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

And then they have to go and make it so we can't explore it on foot. At least their explanation makes sense, unlike the hazards on other planets.

I think the tools for making a good open world game were right in their hands. They should have doubled down on world reactivity. We saw glimpses of it on Eos, where you can decide the nature of your outpost, and the terraforming plot.

As far as I can tell (I've only played the game once), your outpost type doesn't do much. But imagine if you had chosen the militia, the Kett are pushed back, and you encounter fewer spawns. When you assault the Kett base, the militia would show up and make your life easier. The science outpost might give you improved technology and research data, and science-y quests.

Terraforming is the real dropped ball. As of now, it only serves as a content-gate on Eos, and gives viability/changes the skybox on other planets. What if you slowly got to see the effects of the worlds becoming more habitable? Veold could have frozen ruins that get thawed, while the fighting picks up because everyone's not freezing to death. Havarl could be flooded from the rainfall, which evaporates over the course of the game, opening new areas and bringing out new predators. All of this would happen gradually, rather than just an on/off switch like on Eos. What if they actually let you choose the type of world you wanted to terraform it into?

The most disappointing planet, though, is Veold. It's described as "The front line between the Angara and the Kett". I expected it to look like the battle of Hoth (the first area does indeed look like the Hoth base). Instead, I got an icy rectangle with Kett outposts dotted across.

I backed up pre official forum closure. You were one of those that didn't want to listen then. And the fact you don't think the Witcher contracts are repetitive just shows how unwilling you are to even try to understand a dissenting opinion.

If you want to praise TW3 and not here my thoughts on it, go to CDPR based forums. Unlike many here, I don't embarrass myself by hanging around those boards to troll TW3 and raise my favourite games over it. I'm fucking done with the TW3 fanboys and their annoying bullshit.

I don't quite follow this. What did hosting DAO servers have to do with anything?

Open World or Open World like game is not impossible. IMO, it is not "hard" to make good Open World games. What makes Open World game good is the amount of work and effort the developers pour into it; every aspect of it. Unlike linear corridor games, developers cannot concentrate solely on 1 aspect and leave the rest out.

Bethesda, they are great at creating worlds with a lot of hidden things for the player to discover. You can be simply exploring and happen upon a tiny cave that could actually lead to a huge (keyword being huge) dunmer ruins that has a mini quest in itself. Or you can read a book and discover some hidden location, go to sleep in an inn and suddenly wake to unexpected events. They are not that good at creating a strong and compelling story but maybe that is because they are a sandbox RPG.

CDPR, they are great at weaving narrative into the world. They are great at making very detail and believable worlds, interesting characters. It is almost like watching a television series, every episode (event you encounter) can develop into something larger than you initially anticipated. The attention to detail is nothing short of greatness. How you start a quest often changes how they play out. If you didnt meet a certain NPC before proceeding to the next step of the quest, the game knows and it compensates for it. They are however not as good as Bethesda in making all those interesting hidden areas for exploration.

Zelda BOTW, a "new" comer to the Open World genre (yes yes I know, they 1st Zelda is arguably Open World) makes highly interactive environments. It is like they have put common sense into the world. Set fire in the middle of the field, well you may get burn. You can play with the environment and make use of the environment like never before in other Open World games.

All the above is simply the hard work of the developers. The more effort you put into an Open World game, they richer the experience of the players. The more attention to detail you put into an Open World, the livelier it becomes.

Bioware... imo spent too much time making static maps. Hired too many "artist/painters". Paintings are nice to look at, once in a while but when you need to tell a story, you need to hire a comic artist, an animation artist. Also, both DAI and MEA, I think they are struggling with Frostbite, I firmly believe that they have very little skill/experience working with Frostbite. This greatly limited what they can and cannot do - the list of bugs in MEA I think confirms my suspicion. After all, technically Bioware is much weaker than all the 3 developers I mentioned. Because of this, they are struggling to just meet the deadline, or just to get the game to run. They do not have time to even properly test the game. Therefore it is natural that they dont have time to attend to details and polish hence all the problems in MEA.

But there has to be a successful marriage between the writing and other elements like combat frequency, exploration, level design, quest variety etc. So blame isn't all on the narrative team. 

Well played changing the title like that...

Anyways regardless games like MEA and W 3 and DAI prove that sort of open world games but not really (tm) can work along with a heavy narrative and character focus.

Don't get me wrong - I like ME:A.  I just meant that when it comes to realizing the promise of ME1's exploration, this particular planet was much better than all the rest. 

That's a good article. As I've already said numerous times, so far all the open world games I have ever played (TES : Oblivion, Skyrim, Far Cry 3, Dragon-Age Inquisition, now Andromeda) weren't bad games at all but they were more of a chore than joy. I can't say I had a lot of fun playing those games.
The funny thing is, the Story parts of all those games were good, its really just the open world content that was more annoying and stale than fun for me.  I wish playing only for the story was possible but its not since you need the XP and loot you get from doing open world grinding, plus the play time would be really short.

Now Andromeda, everything besides the Story bits feels like a boring chore. Take a boring drive to this Nav-point to fetch object XYZ while scanning the shit out of everything, and while you're doing it slaughter Kett that always respawn at the same place every time you drive by. Press a button and grab some minerals. Take a boring drive to some remnant obelisks to shoot some bots and solve Sudoku Puzzles to make the planet habitable. Repeat this 5 more times to make all the planets habitable, and then drive some more while getting ambushed by looter mooks that keep respawning by the hundreds. Or simply ignore them and let some bullets dent the ass of the NOMAD.

Same story with Dragon Age Inquisition. I LOVED the game till the discovery of Skyhold, then everything fell apart instantly.

I've been a Bioware fan since Baldur's Gate but I am by no means a ''good old bygone times'' guy, a lot of my favorite games have been released in the last 5 years and I do love all their features that weren't possible back in the day.

If I had one single advice to give Bioware I'd tell them to stop bandwagon-jumping and let go of open worlds and focus on story instead. ALl their recent games had really good story bits, if they had spent resources on story entirely I can nearly guarantee they would have been extremely popular and astonishing games.
That open world feature was THE shit couple of years ago when it was suddenly possible to render huge worlds with a lot of freedom, but it looked much better on paper. 
In my humble opinion, outside MMO's, open worlds are passè since the have failed to add anything valuable to the games.  

Well, people all gash over how That Polish Game has amazing characters, but all I see being brought up in casual discussions are Geralt's two wives feoding over him, his raped step-daughter and a wife-beating baron with apparently a glimpse of good in him. Every bio game has more companions people discuss than that... and only in ME series they are all over Shepard. Still, even in ME there are characters of comparable positive allure to Shepard, and, yep, including males.... W3 always gives off that feel that is really all Geralt's all the time... so what characters are there to love or to love to hate? Save for the wives?

Dandilion....Dandilions blond love interest. Then the DLC added a lot of interesting character s

The whole discussion boils down to "simple" fact it always did - open world RPG quests & tasks need to be backed by a developed story motivation provided by at least somehow memorable characters. In most cases, having 3 lines spoken by Angara Resistance Fighter #5274 (lacking any cinematic flair) won'to be enough as the quest basis to avoid making it feel like a boring busywork. Andromeda unfortunately has a ton of those, especially on Voeld or 2nd part of Eos. Too many nameless characters with too many similar short tiny tasks all blending together into a map cleanup chore.

Kadara has probably the best quest structure out of the larger worlds in the game. Most of the quests revolve around Sloan and Reyes leading the whole planetary arc and the quests that do not feature them at least utilize memorable characters or events in some fashion (weed guys are memorable whether you like them or not, anti-AI hacker, oblivion drug etc). Majority of those also utilize cinematic presentation in dialogues. Compare that with Voeld and 7264 resistance tasks with minimal story, character focus and cinematics.

They should have less side quests with less no-name characters and write bigger/longer side quests instead with greater focus on key/memorable developed characters. Preferably with at least decent cinematic presentation so it doesn't look 100x cheaper than main quests. More Kadara, less Voeld. Budget-wise it would be almost exactly the same.