Revisiting this comment a while later, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that making open-world games is hard. Very hard. Too hard, even. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a developer team make a truly good open world game and I’ve played several of the big-hitters. Perhaps in a decade or two, the labour-reducing tools will be there to adequately fill up the open worlds we can create, without having to rely on repeated bosse; repetitive, dopamine-addled gameplay like with Ubisoft’s skinner boxes; or the opposite as in this DLC: “stylistic emptiness” as a cope for lack of content.
If I wanted to see empty hills and fields and marvel at the beauty of them, I would go outside. On the opposite side, if I wanted constant dopamine, I’d do drugs or something. The cleverest and most difficult thing to achieve is finding a dialectical synthesis.
I appreciate From Software’s attempt at it. I genuinely believe it was a worthwhile experiment and a world without Elden Ring is a worse one. But I hope the lesson they draw from it is that perhaps the next game should be more of a return to their roots. I don’t even think they should just fully revert to the more enclosed nature of the Dark Souls series, but instead take what is valuable from open world designs and leave what is less good. I hope that in retrospect, we see Shadow of the Erdtree as a halfway point; starting from the obvious imperfections of the very “flat” open world of the base game; beginning to constrain things once again, adding genuine verticality and lots of winding paths in SotE; and then finally, in whatever their next game is, the transition will be complete, a full synthesis from the thesis and antithesis, creating something both openworldish and metroidvania-ish. In that sense, SotE makes me optimistic despite its flaws, because it is a genuine step in a positive direction.
Not to get too personality-cult (Kojima, anybody?), but out of all the big developers out there, I think Miyazaki stands the best chance of doing it. I think he is a man who possesses a vision, borne of lifelong education in history and philosophy and literature, and with every game, he gets closer and closer to realizing that vision in all its glory. He is nothing without his dev team, of course, but my impression is that he’s aware of that too given that recent article about how he thinks the best way to get good results is to guarantee employment so employees don’t have to stress about whether they’re going to get fired and can just produce good work.
Revisiting this comment a while later, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that making open-world games is hard. Very hard. Too hard, even. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a developer team make a truly good open world game and I’ve played several of the big-hitters. Perhaps in a decade or two, the labour-reducing tools will be there to adequately fill up the open worlds we can create, without having to rely on repeated bosse; repetitive, dopamine-addled gameplay like with Ubisoft’s skinner boxes; or the opposite as in this DLC: “stylistic emptiness” as a cope for lack of content.
If I wanted to see empty hills and fields and marvel at the beauty of them, I would go outside. On the opposite side, if I wanted constant dopamine, I’d do drugs or something. The cleverest and most difficult thing to achieve is finding a dialectical synthesis.
I appreciate From Software’s attempt at it. I genuinely believe it was a worthwhile experiment and a world without Elden Ring is a worse one. But I hope the lesson they draw from it is that perhaps the next game should be more of a return to their roots. I don’t even think they should just fully revert to the more enclosed nature of the Dark Souls series, but instead take what is valuable from open world designs and leave what is less good. I hope that in retrospect, we see Shadow of the Erdtree as a halfway point; starting from the obvious imperfections of the very “flat” open world of the base game; beginning to constrain things once again, adding genuine verticality and lots of winding paths in SotE; and then finally, in whatever their next game is, the transition will be complete, a full synthesis from the thesis and antithesis, creating something both openworldish and metroidvania-ish. In that sense, SotE makes me optimistic despite its flaws, because it is a genuine step in a positive direction.
Not to get too personality-cult (Kojima, anybody?), but out of all the big developers out there, I think Miyazaki stands the best chance of doing it. I think he is a man who possesses a vision, borne of lifelong education in history and philosophy and literature, and with every game, he gets closer and closer to realizing that vision in all its glory. He is nothing without his dev team, of course, but my impression is that he’s aware of that too given that recent article about how he thinks the best way to get good results is to guarantee employment so employees don’t have to stress about whether they’re going to get fired and can just produce good work.