Fallout and RPG veteran Josh Sawyer says most players don't want games "6 times bigger than Skyrim or 8 times bigger than The Witcher 3"
Fallout and RPG veteran Josh Sawyer says most players don't want games "6 times bigger than Skyrim or 8 times bigger than The Witcher 3"
Sawyer says most players, including himself, aren't "concerned with finishing games" either
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8 times bigger than Witcher 3 filled wilth Witcher 3 quality content would be a godsend. 8 times bigger than Witcher 3 filled with procedural generation and AI slop... not so much.
I will argue that Witcher 3 did not have enough content for it's own world. Don't get me wrong, the content was great, but there's large swathes of emptiness inbetween. The devs tried to fill it with map markers that got repetitive very quickly (hello, random floating barrels).
IMO, downscaling the world to 75% size and reducing the amount of non-quest content would have made the game better.
The whole reason I burned out on W3 was trying to be completionist and doing all the map markers before moving to the next area.
Honestly I think these games need more points of interest that are not marked on the map whatsoever, and don't matter towards 100% completion.
I eventually went through the Witcher 3 post game and got every single marker but it was basically background work while I listened to audiobooks, I didn't come across anything interesting for hours. However I do acknowledge that those markers aren't necessary meant to be sought out, but stumbled upon.
If we're copying Witcher 3 levels of content anywhere, can we leave behind like 95% of the ocean based points of interest? That was the absolute lowest point of the game for me by a mile.
I would be happy if they never touched wayer again. Swimming and boating were awful in The Witcher series.
I do think a huge world with an engaging and dense design can still be made worse with size. In some games like Skyrim, Breath of the Wild or GTA 5, you could probably drop me anywhere and I'd know where I was, half due to good and differing region design and half because the map isn't that big.
Back in 2015 I'd dream of a GTA 5 expansion that adds San Francisco and Las Vegas to the map, turning the north and east of the map in to a 500 yard straight of water, but in reality, two more large cities and their surroundings suburbs and wilderness would have never kept it's memorability like the first region.