incentive to provide you with hints or directions to figure it out for yourself. BOTW is a notable exception to this trend
Charles Collins
You are when the game dosen't give you precise directions or the world is designed in a nonsensical way.
Blake Wood
As someone who just finished beating outward I have to say that fast travel is a necessity. Wasting minutes running back and forth across the world constantly is such a huge fucking pain.
Skyrim was right. Todd was right.
Bentley Smith
That's because most of the things in BotW is fairly pointless and the things that aren't stick out like sore thumbs, like the towers.
Adrian Butler
Waypoints were made to not waste my time.
Ethan Taylor
There are landmarks and descriptions to go off of.
Joshua Morgan
Not in anything modern and definitely not in Skyrim, the game in the OP.
Charles Ortiz
If everything involved this it would severely fuck over the pacing of the game unless it was designed where pretty much nothing you do matters and you can go anywhere.
Bentley Roberts
video games are time wasting though
Jackson Perry
>compass pointing across a hill
>forcefully try to climb it instead of taking the road around it
Anthony Davis
Wahhhh wahhh baby needs his fucking dinosaur nuggets and crinkle cut French fries, shut the fuck up faggot.
David Walker
Fast travel can simply not be used and there are horses and dragons that can be used to get around quickly, so no valid argument there. Floating map markers can be disabled so you can still actually explore on your own and refer to your world map if you get lost. It makes sense that if you have a map of the world with you and an NPC tells you to do something you can simply show them the world map and have them point out where it is for you, which is what I always assumed was how the waypoint shows you where you need to do. Then once you're in the actual location you can carefully explore and examine each room on your and find the item/NPC by yourself. Vanilla Skyrim is mediocre but not for these reasons.
Luke Bailey
>"go find this person"
>nothing in quest info to say where they are
>you can't ask people where they are
>quest marker is the only way to find them
Shit comment.
Carter Hall
I agree with you, but also we should be able to stop radiant quests because the worst thing is walking to a destination, no fast traveling enabled, and some random event takes place while in the middle of my mission
Fallout, Red Dead Redemption, The Elder Scrolls and Zelda, I'm looking at you
Jackson Clark
how do I even start gaining mana in that game? I never know where I am, and everything kills me
I literally have restarted this game like 4 times, because some fucking bandits captured me and I lost all my gear into some mines
Asher Allen
You fags just like to complain about everything.
>hurr-durr waypoints sabotage problem-solving for convenience
Alternative universal:
>tracking is SO FUCKING BORING why can't lazy fuck developers do their job and develop an fix.
Gabriel Mitchell
But that takes works. NPCs need to given dialogue, placed in reasonable locations, you'll need to add landmarks, all without making anything seem out of place.
Lucas Anderson
Some are, but most really are more subtile, and NPCs often give complete verbal directions to help you find things too. Plus the memories quest.
William Hughes
yes consume product and move on to next product. dont waste time getting lost in video game worlds. you are on a tight schedule.
Easton Stewart
>video games are time wasting though
A waste of time getting a steady dopamine drip from a false sense of accomplishment.
Don't pretend like you get nothing from it. It is close to nothing, but not nothing.
Jack Phillips
>have world map with you
>"go find this person"
>"okay, show me where on this world map"
>"it's in this cave here"
>"ok thx, be back soon"
Not everything has to be complicated. No NPC is gonna give you some shitty explanation of where something is using landmarks when you literally have the map of the world with you. If your cousin asked you to pick up his kid and you didn't know where he was would your cousin be like "oh go five hundred steps east, sixty steps north, then go to the large tree and look west and walk eighty steps and it's next to the giant boulder with the X on it" or would he just show you where it is on your GPS?
Gabriel Peterson
Except most games are designed around the system. Or more accurately, they lack good level design which makes markers a necessity in the first place.
Grayson Rogers
It does. Having to take cues from the villagers to find the next quest advancer was way more engaging than just following a beacon at the top of the screen.
Julian Walker
He'd tell the address and maybe some distinguishing characteristic of the house I'm supposed to look for.
Benjamin Perez
even Planescape: Torment had fast travel
Camden Taylor
to play devil's advocate, in a world where full voice acting is a baseline demand for any game, this kind of quest is also a billion times cheaper to produce because you don't have to pay the voice actors for all those descriptions.
In a way, voice acting killed open world games.
Isaiah Gonzalez
It is you fucking retard.
Michael Fisher
I have nothing against fast travel.
I never use it, but think it's reasonable.
No difference between that and hopping in the back of a wagon and falling asleep.
Jace Cook
Fast travel is fine if you've already visited the place before. There's nothing more annoying than having to backtrack for several eons just to turn in a sidequest you got hours ago.
Adrian Hernandez
Almost everything is pointless in BotW. Only the thing that are important really stick out, like the sacred beasts, towers and castle.
Shrines are somewhat important but you'll stumble across enough of them any way you go to pull out the master sword, if you so choose.
In other words they don't really need to direct the player as intensely as in some other games, because almost nothing is important and can be skipped.
Eli Foster
Retarded designers/publishers think open world game = get dat GTA money.
Some retarded players say games that don't have 10,000 hours of "gameplay" are SHIT.
The compromise is boring open worlds with mindless wandering around for the autism fags, quest markers for everybody else.
Benjamin Ward
that's just bad game design. morrowind is fuckhuge with no map click fast travel but theres silt riders, boats, mages guild halls can teleport you to other mages guild halls and you can use a spell/scroll to teleport nearest temple. fast travel between hubs is okay in my book but instant fast travel to any given location is cancer.
Lincoln Kelly
By that metric the only thing that actually matters is the castle, everything else is superfluous.
Also you can't even reach the beasts outside their respective quests, they just lure you into the general area. Towers are completely unimportant, you may as well draw a paper map for yourself because it barely shows anything (which is a good thing by the way); they are tall mainly for challenge and to serve as vantage points.
Lincoln Gray
Towers are "important" because they give you fast travel points and with the glider you can easily travel anywhere you want, but yes almost everything in BotW can be skipped. Which is my point.
When nothing is required the pressure to guide the player is gone.
Also with the horrible draw distance and basic terrain you can easily make out your surroundings.