Gamasutra Article - ME:A's closed open world

The article, after the whole lot of "I have this feeling about the ting that I cannot name, but it's that undefined feeling I have had" makes two salient points.

First, the author and her/his partner loved the game.

Second, s/he felt that Kadara having borderlands, rather than being one large slum with lot more encounters in the slums is a wasted opportunity. S/he likes the city settings (she quotes the ancient Menzoberranzan from all things, rather than more recent Kirkwall, Nar SHaadda and Coruscant from Bio games) and misses it in Andromeda.

His/hers screenshots look cool.

Well, they did try that with Kirkwall in Dragon Age 2.

I personally liked it but it didn't work too well overall.

Was going to quote this too. I'll add:



The article is not an Andromeda hit piece. It actually takes time to praise the game and the developer. It is attacking the open world trend. ME:A gets used as an example because it is the only game with four and two half open worlds in it.

But, I think BW has made progress. The open worlds are better than in DAI, just not there yet. Fewer (or smaller) but more detailed worlds in any sequel, while tracking missions like Rockstar or the Witcher (i.e.: only the marker for the tracked quest appears on the map), the addition of a non-combat gameplay loop*, and a clearer way for the player to differentiate between main quests, side quests, collections and vignettes, would solve or mitigate most of the problems.

*GTA has had tennis, golf, pool, and racing. RDR had poker, hunting, and herding. The Witcher 3 has Gwent, fisticuffs and horse racing (basically whatever Geralt's hobbies were). ME needs some kind of fun, challenging, and science/survey based game loop, because James Kirk didn't often shoot folk in the face (and usually set to stun).

The Witcher 3 did as well, with Novigrad and Beauclair, though a lot better executed than DA2's Kirkwall. 

Still, I agree with his basic point. While large urban environments aren't entirely absent from recent RPGs, they aren't common, particularly in Bioware's recent games. Bioware has prioritized the wilderness environments over the hubs, which is a mistake. The main appeal in Bioware games isn't the game worlds, it is the characters that inhabit them.

7/10 might not seem bad, but for a AAA game it's terrible. Unless you also think Sonic Chronicles isn't mediocre, just "polarizing"

Wait, ok.....why would anything need to feel lived in? Yes I had hoped the Nexus and the Angara city to be much larger than they are, but the game is about colonizing and exploring. Like Breath of the Wild, there's big pockets of emptiness because that plays into the whole exploration of worlds not filled with life and have recently gone through basically an apocalypse hundreds of years ago.

I'll go check out the article but it needs to feel sort of empty. I do wish there were more large scale battles / random events though.

Prodromos is actually bigger than any of the hub worlds from the original trilogy sans the Citadel from ME1. At least for in game scale. 

Are we talking critic or user scores?

Because ME3 got really high critic scores and I can't think of a more polarizing game that's come out recently.

Maybe Spec Ops: The Line?

Well, it's actually Eterna's point, so I'm not sure.

The split between critics and players with ME3 is interesting. It doesn't look to me like we're seeing the same divergence with ME:A.

Not sure I get the point of the article. It's very vague...

If it's about how games should focus more on populated spaces rather than endless barren landscapes, then I fully agree. At least for any story driven game this would be very welcome. It was a major gripe with DAI for me. The lack of actual cities.

There is a disconnect between the narrative and the "outside world" if said open spaces only function as huge resources gathering places. This is what makes them sterile.

Sorry to go there again, but W3 did a good job integrating the two major cities with the surroundings. No loading screens either (within the different maps). Smaller scale but also well done is Meridian in Horizon Zero Dawn where around it there are fields, peasants and merchants go about their business. Seamless transition into the wilderness.
It helps immersion a lot for me if it's one big map. Though W3 was segmented too.

It's not just Bioware's open world that suffers from this disconnect. Skyrim's cities are ridiculously small too. You have to actively imagine everything way bigger to get this sense of immersion into a living world. Since it's a sandbox game of infinite adventures, it's not that important that the cities and towns are small in scale.

For Mass Effect (and DA too!), I wish Bioware would give us big cities with lots of cool side stories, rather than empty planets to mine. So basically a series of big hubs, not just one like Skyhold. With a few outside adventure, DA2 style. The idea of Kirkwall, as has been said, was good. Now make it bigger and make it an alien homeworld capital, and I'll be thrilled.

It's strange how Assassin's Creed 2 blew my mind on PS2 with those big cities. And now eight years later most cities in other games still are nowhere near as impressive to me. Or maybe they just seem bigger in my memory. But Redcliffe was just sad.

So basically what I personally want is all the locations of the trilogy, just bigger. So that questlines do not require to teleport to a number of set pieces. I want to walk from one district to the next. And meet quirky characters everywhere.

This would require a lot more work than a desert planet with some minerals to mine. Hence the lack of big cities in many RPGs.
...which, as so often, brings me back to the question if small segmented hubs are really the best medium to tell engaging stories. The trilogy was basically a stage play. Different places just detailed wallpapers for the story to unfold on. I liked that. DA2 was like that to such an extreme that people became too aware of the stage.

I would think that at least bigger theater stages are possible. And it seems that huge open spaces can have paradoxically the effect of coming off staged and not natural. So perhaps there is an optimal middle ground? A medium space that's populated enough so that it allows us to sustain the illusion of a living breathing environment.