2:34 "You can read War and Peace in about 32 hours". Damn, I must be doing something wrong, I still haven't managed to finish the first chapter after 40 years. Is there a walkthrough for the 32-hour speedrun?
[Coury] I always think about how every single PS1 RPG was touted to be "over 40 hours long!" Like 40 hours (and of course, number of discs) was the determining factor of whether the game was worth your time. And so many people bought into it, including me. These days, I look back on a lot of RPGs from that time and realize I only finished small portion of them all the way through because they were often padded and drawn out well beyond their initial scope to meet that 40 hour run time. Then I look over at Chrono Trigger, a game that is considered by many to be the best RPG of all time and its comparatively short story run time of 20 hours. CT is perfectly paced, with almost 0% fat - and will continue to endure and live up to its reputation forever. For me, the "Hundreds of hours of game" more often than not, convinces me that I don't want to play a game. I'd rather play a tightly constructed adventure where you could see that every step of the way had the developers full attention. And I guess that's why I just don't care all that much for open world games (except Red Dead Redemption, that was awesome).
To be fair though, a lot of kids and poor people just want something fun they can play for awhile because they couldn't afford lots of games. I remember picking up ps1 games back then based on length because I didn't have my driver's license yet, and only had $20 in my budget on a game for the next month. Another example would be the time some saint in a funco land recommended Metroid 2 (I hadn't heard of Metroid before this, my family couldn't afford an tv much less an NES when I was little) to me when I was like 8 years old because I asked him for a game that I wouldn't be able to beat in a few days. This isn't as much as a problem now with games downloadable games being pretty cheap. But back in the day it was harder to pick up games for cheap.
When someone says "xx hours of gameplay", you only have to think of online F2P games and mobile games. Long gameplay time doesn't equate to quality gameplay experience. More often than not, these "long games" is just monotonous repetitive gameplay with different text flavors to make it seem like "new content".
the differences with with witcher at least IMO is everything is enjoyable..even if its a sidequest or treasure hunt or crafting im generally having a good time..everything seems created with immense care..really wanted a reason to come back and blood and wine has been amazing so far..been gaming since the early 90s and this might just be my fav game ever..still not bored of it
that seems a bit like a circular statement: enjoyment is vague. But I would say that those side activities are enjoaybable in the context of the game because they deliver on the fantasy of being the witcher, by building up the character and the world around. They are enjoyable because they are narratively rich and thematically coherent.
I think your right. There is a sense I get in all the video games I end up loving. They are far between, but when they show up, they all give me the same sense. And that is that the developers behind had a message they wanted to convey. They had something interesting to say or express, and they use the medium to that effect. I might not agree with the message, but it's there. The only real exeption for this among my favorite games is ARMA II & III, but it was Operation Flashpoint that got me into the series, and that had plenty of message. You can tell if earning the most money is the main motivation behind a game. Such games are designed to impress, to be flashy and to captivate you in the moment, there and then. But once you get past the initital awe, you realize that there is nothing of substance there. Like AC, BF or COD. No real attempt of telling anything, just clever marketing. They are well designed products, but they are designed to earn money, with no deeper meaning or motivation behind it. Witcher, on the other hand, is clearly built by people who deeply care about telling a story, creating a universe and expressing something. It reeks of personality. I also belong to the crowd that isn't particularly found of the gameplay itself, but man I love the universe. It is the first game in maybe a decade to earn a place in my list of favorite games, along the ARMA series.
Spending so much time on a video game is pretty worthless. No one on their death bed is going to think back on their lives and think “I’m so glad I played all those video games”.
I watched that video twice, it was that amazing! Knowledge, as well as humour and wit made the video so great Hey, does anyone knows of channels (or videos) similar to his and SuperBunnyHop?
"Who has time for this" is my thought as well. When I was younger I loved RPGs and the like but now that I'm an adult I just don't have the same amount of time as I used to. I can't do a 60 hour game in a week or two- it takes months.
I sorta bought Skyrim since i like F3 and New Vegas so hey i might like this game too! Eventually the game boiled down to Get fetch quest clear dungeon that looks like every other one get item find a rare weapon you wont use and throw it in the pile because your is stronger find another quest and repeat. Doesn't help that 90% of the enemies were pretty much a couple variations of the skeleton enemy. Eventually you just do laps around a pillar and burn any though one. No challenge.
Tamer I stopped Skyrim when I reached a point where all the next quests forced me to enter a cave and search for loot... it was then that I saw through the illusion and couldn't stomach another cave!
Tamer I'd suggest mods, but if you do find the base gameplay shitty (as opposed to in need of tweaks), won't help much. Did you like Oblivion, out of curiosity? Though it and Fallout 3 are almost (fraternal) twins, I found one much more engaging than the other.
delax000 I should add this was on ps3. But if a game needs mods to be good then i can skip it. The combat was so bad that it wasn't fun anymore once you tried all the weapons. This was also my first TES
Tamer You might like Morrowind if you can stomach it's clunkier stat-based combat. It's less copy paste and there's a lot more backstory/background to each mission.
Tim the Wizard " clunkier stat-based combat" agh kill me. I can take it in the fallout games because of guns and other non sense but no more of that melee ever again.
this channel has some of the best games and game industry related editorial and journalistic content on youtube. years later i still comeback and rewatch.
Maybe I'm weird. I've literally put in hundreds of hours in 8 hr or so games like the Devil May Cry and Bayonetta, but I can barely find the motivation to put in 8 hr into the games that advertise hundreds of hours of content.
I think it's because those 100+ hour games are a large investment to start, emotionally speaking. You have to prepare yourself for sinking a lot of time into them, and sometimes that just seems like too much.
Aladelicous the difference between the 2 is simple. fallout 4 for example. ocean of content, depth of a puddle. whereas with dmc, puddle of content/depth of an ocean
Hello? Anybody? They're gone....all gone.... But now I have time to play all my hundreds of hours of video games. Time enough at last! *goes to reach for Witcher 3, trips and falls on console* It's not fair! There was time now!
I had so much time as a kid and as a teen to play longer games but now not only do i not have the time but the little time i have i like to spend into new shorter experiences
I guess not everybody can afford as much money as they can afford time... Big long 100+ hours games tout themselves giving you extra value for your money... Now whether this value actual or an illusion ( copy-pasted content) is dependent on the game itself, and the player's preferences.
I don't have that much money. I do have tons of steam sales, indie games and the intelligence to only buy really good or great games. I think I only bought 4 full priced games this year, GTA V (although I really shouldn't have given this game that much money, I loved the possibility of mods), The Witcher III, Cities Skylines and Hotline Miami 2. I also plan on buying Fallout 4 for a total of 3 $60 games i one year.
Well... Most of the games you mentioned buying at full price are ones with pretty decent longevity... And besides; I don't think you should waste your time listening to some random TH-cam commentator lecturing you about how you should spend YOUR OWN MONEY! :-P
In AC games I felt Black Flag had the best and most interesting world to explore, maybe it didn't have too much story nor lore, but it was very fun to even encounter random Man o' Wars, search the ocean for treasures and upgrade your Jackdaw.
Grzegorz D It had the greatest completion/100% playthroughs, but I preferred Revelations over all others in game feel. 2 in gameplay, Brotherhood for story, and 3 for being the worst playable game in the series. Too broke to play the new ones so I’m taking everyone’s word and saying Origins is the best open world.
EPISODIC WITCHER. Really no thanks, the witcher 3 is everything I ever want and i'm very glad it's as large as it is. You have the choice of rushing through it or doing as much as you want; I love it. Still have not finished it and having a blast enjoying it.
I came to these videos from the future in the wake of the live service games death spiral, spearheaded by the shutdown of _The Crew,_ so imagine my surprise when I hear you namedrop _The Crew_ here of all places
Coming back to this video, there is no way in HELL Fallout 4 has 400 hours of good content. Maybe 20 hours of passable content, and then everything is those "reactive quests." That's where they keep their timesinks and it's all boring fetch quests or "go to x location and kill y enemy" quests.
nah. The 1-2 months I played Fallout 4 (I didn’t have internet and it was the only game I cared to play throughout those 2 months) by the time I did everything in the game before I finally reached the infinite mundane quests, I had 24days into the game. Fallout 4’s base game has over 400 hours of content for sure. And I didn’t do any base building either.
I have to disagree with George on this one. Never, in my 170hrs Witcher 3 play trough have i forgotten about the main mission, the main players of the plot or the plot itself. The tapestry of quests and sidequests always ties in into what's happening in the world or had happened before adding to the lore without tons of exposition. This is no Skyrim when you lose track of what's going on 1 hour into the game because hey! another pointless dungeon or a click and forget NPC questgiver giving you kill/fetch/deliver rinse and repeat missions... Dragon Age: Inquisition had stellar main quests and absolutely abysmal side content that was forced on the players. So after the stonking main quests i was forced to collect power points to advance the plot, the mire i found myself in doing those terrible assignments killed all the good karma i got from doing the main quests. Witcher 3, has missions where there's always a twist, something funny or horrible happens, even the lowliest of vendors that you won't ever see again has a personality a few choice words (va'ed just for this character) for Geralt... It's a massive, rich world and feels really alive. A world where i decided to walk through rather than fast travel as i wanted to be immersed in it to the fullest. After finishing it i felt like a big chunk of something indescribable was missing... Would defo stayed for another 170 hours of content...
Pete Blades Witcher 3 have a lot of fetch quests.Side things to do in it are very repetitive.The game is just another mediocre open world game.The writing is a lot better than DA:I.
Mitachia The catch is that EACH single side quest and "fetch quest" in Witcher 3 is unique and always delivers something unexpected to the norm, just a single fetch quest in the starting area of the game will give you a really tough choice on the fate of freedom fighters or bandits, depends on how you see it, so when you say it is a mediocre open world game, you are talking out of your ass, because when it comes to the storytelling aspect of Witcher 3, it excels at it, far better than 99.9% of open world RPGs out there, new vegas is the closest to compare to Witcher 3 in that aspect so far.
LN2233 Even if it was it still wouldn't say much about the quality. Never seen a sandbox game that told a story better than a linear game like Half-Life 2.
That is what I love so much about New Vegas. The majority of the self-contained sidequest really feel like they impact the state of the Mojave at the end of the main story. It really feels like you are shaping the region into the place that you want it to be, and these quests feel like they really make a difference towards the final outcome that you are building towards.
What I liked about New Vegas was that many side-quests would help determine the ending of your game, a lot of the quests affected the relationship with faction and enemy faction when playing, like you could do the Enclave side-quest which will change the ending even if its very little
My main problem with The Witcher 3 was that, idk, they felt the need to show you how big the world is, how much stuff you can do to the point where your map is full of points to go, places to check. It would be better if they took an approach similar to S.T.A.L.K.E.R, where it didn't showed you where to go and the many places you could explore. That would not only improve the exploration value, but also the replay value, since with each playthrough you could find new quest since it would be almost impossible to do everything in one playthrough. And that would be amazing in The Witcher because of the mission progression, where side-quests influence the outcome of main quests.... Anyway, another game that promises 100+ hours of content is MGS V, but that game is intriguing: It's basically 4 games in one package. The main campaign; the Mother Base development; FOB (Online Mother Base infiltration) and competitive MGO. I'm intrigued to see how they will manage to balance the narrative with the MB development and online stuff, since MGS was always a game focused primary on the narrative.
***** ***** You guys know you can turn off all those points on the map right? If you seriously have a problem with them, go into the world map and turn them off.
STALKER games too had markers. But it was fitting to the setting of game (IMO). Witcher 3 needs markers on maps, otherwise it may cause some stress about finding locations simply off notes and conversation. Witcher has discovery in much amount as well as the marked things so that players don't feel frustrated or underwhelmed. There is one game that has no markers and can still be played very nicely. TES III : Morrowind. Game is designed to be explored via notes, directions given by NPCs, and hints. It's exploration is refreshing, and makes full use of "sense of discovery" I feel markers should be used for specific, meaningful purposes, and should not deviate from immersion. If you can have no markers, you're awesome! You use few meaningful ones, no problemo, it helps the player after all. If you pull up a "recent Ubisoft game" kind of approach, no thanks
***** actually, I never found the markers all that intrusive in the witcher III because it didn't let you know which direction the markers were in with a minimap or compass. Instead you had to open your map and put a waypoint on where you wanted to go/follow your quest marker. This way, the side stuff like the random caches and so forth never really felt like they were something to be obsessively sought out but instead just stumbled upon. I see what you're saying though, you would rather there be no icons until you actually came across the stuff, which would make sense too but it wasn't so bad.
I think Demon's Souls, Dark Souls (definitely one, two to a lesser degree), and Bloodborne are all also phenomenal examples of games that have (and don't even boast about) hundreds of hours of game play, and remain interesting the whole time. And I'd argue that they do a better job of telling a story that could only be told in a video game. Where The Witcher and Bethesda games still rely very heavily on cutscenes and very long dialogue breaks respectively, the world building and details of the story in a From Soft game come from the player seeking out information through game mechanics and piecing things together, just like the actual character would in that situation. And even if you ignore the actual game play and mechanics themselves (which people so often forget about when talking about games with "hundreds of hours of content, as if the amount of content makes up for a lack of compelling game systems) are so varied and interesting, and there's so much you can do to increase the challenge to make it more interesting, that you can easily get hundreds of hours without even looking at anything past the primary story.
LN2233 I think he meant the in-game event stuff where the NPC's talk to each other and/or possibly stab each other while you just stand there and watch.
It's not always about building a story. Open-world game can aim to build an experience, a sense of exploration, and construct an immersive world better than shorter, linear games can
The immersion breaks if you go to a cave that looks identical to the other so having notes and careful item placement to flesh out the world can be more important than just an uninspired big chunk of land, this is where most open world games are lazy with, the level design gets ignored in favor for them being able to say "we have the biggest open world ever!"
Suwat Saksri This is why "open-world" games are usually a pass for me. Not only is good level design lost, something which I feel gets taken for granted, but usually other aspects of the game are somewhat lackluster because they are trying to focus so much on making their wold huge. I find many of the game mechanics in these games to be shallow and boring.
+Suwat Saksri Actually the notes thing is a bit stupid really and lazy and cliche by now. Devs need better ways of world building than leaving texts for players to read or shoving up cinematics for everything they're going to do. Stuff like that breaks the flow and believability of any open world I feel. Also caves in real life are pretty hard to distinguish from another cave because most caves look alike, with just the rock formations usually being different. But if you're in the same geographic location, you'd be hard pressed to find 5 caves with each looking very different from each other. Outside of caves though is a different story.
+Digital Intent You can still have good level design, but usually open world games rely on procedural generation because it'd take far too long to design them by hand. You can still have good game mechanics as well, that in itself has little to do with open worlds, and what the devs focus is and varies based on game, not by open world vs linear.
I have 1500 hrs in Witcher 3, & I loved every minute..ok almost every minute, there's definitely some annoying/frustrating parts. I played Witcher 3 after work almost everyday for 2 years and, now that I'm done I miss it a lot. I listened to the books while playing and it was the best gaming experience I've ever had.
I think Persona 3/4 found a clever solution to this problem with its schedule system. Events happen at predetermined intervals in the game's year, allowing you to fill up the time in between with carefully planning your sidequests in preparation. But, this system still allows the designers to carefully control the rate at which the player experiences the main plot.
Victoria Dominowski This convinced me to finally buy P4 cause I wanted to for literal decade(s?). Is 3 any good as well? I heard good things about it but I’m broke as fuck and don’t wanna waste money on anything less than best.
I don't know, but whenever you put up a video, I stop any work I'm doing and watch your video. *Quality*. That what pulls me in. Since, *AC II and Brotherhood* had fresh ideas and relatively smaller worlds, they put as much quality as possible, making not only a great story, but a beautiful exploration of the era, as well as another "conspiracy - like" story seem real (Those puzzles and glyphs still have me paranoid). *Not hundreds of hours of content, but a substantial amount of hours of joy, discovery and satisfaction* Let's look east. 1. *Way of the Samurai series* has a very very well thought out world, though smaller in scale, giving much more meaning to action and choices. And there is an immense sense of discovery, making replaying for different endings fun and satisfying. My time doesn't feel wasted. 2. *Zelda, and similar games*, but I'll point to *Okami*. I did only one playthrough of 40 hours (in game timer). If I cut mishaps, and confused wanderings, lets make it 35 hours. All I can say is I'd like to thank Clover Studios with those hours. Except for few "busy works", like fishing (which was quite interesting for short bursts), all the main and side objectives were made with care and love, just like in a TV series where the main and filler episodes are produced with the same care and quality to provide a coherent experience. *Much content was there, and all was there to cater to all types of people, the story player, the challenger, the completionist, and all aspects developed to its maximum* 3. *3D Mario games : Mario64, Super Mario Galaxy* Nintendo's approach to providing much content workout compromising the quality is amazing, with these titles one of their best examples. *With the set abilities of Mario (and Luigi), devs created some of the most creative worlds and interaction possible*. Hours are not wasted, they are invested to get better. 4. *Genres like fighting and bullet hell* Practicing takes hours, so playing them for longer duration makes *you feel a sense of progression and training*. This goes for sports fans and eSports games like MOBAs. 5. *JRPGs* Well.. Fighting and grinding takes 50-70% of the time. Few games tried work around. International version of FF12 had a fast forward button to speed up the game play. *But despite that, people love them to death, simply because of the unparalleled moments and experience that makes the all the busy work worth doing* (if you are playing a good JRPG, that is) Do you remember moments of you grinding your party to defeat the "Weapon" bosses, or the moments of Cloud with Aerith?
Paul Revere Well said. But I think everybody know what to expect already. They've been doing that since Morrowind so it's nothing new. Still better to have those "quests" as side activities then not to have them I thnink, just like in Witcher 3.
The only thing that they can make me play for 400 hours is to make the world actually interesting filled with actual characters to flesh the world out with good writing and careful item placement, i hope its not another Fallout 3
+Paul Revere Actually the fact that they got voiced protagonist and actually put down a number for hours indicates that it won't rely on randomly generated quests and will even add more humanity to the game. Because the truth is bethesda can make some pretty fine hand made quests like the one involving Harold from fallout 3
+v2DaBa I disagree. In the witcher games, it was better not to have those stupid generated quests. Boring. Witcher was great because of the finely crafted quests.
George for the record I really enjoy your thoughtful, thorough, and knowledgeable content. It has a high production value with quality writing and editing. Keep it up sir! PS - For other viewers if you Skip the ads he gets no money. Consider letting them play to help him, like, eat and stuff.
YOU LIED TO ME TODD! "400 hours"! What a fucking joke! Maybe he expected me to do nothing but radiant settlement quests that need your help i'll mark it on your map
lmao yeah that's complete bullshit. There's about 40-50 hours of remotely worthwhile questing in Fallout 4, which is way, way less than New Vegas. It relies on endless customization and looping grinding quests which is weak design
you can easily create a stupidly OP shotgun that basically melts anything you fire at with hardly any effort, and the higher difficulty just makes everything a damage sponge
i bet they count random encouter into it. and since some encounter deactivate each other or can only be found after a certain level or event, youd have to do a lot of replayes to see every random encounter
I'm going to go ahead and say that mythological sagas or cycles are perfect structures for games like this. I re-read The Tain recently, which if you're not familiar is like the Irish Iliad and mainly follows around a warrior called CuChulainn as he gets strong, goes on side-adventures and takes on two whole armies by himself in the centerpiece. But it doesn't feel like, say, a tv series where there's a lack of consistency or focus in the macro scale and only singular episodes have a coherent theme. Instead you have a couple of reoccurring themes that get explored throughout. On top of all sorts of action that would make for great gameplay that gets glossed over. Not only that, but it has a timeline that doesn't always make sense if taken realistically and linearly (some characters seem to age in ways that don't make sense, there's inconsistencies in the order some stories take place, etc). In a video game, that hardly matters; when in the "story" did Trevor meet the old English tourists in GTAV? So yeah, I'd look to those. Also, as a side note, Devil May Cry 3 is a game that uses three act structure PERFECTLY, down to how each act lasts exactly 7 missions and is punctuated by a fight with Vergil. Even the cutscenes add up to just about an hour and a half. The gameplay/combat doesn't even feel like padding because of how it's cutscenes are paced.
I'm probably in the middle ground here, since I dislike with equal passion both exceedingly linear games and exceedingly dispersive one bloated with filler content. The former take away way too much player agency and are far more concerned with showing to the player something, rather than letting him experience things; the latter (with Ubisoft and Bethesda in particular being the flagship of "shittiness") don't seem to bother with offering anything genuinely entertaining and diversified enough in the long run, beside having fairly poorly though mechanical systems. But there's an issue with the whole premise of this criticism of video game narrative, as far as I'm concerned: I don't play games "for the story". A good narrative is all nice added value, but it's not what I look for. I play them precisely because I like to be in control, being immersed in a fictional place where I have to manage on my own way, even if sticking with the internal rules. Generally speaking I'm FAR more favorable to open world/non linear games, but I seriously wish the gaming industry (and audience) could stop pretending there can't be middle grounds between The Order and Skyrim. There have been virtuous models for DECADES. The entire Ultima saga, Fallout 1&2, the entire Looking Glass portfolio, Gothic 1 and 2, Might & Magic, Baldur's Gate, Arcanum, Vampire Bloodlines, Deus ex, etc, etc. All games that managed to be open, non-linear, letting the player have a lot of personal agency and control, without relying on [much] filler content. Sometimes even being tied with a strong and (mostly) coherent narrative in the process.
I'm with you. Not only for RPGs, but action adventure games too. Resi4 was open ended just enough for player agency and story/atmosphere balance. Okami, a Zelda like game, too was open ended, divided into regions, but each one was unique, and had different activities to offer. ACII, best ratio of "openness" of open world and "meaningful" activities. I'm positive other devs will inspire from Witcher 3, and will game more thought to games, as they did back in the days with examples you told
FINALLY somone who gets it. Ive had that discussion time and time again. A good open world game HAS a structure, in that each of its parts act as its own short story. Not completely detached from the "main goal" but still its own narrative. And lets face it, those "several hudrets of hours playtime" are nothing more than artificial padding to produce a big number to print on the package more often then not.
"This hours-race was even going on 5 years..." - Pfff, 5 years ago!? LucasArts used '40 hours plus' on the back of the box to promote The Secret of Monkey Island in 1990.
Ó Braonáin Comment that he doesn't do his homework? That some of his opinions are based on ignorance? Claiming that something is a recent trend when it was a trend in a past 20 years is not very researchy and journalistic. My opinions Are as relevant as an egg, as in whatever i might say he wont change a thing. Eggs are good, btw, im a big fan.
I'm so sick of this pointless hours race. Even if you have 100s of hours of content that really were engaging, players NEED to move on to a new game. Nobody can really find the time to play 10-12 games that boast hundreds of hours and play every hour of it before more games come out that boast the same thing. Plus, I feel like a lot of hour counts are bloated by less than clever syntax. A dev saying he's probably played 400 hours and still hasn't seen everything? Well, a dev SHOULD be playing their game for so many hours through testing and replaying through the improvements. And the word "probably" takes away any responsibility of it being inaccurate or deceptive. "Probably" or "maybe" or "approximately" is a blatant excuse for pulling numbers out of your ass. Don't let PR tell you how long a game is. Get those numbers from actual players.
Ever since the fiasco about the order being so short it's worried me that people think the should pay for quantity over quality in games. If this continues we'll have every major studio making a AC or FC.
Essentially, if you follow the principle "everything that happens, happens for a reason", as in there is a real purpose, real meaning to each and every game design aspect, all the way from UI, content, mechanics, world, physics, story, aesthetics, sounds, music and controls, while keeping in mind human needs and feeling, then you can practically guarantee a game to be good, regardless how long or short its supposed to be. Hell, you could literally make an infinite game be a possibility with the right structure and design decisions.
It almost sounds like Witcher 3 was structured like The Last Wish (One of the few Witcher novels serialized in the states) with its cadre of short stories while 1/2 are more like regular books with a dash of CYOA. Story structure is really important for the series, and 3's shift into this wide world of hundreds of small stories really dilutes the main focus of the Wild Hunt that we were chasing for the past 2 games.
Highwang And they got lot less content than they deserve in the game because of it. Here's hoping for an enhanced edition of Witcher 3 for the damn final act, then the game would be almost perfect.
Highwang Dont really feel like we were chasing the hunt, more like chasing his memories. My only gripe about the story was how urgent they made finding ciri, yet geralt could spend days without even thinking about her. Seriously had a smile and a boner throughout the entire battle of kaer moren, easily my favorite part of the entire game.
The question is, is most of this hundreds of hour worth of gameplay actually fun? This is something I found Dragon Age Inquisition lacked, where, yes they designed these large environments, but the world felt lifeless and most of the side quests felt bland and uninteresting.
Basically I hit the 100 or so hour mark trying to do everything but only enjoyed about a quarter of that time. Meanwhile in the Witcher 3 I didn't start getting bored until around that 100 hour mark, and that was the big difference for me.
same hither, i completed all quests in both dlcs and main game, over 100 hours, and i spend alot of time exploring the world and looking at beautiful scenery, when the amazing bloond and wine expansion ended i truly felt empty, because i know i will not experience anything like it in a long long time.
I had the same thing with dragon age, huge world but filled with the same side quests to do so it felt very repetitive to me. Played it for 80 hours and got sick of it.
Yeah, this type of design ties in with the MMO grinding, limitless content style that I really don't like. It sucks too because I'm too OCD about getting my money's worth and exploring content to completely ignore all the frivolous side stuff. In my experience the games that do it the best are GTAV, Fallout New Vegas, and now The Witcher III. In those games I was so immersed in the world and the great writing/characters that spending time in it never felt like a chore, and the vast majority of the playable content had at least SOME relevance to the games overarching ideologies and it's world. As a Bioware fan I've been disappointed with Inquisition so far as well. I'm only 12 hours in but it feels like almost nothing has happened. It's designed like a giant MMO with the biggest emphasis placed on combat and grinding, which is super annoying when there's random battles everywhere and I have to enter a tactical mode making every fight take 20 minutes. I'm interested in the story/characters but there's been so little of it so far that I'm almost ready to give up; it doesn't help that I played The Witcher III right before it haha. For example, I much, MUCH prefer the relatively linear structure of Mass Effect 2, with far more emphasis on driving story momentum and characters than the giant openness of DA Inquisition. I'd give up all the endless real estate of these worlds for more context and motivation. Also it ends up backfiring in terms of play time as well.. because Mass Effect 2 was so fun and it's character classes were so different I ended up putting in 200 hours replaying that game on different difficulties, seeing different story branches, etc.. where as DA:I is such a grind I can't imagine ever replaying it, or possibly even finishing it. This content for the sake of content philosophy has become a really tiring trend, playing through 2016's DOOM after years of all the big games being giant open worlds was such a breath of fresh air, and I've already spent 50 hours with a 10 hour game due to replaying on harder difficulties, searching for secrets and messing with a map creator.
This is the problem a lot of arkham side quests have also to complete the Riddler's quest line you need to do all of his trials and then for the final fight you need to find 300+ trophies. Fuck that, all for a 2 minute cutscenes. The problem is that some debs will focus on the main quest then pad the remaining time out with copy paste quests- batman arkham knight had many examples such as campaigns of disarment and the ones were you chase an apc.
I've started to find George's little vocabulary slip-ups kind of adorable, somehow. When he describes The Crew as an agrarian example, rather than an egregious example, I just get the image of an expensive car dressed up like a grumpy farmer suspiciously eyeing some hikers.
This is what worries me about The Phantom Pain. That it will become a chore to play. Especially the side ops which will just all be the same thing we saw in Ground Zeroes.
BrainSeepsOut and I've heard that there's going to be a multiplayer quality added where people can invade your game, which would mix it up. But this sounds like a game where they're throwing everything in, not making a quality experience.
BrainSeepsOut This what I think will set me off and probably get bored after playing it for a while. I don't have hundreds or tens of hours to play, I have a job and a wife and my gaming time is very limited. I miss the simpler times when you insert the disc and enjoy the game for a weekend or two at the most. P.S: I never finished Bloodborne, Shadow of Mordor, The Witcher 3 and probably MGS5.
I feel the opposite. Sure, missions might all boil down to the same elements but each mission will have a purpose. You don't do a mission and just get your points and check off a box. You finish your mission and get a tangible reward, like a new item to develop, a new specially skilled staff member, or a bear. Kojima said TPP is following this episodic structure that George is talking about, and I'm excited for it to be another game that does it right.
Wednesday's Serial that multiplayer feature is totally optional and only occures if you expand your motherbase significantly. gorund zeroes was only a tiny little map yet kojima managed to have sidemissions in it that were very different to the maimission. mgs5pp will be a blast. i am pretty sure kojima will set a new standart for open world games when it comes to gameplay and story telling.
Wednesday's Serial I'm probably gonna sound like an MGS fanboy in this comment, so I highly suggest you check the official gameplay videos they've shown off so far and maybe read the previews to double check your opinion. Each new gameplay video, to me anyway, had very clear improvements over the previous one, and the latest one from Gamescom 2015, that shows off the Mother Base and FOBs (the 1v1 invasions) showed a fair bit of quality work you'd expect from a Metal Gear Solid title The very first videos looked like minor improvements over Ground Zeroes, but mostly just a new coat of paint, but what we're shown now is a whole other thing. Various previews from journalists that got to play at the Boot Camp event and the preview events also say that the game definitely feels great and well polished.
The one thing that all my favorite games have in common is that you can feel that a lot of love went into them. There's no single thing or even a group of things I can point to that gives this impression (or lack thereof), but it becomes very obvious very quickly once you dive into a game. That loved quality can compensate for a lot of jankiness.
I'm going through this cycle with Fallout 3, The biggest chunk of my playtime was the side missions and the random events I come across in the wasteland. Never a dull moment. Like most 100+ hour games, there is such thing as burnout. I wonder how games can account for that in the future. Really interested How Fallout 4 will tackle it. In any case great argument George. The Quality vs Quantity debate is still something game developers need to ask themselves, considering how much more media we consume nowadays. That is for another day though.
It also helps that Witcher 3 has character-driven plots. Each area, Velen/Novigrad/Skellige has one or two characters that the plot develop around, and that really helped me to keep track.
Hn Henrique Yeah, but in WoW you actually interact with other human beings while doing the same things over and over again, wich makes every experience different. Its a totally different experience.
chcuc I mean in the way that games like wow have a ton of content but its all the same. Its the quantity over quality. Yeah play with friends make it better but is still the same shit.
Hn Henrique That's like saying a story would be the same if you replaced all the characters. Technically, your right, if all your looking for is the overall plot and nothing else, but for a lot of people, characters make the story, and friends make the experience. I'm speaking in abstracts because I actually don't know why people find MMO's fun, but I try to empathize anyways.
chcuc Interacting with other human beings can be a positive or negative experience depending on the human beings. Pretty sure everyone just watches youtube or TV or something to keep themselves entertained while doing god awful boring stuff in MMOs. Personally I stopped enjoying and playing MMOs when I realized there is no challenge at all when it comes to PVE and PVP is an unbalanced mess. The only challenge in PVE is a social one, the challenge is, "Can you find enough people with enough time on their hands and actually know how to play the game to beat this? Congrats, you win." Trying to find intelligent people in this world full of idiots stopped being fun for me, that and MMOs require way too much of your time.
Loved the structure of the Witcher 3. The main quest was simple enough that you can play a couple times a month and still know what's happening in the overall story arc, and each sidequest felt lovingly crafted and interesting but could be digested in a single sitting. Even the treasure hunts had stories behind them.
+JymSwis Which is an absolute shame. Random people make better content than professional game developers, for FREE. That is why BGS sucks. I love mods and modders, that doeant mean they should rely on them fixing their crappy games.
The Crew still makes me sad. I so wanted that game to be good. I really wanted it to be the spiritual successor to the TDU and NFSU games that it looked like it was. There's no doubt that it's got a dull structure, but I'm not so sure comparing it to the likes of Assassin's Creed and The Witcher really makes sense. I mean, the game does follow the boring Ubisoft formula, but it doesn't really make sense to think of narrative progression in a racing game. The Crew may have had a narrative, but it was stupid and trash and shouldn't have existed. Yet there are plenty of open world racing games that do a sense of progression well. the Forza Horizon games, and some of the older NFS games for example. I'm not sure what the "right" way to design progression in this type of game is, but what I'm trying to say that whatever it is, it's not what makes The Witcher or Fallout: NV work.
Scrustle Open-world racing games are inherently flawed since the devs have to compromise a lot of the 'track-design' for the open-world. What I mean by this is that often the roads on open-world games are way too large and not even remotely challenging to drive on. The advantage of closed tracks is that the devs can exploit all the nuances of the car-handling and car-physics thanks to tight and concise circuits. Drive-club is the latest example of that. However, when you look at open-world racing games like NFS-rivals, it basically becomes straight-line racing with very little input from the player aside from the boost and a drift or two. Now this can work pretty well on games like Burnout Paradise, which is basically a mindless crash-fest full of ridiculous jumps. But not all games should be like that. The NFS reboot for example has the pretension of going back to the roots of the franchise. But I don't see it work with an open-world track-design since the first NFS games are known for their nuanced driving-physics and precise handling. And like I said, most of the time this cannot fit into an open-world racing game.
***** I think you are wrong there. It is possible to create great story based open-world racing games and the best example for this is Driver: San Francisco. There, the focus of the game is not so much on races, as it is on police chases. It is a culmination of all the light hearted and fun gameplay from the last decade. The same focus creates a story that is elevated by the gameplay - You are a police in dreaming in his hospital bed and ramming perp cars is a way to deal with being wrecked by the bad boss. It is story that compleately fits the gameplay. And best of all -It is an open world Ubisoft game.
How to drag out the lenght of a game: Add collectibles, side quests that are very hidden and make you move long distances, add a lot of areas to 'explore' (even if it's just a flat part on a cliff), have minigames...
I like that assessment. Good open-world games do feel like The Outer Limits or other episodic shows that can be watched more or less out of order. That's certainly how I felt playing Fallout 3 & New Vegas. It even applies to a lesser extent to games like Divinity: Original Sin, which is more directed in some linear story path, but is still extremely open, non-linear and filled with little episodic moments and quests that enrich the world without needing to relate directly to each other.
3:48 Thank you, that's why so many games feel very side-quest-of-the-week-ish. Just like old TV shows with their monster of the week narrative structure.
One game series I've come to love over the years is Monster Hunter. I put about 800 hours in 3 Ultimate and 500 hours in 4 Ultimate. But these games don't follow the type of structure mentioned in this video. The way they last so long is because they're a grindfest. But the best kind of grindfest. All you really do for the majority of the game is fight monsters in various small, sectioned areas and then get taken back to a hub world after the boss fight where you can craft new equipment. I still have to wrap my head around the fact that after so many hours I don't find this boring at all. It's probably because of player choice, the game is huge in the sense that there are many things to experience, many weapon types to try out and even sub types and playstyles that can differ. Still, even when I stick to my comfort zone I don't get bored, even if I have been doing so for the past 1000 hours. There is just something about the combat which makes you want to keep playing. If I had to describe it I'd say it's just plain fun, everytime.
Good episode. The funny thing is this problem about "hundreds of hours" and little time to play it has already happened. You can see it from somebodies steam backlog, or simply from how many COD-like FPS games showed up where every multiplayer is stuffed full of more gimmicks and grinding more so than strong core mechanics to master (low hp easy kills, regen health, and a dumbed down matchmaking system that just leads the majority to playing TDM). Meanwhile there were awards all over the place, things to customize, and you get a new weapons with tiny tweaks every handful of matches. It was a perfect skinner box... only there's a bunch of them each year and they can take a while to complete. Seriously, whoever was buying all the military shooters of last gen, I doubt they ever had time to complete them all. I really just gave up with looking at shooters for their MP perspective, save for just the one or two series. The skinner box mentality really felt like it hurt online games. Personally though, I'll always prefer 12 hours campaign focused games that have really good mechanics. Things like Dishonored, Metro, or the latest Wolfenstein. Witcher 3 is amazing though, and I also had a blast blowing up stuff in Far Cry 4.
It’s all thanks to Skyrim, man. It got everyone hooked on it for so much longer than just about any “mainstream” game before it that now EVERY big game has to try and compete.
I like how Skyrim did its big quests. You have four or five long five to ten hour quest lines then a bunch of smaller quests. To populate a fairly interesting world.
What's funny is that, the games I have the most hours in are strategy games, or otherwise base-building games, Civ V has THE most hours for me, at almost 3500 hours, and around that same one is Ogre Battle 64: PoLC, a strategy JRPG and it has a 3 or 4 Act story separated into many many episodes, and what keeps me interested is the progression of my characters under my command, and new character types and equipment that become available throughout the game for me to reorganize into new more advanced units to optimize certain things, Civ does much the same thing with the Tech tree unlocking more advanced units. I play these games over, and over, and over again.
A game that comes to mind is Red Dead Redemption. It did a great job at telling it's story in an open world and making me feel invested in the character. I'm not sure about a hundred hours but I did in put a lot of time outside the main game doing side quest, hunting, and other stuff that felt real to John Marston's character.
The binding of Isaac is an interesting example that promises hundreds of hours, though a game session only lasts around an hour if that. It asks the player to give it another go, each time revealing more content and randomizing everything about the playthrough. It makes each experience unique enough that it takes ages for it to get old, even though you're doing the same thing.
More game writers ought to take a page from Naked Lunch and its "mosaic whole" approach. It was designed as a book that could be "cut into at any point," and it works that way. Altogether it describes a world, accomplished in little dribs and drabs which, to a player of a game, are most analogous to short, self-contained missions. Over time they pile up, and you get a further and further developed idea of this world being presented. There absolutely are ways to structure narrative with less linearity. Even just taking the approach of a picaresque, which I'd say some games have done successfully already.
I also find that the best structure is a middle ground between linear and sandbox, like Thief, System Shock 2, Deus Ex etc. These games have many, many ways to play, many routes to take and lots of important choices to make, but are confined within a thematically suitable level structure to maintain design "focus" and prevent "artificial length" and padding. Additionally, linear design can be far better than sandboxes in my opinion, when it's done correctly. Between an hour-long sandbox sidequest where a decent percentage of that hour will be spent walking around doing nothing in particular and a 3-5 minute long shmup level (for example) where literally every second counts and can make the difference between victory and defeat, I would much rather pick the latter, although I still acknowledge that the former approach can have its advantages.
I feel like open worlders need to troll the player by making the main quest promptly die in a dead end lack of leads. You're tasked with finding something you have no clue where to even begin to look for, thus thrusting you into the open world sidequester genre. Until one day you suddenly discover the main quest needle in the sidequest haystack and get a tight and polished ending arc to finish off your game. A fraction of the sidequests would foreshadow the events to come in the ending arc, and an even smaller subset would give clues to the location of the main plot. It's one of the few things I enjoy about Fallout 1; it follows this setup. All leads on where to find a waterchip just die off super quick and you're left with nothing. So you just need to wander about the place doing random stuff to survive while keeping the water chip as a note to self as something to look out for.
Interesting to see you bring up TES as good examples; I remember your criticism of Skyrim's main quest and how all the other quests also came off as boring. In truth Skyrim had too many fetch bear hides or dungeon crawl for a lost ring just because someone asks you to type quests. Morrowind, on the other hand, did it better because even if the content itself of the quests could be the blandest thing in the world, it was always tied to you doing it for a reason that told you something about the broader political, social and geographical facts of the land. Take that early killing mudcrabs quest for House Redoran; in terms of the actual content it may just be killing a few mudcrabs, but shows how the system of the houses work, it conveys that the Redoran are serious and dutiful, and it gives a hint of the challenges of life on the frontier in the hostile land of Vvardenfell. Compare it with getting bear hides for the miller in Ivarstead. It's comparable in content but it shows, at the most, that the Rift has a bit of a bear problem. It might seem like nitpicking, but for me this distinction between a quest existing to show something about the world and a quest existing just to give you something to do is important and it lends that crucial sense of meaning, the sense of "why" to the actions of my character. Morrowind not pushing its sense of urgency on you as hard as Skyrim (and Oblivion) also helped a great deal with this as you brought up in your comparison of the two games. It really seems to be an undervalued side of writing for an open-world game to make the player feel free to go off and side-quest, explore or fight if they so desire, without feeling like it interferes in the slightest with the main story. Even the great New Vegas from the accomplished writers of Obsidian, with its less linear main quest, didn't really seem to fully embrace this; Bethesda's recent offerings haven't even tried.
Actually I think the "Kishotenketsu" 4-Act Structure could probably work with an open world game like the witcher since it doesnt really rely on conflict or progression. It more relies on information, and getting the auduence to be familiar with the characters, and possible the world of the story. Which is exactly what you do in these kinds of games, you explore the world and characters to find out more about them.
Narrative dissonance and playtime definitely has a correlation. That bit about Ryo wanting to protect the act after vowing for vengeance for his dad was hilarious!
I like to think of Sandbox games as Short story compilations. Elder Scrolls being similar to the Conan Saga in narrative formula and Fallout being like the Mad Max movies, which are like short stories in that they are vaguely connected through the character alone a lot like side quests in an RPG.
I don't think they got lucky in choosing The Witcher to make a game, I think CDPR knew that the main character and the general story structure would fit the RPG story-telling scheme; or at least they had a hunch. The books themselves are mostly collections of short stories. so there's no other way of telling The Wticcher story in a videogame than through a great RPG. Other than that, great video! Oh, and lets not forget the origin of videogame RPGs: that is, tabletop RPGs. Most RPGs, particularly the classic ones like D&D, are structured mechanically and thematically around the whole "quest" idea, signified by the basic concept of a dungeon (a series of rooms i.e encounters that present challenges individually and overall tell a cohesive story). In recent editions they call them adventures, but it's all the same. Even Shadowrun has it in its very name: a Shadowrun is a heist, a corporate espionage mission, a political assassination, etc. Basically, a cyberpunk operative quest. And the best videogame RPGs are the ones who get the idea of a campaign right: every adventure, or quest, or whatever, tells you a little bit about the world, the characters that inhabit it, your own character, and an overarching story your charater(s) are part of. I loved the Witcher 1 because while doing all of my Witcher stuff I learned little by little about the world and its characters, including Geralt, and about the whole Salamandra conspiracy and stuff.
the 100 hour game has basically became a separate genre now, yeah they take different forms but they all play on the way a game would come out and it would be so massive and engaging that you couldn't help but play it for months (remember we where kids back then), now its a type of game rather than an event, so there being 5 or 6 of them year just means that consumers have to be more savvy with their purchases, not just because of the price but because of the investment one of these games needs just to start belonging in their world. i remember getting Ocarina of time and for me that was staggeringly huge at the time, it took a huge portion of my play time but there where several smaller games that where played along side it, if zelda had turned out to be rubbish then what would have happened would be that i would have played the smaller games a lot more and ended up with nothing to play sooner. these big games are a perfect accompaniment to normal lengthen games and short ones, they add value to the other games in your current play list and give you a feeling of truly entering a new world instead of just visiting one. Having big games is a great part of games as a hole, and having more of them means more people will have their particular tastes catered too, although consumers need to make sure that the bad ones are thrown to one side and the good ones get the attention, it would be good if the media didn't just give everything a good score so that consumers could navigate the increasing amount of large games, it got so bad for me that even though people where saying that witched 3 was amazing, it all felt like i should be taking their praise and toning it down because of the current trend to paraise everything
I think for video game stories the character is often a witness to the story arc; The world itself usually goes through the narrative arc that the protagonist in a movie would go through. The threat usually ends up destroying parts of the world itself and the NPCs within it, and bringing it to the brink, before coming back to something hopeful after the climax. But the player character themselves simply becomes continually more and more powerful. Any moments where they are stripped of their collected powers and skills are superficial and short lived; A novel challenge that is usually rewarded with even more power simply as a prelude to the final "boss battle". How many games have we seen where, after the climactic battle, the denouement is a cinematic of the game world regrowing, cities rebuilding, NPCs we've met thriving? Our "happily ever after" doesn't even have to be about our protagonist. For me, it can even be a turn off to have it implied that the character lives on without my input. I'm usually more concerned with the world that I've been trying to save. So to me it makes sense that the world itself is the focus of the narrative. This isn't universal, I'm sure, but it is maybe one way to reframe the way one traditionally looks at a story arc and apply it to video game narratives.
I didn't really like witcher 3's open world. The side quests were the best part, but the loot areas were very repetitive to me. I feel like fallout and elder scrolls worlds have a more interesting sense of environmental story telling. Maybe if I had played the previous entries, my view would be different. Right now, I travel into abandon towns in fallout 4 with a wonderment of what the heck actually happened there, when I see 100+ question marks on the witcher 3's map, it makes exploration feel more like a checklist. It's just my opinion, but still a very unpopular one. I may have enjoyed fallout 4 more, but witcher 3 was still a fun game for me.
Ok, so Fallout 4 is coming out soon. But I've been playing Fallout 3 for like the 3rd time, and I'm going places and doing quests that I didn't do in the first 2 play thoughts. Sure, 200+ hours is probably too much for most people in 1 play through but I think it lends games a lot more replay ability. Here I am on the 3rd run and it's still giving me new experiences. Hell, this time I didn't go for my usual social talents and dumped all my skills into guns and explosives. That made the gunplay a LOT more effective and satisfying, and changed the whole feel of the game.
Egrerious? That's a new one. On topic, The Witcher 3 really is by far the most compelling open-world RPG I've ever played. There's so much to do and I, for once, I actually wanted to do most of it.
"As the deathclaw patiently stalks his prey, the hunt suddenly culminates in an explosion of action... it's over, the deathclaw has expended a great deal of energy in his pursuit, but now he has his price. the protein in the super mutant body will help sustain him over the hard winter months. it's a dance that has been danced countless times over the millenia and yet one cannot help but feel privileged of witness this latest step in the circle of life"
Men I love your videos! I always see them 1,2,3,4 times and I dont even care because your videos are sooooo good. Sorry is my english are not to good, Im from a Spanish speaking country in the other point of the continent (Argentina). CHAU!
I'll admit, as someone who is normally a fan of 100-hour convoluted JRPGs, I'm finding myself playing shorter, compacted experiences lately. Games like Juniper's Knot (~2 hours), any Ys game (~6 hours), Cherry Tree High Comedy Club (~3 hours), Time and Eternity (~20 hours) and Ghost Trick (~9 hours) are providing satisfying amuse-bouches of content compared to a lengthy game like The Witcher 3 which can feel like a slog sometimes. I'm always torn, because as much as I want to dive into a meaty game like Pillars of Eternity or Planescape: Torment, the fatigue that you imply with these kinds of games conflicts with the plethora of instantly gratifying short experiences we have today. As much as I want to spend a weekend breeding up a new Pokemon party, the satisfaction/time ratio seems to trend away from these lengthy experiences. And I'm frankly at a loss right now as to where to spend my time.
The Uncharted games do a great job of sticking to what they intend for the player to do while offering slower moments. Not once have I felt a puzzle dragged out for too long or that a gun fight became repetitive. The thing about the "100 hours of content" games is what will the player have to do or can do in that time. Taking GTA for example there's nothing that is that time consuming in GTA V that isn't the standard running or driving screwing about. Most of the "content" is just doing sidequest which isn't bad but that is mostly what you'll be doing if you rush the story.
The best example of a good open world game is the Gothic series, that is Gothic 1 and 2. If you can brute-force the controls and stomach the graphics, you may find a vast world full of side quests with such good writing that it can carry the game on its own. At least in German. Exactly these points you mention in your video for good examples are hold. On top of it, it actually has a decent main plot and even character developement. The main character really has character, which also evolves within the game and especially in the second game. It also depends on the way you chose, 3 ways in both games that change in terms of story and gameplay. If you wanted to get the most out of one playthrough, you can do quests for every party, but only to a certain point. The protagonist has no name, but speaks and shows emotions if you chose to. Not just like "Ah, that's very sad." in opposition to "You deserved it, asshole.", but from a variety of diplomatic responses to insults to backstabs for other NPCs etc. It puts Mass Effect to a shame, frankly. All the time in tango with the quest, so it always makes sense. And this in every single quest, some of course are a bit more defined than others if it wouldn't make sense to have the character insult his best buddy. What I'm trying to say is that every quest has pletoras of dialogue options, all within character. The character has no name, but that's the only thing missing about his personality, even though this is technically, as far as I know, about his background rather than his identity. And the background is missing as well. The worlds of Gothic 1 and 2 have lore, consistency, mystery and character. It's a dick-version of fantasy, while the Witcher is gritty and dark. Gothic shares its name only with the architecture and art style closely tied to the German understanding of the architecture and fashion of back then, not the pale-people-type. It's German, Witcher is Polish. Witcher controls way better and probably has more or better lore, while Gothic is purely original in its lore and manages to give its game a vast amount of flavour/fluff without any original sources. If you're in for story, and as I said, can really handle horrible controls and really dated graphics, then you owe it to yourself to play Gothic 1 and 2. But I'm not sure about the English version. As I said, it gets carried by its story and world in every direction. But sadly, this could mean that this gets obliterated by silly translations and emotionless voice acting. Oh, and if everything fails, use cheats. I wouldn't hold it against you.
Gordon S. Gothic was a big mess: bad controls, cringy dialogue, and awful HUD. I never really understood what people like about this game, I guess story and the overworld is pretty good but I couldn't force myself to deal with all the bad things. I'm not calling Gothic a bad game, but if I wanted a good story I could read a book.
Gordon S. Thanks for bringing up the Gothic series. Love those games. It constantly irritates me when I hear people praising rpg or open-world games and never mention Gothic.
v2DaBa In what language did you play it? As I said, I played it in its original language German. And, of course if you liked the type of 'rough world' itself, the dialogue was *supreme* hands down. Seriously, I've never played anything that comes close. You're right with your other points. The difficulty, even if the controls were smooth, is brutal as well. Don't know how I managed to get it when I was a teen. But the fluff/lore/dialogue/atmosphere were or was worth it.
This is why I prefer JRPGs over regular modern RPGs. Games like Xenoblade Chronicles and Bravely Default are also gigantic 100+ hour adventures with tons of content, and Xenoblade in particular has tons of side quests and an open world, but all the side quests contribute to the overall plot and to character development in both games, all the while allowing the player to still focus on their main goal and the story of the game.
I like to think of open-world games like the Witcher or New Vegas being more similar in structure to shows like Doctor Who or Star Trek. That being in which most of the episodes while taking place in a chronological order are for the most part are self-contained stories or arc (these are the side quest), or there will be episodes that contribute to a much larger, ongoing story arc (these are the main quests).
Not only does a witcher tend to fix all sorts of problem, this specific witcher is canonically described as having a tendency of getting distracted by side quests - before the games even existed!
I think open-world quite obviously follow the model of a bunch of short stories and an over-arching plot probably why witcher 3 works really well is because they made it rely in the model witcher has started from - short stories connected by characters and plot tit bits which then flow into a bigger narrative It started out as two books of sidequests before starting the proper plot of the other like five books or so To this day one of the most enjoyable narrative choices i've witnessed
Personally I think the good way to sell hundreds of hours of worth of content is to make it all interesting and engaging; either through making it a difficult or interesting combat challenge or by making it a well-told story either by NPCs asking you to do things or by notes and environmental details. This is why Skyrim is called wide as an ocean but deep as a puddle largely due to mostly bland and uninspired quests and radiant quests, with only a few stand out pieces of engaging quests and environmental stories (the Thieve's Guild quest comes to mind). Whereas New Vegas can do basically the same thing but be much more highly regarded because almost every side quest has interesting characters, plots, and are generally more complicated than going to a dungeon and either clearing it out and/or getting a thing (though I will admit fetch quests aren't uncommon in New Vegas). Morrowind does a similar thing with it's large open world but mostly by making the rewards from exploring and completing side quests actually useful more often than not and simply by letting you see more nooks and crannies of the strange alien landscape that is Vvardenfell.
Super Bunnyhop Very interesting timing on this topic, a French magazine just posted their thoughts on MGS5, and pretty much said the amount of time you can go off track between missions to do side ops can lead to the story getting lost and the pacing of it suffering as a result. Sounds similar to the problems listed in your video. I really hope they don't mess it up :(
Seeing that known game series are always finished in a standardized frame of time we will always whether have a cheap large game or a great smaller one. Even with the technological advancements we have that optimize every other aspect in gaming, that simply will always be the law because it's dependent on the amount of time that was put in.
Now the music's stuck in my head again. Thanks, George.
Cryptic Joy Haha at least the soundtrack is amazing!
Cryptic Joy Im never gonna get tired of that gwent song
Bohdee burr bohdee burr bohdee burr BRRRRRDDD D BrrrDdddd
2:34 "You can read War and Peace in about 32 hours".
Damn, I must be doing something wrong, I still haven't managed to finish the first chapter after 40 years.
Is there a walkthrough for the 32-hour speedrun?
I probably spent 30 hours in Gwent alone.
No regrets.
Good Game in a great game. What's to complain? ^_^
RaithSienar I think, that it is amazing, how they managed to create entire world around a card game.
David Kirth hahahahhahahahahhahahahhahahahahha
I want to fight eredin in gwent
Raith hahahahahahaha
[Coury] I always think about how every single PS1 RPG was touted to be "over 40 hours long!" Like 40 hours (and of course, number of discs) was the determining factor of whether the game was worth your time. And so many people bought into it, including me.
These days, I look back on a lot of RPGs from that time and realize I only finished small portion of them all the way through because they were often padded and drawn out well beyond their initial scope to meet that 40 hour run time.
Then I look over at Chrono Trigger, a game that is considered by many to be the best RPG of all time and its comparatively short story run time of 20 hours. CT is perfectly paced, with almost 0% fat - and will continue to endure and live up to its reputation forever.
For me, the "Hundreds of hours of game" more often than not, convinces me that I don't want to play a game. I'd rather play a tightly constructed adventure where you could see that every step of the way had the developers full attention. And I guess that's why I just don't care all that much for open world games (except Red Dead Redemption, that was awesome).
***** Red Dead Redemption was amazing, I easily poured in over 40 hours into it without even thinking about it.
Yup. Red dead redemption was surprisingly interesting and detailed all the way through for a desert landscape setting.
To be fair though, a lot of kids and poor people just want something fun they can play for awhile because they couldn't afford lots of games. I remember picking up ps1 games back then based on length because I didn't have my driver's license yet, and only had $20 in my budget on a game for the next month.
Another example would be the time some saint in a funco land recommended Metroid 2 (I hadn't heard of Metroid before this, my family couldn't afford an tv much less an NES when I was little) to me when I was like 8 years old because I asked him for a game that I wouldn't be able to beat in a few days.
This isn't as much as a problem now with games downloadable games being pretty cheap. But back in the day it was harder to pick up games for cheap.
When someone says "xx hours of gameplay", you only have to think of online F2P games and mobile games.
Long gameplay time doesn't equate to quality gameplay experience. More often than not, these "long games" is just monotonous repetitive gameplay with different text flavors to make it seem like "new content".
the differences with with witcher at least IMO is everything is enjoyable..even if its a sidequest or treasure hunt or crafting im generally having a good time..everything seems created with immense care..really wanted a reason to come back and blood and wine has been amazing so far..been gaming since the early 90s and this might just be my fav game ever..still not bored of it
I agree, I've spent more time on a single playthrough in The Witcher 3 than any other game (about 160 hours).
I really loved the witcher's stoey, characters and atmosphere but just couldn't dig the gameplay. its a shame really
that seems a bit like a circular statement: enjoyment is vague.
But I would say that those side activities are enjoaybable in the context of the game because they deliver on the fantasy of being the witcher, by building up the character and the world around. They are enjoyable because they are narratively rich and thematically coherent.
I think your right. There is a sense I get in all the video games I end up loving. They are far between, but when they show up, they all give me the same sense.
And that is that the developers behind had a message they wanted to convey. They had something interesting to say or express, and they use the medium to that effect. I might not agree with the message, but it's there. The only real exeption for this among my favorite games is ARMA II & III, but it was Operation Flashpoint that got me into the series, and that had plenty of message.
You can tell if earning the most money is the main motivation behind a game. Such games are designed to impress, to be flashy and to captivate you in the moment, there and then. But once you get past the initital awe, you realize that there is nothing of substance there. Like AC, BF or COD. No real attempt of telling anything, just clever marketing. They are well designed products, but they are designed to earn money, with no deeper meaning or motivation behind it.
Witcher, on the other hand, is clearly built by people who deeply care about telling a story, creating a universe and expressing something. It reeks of personality. I also belong to the crowd that isn't particularly found of the gameplay itself, but man I love the universe. It is the first game in maybe a decade to earn a place in my list of favorite games, along the ARMA series.
Spending so much time on a video game is pretty worthless. No one on their death bed is going to think back on their lives and think “I’m so glad I played all those video games”.
MrBTongue's video on 'Shandification' explains the whole open-world narrative structure topic very well. It's totally a legitimate story structure.
ThatGunslinger Indeed. And on this occasion,
Thank god for George,
Thank god for MrBtongue
Thank god for Jim Sterling
That is a fantastic video. Perfectly explains why I think games need to stop prioritizing "cinematic" game design.
That was almost my first thought as well. The second New Vegas was mentioned, that video popped into my head.
I watched that video twice, it was that amazing! Knowledge, as well as humour and wit made the video so great
Hey, does anyone knows of channels (or videos) similar to his and SuperBunnyHop?
By the way, nice "Missile" photo ^_^
"Who has time for this" is my thought as well. When I was younger I loved RPGs and the like but now that I'm an adult I just don't have the same amount of time as I used to. I can't do a 60 hour game in a week or two- it takes months.
I sorta bought Skyrim since i like F3 and New Vegas so hey i might like this game too! Eventually the game boiled down to
Get fetch quest
clear dungeon that looks like every other one
get item
find a rare weapon you wont use and throw it in the pile because your is stronger
find another quest and repeat.
Doesn't help that 90% of the enemies were pretty much a couple variations of the skeleton enemy. Eventually you just do laps around a pillar and burn any though one. No challenge.
Tamer I stopped Skyrim when I reached a point where all the next quests forced me to enter a cave and search for loot... it was then that I saw through the illusion and couldn't stomach another cave!
Tamer I'd suggest mods, but if you do find the base gameplay shitty (as opposed to in need of tweaks), won't help much.
Did you like Oblivion, out of curiosity?
Though it and Fallout 3 are almost (fraternal) twins, I found one much more engaging than the other.
delax000 I should add this was on ps3. But if a game needs mods to be good then i can skip it. The combat was so bad that it wasn't fun anymore once you tried all the weapons. This was also my first TES
Tamer You might like Morrowind if you can stomach it's clunkier stat-based combat. It's less copy paste and there's a lot more backstory/background to each mission.
Tim the Wizard " clunkier stat-based combat" agh kill me. I can take it in the fallout games because of guns and other non sense but no more of that melee ever again.
this channel has some of the best games and game industry related editorial and journalistic content on youtube. years later i still comeback and rewatch.
Maybe I'm weird. I've literally put in hundreds of hours in 8 hr or so games like the Devil May Cry and Bayonetta, but I can barely find the motivation to put in 8 hr into the games that advertise hundreds of hours of content.
Aladelicous Me too. Hundreds of hours games are too overrated
I think it's because those 100+ hour games are a large investment to start, emotionally speaking. You have to prepare yourself for sinking a lot of time into them, and sometimes that just seems like too much.
Aladelicous the difference between the 2 is simple. fallout 4 for example. ocean of content, depth of a puddle. whereas with dmc, puddle of content/depth of an ocean
I'm the same to be honest...heck most of the games I play can be confterably beaten in less than 2 hours! -_-
I literally watch episodes of South park I've seen multiple times, but if a series has more than 3 seasons I struggle to start watching, a la GoT, TWD
Hello? Anybody? They're gone....all gone....
But now I have time to play all my hundreds of hours of video games. Time enough at last!
*goes to reach for Witcher 3, trips and falls on console*
It's not fair! There was time now!
I had so much time as a kid and as a teen to play longer games but now not only do i not have the time but the little time i have i like to spend into new shorter experiences
I really like short games because I like playing different games and finishing them, something 5 100+ hours games a year doesn't allow me to do.
Otávio Do Not Look Here Google battleblock cat guard
I guess not everybody can afford as much money as they can afford time...
Big long 100+ hours games tout themselves giving you extra value for your money...
Now whether this value actual or an illusion ( copy-pasted content) is dependent on the game itself, and the player's preferences.
For someone who has lesser time for games, I feel you. With a few exceptions, I feel the same.
I don't have that much money. I do have tons of steam sales, indie games and the intelligence to only buy really good or great games. I think I only bought 4 full priced games this year, GTA V (although I really shouldn't have given this game that much money, I loved the possibility of mods), The Witcher III, Cities Skylines and Hotline Miami 2. I also plan on buying Fallout 4 for a total of 3 $60 games i one year.
Well... Most of the games you mentioned buying at full price are ones with pretty decent longevity...
And besides; I don't think you should waste your time listening to some random TH-cam commentator lecturing you about how you should spend YOUR OWN MONEY! :-P
In AC games I felt Black Flag had the best and most interesting world to explore, maybe it didn't have too much story nor lore, but it was very fun to even encounter random Man o' Wars, search the ocean for treasures and upgrade your Jackdaw.
Grzegorz D It had the greatest completion/100% playthroughs, but I preferred Revelations over all others in game feel. 2 in gameplay, Brotherhood for story, and 3 for being the worst playable game in the series. Too broke to play the new ones so I’m taking everyone’s word and saying Origins is the best open world.
EPISODIC WITCHER. Really no thanks, the witcher 3 is everything I ever want and i'm very glad it's as large as it is. You have the choice of rushing through it or doing as much as you want; I love it. Still have not finished it and having a blast enjoying it.
I came to these videos from the future in the wake of the live service games death spiral, spearheaded by the shutdown of _The Crew,_ so imagine my surprise when I hear you namedrop _The Crew_ here of all places
Coming back to this video, there is no way in HELL Fallout 4 has 400 hours of good content. Maybe 20 hours of passable content, and then everything is those "reactive quests." That's where they keep their timesinks and it's all boring fetch quests or "go to x location and kill y enemy" quests.
I got a good 200 hours of it
I'm going to level with you most of my time in that game was base building.
nah. The 1-2 months I played Fallout 4 (I didn’t have internet and it was the only game I cared to play throughout those 2 months) by the time I did everything in the game before I finally reached the infinite mundane quests, I had 24days into the game. Fallout 4’s base game has over 400 hours of content for sure.
And I didn’t do any base building either.
Only 20? I've sinked about 120 hours into Fallout 4 and I still haven't finished everything in the game
I have to disagree with George on this one. Never, in my 170hrs Witcher 3 play trough have i forgotten about the main mission, the main players of the plot or the plot itself. The tapestry of quests and sidequests always ties in into what's happening in the world or had happened before adding to the lore without tons of exposition.
This is no Skyrim when you lose track of what's going on 1 hour into the game because hey! another pointless dungeon or a click and forget NPC questgiver giving you kill/fetch/deliver rinse and repeat missions...
Dragon Age: Inquisition had stellar main quests and absolutely abysmal side content that was forced on the players. So after the stonking main quests i was forced to collect power points to advance the plot, the mire i found myself in doing those terrible assignments killed all the good karma i got from doing the main quests.
Witcher 3, has missions where there's always a twist, something funny or horrible happens, even the lowliest of vendors that you won't ever see again has a personality a few choice words (va'ed just for this character) for Geralt... It's a massive, rich world and feels really alive. A world where i decided to walk through rather than fast travel as i wanted to be immersed in it to the fullest. After finishing it i felt like a big chunk of something indescribable was missing... Would defo stayed for another 170 hours of content...
Pete Blades But...But I loved Skyrim and all of its skeletons, Draugs, Dragons, and Wangdits..
Pete Blades Witcher 3 have a lot of fetch quests.Side things to do in it are very repetitive.The game is just another mediocre open world game.The writing is a lot better than DA:I.
Mitachia The catch is that EACH single side quest and "fetch quest" in Witcher 3 is unique and always delivers something unexpected to the norm, just a single fetch quest in the starting area of the game will give you a really tough choice on the fate of freedom fighters or bandits, depends on how you see it, so when you say it is a mediocre open world game, you are talking out of your ass, because when it comes to the storytelling aspect of Witcher 3, it excels at it, far better than 99.9% of open world RPGs out there, new vegas is the closest to compare to Witcher 3 in that aspect so far.
***** don't you think you are greatly exaggerating that the game's storytelling is far better than 99.9% of other open world rpg's out there?
LN2233 Even if it was it still wouldn't say much about the quality. Never seen a sandbox game that told a story better than a linear game like Half-Life 2.
That is what I love so much about New Vegas. The majority of the self-contained sidequest really feel like they impact the state of the Mojave at the end of the main story. It really feels like you are shaping the region into the place that you want it to be, and these quests feel like they really make a difference towards the final outcome that you are building towards.
What I liked about New Vegas was that many side-quests would help determine the ending of your game, a lot of the quests affected the relationship with faction and enemy faction when playing, like you could do the Enclave side-quest which will change the ending even if its very little
My main problem with The Witcher 3 was that, idk, they felt the need to show you how big the world is, how much stuff you can do to the point where your map is full of points to go, places to check. It would be better if they took an approach similar to S.T.A.L.K.E.R, where it didn't showed you where to go and the many places you could explore. That would not only improve the exploration value, but also the replay value, since with each playthrough you could find new quest since it would be almost impossible to do everything in one playthrough. And that would be amazing in The Witcher because of the mission progression, where side-quests influence the outcome of main quests....
Anyway, another game that promises 100+ hours of content is MGS V, but that game is intriguing: It's basically 4 games in one package. The main campaign; the Mother Base development; FOB (Online Mother Base infiltration) and competitive MGO.
I'm intrigued to see how they will manage to balance the narrative with the MB development and online stuff, since MGS was always a game focused primary on the narrative.
***** You could filter out the question marks. That's what I did at least.
***** ***** You guys know you can turn off all those points on the map right? If you seriously have a problem with them, go into the world map and turn them off.
STALKER games too had markers. But it was fitting to the setting of game (IMO). Witcher 3 needs markers on maps, otherwise it may cause some stress about finding locations simply off notes and conversation. Witcher has discovery in much amount as well as the marked things so that players don't feel frustrated or underwhelmed.
There is one game that has no markers and can still be played very nicely. TES III : Morrowind. Game is designed to be explored via notes, directions given by NPCs, and hints. It's exploration is refreshing, and makes full use of "sense of discovery"
I feel markers should be used for specific, meaningful purposes, and should not deviate from immersion. If you can have no markers, you're awesome! You use few meaningful ones, no problemo, it helps the player after all. If you pull up a "recent Ubisoft game" kind of approach, no thanks
Can you tell me more about MGS V's content? Seems interesting
***** actually, I never found the markers all that intrusive in the witcher III because it didn't let you know which direction the markers were in with a minimap or compass. Instead you had to open your map and put a waypoint on where you wanted to go/follow your quest marker. This way, the side stuff like the random caches and so forth never really felt like they were something to be obsessively sought out but instead just stumbled upon.
I see what you're saying though, you would rather there be no icons until you actually came across the stuff, which would make sense too but it wasn't so bad.
I think Demon's Souls, Dark Souls (definitely one, two to a lesser degree), and Bloodborne are all also phenomenal examples of games that have (and don't even boast about) hundreds of hours of game play, and remain interesting the whole time. And I'd argue that they do a better job of telling a story that could only be told in a video game. Where The Witcher and Bethesda games still rely very heavily on cutscenes and very long dialogue breaks respectively, the world building and details of the story in a From Soft game come from the player seeking out information through game mechanics and piecing things together, just like the actual character would in that situation.
And even if you ignore the actual game play and mechanics themselves (which people so often forget about when talking about games with "hundreds of hours of content, as if the amount of content makes up for a lack of compelling game systems) are so varied and interesting, and there's so much you can do to increase the challenge to make it more interesting, that you can easily get hundreds of hours without even looking at anything past the primary story.
TasteDatRainbow I don't agree with any of that
***** Care to elaborate?
Bethesda games have cutscenes?
LN2233 I think he meant the in-game event stuff where the NPC's talk to each other and/or possibly stab each other while you just stand there and watch.
Birdassasin scripted moments then. I don't remember there being that much in any recent BethSoft game I've played.
I much rather have tight 25 hours of a Metal Gear or Mass Effect than 200 hours of fetch quests and collecting crafting resources
It's not always about building a story. Open-world game can aim to build an experience, a sense of exploration, and construct an immersive world better than shorter, linear games can
The immersion breaks if you go to a cave that looks identical to the other so having notes and careful item placement to flesh out the world can be more important than just an uninspired big chunk of land, this is where most open world games are lazy with, the level design gets ignored in favor for them being able to say "we have the biggest open world ever!"
Suwat Saksri This is why "open-world" games are usually a pass for me. Not only is good level design lost, something which I feel gets taken for granted, but usually other aspects of the game are somewhat lackluster because they are trying to focus so much on making their wold huge. I find many of the game mechanics in these games to be shallow and boring.
+Richard Tsai Metroid style game worlds do both pretty well
+Suwat Saksri Actually the notes thing is a bit stupid really and lazy and cliche by now. Devs need better ways of world building than leaving texts for players to read or shoving up cinematics for everything they're going to do. Stuff like that breaks the flow and believability of any open world I feel.
Also caves in real life are pretty hard to distinguish from another cave because most caves look alike, with just the rock formations usually being different. But if you're in the same geographic location, you'd be hard pressed to find 5 caves with each looking very different from each other.
Outside of caves though is a different story.
+Digital Intent You can still have good level design, but usually open world games rely on procedural generation because it'd take far too long to design them by hand. You can still have good game mechanics as well, that in itself has little to do with open worlds, and what the devs focus is and varies based on game, not by open world vs linear.
Thanks for the shout-out. Loved this exploration of the issue!
I have 1500 hrs in Witcher 3, & I loved every minute..ok almost every minute, there's definitely some annoying/frustrating parts. I played Witcher 3 after work almost everyday for 2 years and, now that I'm done I miss it a lot. I listened to the books while playing and it was the best gaming experience I've ever had.
I think Persona 3/4 found a clever solution to this problem with its schedule system. Events happen at predetermined intervals in the game's year, allowing you to fill up the time in between with carefully planning your sidequests in preparation. But, this system still allows the designers to carefully control the rate at which the player experiences the main plot.
Victoria Dominowski This convinced me to finally buy P4 cause I wanted to for literal decade(s?). Is 3 any good as well? I heard good things about it but I’m broke as fuck and don’t wanna waste money on anything less than best.
@@AVerySexuallyDeviantOrange Go with Persona 3 FES or Persona 5 instead. P4 is about 25 hours too long in my opinion
thepurplewalrus TOO LATE I loved it, even if I still never finished it yet.
I don't know, but whenever you put up a video, I stop any work I'm doing and watch your video. *Quality*. That what pulls me in.
Since, *AC II and Brotherhood* had fresh ideas and relatively smaller worlds, they put as much quality as possible, making not only a great story, but a beautiful exploration of the era, as well as another "conspiracy - like" story seem real (Those puzzles and glyphs still have me paranoid). *Not hundreds of hours of content, but a substantial amount of hours of joy, discovery and satisfaction*
Let's look east.
1. *Way of the Samurai series* has a very very well thought out world, though smaller in scale, giving much more meaning to action and choices. And there is an immense sense of discovery, making replaying for different endings fun and satisfying. My time doesn't feel wasted.
2. *Zelda, and similar games*, but I'll point to *Okami*. I did only one playthrough of 40 hours (in game timer). If I cut mishaps, and confused wanderings, lets make it 35 hours. All I can say is I'd like to thank Clover Studios with those hours. Except for few "busy works", like fishing (which was quite interesting for short bursts), all the main and side objectives were made with care and love, just like in a TV series where the main and filler episodes are produced with the same care and quality to provide a coherent experience. *Much content was there, and all was there to cater to all types of people, the story player, the challenger, the completionist, and all aspects developed to its maximum*
3. *3D Mario games : Mario64, Super Mario Galaxy* Nintendo's approach to providing much content workout compromising the quality is amazing, with these titles one of their best examples. *With the set abilities of Mario (and Luigi), devs created some of the most creative worlds and interaction possible*. Hours are not wasted, they are invested to get better.
4. *Genres like fighting and bullet hell* Practicing takes hours, so playing them for longer duration makes *you feel a sense of progression and training*. This goes for sports fans and eSports games like MOBAs.
5. *JRPGs* Well.. Fighting and grinding takes 50-70% of the time. Few games tried work around. International version of FF12 had a fast forward button to speed up the game play. *But despite that, people love them to death, simply because of the unparalleled moments and experience that makes the all the busy work worth doing* (if you are playing a good JRPG, that is) Do you remember moments of you grinding your party to defeat the "Weapon" bosses, or the moments of Cloud with Aerith?
400 hours......of radiant quests that are all just go kill x at the end of a dungeon! like Skyrim
Paul Revere Well said. But I think everybody know what to expect already. They've been doing that since Morrowind so it's nothing new. Still better to have those "quests" as side activities then not to have them I thnink, just like in Witcher 3.
The only thing that they can make me play for 400 hours is to make the world actually interesting filled with actual characters to flesh the world out with good writing and careful item placement, i hope its not another Fallout 3
+Paul Revere Actually the fact that they got voiced protagonist and actually put down a number for hours indicates that it won't rely on randomly generated quests and will even add more humanity to the game. Because the truth is bethesda can make some pretty fine hand made quests like the one involving Harold from fallout 3
+Paul Revere The Witcher 3 is actually very interesting, the side quests are better than the main one in all but the wild hunt being bad ass as hell.
+v2DaBa I disagree. In the witcher games, it was better not to have those stupid generated quests. Boring. Witcher was great because of the finely crafted quests.
George for the record I really enjoy your thoughtful, thorough, and knowledgeable content. It has a high production value with quality writing and editing. Keep it up sir!
PS - For other viewers if you Skip the ads he gets no money. Consider letting them play to help him, like, eat and stuff.
YOU LIED TO ME TODD!
"400 hours"! What a fucking joke! Maybe he expected me to do nothing but radiant settlement quests that need your help i'll mark it on your map
lmao yeah that's complete bullshit. There's about 40-50 hours of remotely worthwhile questing in Fallout 4, which is way, way less than New Vegas. It relies on endless customization and looping grinding quests which is weak design
you can easily create a stupidly OP shotgun that basically melts anything you fire at with hardly any effort, and the higher difficulty just makes everything a damage sponge
Antiform I played 400+ hours. Idk why tbh lol spent way more on previous games, but that was before I left highschool
i bet they count random encouter into it. and since some encounter deactivate each other or can only be found after a certain level or event, youd have to do a lot of replayes to see every random encounter
I'm going to go ahead and say that mythological sagas or cycles are perfect structures for games like this. I re-read The Tain recently, which if you're not familiar is like the Irish Iliad and mainly follows around a warrior called CuChulainn as he gets strong, goes on side-adventures and takes on two whole armies by himself in the centerpiece.
But it doesn't feel like, say, a tv series where there's a lack of consistency or focus in the macro scale and only singular episodes have a coherent theme. Instead you have a couple of reoccurring themes that get explored throughout. On top of all sorts of action that would make for great gameplay that gets glossed over.
Not only that, but it has a timeline that doesn't always make sense if taken realistically and linearly (some characters seem to age in ways that don't make sense, there's inconsistencies in the order some stories take place, etc). In a video game, that hardly matters; when in the "story" did Trevor meet the old English tourists in GTAV?
So yeah, I'd look to those.
Also, as a side note, Devil May Cry 3 is a game that uses three act structure PERFECTLY, down to how each act lasts exactly 7 missions and is punctuated by a fight with Vergil. Even the cutscenes add up to just about an hour and a half. The gameplay/combat doesn't even feel like padding because of how it's cutscenes are paced.
Great editorial. Those about narrative structure are the ones I like the most from you! Keep it up! :)
I'm probably in the middle ground here, since I dislike with equal passion both exceedingly linear games and exceedingly dispersive one bloated with filler content.
The former take away way too much player agency and are far more concerned with showing to the player something, rather than letting him experience things; the latter (with Ubisoft and Bethesda in particular being the flagship of "shittiness") don't seem to bother with offering anything genuinely entertaining and diversified enough in the long run, beside having fairly poorly though mechanical systems.
But there's an issue with the whole premise of this criticism of video game narrative, as far as I'm concerned: I don't play games "for the story". A good narrative is all nice added value, but it's not what I look for.
I play them precisely because I like to be in control, being immersed in a fictional place where I have to manage on my own way, even if sticking with the internal rules.
Generally speaking I'm FAR more favorable to open world/non linear games, but I seriously wish the gaming industry (and audience) could stop pretending there can't be middle grounds between The Order and Skyrim.
There have been virtuous models for DECADES.
The entire Ultima saga, Fallout 1&2, the entire Looking Glass portfolio, Gothic 1 and 2, Might & Magic, Baldur's Gate, Arcanum, Vampire Bloodlines, Deus ex, etc, etc.
All games that managed to be open, non-linear, letting the player have a lot of personal agency and control, without relying on [much] filler content.
Sometimes even being tied with a strong and (mostly) coherent narrative in the process.
I'm with you. Not only for RPGs, but action adventure games too. Resi4 was open ended just enough for player agency and story/atmosphere balance. Okami, a Zelda like game, too was open ended, divided into regions, but each one was unique, and had different activities to offer. ACII, best ratio of "openness" of open world and "meaningful" activities.
I'm positive other devs will inspire from Witcher 3, and will game more thought to games, as they did back in the days with examples you told
FINALLY somone who gets it. Ive had that discussion time and time again.
A good open world game HAS a structure, in that each of its parts act as its own short story. Not completely detached from the "main goal" but still its own narrative.
And lets face it, those "several hudrets of hours playtime" are nothing more than artificial padding to produce a big number to print on the package more often then not.
"This hours-race was even going on 5 years..."
- Pfff, 5 years ago!? LucasArts used '40 hours plus' on the back of the box to promote The Secret of Monkey Island in 1990.
He probably didn't exist back then. do your homework, George!!!
GmTy Your comment is about as relevant as an egg.
Ó Braonáin Comment that he doesn't do his homework? That some of his opinions are based on ignorance? Claiming that something is a recent trend when it was a trend in a past 20 years is not very researchy and journalistic.
My opinions Are as relevant as an egg, as in whatever i might say he wont change a thing. Eggs are good, btw, im a big fan.
I like these discussion-type videos, kinda makes you scrutinise about the marketing terms developers/publishers use to advertise their games.
I'm so sick of this pointless hours race. Even if you have 100s of hours of content that really were engaging, players NEED to move on to a new game. Nobody can really find the time to play 10-12 games that boast hundreds of hours and play every hour of it before more games come out that boast the same thing.
Plus, I feel like a lot of hour counts are bloated by less than clever syntax. A dev saying he's probably played 400 hours and still hasn't seen everything? Well, a dev SHOULD be playing their game for so many hours through testing and replaying through the improvements. And the word "probably" takes away any responsibility of it being inaccurate or deceptive. "Probably" or "maybe" or "approximately" is a blatant excuse for pulling numbers out of your ass.
Don't let PR tell you how long a game is. Get those numbers from actual players.
Ever since the fiasco about the order being so short it's worried me that people think the should pay for quantity over quality in games. If this continues we'll have every major studio making a AC or FC.
Essentially, if you follow the principle "everything that happens, happens for a reason", as in there is a real purpose, real meaning to each and every game design aspect, all the way from UI, content, mechanics, world, physics, story, aesthetics, sounds, music and controls, while keeping in mind human needs and feeling, then you can practically guarantee a game to be good, regardless how long or short its supposed to be.
Hell, you could literally make an infinite game be a possibility with the right structure and design decisions.
It almost sounds like Witcher 3 was structured like The Last Wish (One of the few Witcher novels serialized in the states) with its cadre of short stories while 1/2 are more like regular books with a dash of CYOA. Story structure is really important for the series, and 3's shift into this wide world of hundreds of small stories really dilutes the main focus of the Wild Hunt that we were chasing for the past 2 games.
Highwang And they got lot less content than they deserve in the game because of it.
Here's hoping for an enhanced edition of Witcher 3 for the damn final act, then the game would be almost perfect.
Highwang Dont really feel like we were chasing the hunt, more like chasing his memories.
My only gripe about the story was how urgent they made finding ciri, yet geralt could spend days without even thinking about her.
Seriously had a smile and a boner throughout the entire battle of kaer moren, easily my favorite part of the entire game.
The question is, is most of this hundreds of hour worth of gameplay actually fun? This is something I found Dragon Age Inquisition lacked, where, yes they designed these large environments, but the world felt lifeless and most of the side quests felt bland and uninteresting.
Basically I hit the 100 or so hour mark trying to do everything but only enjoyed about a quarter of that time. Meanwhile in the Witcher 3 I didn't start getting bored until around that 100 hour mark, and that was the big difference for me.
same hither, i completed all quests in both dlcs and main game, over 100 hours, and i spend alot of time exploring the world and looking at beautiful scenery, when the amazing bloond and wine expansion ended i truly felt empty, because i know i will not experience anything like it in a long long time.
I had the same thing with dragon age, huge world but filled with the same side quests to do so it felt very repetitive to me. Played it for 80 hours and got sick of it.
Yeah, this type of design ties in with the MMO grinding, limitless content style that I really don't like. It sucks too because I'm too OCD about getting my money's worth and exploring content to completely ignore all the frivolous side stuff. In my experience the games that do it the best are GTAV, Fallout New Vegas, and now The Witcher III. In those games I was so immersed in the world and the great writing/characters that spending time in it never felt like a chore, and the vast majority of the playable content had at least SOME relevance to the games overarching ideologies and it's world. As a Bioware fan I've been disappointed with Inquisition so far as well. I'm only 12 hours in but it feels like almost nothing has happened. It's designed like a giant MMO with the biggest emphasis placed on combat and grinding, which is super annoying when there's random battles everywhere and I have to enter a tactical mode making every fight take 20 minutes. I'm interested in the story/characters but there's been so little of it so far that I'm almost ready to give up; it doesn't help that I played The Witcher III right before it haha. For example, I much, MUCH prefer the relatively linear structure of Mass Effect 2, with far more emphasis on driving story momentum and characters than the giant openness of DA Inquisition. I'd give up all the endless real estate of these worlds for more context and motivation. Also it ends up backfiring in terms of play time as well.. because Mass Effect 2 was so fun and it's character classes were so different I ended up putting in 200 hours replaying that game on different difficulties, seeing different story branches, etc.. where as DA:I is such a grind I can't imagine ever replaying it, or possibly even finishing it. This content for the sake of content philosophy has become a really tiring trend, playing through 2016's DOOM after years of all the big games being giant open worlds was such a breath of fresh air, and I've already spent 50 hours with a 10 hour game due to replaying on harder difficulties, searching for secrets and messing with a map creator.
AllHailShadow117 it's why I like just cause 2. lots of fun to be had
This is the problem a lot of arkham side quests have also to complete the Riddler's quest line you need to do all of his trials and then for the final fight you need to find 300+ trophies. Fuck that, all for a 2 minute cutscenes. The problem is that some debs will focus on the main quest then pad the remaining time out with copy paste quests- batman arkham knight had many examples such as campaigns of disarment and the ones were you chase an apc.
*Debs=Devs
I've started to find George's little vocabulary slip-ups kind of adorable, somehow. When he describes The Crew as an agrarian example, rather than an egregious example, I just get the image of an expensive car dressed up like a grumpy farmer suspiciously eyeing some hikers.
This is what worries me about The Phantom Pain. That it will become a chore to play. Especially the side ops which will just all be the same thing we saw in Ground Zeroes.
BrainSeepsOut and I've heard that there's going to be a multiplayer quality added where people can invade your game, which would mix it up. But this sounds like a game where they're throwing everything in, not making a quality experience.
BrainSeepsOut This what I think will set me off and probably get bored after playing it for a while. I don't have hundreds or tens of hours to play, I have a job and a wife and my gaming time is very limited. I miss the simpler times when you insert the disc and enjoy the game for a weekend or two at the most.
P.S: I never finished Bloodborne, Shadow of Mordor, The Witcher 3 and probably MGS5.
I feel the opposite. Sure, missions might all boil down to the same elements but each mission will have a purpose. You don't do a mission and just get your points and check off a box. You finish your mission and get a tangible reward, like a new item to develop, a new specially skilled staff member, or a bear. Kojima said TPP is following this episodic structure that George is talking about, and I'm excited for it to be another game that does it right.
Wednesday's Serial that multiplayer feature is totally optional and only occures if you expand your motherbase significantly.
gorund zeroes was only a tiny little map yet kojima managed to have sidemissions in it that were very different to the maimission. mgs5pp will be a blast. i am pretty sure kojima will set a new standart for open world games when it comes to gameplay and story telling.
Wednesday's Serial I'm probably gonna sound like an MGS fanboy in this comment, so I highly suggest you check the official gameplay videos they've shown off so far and maybe read the previews to double check your opinion.
Each new gameplay video, to me anyway, had very clear improvements over the previous one, and the latest one from Gamescom 2015, that shows off the Mother Base and FOBs (the 1v1 invasions) showed a fair bit of quality work you'd expect from a Metal Gear Solid title
The very first videos looked like minor improvements over Ground Zeroes, but mostly just a new coat of paint, but what we're shown now is a whole other thing. Various previews from journalists that got to play at the Boot Camp event and the preview events also say that the game definitely feels great and well polished.
The fact that The Witcher 3 has soo much content and soo much quality in each thing is kinda mental
The one thing that all my favorite games have in common is that you can feel that a lot of love went into them. There's no single thing or even a group of things I can point to that gives this impression (or lack thereof), but it becomes very obvious very quickly once you dive into a game. That loved quality can compensate for a lot of jankiness.
I had a Nintendo 64 VHS tape where the hosts claimed Ocarina of Time was a 100 hour game.
I'm going through this cycle with Fallout 3, The biggest chunk of my playtime was the side missions and the random events I come across in the wasteland. Never a dull moment. Like most 100+ hour games, there is such thing as burnout. I wonder how games can account for that in the future. Really interested How Fallout 4 will tackle it.
In any case great argument George. The Quality vs Quantity debate is still something game developers need to ask themselves, considering how much more media we consume nowadays. That is for another day though.
"Daggerfall" was the first PC game that made me spend hundreds of hours exploring its world.
It also helps that Witcher 3 has character-driven plots. Each area, Velen/Novigrad/Skellige has one or two characters that the plot develop around, and that really helped me to keep track.
Well, we still got people playing wow doing the same thing over, and over, and over, and over, and over.....
Hn Henrique ZING!
Hn Henrique Yeah, but in WoW you actually interact with other human beings while doing the same things over and over again, wich makes every experience different. Its a totally different experience.
chcuc I mean in the way that games like wow have a ton of content but its all the same. Its the quantity over quality. Yeah play with friends make it better but is still the same shit.
Hn Henrique That's like saying a story would be the same if you replaced all the characters. Technically, your right, if all your looking for is the overall plot and nothing else, but for a lot of people, characters make the story, and friends make the experience.
I'm speaking in abstracts because I actually don't know why people find MMO's fun, but I try to empathize anyways.
chcuc Interacting with other human beings can be a positive or negative experience depending on the human beings. Pretty sure everyone just watches youtube or TV or something to keep themselves entertained while doing god awful boring stuff in MMOs.
Personally I stopped enjoying and playing MMOs when I realized there is no challenge at all when it comes to PVE and PVP is an unbalanced mess. The only challenge in PVE is a social one, the challenge is, "Can you find enough people with enough time on their hands and actually know how to play the game to beat this? Congrats, you win." Trying to find intelligent people in this world full of idiots stopped being fun for me, that and MMOs require way too much of your time.
Loved the structure of the Witcher 3. The main quest was simple enough that you can play a couple times a month and still know what's happening in the overall story arc, and each sidequest felt lovingly crafted and interesting but could be digested in a single sitting. Even the treasure hunts had stories behind them.
Why did TH-cam suggest I watch this game again? Because No man's sky came out?
Plebeian+ "Watch this game"
"Watch this game"
this isn't Metal Gear Solid
Actually, Witcher 3's loot caches and treasures generally contained some pretty nice things in my case.
Yup, recipes for example
Its best to look at the Ubisoft sandbox formula as a huge, shallow pool that's seperated in tiny, straight corridors.
5:22 "egrerious".
Gotta love George's genius video critiques an his quirky pronunciations. =3
4:05 best Twilight Zone episode, ever.
He had all the time in the world to play video games...but he couldn't see them anymore. Poor, poor man.
I never thought about the Fallout-Twilight Zone connection before but it makes so much sense.
Fallout 4 400 hours? Pfft.. Try like 60-80.
+Im Tabe Most of it is still repetitive though. I'd say all of the meaningful content in the game could be finished in 25 hours.
SamPlaysGames Can't say I disagree with you
The real problem with Fallout 4 being 400 hours, is the fact that there are only like 20 quests in the entire game.
I did ten. then I modded the absolute fuck out of it. that's where content comes from in bethesda games. mods.
+JymSwis Which is an absolute shame. Random people make better content than professional game developers, for FREE. That is why BGS sucks. I love mods and modders, that doeant mean they should rely on them fixing their crappy games.
The Crew still makes me sad. I so wanted that game to be good. I really wanted it to be the spiritual successor to the TDU and NFSU games that it looked like it was.
There's no doubt that it's got a dull structure, but I'm not so sure comparing it to the likes of Assassin's Creed and The Witcher really makes sense. I mean, the game does follow the boring Ubisoft formula, but it doesn't really make sense to think of narrative progression in a racing game. The Crew may have had a narrative, but it was stupid and trash and shouldn't have existed.
Yet there are plenty of open world racing games that do a sense of progression well. the Forza Horizon games, and some of the older NFS games for example. I'm not sure what the "right" way to design progression in this type of game is, but what I'm trying to say that whatever it is, it's not what makes The Witcher or Fallout: NV work.
Scrustle Open-world racing games are inherently flawed since the devs have to compromise a lot of the 'track-design' for the open-world. What I mean by this is that often the roads on open-world games are way too large and not even remotely challenging to drive on. The advantage of closed tracks is that the devs can exploit all the nuances of the car-handling and car-physics thanks to tight and concise circuits. Drive-club is the latest example of that. However, when you look at open-world racing games like NFS-rivals, it basically becomes straight-line racing with very little input from the player aside from the boost and a drift or two. Now this can work pretty well on games like Burnout Paradise, which is basically a mindless crash-fest full of ridiculous jumps. But not all games should be like that. The NFS reboot for example has the pretension of going back to the roots of the franchise. But I don't see it work with an open-world track-design since the first NFS games are known for their nuanced driving-physics and precise handling. And like I said, most of the time this cannot fit into an open-world racing game.
*****
I think you are wrong there. It is possible to create great story based open-world racing games and the best example for this is Driver: San Francisco. There, the focus of the game is not so much on races, as it is on police chases. It is a culmination of all the light hearted and fun gameplay from the last decade. The same focus creates a story that is elevated by the gameplay - You are a police in dreaming in his hospital bed and ramming perp cars is a way to deal with being wrecked by the bad boss. It is story that compleately fits the gameplay.
And best of all -It is an open world Ubisoft game.
Great video man. Such an amazing gaming channel.
How to drag out the lenght of a game: Add collectibles, side quests that are very hidden and make you move long distances, add a lot of areas to 'explore' (even if it's just a flat part on a cliff), have minigames...
I like that assessment. Good open-world games do feel like The Outer Limits or other episodic shows that can be watched more or less out of order. That's certainly how I felt playing Fallout 3 & New Vegas. It even applies to a lesser extent to games like Divinity: Original Sin, which is more directed in some linear story path, but is still extremely open, non-linear and filled with little episodic moments and quests that enrich the world without needing to relate directly to each other.
3:48 Thank you, that's why so many games feel very side-quest-of-the-week-ish. Just like old TV shows with their monster of the week narrative structure.
One game series I've come to love over the years is Monster Hunter. I put about 800 hours in 3 Ultimate and 500 hours in 4 Ultimate. But these games don't follow the type of structure mentioned in this video. The way they last so long is because they're a grindfest. But the best kind of grindfest. All you really do for the majority of the game is fight monsters in various small, sectioned areas and then get taken back to a hub world after the boss fight where you can craft new equipment. I still have to wrap my head around the fact that after so many hours I don't find this boring at all. It's probably because of player choice, the game is huge in the sense that there are many things to experience, many weapon types to try out and even sub types and playstyles that can differ. Still, even when I stick to my comfort zone I don't get bored, even if I have been doing so for the past 1000 hours. There is just something about the combat which makes you want to keep playing. If I had to describe it I'd say it's just plain fun, everytime.
Good episode. The funny thing is this problem about "hundreds of hours" and little time to play it has already happened. You can see it from somebodies steam backlog, or simply from how many COD-like FPS games showed up where every multiplayer is stuffed full of more gimmicks and grinding more so than strong core mechanics to master (low hp easy kills, regen health, and a dumbed down matchmaking system that just leads the majority to playing TDM). Meanwhile there were awards all over the place, things to customize, and you get a new weapons with tiny tweaks every handful of matches. It was a perfect skinner box... only there's a bunch of them each year and they can take a while to complete. Seriously, whoever was buying all the military shooters of last gen, I doubt they ever had time to complete them all. I really just gave up with looking at shooters for their MP perspective, save for just the one or two series. The skinner box mentality really felt like it hurt online games.
Personally though, I'll always prefer 12 hours campaign focused games that have really good mechanics. Things like Dishonored, Metro, or the latest Wolfenstein. Witcher 3 is amazing though, and I also had a blast blowing up stuff in Far Cry 4.
It’s all thanks to Skyrim, man. It got everyone hooked on it for so much longer than just about any “mainstream” game before it that now EVERY big game has to try and compete.
I like how Skyrim did its big quests. You have four or five long five to ten hour quest lines then a bunch of smaller quests. To populate a fairly interesting world.
What's funny is that, the games I have the most hours in are strategy games, or otherwise base-building games, Civ V has THE most hours for me, at almost 3500 hours, and around that same one is Ogre Battle 64: PoLC, a strategy JRPG and it has a 3 or 4 Act story separated into many many episodes, and what keeps me interested is the progression of my characters under my command, and new character types and equipment that become available throughout the game for me to reorganize into new more advanced units to optimize certain things, Civ does much the same thing with the Tech tree unlocking more advanced units. I play these games over, and over, and over again.
A game that comes to mind is Red Dead Redemption. It did a great job at telling it's story in an open world and making me feel invested in the character. I'm not sure about a hundred hours but I did in put a lot of time outside the main game doing side quest, hunting, and other stuff that felt real to John Marston's character.
The binding of Isaac is an interesting example that promises hundreds of hours, though a game session only lasts around an hour if that. It asks the player to give it another go, each time revealing more content and randomizing everything about the playthrough. It makes each experience unique enough that it takes ages for it to get old, even though you're doing the same thing.
More game writers ought to take a page from Naked Lunch and its "mosaic whole" approach. It was designed as a book that could be "cut into at any point," and it works that way. Altogether it describes a world, accomplished in little dribs and drabs which, to a player of a game, are most analogous to short, self-contained missions. Over time they pile up, and you get a further and further developed idea of this world being presented.
There absolutely are ways to structure narrative with less linearity. Even just taking the approach of a picaresque, which I'd say some games have done successfully already.
I also find that the best structure is a middle ground between linear and sandbox, like Thief, System Shock 2, Deus Ex etc. These games have many, many ways to play, many routes to take and lots of important choices to make, but are confined within a thematically suitable level structure to maintain design "focus" and prevent "artificial length" and padding.
Additionally, linear design can be far better than sandboxes in my opinion, when it's done correctly. Between an hour-long sandbox sidequest where a decent percentage of that hour will be spent walking around doing nothing in particular and a 3-5 minute long shmup level (for example) where literally every second counts and can make the difference between victory and defeat, I would much rather pick the latter, although I still acknowledge that the former approach can have its advantages.
I feel like open worlders need to troll the player by making the main quest promptly die in a dead end lack of leads. You're tasked with finding something you have no clue where to even begin to look for, thus thrusting you into the open world sidequester genre. Until one day you suddenly discover the main quest needle in the sidequest haystack and get a tight and polished ending arc to finish off your game. A fraction of the sidequests would foreshadow the events to come in the ending arc, and an even smaller subset would give clues to the location of the main plot. It's one of the few things I enjoy about Fallout 1; it follows this setup. All leads on where to find a waterchip just die off super quick and you're left with nothing. So you just need to wander about the place doing random stuff to survive while keeping the water chip as a note to self as something to look out for.
Interesting to see you bring up TES as good examples; I remember your criticism of Skyrim's main quest and how all the other quests also came off as boring. In truth Skyrim had too many fetch bear hides or dungeon crawl for a lost ring just because someone asks you to type quests. Morrowind, on the other hand, did it better because even if the content itself of the quests could be the blandest thing in the world, it was always tied to you doing it for a reason that told you something about the broader political, social and geographical facts of the land. Take that early killing mudcrabs quest for House Redoran; in terms of the actual content it may just be killing a few mudcrabs, but shows how the system of the houses work, it conveys that the Redoran are serious and dutiful, and it gives a hint of the challenges of life on the frontier in the hostile land of Vvardenfell. Compare it with getting bear hides for the miller in Ivarstead. It's comparable in content but it shows, at the most, that the Rift has a bit of a bear problem. It might seem like nitpicking, but for me this distinction between a quest existing to show something about the world and a quest existing just to give you something to do is important and it lends that crucial sense of meaning, the sense of "why" to the actions of my character.
Morrowind not pushing its sense of urgency on you as hard as Skyrim (and Oblivion) also helped a great deal with this as you brought up in your comparison of the two games. It really seems to be an undervalued side of writing for an open-world game to make the player feel free to go off and side-quest, explore or fight if they so desire, without feeling like it interferes in the slightest with the main story. Even the great New Vegas from the accomplished writers of Obsidian, with its less linear main quest, didn't really seem to fully embrace this; Bethesda's recent offerings haven't even tried.
Actually I think the "Kishotenketsu" 4-Act Structure could probably work with an open world game like the witcher since it doesnt really rely on conflict or progression. It more relies on information, and getting the auduence to be familiar with the characters, and possible the world of the story. Which is exactly what you do in these kinds of games, you explore the world and characters to find out more about them.
Narrative dissonance and playtime definitely has a correlation. That bit about Ryo wanting to protect the act after vowing for vengeance for his dad was hilarious!
"Storytelling" is the antithesis of an sandbox game (I don't like the "open world" nonsense, it is the reason why Ubisoft games feel so generic).
I like to think of Sandbox games as Short story compilations. Elder Scrolls being similar to the Conan Saga in narrative formula and Fallout being like the Mad Max movies, which are like short stories in that they are vaguely connected through the character alone a lot like side quests in an RPG.
I don't think they got lucky in choosing The Witcher to make a game, I think CDPR knew that the main character and the general story structure would fit the RPG story-telling scheme; or at least they had a hunch. The books themselves are mostly collections of short stories. so there's no other way of telling The Wticcher story in a videogame than through a great RPG.
Other than that, great video!
Oh, and lets not forget the origin of videogame RPGs: that is, tabletop RPGs. Most RPGs, particularly the classic ones like D&D, are structured mechanically and thematically around the whole "quest" idea, signified by the basic concept of a dungeon (a series of rooms i.e encounters that present challenges individually and overall tell a cohesive story). In recent editions they call them adventures, but it's all the same. Even Shadowrun has it in its very name: a Shadowrun is a heist, a corporate espionage mission, a political assassination, etc. Basically, a cyberpunk operative quest.
And the best videogame RPGs are the ones who get the idea of a campaign right: every adventure, or quest, or whatever, tells you a little bit about the world, the characters that inhabit it, your own character, and an overarching story your charater(s) are part of. I loved the Witcher 1 because while doing all of my Witcher stuff I learned little by little about the world and its characters, including Geralt, and about the whole Salamandra conspiracy and stuff.
the 100 hour game has basically became a separate genre now, yeah they take different forms but they all play on the way a game would come out and it would be so massive and engaging that you couldn't help but play it for months (remember we where kids back then), now its a type of game rather than an event, so there being 5 or 6 of them year just means that consumers have to be more savvy with their purchases, not just because of the price but because of the investment one of these games needs just to start belonging in their world.
i remember getting Ocarina of time and for me that was staggeringly huge at the time, it took a huge portion of my play time but there where several smaller games that where played along side it, if zelda had turned out to be rubbish then what would have happened would be that i would have played the smaller games a lot more and ended up with nothing to play sooner.
these big games are a perfect accompaniment to normal lengthen games and short ones, they add value to the other games in your current play list and give you a feeling of truly entering a new world instead of just visiting one.
Having big games is a great part of games as a hole, and having more of them means more people will have their particular tastes catered too, although consumers need to make sure that the bad ones are thrown to one side and the good ones get the attention, it would be good if the media didn't just give everything a good score so that consumers could navigate the increasing amount of large games, it got so bad for me that even though people where saying that witched 3 was amazing, it all felt like i should be taking their praise and toning it down because of the current trend to paraise everything
I think for video game stories the character is often a witness to the story arc;
The world itself usually goes through the narrative arc that the protagonist in a movie would go through. The threat usually ends up destroying parts of the world itself and the NPCs within it, and bringing it to the brink, before coming back to something hopeful after the climax.
But the player character themselves simply becomes continually more and more powerful. Any moments where they are stripped of their collected powers and skills are superficial and short lived; A novel challenge that is usually rewarded with even more power simply as a prelude to the final "boss battle".
How many games have we seen where, after the climactic battle, the denouement is a cinematic of the game world regrowing, cities rebuilding, NPCs we've met thriving? Our "happily ever after" doesn't even have to be about our protagonist.
For me, it can even be a turn off to have it implied that the character lives on without my input. I'm usually more concerned with the world that I've been trying to save. So to me it makes sense that the world itself is the focus of the narrative.
This isn't universal, I'm sure, but it is maybe one way to reframe the way one traditionally looks at a story arc and apply it to video game narratives.
I didn't really like witcher 3's open world. The side quests were the best part, but the loot areas were very repetitive to me. I feel like fallout and elder scrolls worlds have a more interesting sense of environmental story telling. Maybe if I had played the previous entries, my view would be different. Right now, I travel into abandon towns in fallout 4 with a wonderment of what the heck actually happened there, when I see 100+ question marks on the witcher 3's map, it makes exploration feel more like a checklist. It's just my opinion, but still a very unpopular one. I may have enjoyed fallout 4 more, but witcher 3 was still a fun game for me.
Ok, so Fallout 4 is coming out soon. But I've been playing Fallout 3 for like the 3rd time, and I'm going places and doing quests that I didn't do in the first 2 play thoughts. Sure, 200+ hours is probably too much for most people in 1 play through but I think it lends games a lot more replay ability.
Here I am on the 3rd run and it's still giving me new experiences. Hell, this time I didn't go for my usual social talents and dumped all my skills into guns and explosives. That made the gunplay a LOT more effective and satisfying, and changed the whole feel of the game.
I never thought of RPGs as a collection of short stories, but it certainly makes sense. Maybe I should read more short stories.
Egrerious? That's a new one.
On topic, The Witcher 3 really is by far the most compelling open-world RPG I've ever played. There's so much to do and I, for once, I actually wanted to do most of it.
"As the deathclaw patiently stalks his prey, the hunt suddenly culminates in an explosion of action... it's over, the deathclaw has expended a great deal of energy in his pursuit, but now he has his price. the protein in the super mutant body will help sustain him over the hard winter months. it's a dance that has been danced countless times over the millenia and yet one cannot help but feel privileged of witness this latest step in the circle of life"
Men I love your videos! I always see them 1,2,3,4 times and I dont even care because your videos are sooooo good. Sorry is my english are not to good, Im from a Spanish speaking country in the other point of the continent (Argentina). CHAU!
I'll admit, as someone who is normally a fan of 100-hour convoluted JRPGs, I'm finding myself playing shorter, compacted experiences lately. Games like Juniper's Knot (~2 hours), any Ys game (~6 hours), Cherry Tree High Comedy Club (~3 hours), Time and Eternity (~20 hours) and Ghost Trick (~9 hours) are providing satisfying amuse-bouches of content compared to a lengthy game like The Witcher 3 which can feel like a slog sometimes.
I'm always torn, because as much as I want to dive into a meaty game like Pillars of Eternity or Planescape: Torment, the fatigue that you imply with these kinds of games conflicts with the plethora of instantly gratifying short experiences we have today. As much as I want to spend a weekend breeding up a new Pokemon party, the satisfaction/time ratio seems to trend away from these lengthy experiences. And I'm frankly at a loss right now as to where to spend my time.
The Uncharted games do a great job of sticking to what they intend for the player to do while offering slower moments. Not once have I felt a puzzle dragged out for too long or that a gun fight became repetitive. The thing about the "100 hours of content" games is what will the player have to do or can do in that time. Taking GTA for example there's nothing that is that time consuming in GTA V that isn't the standard running or driving screwing about. Most of the "content" is just doing sidequest which isn't bad but that is mostly what you'll be doing if you rush the story.
You're a pretty good reviewer & speaker, George. Well done.
I actually played Fallout NV for 200+ hours when I was younger. It was always entertaining and I dont regret spending the time.
The best example of a good open world game is the Gothic series, that is Gothic 1 and 2. If you can brute-force the controls and stomach the graphics, you may find a vast world full of side quests with such good writing that it can carry the game on its own. At least in German.
Exactly these points you mention in your video for good examples are hold. On top of it, it actually has a decent main plot and even character developement. The main character really has character, which also evolves within the game and especially in the second game. It also depends on the way you chose, 3 ways in both games that change in terms of story and gameplay. If you wanted to get the most out of one playthrough, you can do quests for every party, but only to a certain point. The protagonist has no name, but speaks and shows emotions if you chose to. Not just like "Ah, that's very sad." in opposition to "You deserved it, asshole.", but from a variety of diplomatic responses to insults to backstabs for other NPCs etc. It puts Mass Effect to a shame, frankly. All the time in tango with the quest, so it always makes sense. And this in every single quest, some of course are a bit more defined than others if it wouldn't make sense to have the character insult his best buddy.
What I'm trying to say is that every quest has pletoras of dialogue options, all within character. The character has no name, but that's the only thing missing about his personality, even though this is technically, as far as I know, about his background rather than his identity. And the background is missing as well.
The worlds of Gothic 1 and 2 have lore, consistency, mystery and character. It's a dick-version of fantasy, while the Witcher is gritty and dark. Gothic shares its name only with the architecture and art style closely tied to the German understanding of the architecture and fashion of back then, not the pale-people-type. It's German, Witcher is Polish. Witcher controls way better and probably has more or better lore, while Gothic is purely original in its lore and manages to give its game a vast amount of flavour/fluff without any original sources.
If you're in for story, and as I said, can really handle horrible controls and really dated graphics, then you owe it to yourself to play Gothic 1 and 2. But I'm not sure about the English version. As I said, it gets carried by its story and world in every direction. But sadly, this could mean that this gets obliterated by silly translations and emotionless voice acting.
Oh, and if everything fails, use cheats. I wouldn't hold it against you.
Finally, someone else who played gothic. I'm playing Gothic 2 now and it nails the open world rpg thing well.
Gordon S. Gothic was a big mess: bad controls, cringy dialogue, and awful HUD. I never really understood what people like about this game, I guess story and the overworld is pretty good but I couldn't force myself to deal with all the bad things. I'm not calling Gothic a bad game, but if I wanted a good story I could read a book.
Gordon S. Thanks for bringing up the Gothic series. Love those games. It constantly irritates me when I hear people praising rpg or open-world games and never mention Gothic.
v2DaBa In what language did you play it? As I said, I played it in its original language German. And, of course if you liked the type of 'rough world' itself, the dialogue was *supreme* hands down. Seriously, I've never played anything that comes close.
You're right with your other points. The difficulty, even if the controls were smooth, is brutal as well.
Don't know how I managed to get it when I was a teen. But the fluff/lore/dialogue/atmosphere were or was worth it.
v2DaBa did you play gothic 2 though? both games barely have a HUD
This is why I prefer JRPGs over regular modern RPGs. Games like Xenoblade Chronicles and Bravely Default are also gigantic 100+ hour adventures with tons of content, and Xenoblade in particular has tons of side quests and an open world, but all the side quests contribute to the overall plot and to character development in both games, all the while allowing the player to still focus on their main goal and the story of the game.
I like to think of open-world games like the Witcher or New Vegas being more similar in structure to shows like Doctor Who or Star Trek. That being in which most of the episodes while taking place in a chronological order are for the most part are self-contained stories or arc (these are the side quest), or there will be episodes that contribute to a much larger, ongoing story arc (these are the main quests).
Not only does a witcher tend to fix all sorts of problem, this specific witcher is canonically described as having a tendency of getting distracted by side quests - before the games even existed!
I think open-world quite obviously follow the model of a bunch of short stories and an over-arching plot
probably why witcher 3 works really well is because they made it rely in the model witcher has started from - short stories connected by characters and plot tit bits which then flow into a bigger narrative
It started out as two books of sidequests before starting the proper plot of the other like five books or so
To this day one of the most enjoyable narrative choices i've witnessed
Personally I think the good way to sell hundreds of hours of worth of content is to make it all interesting and engaging; either through making it a difficult or interesting combat challenge or by making it a well-told story either by NPCs asking you to do things or by notes and environmental details. This is why Skyrim is called wide as an ocean but deep as a puddle largely due to mostly bland and uninspired quests and radiant quests, with only a few stand out pieces of engaging quests and environmental stories (the Thieve's Guild quest comes to mind). Whereas New Vegas can do basically the same thing but be much more highly regarded because almost every side quest has interesting characters, plots, and are generally more complicated than going to a dungeon and either clearing it out and/or getting a thing (though I will admit fetch quests aren't uncommon in New Vegas). Morrowind does a similar thing with it's large open world but mostly by making the rewards from exploring and completing side quests actually useful more often than not and simply by letting you see more nooks and crannies of the strange alien landscape that is Vvardenfell.
Super Bunnyhop Very interesting timing on this topic, a French magazine just posted their thoughts on MGS5, and pretty much said the amount of time you can go off track between missions to do side ops can lead to the story getting lost and the pacing of it suffering as a result. Sounds similar to the problems listed in your video. I really hope they don't mess it up :(
Seeing that known game series are always finished in a standardized frame of time we will always whether have a cheap large game or a great smaller one.
Even with the technological advancements we have that optimize every other aspect in gaming, that simply will always be the law because it's dependent on the amount of time that was put in.