Polygon's open-letter to BioWare regarding their open-world-like games.

Andromeda is a step in the right direction in open world story telling. you had the overall goal and progress of "viability" as a mechanic, to make your grindy quests feel more important. however, the quests themselves are still largely forgettable and lackluster.

theres just way too many of these forgettable quests that feel more like clutter on my map than meaningful stories. if there were fewer of these sidequests, with minor but reappearing characters that tie them together, with an interwoven story it would have much more of an impact.

instead we get a plethora of forgettable characters with shallow sidestories that i frankly dont remember.

I played DAI and The Witcher 3 like a robot (and lots of other games), optimizing my quest log to finish stuff as fast as possible and I ended up burning out real fast and getting bored of side questing and map icons and just wanted the game to end after 30-40 hours into it. Then I had the same results trying to replay BG1 to play Siege of Dragonspear and I knew something was wrong we me and not the games.

I took the time to compare how I was playing those games and how I played Bethesda games or BG1/BG2 back in the days and I realized that I didn't try to optimize my play time. I started to do that (optimizing) when I started to play MMORPGs and linear mission based games and just more games in general (you know not enough time, too many games).

My solution was to actually role play my character and not look at my quest logs as a checklist. Now when I look at my quest log I wonder what my character would do based on his character and not how should I optimize my quests to do as many as possible today. I had a blast in MEA because of that.

Huh... and here I am finding Inquisition and Andromeda to have two of the better open worlds and oth are two of my favourite games of all time.

But then the throwaway mention of TW3 exposed the author... that is an open world game that suffers exactly what he says Biowate's recent efforts suffer from.

Of course there's a potential waiting to be tapped. The toil of creative media is to arduously attempt perfection and forever fall short of the mark, but more specifically, we've yet to have a perfect Mass Effect game. You could argue the same with any BioWare property, but Mass Effect is probably the best example. BioWare have flipped, refined, flopped, and removed all up and down the franchise to greater or lesser effect, and they've not yet found the sweet spot.

The problem now is that BioWare is charging towards perfection from the wrong direction, and they're falling flat on their face because of it. They're building these massive spaces, slowly plumbing the depths of this "open world" thing (far too slowly, I might add, given how much design reference they have available), all while expecting that the stuff they've always done well (the characters, the setpieces, the gameplay, etc.) will just be fine as it is. Clearly, that's not the case.

With Inquisition, you can sort of make the argument that there's a good, linear BioWare game under there, because the main quest hold up fairly well on its own, but the pointless questing still brought down the game's pacing and atmosphere. And Mass Effect isn't in nearly as good a state as Dragon Age at this point. Andromeda may have improved upon Inquisition's mundanity (marginally, of course), but the core writing talent seems to be drying up. I can confidently come out of Inquisition saying that it had one of BioWare's finer companion lineups, not so much with this recent Mass Effect. The creative core of this franchise seems to be hemorrhaging from all ends. The writing isn't up to snuff and the open world still isn't good enough to justify it.

Why continue floundering about in an attempt to find the perfect balance when you're squandering the reputation of the franchise? I shouldn't have to keep judging BioWare games based on how good their sequels could be.

BioWare had a design paradigm that worked. They should go back to that, bolster their creative and managerial talent, and on firm footing, and firm footing only, they should slowly and confidently expand from there.
I really don't like it when people say stuff like this, because I despise the notion that technology should be used to make bigger, not deeper. If Frostbite can render massive landscapes with good fidelity, then it should be able to render small vignettes with great fidelity. I find it so odd that people actually prefer having big zones with nebulous rocks than small ones with historical detail.

Dead Space 3 was made in Frostbite years ago, and Mass Effect (or just about any other game sci-fi) has yet to reach its level of detail.

TW3 gets mentioned around here a lot and i think it is one of a the reasons the game was released in the state it was and well still is mostly. Because after TW3 was released and gaming media and players collectively creamed their pants about it some executives in EA had a meeting and decided to change the game to be more like witcher and damaged the whole game as a result.
This is of course pure speculation but lots of speculation from everyone is the Bioware motto.

I doubt it. At the time of Witcher 3, DA:I was already out for half a year and that already showed where BW's design philosophy was headed. Also, ME:A was already in development for 3 years at the time, which would mean it was way past its concept stage.

As others have said, Skyrim seems like the more like inspiration, given the timing of things.

This is one of the silliest criticisms of Andromeda i have yet read. This notion that Andromeda is an open world game is a little dangerous to the future of gaming in general.

Andromeda is no more an open world game then DA 2. And had the author actually bothered to play the game he'd realize that most quests don't open until you get to a certain place. Ie the motivations are based around narrative. Not to mention the concept of viability.

His commentary is accurate but needs to be pointedb at games like FO and TES. You know, open world games?

For me the flow of a game encompasses all aspects which can be broken down into a few key aspects:
- dialogue with npcs (this includes all character interactions involving dialogue)
- interaction with the environment (this includes everything from combat, trading, crafting, mining, exploring, salvaging, etc...)
- cinematic sequences to bridge events (cutscenes, galaxy map, etc)

For a game to have engaging narrative, for me that doesn't mean an overwhelming amount of dialogue and no other gameplay elements.

Rather everything should connect in one coherent flow, which altogether defines the narrative of the game, gives it substance and meaning and makes it relatable - like watching a movie or reading a book.

For example, driving across a barren ice field for 5 minutes is part of the narrative. In a book that might be glossed over in one sentence, but I want to feel the experience which is then stored as a memory in my mind. As is engaging in combat with that enemy outpost, salvaging what equipment you can find from it, stopping to admire and be in awe of the environment, making a decision of where to move next, chatting with some npcs about something, etc...

Novels aren't 100% dialogue from beginning to end, neither are movies - and flow in RPGs in particular should aim to reflect a realistic coherent experience of the player character. This can certainly work in an open world environment as long as substanceless tasks (ie scanning items where there is no skill, thus no unpredictability and so no mental reward for the player) and abstract resource collection are kept to a minimum, so the game doesn't feel like "systematically vacuum cleaning a carpet", but more an organic experience of "decorating a room".

I think there is a difference between liking Open-world as a genre or not and judging an open-world game based on whether it's well done. He's not criticizing Andromeda for being open world. He's criticising it for being a narrative-focused game in the open world genre where the genre does not properly contribute to its narrative focus. He's completely right IMO about the monetized narrative found in ME3, DAI and this (EMS, Power and Viability) because it distances your perception from the narrative by making you aware of how you're just checking boxes to increase an arbitrary score.

I still remember how my heart sank a couple of hours into ME3 as I realized what EMS was. I remember thinking "So this is all my choices will do? They all feed into some uninteractive meter?". You could tell before ME3's endgame that this was not going to be a good thing.

Andromeda is nothing like The Witcher, though. How could you possibly believe The Witcher is to blame? 

I anything, influence from The Witcher would have helped. Rumor has it that Andromeda was aping No Man's Sky, and we all know how well that ended up. Imagine Andromeda with less meaningful quests spread across even more planets. The Witcher also managed to have interesting, nuanced writing, brilliant performances, and solid atmosphere in spite of a rather lackluster open world and poor game mechanics. I'm sure BioWare wishes they could make a game like that again.

ME A

A balance of quality corridor and open world, and not too much of either; and not without a well thoughout, written story that is dedicated/loyal to fleshing out and unfolding an intriguing narrative. That includes mature, purposeful crew members that add fuel and drive to the primary narrative. That's all it would've taken.

But no, the elephant in the room is the "pandering" to an ideological social justicism. That was their main priority and focus. Oh, and the sex scenes. Nail those, and Bioware felt like they had a winner...and probably still do.