Small compared to really the only other open-world current-gen title. And the comparisons were moreso on a technical level than the actual game flow and design of each, which I wasn't really comparing between the different titles. I was expecting a rather large leap in the scale and content that open-worlds could boast when we moved to current-gen hardware, which is just so much more capable. And we've had those leaps! There's already been games which have show-cased what exactly is possible on them, huge open-worlds bigger than ever before with even more quality content than what filled much smaller spaces. Bigger, and better! And so I was expressing slight disappointment that Fallout 4 might not be pushing the hardware as much as it could.
I've never really liked the assumption that bigger is better, I think it's more of a pretentious argument brought up in a lot of cases.
Oblivion was a game made 6 years before
Skyrim yet was actually bigger, but yet the latter game was the one that everyone considers to be one of the greatest of its time and is considered the pinnacle of open world gaming among many mainstream fans. If you go back to the likes of
Daggerfall, that game was the size of a country. Now I know the argument back would be, but the game has evolved from a gameplay and visual perspective and that would be my exact point. There's only so much a game could do with size. Hell in 10 years time we could have planet sized games (No Man's Sky) pushing that boundary, but there's only so much you can actually go with size and that's where the bigger is better argument really falls over itself.
It has to be relevant to what the game is trying to achieve. For example,
The Legend of Zelda, in that case bigger is what a lot of people are craving because the series is more so contained sandboxes mimicking an open world. But when you have an already huge open world game where it takes 15+ hours to complete the main quest (average) and +100 hours to do everything else, then bigger gets harder to achieve.
This is why I was never the biggest fan of
Skyrim, and I've known many people to have the same view, the game felt too overwhelming. The size was great and all, but when there is too much to do and your quest list almost becomes a checklist of chores, and constant distractions plague your playthrough, things get tedious. Fans of the series, and people with tons of time on their hands, or who can commit themselves to this kind of world will love the game, and hell even I loved my 50 hours of the game, but that's not going to be everyone. Theoretically if a game pushes the boundary in size every year then in 5-10 years time we'll have a 1000 square mile game with over 100,000 hour play time, which would be literal hell trying to play. My point is, there's a time and a reason to make a game bigger, and it's not always the right design choice just so a game can market it's ego and make it a selling point.
Now I'm not knocking it for that, not every game needs to be some boundary-pushing technical piece and not every developer needs to join in on the variety of arms races which are currently ensuing, but I am entitled to think it's a shame a big release like this might not be doing it.
I don't even think every game needs to push the boundary.
The Order pushed the boundaries in terms of visuals yet was a pretty borderline average game. Size doesn't necessarily mean pushing boundaries either. I mean
Skyrim will probably be up there for years as an influential title yet it didn't push any boundaries in terms of size. If you set out just solely on making something bigger because it's on next-gen for the right to say it, then the game could lose all its charm. Hell, the game might push boundaries, we don't even know yet, but I don't think the key to success is to push boundaries, especially when it can make or break a game. Give me a brilliant open world game with great exploration, detail, refined gameplay, interesting plot/characters, improved physics/engine over physical size any day of the week.
I'm not sure why a world being bigger if the amount, and quality, of the content isn't compromised is a bad thing? I mean, going off what you're saying, it sounds like a very large part of the games is exploration and discovery, something which I adore in games, so what would be bad about having an even bigger world full of more things to explore and discover, if the quality and content is not at all worsened by the increase in scale?
Yeah like I said before, you could apply your state of mind to a 1000+ sqaure mile game and I think most people would agree that it would be too overwhelming. If they can go for a bigger a better world then by all means go for it, but there's a big problem with that, In being, that it just might not suit the game.
Fallout is already big enough in many people's eyes. I spent 80 hours in
Fallout 3 and 100 hours in
New Vegas and then more hours in separate playthroughs and DLC. That surly isn't considered small for a single player experience when the majority of games typically last >10 hours. Though my point being, if the game is 5x as big in scope, then just completing the main quest line would take 50 hours plus meaning to experience the game fully you would have to put in these hours. He problem with this is that most people don't have that kind of time, you can lose interest, feel overwhelmed, or the game's pacing might be completely different to the point where it doesn't even feel like the same kind of game anymore.
I've always said in the new
Fallout, that I wouldn't mind a bigger game, but I just wouldn't want it to be too big; it wouldn't feel right in this kind of game. Especially when you consider the amount of detail in the game. Just because another game is bigger and was successful doesn't mean every game should follow suit or face living in its shadow.
Fallout is a huge series with its own feel to the game and there honestly isn't a whole lot that needs to change. The main thing is refinement. Character models, textures, physics, engine, bugs, animations etc. Those were really all the negatives the series received and it's better to fix them first and foremost and then maybe add on. The game could honestly just be a big success it it did just that and nothing else.
Mercedes said:
And I didn't feel like I missed out on any of the content on other open-world titles just because we had fast travel or horses. If I saw something, I'd just stop and go explore. I don't feel I would have gotten more out of the games without those means of transportation.
Yeah that's where this series differs and exactly why it doesn't have transportation, well
yet anyway, lol. Like in
GTA V, you will ignore quite a lot of the details since you're in a car or some other mode of transportation most of the time. I mean imagine how big the game would seem if you couldn't run and you couldn't use any sort of transportation. That's why
GTA shoots for that kind of scale. That's why
Fallout--even though it can have large open areas--has quite a lot of detail; locations, enemies, items, around every corner to keep you busy. If you took a car, or hell, even a horse, and put it in either
F3 or
NV the game would seem a lot smaller than it is. I guess you could balance out a huge
Fallout game with some of transportation, but honestly I like the lone walk feel the game has to it; makes you really appreciate every inch of the world.
Though I would also so that the literal sq mile map size is touching the surface when it comes to actual game size and content in the game really. There's so much detail, because it's a post apocalyptic game, that it would probably extremely hard to replicate all this detail on an improved engine with improved physics/graphics etc. and then upscale it 2 or 3 times. It's not like they're just replicating scenery from the real world, they have to go over every detail to make sure it fits this apocalyptic setting. Then of course you have the fact that you can interact with most objects in the game and that they're not just there purely for cosmetic reasons. Then, like I said before, most of the actual size is indoors and that's where you'll be doing most of the exploring, so even if the sq mile size might not seem that big (though I think 99% would disagree), the game feels a lot more extensive from the inside portions and detail.
I would love the map to be somewhere in the 20 Sq mile range personally, maybe even smaller of anything. That would be the perfect size in my opinion considering that this game seems a lot more populated with more buildings. It probably will be a huge game, I just really disagree with the notion that bigger is better or groundbreaking, or even important, when a game is already huge and when it just doesn't seem of any reason or purpose other than to say "lol lol we have the biggest game now!".
Okay, thanks! Sounds like New Vegas might be more my thing, then.
Shall reinstall that and give it a play sometime, looking forward to it. Did love a lot of the concept art and style of the world I saw! And I'm not going to mention it to anyone! I hate being bombarded with "OMG VANILLA SKYRIM IS ****, YOU NEED TO DOWNLOAD THESE BILLION MODS!!!" type things when mentioning you're playing
any Bethesda game on PC.
Vanilla isn't really all that bad, it's just when you've played with tons of mods that vanilla seems ****. If you start off with vanilla and add a few mods here and there it will probably be better. It's like when you first switched to a HDMI Cable. At first you don't really see the big deal, but when you go back it will seem awful. Of course I played the vanilla games on console, so I don't know any better anyway.