this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
80 points (85.1% liked)

Games

32931 readers
2068 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

  1. Submissions have to be related to games

  2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

  3. No excessive self-promotion

  4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

  5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

  6. No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
80
Shower thought, traversal in open world games have turned from game mechanics to loading screens (lemm.ee)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
24 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

3 big ones recently, this year was God of War Ragnarok, FF7 Rebirth and Jedi Survivor

Back when 3d games were new, tomb raider, prince of persia etc the traversal was the challenge, the gameplay.

Eventually they got watered down and simplified, now they are cleverly disguised choke points while the open world or boss ahead loads.

You'll notice the squeezing between narrow walls to separate 2 areas or a simple climb against a flat wall just before a boss. I think Uncharted was the first to do this as they moved away from climbing and focused more on combat and puzzles.

There is no reason to actually have the characters climb anything if it's not fun or there are better ways of traversal, GoW being the biggest offender here

Jedi Survivor embraces traversal more but still locks you out with invisible walls and floors that kill you

I think I might prefer the elevator loading screens from Elden Ring, at least you get to stretch out your fingers when waiting

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Ironically, one game that’s handled open worlds a bit better is on a console less capable of handling them.

This is even more interesting when we consider that BotW was not developed for the Switch, but for an even less capable console: the Wii U.

Hardware limitations haven't been a real barrier to open world continuity for a long time, if ever. (Seven Cities of Gold allowed you to sail from Europe to the New World, and then explore it over land, with no loading screens along the way. That was on 8-bit computers with 48KiB of RAM, loading data from some of the slowest floppy drives ever, back in 1984.) Doing it on lower-end machines does require some planning ahead, but the effort is worthwhile, IMHO.

Breath of the Wild uses it to promote exploring towards vantage points and then interesting sights.

Not only that, but to incorporate verticality into the game mechanics. Reaching things that are surrounded by hazards, or taming especially wild horses by gliding to them from a mountain, for example.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yeah anyone who thinks 3D games without loading screens are only possible on SSDs needs to go back and play Dungeon Siege or Asheron's Call. GTA3 mostly didn't have loading screens either.

The Witcher 3 wasn't even that long ago and it didn't need loading screens on HDDs. (traveling between the main big areas did, but I guess that's more because they didn't have an animation of Geralt taking a boat or something, everything else streamed fine)