For those of you who enjoy open-world games, how big of a world is too big?

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

There are already some huge maps out there, Just Cause 2 and 3 both have maps at around 1000km^2^, and those games are beloved by their players. But if the next Cyberpunk game was announced with Night City now being the size of an actual large metropolis, say like New York, would you say that’s too big? What determines what “too big” is?

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prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I prefer smaller open worlds, like in the Yakuza series

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spaciouscoder78@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
As long as it has fast travel I don’t mind having a big open world but if the open world itself feels empty without much life then I’m immediately turned off by the game

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- invertedspear@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Funny, I have the opposite complaint about Fallout 4. In what is supposed to be a nuclear wasteland of a city where everyone is struggling to keep their small communities going, there are just too many people in such a small space to make this feel real. I liked Fallout 3 and New Vegas more because the world was properly empty, but still had so many things to discover.
  
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- faintwhenfree@lemmus.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Reminds me of no man’s sky and it’s empty bajillions of planets.
  
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  - spaciouscoder78@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I have 90 hours in no man’s sky and I got pretty burnt out on it. After a certain point, every planet feels the same and lifeless.
    
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thatradomguy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Was that 30GB RAM Harry Potter game real or were my friends messing with me? 'Cause my answer would be that.

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Naia@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Depends on a lot of factors like what the actual game is.

A sandbox game, bigger is better. Like Minecraft. If the goal is exploration and resource gathering you can plop me into an infinitely generated map and I will be happy.

Outside of that, narrative games can be too big if there’s nothing to do in between points of interests. I don’t mean like side-quests, but more like random encounters or crafting/gathering stuff. There has to be something there I can either get distracted with or to “on the way” to the next location.

I think a lot of games want their cake and eat it too. It’s not an open world game, but Final Fantasy XIV promoted the Heavensward expansion with the zones being like 5 times bigger than the base game…

…but there were only 6 of them and between already being able to teleport to each zone there wasn’t any difficulty navigating the zones and they added flying which made them seem smaller than the base zones.

1.0 XIV had impressively sized zones that were unfortunately very copy pasted and between the rushed release and the engine limitations enemies were very spread out.

Again, depends on the game.

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pheonixdown@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
An Open World is only too big if it requires loading screens at transition points that aren’t natural. An Open World can have an insufficient density of relevant content, where exploring it has too little marginal utility to the player, and therefore it is ultimately not useful to exist.

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whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I don’t think there’s a too big for a simulation type game world, go all the way. But for more directed game styles that are narrative driven or more carnival ride than simulation don’t make it boring use techniques from past games; the keeping distant landmarks in view outside like in New Vegas, or hilly landscapes to obscure stuff to discover like in Zelda or Skyrim. Bad examples would be like traveling between towns in daggerfall or those monuments in the middle of nowhere in starfield.

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schwim@piefed.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I have not met a too-big open world as of yet.

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- PP_BOY_@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Its not about being too big but too little stuff to do IMO. The first Assassin’s Creed wasnt even that big but felt like a wasteland going from one side of the map to the other
  
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rafoix@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Depends on the mood I’m in.

Zelda BotW is a giant map and mostly chill game that I have tons of fun just taking my time exploring.

Far Cry 3 has me going around murdering folks and clearing camps non-stop at a pretty good pace.

Far Cry 4 was way too much pew pew and it bored me.

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Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Depends how full it is, how interesting is it (note this is not the same as full), how fast you can travel, and how fun movement is.

There’s a lot of elements to open world and a lot of devs get the balance very wrong. You end up playing in a map rather than the world.

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IWW4@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It is all about the amount of content. If you are just wandering around with nothing work doing than to hell with that.

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NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Big enough that I lose interest or notice the padding.

A lot of it boils down to execution. The more urban areas of a Sleeping Dogs or the TW3 map with the Bloody Baron (not the viking map) feel geuinely massive enough though both are on the smaller end. Whereas something like GTA5’s San Andreas actively pissed me off because so much of the game was just driving to and from set pieces on the interstate.

That said: I actively don’t care about completion unless I really love the game. So if something was 40000km^2… I might never leave the two square kilomters the actual game takes place in and not care about the rest.

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tpihkal@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I don’t think it can be too large, but like others have said, there has to be enough quality content in each location you can visit to compensate for the vastness of the open world.

It be amazing if you could go inside every single building/dungeon/etc. and have every one of them chockablock full of things to experience, like they did with Elder Scrolls 6, but look how long it took for that game to come out…

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bert_macklin_fbi@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I recall True Crime: Streets of L.A. being too big. The city felt so similar, I just lost interest. It could have been that the hardware wasn’t where it should have been to land a project that ambitious?

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tal@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I don’t think that there’s a “too big”, if you can figure out a way to economically do it and fill it with worthwhile content.

But I don’t feel like Cyberpunk 2077’s map size is the limiting factor. Like, there’s a lot of the map that just doesn’t see all that much usage in the game, even though it’s full of modeled and textured stuff. You maybe have one mission in the general vicinity, and that’s it. If I were going to ask for resources to be put somewhere in the game to improve it, it wouldn’t be on more map. It’d be on stuff like:

More-complex, interesting combat mechanics.

More missions on existing map.

More varied/interesting missions. Cyberpunk 2077 kinda gave me more of a GTA feel than a Fallout feel.

A home that one can build up and customize. I mean, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t really have the analog of Fallout 4’s Home Plate.

The city changing more over time and in response to game events.
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- al_Kaholic@lemmynsfw.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Cp2077 is definitely more gta than fallout by design homie
  
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