Aui wrote on 2025-02-02, 07:43:what about minecraft ?
That's a sandbox, not a world.
MrFlibble wrote on 2025-02-01, 17:46:Haha, I wanted to mention exactly this, but my post was already too long. Yes, a good while ago, while exploring the urban levels I had this idea that it would be vey cool to have a real city on Duke3D, with every building fully detailed and explorable from top to bottom. Now I think that this, while being a cool gimmick, would hardly serve any purpose in the actual level design. That said, there are some very detailed user-made urban maps like the Roch series (I know not all folks are fan of those though) that kind of scratch this itch, and Ion Fury did a great job at that as well (actually, I especially liked the preview demo level where the offices from Zone 3 were put into the building that houses the shopping mall in the full game).
that sounds cool - i remember the effort in creating duke 3 d maps, however if they could be procedural then entire buildings would be possible! although they could end up bland if too samey.
Back to the "perfect game" ideals, I like various strategy games, both real-time and turn-based, but what I felt lacking in many of those is the feeling that I'm actually controlling settlements (or nations, civilizations) of living people with actual needs. Sure, there are games where you'll have to manage food for your population, various tools and firewood for winter, and so on, but it all ultimately comes down to being a sort of playing mechanic to master, rather than an aspect of life for the virtual characters on the screen.
yes me too - i wanted to really see the effects of things like new tech rather than have generic numerical advantage and graphical changes. i really like empire earth, as example, but if playing seriously there is a constant need to ascend to the max tech and/or rush opponents. everything is an optimized spreadsheet in the end. I liked the idea of city builders like simcity and also later games like children of the nile with the idea of creating a living place, but they too tended to have optimization tactics[/quote]
Joakim wrote on 2025-02-01, 21:59:I mostly enjoy adventure games and open world games. I like games that are somewhat mysterious, where the story is not told too […]
I mostly enjoy adventure games and open world games. I like games that are somewhat mysterious, where the story is not told too open and with a lot of forced dialog. Instead give the player a chance to investigate and read books etc to find out what is going on in their own pace.
Also I'm tired of fast traveling, it kills immersion and should be at a cost for the player or at least with some limitation.
Other modern things that is more or less expected of games is a compass pointing to the objective, it is also very immersion-killing, as you don't even have to look at your surrounding.
In rpgs etc you should not be forced to level up your party members, I find it absolutely exhausting.
An other thing that is infuriating are automatically picked up quests. I do not like my quest log to be filled up, perhaps I don't want to save the farmers daughter at the moment and probably don't want to do it later either
all true of modern RPGs, i like them but soon enough i feel like i'm on the hook for 100 quests! also fast travel - i admit i use it but my preference would be a 'points of civilization' thing, where you can travel between towns but if you go into the wilderness you cannot just jump out of a cave, check there are no enemies in the immediate area and then fast travel, at least get back to the path first!
vstrakh wrote on 2025-02-02, 09:36:Aui wrote on 2025-02-02, 07:43:what about minecraft ?
That's a sandbox, not a world.
interesting because you kind of make "a world" in a sandbox, according to the rules of the sandbox. there is some overlap.
gerry wrote on 2025-02-03, 19:39:interesting because you kind of make "a world" in a sandbox, according to the rules of the sandbox. there is some overlap.
I'd call the perfect game "a world in a bottle".
And a sandbox in my book is just that - you play only with what you brought in. It doesn't expose you to new experiences. If anything it will turn into another kind of job on entertaining yourself, all by yourself.
vstrakh wrote on 2025-02-03, 19:50:I'd call the perfect game "a world in a bottle".
And a sandbox in my book is just that - you play only with what you brought in. It doesn't expose you to new experiences. If anything it will turn into another kind of job on entertaining yourself, all by yourself.
A sandbox could expose you to new experiences but i think i know what you mean, it is a set of rules and the 'gameplay' is emergent within the sandbox without goals or external prompts to action
this kind of 'game' is already being done without a game engine by ai generation
https://oasis-ai.org/howitworks.php
i have though about this before - if it is frame generation then no "engine" is needed, only something to do the 'training' on. hence a new game can be the result of training on old games or other inputs and from this the ai will generate the game on the fly, a kind of endless open world becomes possible
It’s all just good writing and game mechanics, even in simulation type games — not emergent gameplay or procedural generation. You need a number of decisions to feel a degree of freedom, and then you need those decisions to reshape things in a way that they matter. Considering the vast resources that are put into creating modern games, they remain incredibly shallow.
Aside from casual genres, the two types of games I most enjoy are either of the Red Baron/Wing Commander/TIE Fighter combat flight career type or the Europa Universalis grand strategy type. They make for two quite different games. I think regardless of genre, the more the game can do to place you there, the better and closer to perfect they are — given that you can make interesting choices therein. The main thing that takes you out of Europa Universalis is the ahistorical chaos of the brain dead AI. Flight sims fall short in showing a living world; they need to put you in the role, meet people and make decisions as you move up the chain of command.
To me, the perfect game would let you interact with events that shaped the world significantly, grounded by real history but giving you agency, immersive with its fidelity/detail. Vastly more content than these existing games, even if the overall scope remains similar. The perspective certainly does not need to veer all the way into tedious open world territory, though.
firage wrote on 2025-02-04, 11:50:It’s all just good writing and game mechanics, even in simulation type games — not emergent gameplay or procedural generation. You need a number of decisions to feel a degree of freedom, and then you need those decisions to reshape things in a way that they matter. Considering the vast resources that are put into creating modern games, they remain incredibly shallow.
Aside from casual genres, the two types of games I most enjoy are either of the Red Baron/Wing Commander/TIE Fighter combat flight career type or the Europa Universalis grand strategy type. They make for two quite different games. I think regardless of genre, the more the game can do to place you there, the better and closer to perfect they are — given that you can make interesting choices therein. The main thing that takes you out of Europa Universalis is the ahistorical chaos of the brain dead AI. Flight sims fall short in showing a living world; they need to put you in the role, meet people and make decisions as you move up the chain of command.
To me, the perfect game would let you interact with events that shaped the world significantly, grounded by real history but giving you agency, immersive with its fidelity/detail. Vastly more content than these existing games, even if the overall scope remains similar. The perspective certainly does not need to veer all the way into tedious open world territory, though.
That's a good analysis, especially in actions being able to "reshape things in a way that they matter". As a typical fps/rpg example its often illusion breaking how the player can cause havoc in one room and then engage in standard dialogue with an NPC in the next, or guards don't have any idea what was happening down the corridor. More pointedly there are simple attempts to implement consequence such as good/evil or karma etc, which allow for a kind of gaming of numbers rather than true role play to develop (though fallout nv does ok)
To model more authentic consequent changes in the game world might require something emergent not pre-designed though, something that is a programmed model will in the end be exploitable (even unintentionally) simply because the model will have limits, something emergent isn't as predictable. Using some combination of procedural and ai generation seems to be the way to do that, to create vastly more content
gerry wrote on 2025-02-03, 19:39:that sounds cool - i remember the effort in creating duke 3 d maps, however if they could be procedural then entire buildings would be possible! although they could end up bland if too samey.
My experience with Daggerfall suggests that this might very well become the case, but it will likely depend on the number and quality of the original prefabs that go into random interior generation. After all, real life apartment buildings are based on standard designs, and so is interior decoration in many cases. But it will likely get repetitive once the novelty wears off, there is no way to counter this. But if exploration would be rewarded with random items or enemy drops, that would make even the most repetitive locations worth exploring.
gerry wrote on 2025-02-03, 19:39:yes me too - i wanted to really see the effects of things like new tech rather than have generic numerical advantage and graphical changes. i really like empire earth, as example, but if playing seriously there is a constant need to ascend to the max tech and/or rush opponents. everything is an optimized spreadsheet in the end. I liked the idea of city builders like simcity and also later games like children of the nile with the idea of creating a living place, but they too tended to have optimization tactics
I would like to share my experience of a game that might be unfamiliar to you, called Horde: The Northern Wind (not to be confused with The Horde by Toys for Bob). This game takes the gameplay formula from Warcraft II and puts it into sandbox mode. There are no missions, you have the main character (hero/leader) who can travel between very large maps, and each map is a persistent world with several opponents, special events and characters. You start with only a vague goal to find and kill a dragon (and even that is something hinted at in the built-in manual, rather than spelled out straight in a mission briefing or something), but you will need to figure out how to do that over the course of the game, in what is actually a pretty adventure-like quest: you have to talk to characters, collect and possibly trade items and even solve simple puzzles.
At the same time, you build up a settlement, harvest resources and train troops like you would in a regular Warcraft 2 game. An important difference is that once you get to a certain level of base development, it will generate unlimited income in the form of taxes, and will allow to field huge armies (which was advertised as one major feature of Horde's engine) very quickly, provided you have the infrastructure for this.
Back in the early 2000s, being a Warcraft 2 fan without a copy of the game, I used to play this quite a lot. The game is fairly good at world-building, and I could just build up the settlement and watch it grow. There's no music, but a lot of ambient sounds (including idle chatter from your troops if you leave them for a while), which added to the "realism" of the game world. Unusual features include wildlife, such as bears and wolves in forests -- not actually seen as units, but you can hear the latter's howling, and they will certainly much a few unsuspecting peasants or even warriors who are not cautious enough walking in the forests (yes, infantry can walk through the woods in this game). Units gain experience and have somewhat autonomous AI, meaning that a unit might get frightened and run away from battle, or do so when wounded. The resulting skirmishes are rather hectic. There is also a very basic diplomacy system, which, well, let's say it works.
Later in the 2010s I revisited Horde, this time already in DOSBox, and played again, in a more aggressive style this time. You see, once you move to a new map, you can find a suitable place for your new settlement and build it from the ground up. However, you can also find one of the neutral settlements and capture it if you force them to surrender (normally, if an enemy surrenders, they just pay you tribute for a while). So I picked the starting character with the most favourable position on the global map (which is a grid of 3x3 regular in-game maps), built up my initial settlement to the max and started conquering neighbouring areas. This was also an interesting experience, although I think that when you know the game's limits, the enemy AI poses very little challenge; and since most maps have only one settled nation at the start (there are also nomads that start trickling into any map at some point), this strategy makes the game arguably easier, although you still have a lot to do and there are more obstacles in later maps that bring you closer to the finale.
Horde certainly has its flaws, having been developed by a small team (IIRC, it was their first project), but it holds a great appeal to me, and I'd like to think it's not only because I played it in my formative years as an RTS player. It's definitely one of the few titles in the genre where I can more or less believe in the game world as some kind of real thing and not just fancy graphics for the underlying mechanics. I even thought that it would have been nice if there were more options for peaceful playing, like having meaningful trade with neutral settlers or the like. I'd say it's a niche that it not really occupied by real-time strategy games: usually you either have straight build-n-rush thingies (not bad by itself, though), the German school that gets too focussed on economy and logictics (think The Settlers series), and the city-builders, which is frankly something I'm not enjoying too much overall.
gerry wrote on 2025-02-03, 19:39:all true of modern RPGs, i like them but soon enough i feel like i'm on the hook for 100 quests! also fast travel - i admit i use it but my preference would be a 'points of civilization' thing, where you can travel between towns but if you go into the wilderness you cannot just jump out of a cave, check there are no enemies in the immediate area and then fast travel, at least get back to the path first!
To be very honest, I'm a late-comer to the RPG genre, and haven't played any of the recent titles at all. I did enjoy Spiderweb Software's early Exile titles, as well as Nethergate, which I tried in shareware form in the 2010s, although I've not played any one to completion. I dig the art style (including the early versions of Exile where all art was drawn by the author's wife) and the world-building, the games might seem simple but there's considerable depth to be found. But these games use the old-school RPG mechanics like typing words manually to converse with NPCs (which is something I like immensely as there is no hand-holding, and with some imagination you can squeeze out extra information if you think up of the right keywords), and the requirement to visit a paid trainer to level up skills. Alas, the same developer's more modern games (they're still in business) have disposed of many of these mechanics in favour of more streamlined gameplay (even Encumbrance now only covers the items worn by each character, while everything else goes into a bottomless Bag of Holding), which is something I'm not a fan of. The pre-rendered art also lost a lot of charm that still holds with the hand-drawn sprites.
Although I've not played many new games as I mentioned above, I'm getting this feeling that the older ones did a much better job of creating an illusion of very large worlds which you are more or less free to explore. I think that both developers and players often forget that ultimately, the game world only exists in the mind of a player, while "objectively" it's just a series of pictures on the computer screen. The less a game leaves to the player's imagination, the more this world will feel like a stage set, requiring a lot of suspension of disbelief to maintain the illusion. Designs that strive to be more realistic ultimately alienate the player's imagination and reduce engagement to mechanical actions without any "make-believe" going into them. Or, at least, this is how I understand it, and the numerous complaints by players that I read online seem to suggest I might not be very far off the mark.
That said, I have a sort of a "dream game" that I secretly hope to dig up somewhere sometime that would offer a lot of depth and "food for imagination", wrapped in fairly ascetic, stylised presentation. However, so far I've not stumbled upon such a game yet, or at least what I know of is not exactly how I imagine this kind of game.
To me it's very genre specific. Even sub-genre specific. So essentially it has to do well what it sets out to do. There are some general things I dislike though, regardless of genre. And there are certain genres I fundamentally dislike, like for example visual novels, but they are entirely built on one of the things I dislike regardless of genre.
MrFlibble wrote on 2025-02-19, 15:36:gerry wrote on 2025-02-03, 19:39:that sounds cool - i remember the effort in creating duke 3 d maps, however if they could be procedural then entire buildings would be possible! although they could end up bland if too samey.
My experience with Daggerfall suggests that this might very well become the case, but it will likely depend on the number and quality of the original prefabs that go into random interior generation. After all, real life apartment buildings are based on standard designs, and so is interior decoration in many cases. But it will likely get repetitive once the novelty wears off, there is no way to counter this. But if exploration would be rewarded with random items or enemy drops, that would make even the most repetitive locations worth exploring.
that's the issue with lots of procedural approaches; repetition. To some extent it is realistic, as with the apartment example. I think to get the best would need to encompass some kind of sequential method where the landscape, location, weather and cultural factors drives the town layout and the buildings and contents are generated from that. Its more akin to generative ai - along the lines of "given this what happens next". With a sufficiently fine grained approach there will be variety enough to avoid that repetition
I would like to share my experience of a game that might be unfamiliar to you, called Horde: The Northern Wind (not to be confused with The Horde by Toys for Bob). This game takes the gameplay formula from Warcraft II and puts it into sandbox mode. There are no missions, you have the main character (hero/leader) who can travel between very large maps, and each map is a persistent world with several opponents, special events and characters. You start with only a vague goal to find and kill a dragon (and even that is something hinted at in the built-in manual, rather than spelled out straight in a mission briefing or something), but you will need to figure out how to do that over the course of the game, in what is actually a pretty adventure-like quest: you have to talk to characters, collect and possibly trade items and even solve simple puzzles.
that game sounds well ahead of its time! a kind of sandbox rts with some well thought out individual behaviours, shame it never saw wider influence as it seems a little more open in some ways than early 2000's rts type games
Although I've not played many new games as I mentioned above, I'm getting this feeling that the older ones did a much better job of creating an illusion of very large worlds which you are more or less free to explore. I think that both developers and players often forget that ultimately, the game world only exists in the mind of a player, while "objectively" it's just a series of pictures on the computer screen. The less a game leaves to the player's imagination, the more this world will feel like a stage set, requiring a lot of suspension of disbelief to maintain the illusion. Designs that strive to be more realistic ultimately alienate the player's imagination and reduce engagement to mechanical actions without any "make-believe" going into them. Or, at least, this is how I understand it, and the numerous complaints by players that I read online seem to suggest I might not be very far off the mark.
that illusion of older games falls away quickly though, in my experience, when you sense the basic repeating mechanic. As example are old SNES type RPGs where pretty soon the players realises they are doing the same things again and again but with different skins and stats, immersion in a self consistent 'world' is more important and the thing most difficult to believe - walking and not fast travelling may add to the realism but it wouldn't matter if a town had only 7 inhabitants (much as i like oblivion, i never really believe its a world)
MrFlibble wrote on 2025-01-30, 15:06:The specifics would very likely depend on the genre, but, in general terms (warning, very long post incoming): […]
gerry wrote on 2025-01-29, 13:25:[short version - what characteristics would make a game perfect for you? any actual games come close?]
The specifics would very likely depend on the genre, but, in general terms (warning, very long post incoming):
A. The game should be fun and interesting to play to me, meaning that there has to be something that would compel me to continue playing. I often think that this quality cannot be narrowed down to a specific list of features, but also depends on my personal tastes and my previous gaming history. Yet if I don't want to spend my time on a game, it will remain an occasional curiosity to me, however pleasant it might be in any other respect.
I also think it is quite noticeable when a game has sprung from a genuine creative effort of its author(s), and is a labour of love, or at least a work of clever invention; as opposed to all other motivations behind creating games, which, sadly, quite often boils down to going for a quick buck and attention-craving.
B. The game should be challenging but fair. I don't mind relaxing gameplay from time to time, but games that require no real effort will quickly become boring.
However, the challenge should be overcome by building your skill and learning the game's workings, not by luck/RNG or by simply going through all available options to find the right solution. For example, I'm not a fan of adventure games where there are "hard" counter-intuitive puzzles that you can only solve if you get an extremely lucky insight, or if you just cycle through all items in your inventory and/or dialogue options with NPCs.
C. I much prefer games with great replay value. If I enjoy a game, it'd better last for as long as possible. This may be achieved by introducing non-linear progression, various game modes, secrets, secret levels, optional ordinary levels and so on. From the more recent titles, I like it when games have clever achievements, that is when you have to accomplish some real in-game feat to get them (unfortunately there are plentiful games that give players completely dumb "achievements", such as for finishing a regular level).
D. Following the above, it's very good when a game is moddable and allows for plenty community content. I love user-created stuff, and the general notion of player creativity is very dear to me. Again, quality user content adds to replay value.
E. It is very desirable for the game to be open source and cross-platform. That will ensure better survival of the game overall, and is a nice thing to have. This also contributes to a much greater degree of moddability. The game does not have to be free as in free beer, I'm quite fine with developers making a buck off their work 😀 All the more I appreciate it if the game is free and open source.
F. A pleasant art style is always welcome. I don't expect every game to be a visual masterpiece, nor do I give much worth to cutting-edge 3D graphics that will make your latest GPU melt; but good art always makes itself visible, and that's a good bonus point.
G. A game is something meant to be played, and I have to confess that I value game mechanics and playability over everything else. However, I will much appreciate a game that will evoke some positive emotional response in me. I completely detest any form of glorification of violence or cruelty, and there are themes and settings that I do dislike, so I will not enjoy certain games that might otherwise hit the mark but go in directions that make them overall unpleasant to me.
I think that's about it concerning the theory, now to some examples:
Tyrian/Tyrian 2000 -- interestingly, this one seems to tick all or almost all of the boxes for me. I missed this game in the 90s when it came out, and discovered it in the early 2010s. Had a blast playing, completed the shareware episode several times in different releases (1.0, 2.0 and 2000), played some other episodes too. The trick is, I'm not a fan of shmups generally, so this one kind of bucked the trend for me. Anyway, the game is notable for excellent art, excellent music, great replay value, lots of game modes and secrets, and so on. The shareware episode alone could count as a complete, full-featured game. Amazing.
Duke Nukem 3D -- out of the famous 90s FPS titles, I'll pick this over Doom, simply because I like it way more. It's an excellent and fairly balanced game with loads and loads of user content, mods and derived games. And in a way, Ion Fury is the perfect successor to Duke3D for scaling everything up while remaining true to the core gameplay and level design philosophy.
Prince of Persia (1989) -- this game excels in level design and world-building. The replay value comes not from optional game modes or extra levels, but from the challenge of conquering the tightly packed 12-level adventure through the trap-filled castle/palace. When I was a kid I did not know of the save game feature, and I'd just play again and again until the clock would run out, making it slightly further each time. I think it's a perfectly valid strategy for playing and learning. At the same time, the labyrinthine dungeons and palace levels in PoP definitely evoke a feeling of a living world in me -- granted, this is one of my first games that I played as a kid, and I might be looking at it through rose glasses. But every level introduces new elements, hazards and enemies, and is completely unlike all the rest. Overall, I do believe it is a game design masterpiece that has not been eclipsed to this day.
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty -- I only played the singleplayer campaign, which felt perfectly written to me in a number of ways. First off, every mission is so designed that you should complete it in 25 to 40 minutes or so. During the pandemic I'd wrap up my work day an have a try at the next chapter of the campaign, then go to bed. Each mission gives you several achievements of the "clever" kind to be unlocked, encouraging players to master the game and replay the levels. And like the levels in Prince of Persia, every mission is unique and requires the player to do different things with different units. At the same time, all of this tells a story that is, granted, not the pinnacle of sci-fi writing, but it features pleasant characters, fun dialogue and decent world-building. The characters were not particularly deep, but relatable enough to roll along with the story. I don't know how well this would've worked, had I not been a longtime fan of the first game, but it does not matter. At any rate, I did not care for retcons and inconsistencies with StarCraft and Brood War. I had fun playing and replaying the levels, generally had a great time. I wish this game was not only free(-to-play) but also open source, but it doesn't look like this is gonna happen soon.
The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall -- this game is very much imperfect in many ways, but I like it. It has some great replay value thanks to multiple options for character classes, random quests and a huge game world. I've never been a very dedicated roleplayer, but this game just has this good balance of action and RP, making it appealing to me to come back to it over and over again. Sadly, the source code is lost and Daggerfall Unity is not a 1:1 recreation, but it offers very broad modding possibilities that enhance the experience even further. It also does well to evoke positive emotions in me. I picked this over other titles in the TES series that I've played (namely Arena and Morrowind) because Daggerfall is the perfect example of the mid-90s first-person game, and I like the art style with all the imperfections, partly due to nostalgia.
I'm working on a game and I have to say that this post contains many of my own opinions and gave me insight as to why I have them. I'll use this along with other posts from this thread for game design reference. Very well worded and honest post.
I am as smooth as a gravy train with flaming biscuit wheels.
gerry wrote on 2025-02-20, 13:03:that illusion of older games falls away quickly though, in my experience, when you sense the basic repeating mechanic. As example are old SNES type RPGs where pretty soon the players realises they are doing the same things again and again but with different skins and stats, immersion in a self consistent 'world' is more important and the thing most difficult to believe - walking and not fast travelling may add to the realism but it wouldn't matter if a town had only 7 inhabitants (much as i like oblivion, i never really believe its a world)
I don't think that repetition in itself is a bad thing -- although a lot depends on other design choices, of course. I remember that in Spiderweb's Exile, I had this really grounded feeling of a complex world that is pretty inhospitable to the player, or to humans in general. IIRC, there were rather frequent random encounters with mobs of orcs/goblins and lizardmen (and the cat people are also hostile in the first game) when exploring the world map, which played out rather samey when I grasped the combat mechanics, but it just added to this feeling of a hostile environment. At the same time, the player is also rewarded with progression as more victories bring you closer to levelling up your party members.
In Daggerfall, and I guess in every RPG in general, from a certain abstract standpoint every quest boils down to "go to place X and interact with object Y", place X being a town or a dungeon, and object Y either an enemy to kill, NPC to talk to or item to pick up. However, there's enough lore and flavour to wrap around this basic scheme, which, coupled with the random selection of locations, helps create vastly different adventures each time you pick a quest -- provided that you let your imagination do its magick. Even random area generation can be beneficial, because I admit I'd be lost in Daggerfall's dungeons forever if the layouts did not repeat themselves (allowing me to memorize what goes where) but retained the same level of complexity. On the other hand, take Morrowind (I've not played later TES titles), and the hand-crafted dungeons for the most part pale in comparison with Daggerfall's, barring a few exceptions. There's a good deal of hit-and-miss, but in some cases I could quite naturally come up with a whole background scenario for a random dungeon in Daggerfall, like the one that was populated by brigands, spiders and skeletons, which I imagined was a fortress of an unscrupulous warlock who was plotting something.
Of course, on the other hand there's games like The Bard's Tale, which I tried out in the form of The Bard's Quest (I believe it's simply the sample scenario from The Bard's Tale Construction Set that someone tried to sell as a shareware game), and I think that the repetition-reward ratio can be only described as acceptable under the technological constraints and the overall availability of computer entertainment at the time of the original game's creation. I suppose this also applies to the old console titles that you've mentioned. Yet I can still vividly picture myself as a kid back in the early 90s playing the same Bard's Something game with considerable interest, if not amazement and awe -- had I access to that game back then, that is. After all, it is still barebones enough to allow your imagination to put meanings into it and make the world alive. The trick is that this process of finding meanings is not automatic, and I guess if a game has no appeal to you you won't be able to see anything beyond its surface appearance anyway -- because there's no desire to create those meanings.
It is not to say that modern games leave absolutely no room for imagination (although, admittedly, going overboard with realistic detail indeed sets imagination aside for many aspects of the game world), but the problem as I understand it is that the player is no longer expected to apply imagination at all, and is often encouraged to sit back and just soak in the story that the developers chose to tell. It is kind of like with cinematography where you can see through the practical effects of the old films, yet in many cases they feel more impactful compared to modern CGI that can insta-produce any imagery of supposedly breathtaking scale, but ultimately it very quickly loses its novelty and awe-inspiring value.
Speaking of Morrowind, I mentioned above that I wasn't an RPG player in my formative gaming years, and I tried out this game only relatively recently, after playing a lot of Daggerfall in the 2010s. I deliberately did not read up on Morrowind to play it completely fresh, but I had expectations of something similar to Daggerfall (which were to be subverted as it turned out). I also wanted to do some "serious" role-playing and decided to keep a mental diary of my character's observations to add more depth to my playing experience. It turned out that Morrowind is not really suited for this kind of approach, as it is very narrative-focussed. There are exciting stories to be told and the devs will tell them, whether you like it or not (BTW, I found that the most fun stories are found in the game's numerous books, which I quite enjoyed reading, especially the story of Decumus Scotti). Everything else is strictly secondary, and in many cases, irrelevant.
Once I realised this, I ditched my first character and started anew, and when the next character fluked as well I went on (after a hiatus) and created another one, which turned out to be quite functional. By this time I had already grasped enough of the mechanics to roam freely in the world without having to worry that I'd softlock myself into not having enough cash to maintain my weapons and armour in a functional state, which ruined my previous attempts. Sometimes it is a good idea to shift focus to mechanics from other aspects like the game's plot, because reflecting on mechanics and rules is pure intellectual work, although not without applications for imagination. What about the role-playing aspect? I decided to roll along with the devs and let them tell their stories, which are actually quite nice overall. The game world in Morrowind was decidedly created to appear beautiful, but the characters mostly fail to convincingly pretend they're real persons, as they never sleep, eat or engage in complex behaviours but just either stand in the same place, or walk around aimlessly, ignoring bad weather and other inconveniences if outdoors. Yet the quest dialogue and narration allow for adding some depth to these stage sets, provided you're more or less willing to do so. If anything, the devs are good story-tellers, and that compensates for other deficiencies of this game -- yet you still need to apply some imagination for the stories to be engaging. What the characters lacked in outward appearance of realism, they made up for with relatable traits that you'd discover in conversations with them (for example, I liked the quest where I had to figure out a meaningful present for an Ashlander merchant, and another one where I inadvertently convinced a noble youth to repent and start a righteous life).
That said, I also put my own meanings into Morrowind. I joined House Redoran for roleplaying reasons, and their wasteland strongholds heavily reminded me of Dune, which is one of my favourite pieces of (philosophical) fiction. While the rest of Vvardenfell left me largely unmoved -- I only registered that the game must have appeared gorgeous to players who bought and played it on release -- the dust storm-blasted wastes and the windtrap-like buildings of House Redoran evoked some more definite responses in me. It was cool to feel moderately safe indoors while dust storms raged on the surface, and it felt like an adventure to trek on foot from Ald-Ruhn to Maar Gan (there's one quest to find a lost merchant along that route too). I never expected, and never intended to have this experience from this game, but here you go, and it was quite neat.
Cursed Derp wrote on 2025-02-24, 16:18:this post contains many of my own opinions and gave me insight as to why I have them. I'll use this along with other posts from this thread for game design reference. Very well worded and honest post.
Thank you for your kind words!
MrFlibble wrote on 2025-02-26, 14:35:The trick is that this process of finding meanings is not automatic, and I guess if a game has no appeal to you you won't be able to see anything beyond its surface appearance anyway -- because there's no desire to create those meanings.
It is not to say that modern games leave absolutely no room for imagination (although, admittedly, going overboard with realistic detail indeed sets imagination aside for many aspects of the game world), but the problem as I understand it is that the player is no longer expected to apply imagination at all, and is often encouraged to sit back and just soak in the story that the developers chose to tell. It is kind of like with cinematography where you can see through the practical effects of the old films, yet in many cases they feel more impactful compared to modern CGI that can insta-produce any imagery of supposedly breathtaking scale, but ultimately it very quickly loses its novelty and awe-inspiring value.
this is true, i think generally a game can degrade the imaginative value given to it by a player by eroding the illusions with too much play-mechanics or a sense of repetition ("hang on, every town is the same just with bigger monsters and better treasure...i know how this game works now"), to help with this, variability has to be more than skin deep and game mechanics not be too intrusive. I think its also to do with believability, in the context of the game world. If something appears to break the game world's own continuity then its breaks the illusion. In that sense adding lots of details can also break illusions, exploring an office in an fps/rpg i expect to be able to read the paperwork, i expect an explosion to knock doors down and so on
