You can never go back. (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, May 05, 2022, 10:28 (940 days ago) @ ManKitten
edited by Cody Miller, Thursday, May 05, 2022, 11:22

I’d honestly be surprised if I ever play Infinite’s campaign again, and that’s the first time I can say that about a Halo campaign.

This was biggest let down about the game. I completed the campaign, did all the side quests / world activities in just over a week. Now there is literally nothing left for me to do.
I don't want to start a new campaign to collect the stuff I missed in missions.
I don't want to start a new character that has no power ups.

I just want to jump into a mission and play it. Part of the fun of the Halo campaigns (for me at least) is playing the linear mission, in a huge environment and seeing what all I can do. Limits = Creativity. When you're fenced in, you find ways to get out and have fun. When you're in the open field...you just...wander around.

Halo was never a "do whatever you want" kind of game. You were given a mission and tasked with completing it. So go figure out how to do it the best! For me, this whole concept was thrown away for Infinite.

I get that sense too from many modern games besides Halo Infinite. Think about how most other art forms condense life to the interesting parts.

So when you think about it, the 'open world' necessarily implies a dilution of the interesting. If every inch of Halo Infinite were as designed and as dense as the levels in Halo CE, then it would not just be a really really really long game? The open world in a sense requires much of it to be boring and there for mere traversal, or else it'd just be a giant traditionally designed level.

Older open world games were small enough not only to develop, but for players to have a full sense of it as well. Zelda's overworld was 16 screens by 8 screens. 128 screens which could not only be individually designed with care packing an experience into each one, but a player could probably deal with holding all that in their head while navigating, or at least make a map. The sheer size of the open world in games now precludes both of those things.

This is what modern open world IS. Loosely designed challenges connected by a world with not much in between. Look at the sheer number of side jobs, collectables, etc are crammed into all these games. Extrinsic rewards because the world doesn't provide as much intrinsic fun.

The genre requires the expansion of the game into the mundane. The way I see it, there are two choices you have when making an open world game. Either make the mere traversal of those paths in between fun to navigate, thus making the mundane interesting again (Death Stranding, BotW), or just… don't do open world.