Mike Laidlaw: "Inquisition’s World Was A Bit Hollow"

Open World Game: A game which takes place on a single map where the player does not have to go to any other area (a central hub) to access any other mission areas. Ex: The Elder Scrolls series (aside from ESO I believe) ,FO 4, Ghost Recon Wildlands.

How does Inquisition fit this definition with its many distinct maps? What is your definition?

Moreover the problem with calling Inquisition an Open World Game risks calling any game with multiple maps Open World Games. Like DAO, DA2, the MET, or even Call of Duty. Because the definition of Open World Game looses all useful meaning (a problem which comes up often it seems). Fine one can have the argument all day long about whether or not the maps were too 'large' and 'empty' as Laidlaw himself apparently invites but when talking about these issues we have to be very, very careful about the language we use and not to misuse it to avoid confusion. And if you were judging Dragon Age Inquisition as an open world game, like Skyrim, then no wonder you think the game failed since it would never match the kind of gameplay you'd have in Skyrim. (Even though I think Inquisition is the far superior game to Skyrim overall.)

I'm tired of big open-world games (or I just simply don't have time for those anymore, Horizon was a goddamn slog for me)

I opt for a lesser world filled with meaningful content, like Yakuza.

Roleplaying is always about the player creating content. What makes a good RPG is leaving us the space to do that.

Disagree. If I want nothing but my own content I wouldn't bother with an established setting or fleshed-out characters.

That's a much too restrictive definition, designed to exclude DAI. Horizon Zero Dawn has a hub, in fact it sequentially puts you in one hub then another, just like DAI. But you aren't restricted to travel to/from the hub, that is a very specific DAI design choice that Mike explained in the article. They wanted to insure that people didn't get too disconnected from the flow of the main quest in their random wandering, so they forced a return to the hub to allow "events" to occur to remind the player that main quest shit has to get done. He even mentions that Skyrim did not have such a forcing function and you could play the game for hours without ever getting "the shouts" (the way it was quoted made me giggle, because it sounds like "the shits"). Personally, I thought that was a great thing about Skyrim and I played many characters that never got the shouts, but I digress ....

It's also a continuum. Even games that are considered linear, like Hellblade, have areas where you can roam freely and choose the order in which you do branching linear paths.

It's silly to say DAI is not open world, given that the dev team was put under pressure to make DAI be a damn open world game, though Mike didn't say what the stated rationale was. We can guess it was to stay competitive with Skyrim and the like.

Personally, I'm moving away from the whole open/closed world terminology. It's not a useful descriptor any more, in the same way RPG is useless. It's more useful to talk about how much choice players have in exploration and in the sequence of decisions/quests. The more choice the player has, the more open world it is. DAI has way more choice than Hellblade does, but less than Skyrim and HZD.

BZZT! False. TW3 was an endless nightmare of loading screens. Proof:



This seemed to vary for a lot for different people and platforms, but for me on PC, I'd get loading screens just trotting Roach from one place to another, while most other people only got them during fights or dialogue transitions.

Whether people ask about my past has no bearing on whether that past occurred.

I can't tell what the modern definition is. It doesn't seem to make any sense. As I see it, any meaningful definition of the term would need to encompass all RPGs ever, which includes tabletop roleplaying.

Also, I had to look up "OG". That one is new to me.

Regarding my signature, that comment was made about me in 2006.

Still checks out even today.

I'm having similar problems and it isn't a loading screen thing. It seems like if you have a dual core CPU, it doesn't matter how good your GPU is you might encounter small freezing every minute or so. It's a pretty common problem on PC (and freaking annoying). And yes, it freezes even in dialogues, there's a bottleneck with that guy's PC same as mine (my GPU more than meets the requirements so that's not the problem).