The "Open World" Compromise

This is a pretty hotly talked about topic. I'll try to put something more coherent together, but I think the main issue with BW doing an open world is trying to just copy the filler quest mechanics of other games. All the fetch quests, tasks, and scan rocks/plants/animals/whatever all feel like they belong in an MMO more than a SP story.

Despite the gap in release dates (Nov 14 and Mar 17), DA:I and ME:A felt like "siblings"...both shared a common ideal in terms of open world.  DA:I was met with positive reviews and sales so, despite some valid criticism, there was little incentive for ME:A to deviate too much from what had worked just two years prior.  I think its valid to point out that its release was prior to The Witcher 3 coming out and ME:A was released in the midst of Zelda hype so ME:A would be under more scrutiny to see if it repeated DA:I's mistakes and adopt TW3's approach to side quests.  Overall, I think ME:A handled side content better than DA:I but, because of timing and technical issues, ME:A bore the brunt of the criticism.

bsn.boards.net/thread/9044/polygons-letter-bioware-regarding-world
We had a discussion about it based on Polygon's take on this issue. Plenty of reviewers pointed out how the open world stuff didn't make this a better BioWare game I believe.

But yeah, I think most of us in here have been thinking those things since Inquisition. It's not all bad and some probably like it a lot. Personally I would like to see them continue doing open-ended games like this but they should scale the breadth of content down by 25% at least and then focus on making the remaining content more substantial and most importantly more rewarding.

I had a shower-thought today about Inquisition and Andromeda thinking that the open world quests weren't all terrible in DA:I actaully (unlike how I remembered them) but they still improved some of it in MEA by making more actual cutscenes and the sense that it was important and more emotioanlly engaging sometimes but the most memorable quests always ended up feeling shallow anyway and that was because they didn't end properly or they ended too abruptly without enough wrapup. It wasn't something that really stood out enough most of the time and the most memorable quest endings in Andromeda were just too few and far between anyway. Meanwhile Inquisition actually trumps Andromeda in how it ties the story into the environments and I really liked the caves in it like the Shrine of Dumat area or the keeps you capture and things like that, but Inquisition just didn't have any quests that featured "character-moments" in the open world stuff so it's a weird tie. Like I said, I think they just need to go back to what Inquisition did, scale it down by cutting away 2-3 of the open world locations and of course add cutscenes to the most story-driven quests. Imagine you have that as a foundation and then the time and money they spent on Hissing Wastes, Emerald Graves and Fallow Mire could've been spent on making that "My husband has gone missing!" quest in the Hinterlands into an actual series of events where the NPC questgiver has a personality and a plight and the Mayer in Crestwood questline could've become something like Reyes and Sloane on Kadara.

Then when you have that you somehow magically go even further and improve the story-foundation so that Reyes and Sloane's questline is actually a part of the main plot and not just an isolated side-story with trivial ties to the lore, so it becomes like KOTOR in that you land on a planet, you go through a linear beat with branching decisions and certain skippable parts and extra quests and then you find that main story revelation and go elsewhere.

Remember what ME1 did with Feros, Noveria? We need that in a DA:I open world setting where the full length of the Kadara-specific plot line contains vital revelations to the core story and the Krogan conflict on Elaaden has, let's say Drack instead of Morda who we have to help out so he will join us and then he will show us the glyphs he obtained to enter Remnant Vault there and terraform Elaaden.

Then each planet would have its own story that tied into the main plot at the end of their respective questlines and you could choose any planet in any order.

I also want freighters back like those in ME1 for some side missions and I hope they can make Loyalty missions happen on the actual open-world planets. They should look at InFamous which was like GTA III in the sense that there were 3 islands of one big open-world map and you were locked to only one for the first 20% of the plot and then a critical mission would unlock that took you through an underground tunnel to the next island and that felt almost like a linear level in an action game even though it was technically part of the open-world map and it had an iconic boss-battle within it as well.

That's the kind of design I want to see BioWare do with this formula. Keep it simple and focused and take advantage of having the explorable planets as your main attraction.

It seems that many fans would prefer fewer side/go-fetch/collection type quests. To me DA:I had the right amount. MEA seems a bit overloaded with quests so I am choosing not to do some of the "tasks" .

TW3 was very overwhelming in terms of the number of side quests although I agree most of them were pretty interesting....some though, pretty silly.

As for the game that everyone seems to think is the all time best open world game.... Skyrim - I have nothing but frustrated memories of a souless/humourless kind of game where I became so mired in side quests I forgot what the game was about! I have never finished the game... although in part that was due to the incredible bugginess of the game. I often wonder why Bioware seems to get so much criticism for bugginess (although I have never had a bug in any Bioware game to date) and bland/boring side quests, when Skyrim takes the crown in both those areas from my perspective.

TW3 was very overwhelming in its abundance of side quests. The good thing is they didn't make it seem like doing them was necessary for something larger like the EMS or Power scores did or the illusion that every side-quest is somehow tied to the main goal of the game like the Inquisitor "restoring order" or whatever.

In Witcher 3 it's more like Mass Effect 1 but on a much larger scale. The side-quests are just there and you'll do them if they interest you.

In my opinion they should make more planets like H-047c. That planet was what ME1 tried to do but done right.

-Beautiful.

-Not huge but not small.

-Cool to explore.

-A few linear missions inside the planet.

-No fetch quests.

I was so happy while i was on that planet and i wish the entire game was like that, but it wasn't. Hmph...

In my opinion there are inherent problems with marrying open world and story content. Even something as beautifully crafted as the witcher 3 story storywise from its open world nature.

I know a lot of people seem to be against linear games, but linear doesnt automatically mean every game has to be like Uncharted. You can still do a lot in with linear, its merely a basic framework. But it does allow for a much tighter and focused narrative and atmosphere. Give me hubs that are extremely atmospheric, colourful, complete with excellent world building, places where you can really feel that your right there, right in heart of some of those unknown planets and places in the far reaches of the galaxy, or inside an alien ship or a normal outpost. I want the universe to feel much more exspansive and alive, lived in etc and for the most part that is only brought about as a result of such a tighter focused, more linear game design. Something not found in ME:A... A game about large maps, open worlds and exploration etc and whilst that sounds good, the game it just doesnt do a good job at any of those things imo. Its just large maps but with no substance. I feel like thats the downside to open world, you have to make too many sacrifices and indeed as you noted OP compromises in so many other aspects to make an open world possible. And too often the final results simply arent worth it.

But in contrast to that take Illium, Omega's streets, ME2's Citedel, the collector ship, the quarian floatilla, the geth dreadnought, Kasumi's Stolen Memory/Beckenstein, The Layer of the Shadowbroker, all the N7 anomaly missions in ME2 etc... Not huge open worlds, but lot of ambience, atmosphere, variety, depth, context, meaningful details and still big enough to explore, fight there, run, cover, use powers, and decisions. I mean these smaller maps can still be filled with content, not so big a level, but more than big enough where every detail matters, meaninguful decisions and the perfect ambience and environment. No open worlds but small to medium maps dripping in atmosphere, compact with lotsa detail and big enough that you can still explore to an extent(you really dont need the game to be a huge open world for it to be great). ME2 and games like Deus Ex:HR etx is linear done right. But i digress... thats plenty big enough imo. Have many worlds in that ilk, thats all one needs. And its very much preferable to the current Bioware open world game design.

Popular topic, but obviously an important one to many.

I thought the tie in between planet viability and setting up a colony was good way to go about it. That might mean traveling between vaults but that's a good way to exploit the use of an open zone of land. Those were direct tie in's to the plot of being a Pathfinder.

I think you it right the first time, "there is nothing there to explore". For a game about 'exploration', the only thing we, the Pathfinder, explores before anyone else, are the Vaults (and even then sometimes Kett are in there before us, even though they can't make the RemTech work??). Much like No Man's Sky, we don't actually explore, it's all been explored already, and colonized.

 The environmental hazards did not help with this illusion of being Pathfinders. With their tech, assuming it's the same level of tech from the MET, their suits/armors should be able to protect them from intense heat, cold, and radiation, for extended periods of time. Without that, the idea of Pathfinders leading the way and being prepared for anything they find is, well, hard to follow.

In the MET, Shepard wasn't a gofer, they had a goal/mission and did what had to be done to complete that mission before moving onto the next one (or didn't do it, if you wanted to skip the side stuff). Ryder, and the Pathfinders as a whole, feel like glorified gofer's, and that, to me at least, really pulls me out of the story where the Pathfinders, and their teams (why is it only the human pathfinder has people of other races on their team?), are the most important asset of the Andromeda Initiative in regards to not only surviving in Andromeda, but finding planets to live on. Though it's not exactly the same, I was expecting more, ST's 'To explore strange, new worlds; To see out new life, and new civilizations; To boldly go where no one has gone before', instead we end up hunting for bodies, data pads, a random plant to make beer, scanning 'unknown' minerals (that are exactly the same as minerals we've already scanned, they just 'look' different), and other gofer type things. The Pathfinders in MEA are lowly grunts. When the Pathfinders are continuously doing something other than...Pathfinding...What was the point of being a 'Pathfinder'?

As much as I hated the War Table from DAI, it made some sense. Issues and complications came up, and things needed to get done. There was no point in doing all of it yourself, so you send others to take care of it for you, and you read a report about it later.

Instead of the Pathfinder going out to scan rocks themselves, perhaps we should have had drum up the resources we needed to get that done, maybe use the AVP for that. Don't need to go all Fallout 4 and settlement build, but use resources to allocate to accomplish non-critical/non-main-story goals/missions, and once complete, we get some boon or increase to our AVP to use some other way to actually help the Initiative, or gain bonuses to help us in our main missions.

I guess what I'm trying to say, in a most likely really terrible, round about way, is that MEA lacked focus and wasn't really sure what to do with the Pathfinder, and that really hurt their quest design and much of their open world because they were all over the place, trying to tick all the boxes.

I always found that argument a bit silly (both in NMS and here).
Of course we explore from our perspective. Exploration doesn't mean that you have to go to a lifeless place where no sentient ever set foot. In fact, almost every piece of fiction - and history for that matter - that deals with exploration has people go to places that were already visited by others (and interact with them). Columbus was certainly an explorer but he went to a place that was already inhabited by native Americans. Marco Polo was certainly an explorer but he went to China, where people lived and built a civilization. In fiction, the catchphrase of one of the greatest SciFi exploration based franchise is "to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before". "No man", not "no one ever" and even then, the series often enough deals with the Enterprise discovering lost human colonies and such.
And this is exactly what we are doing in ME:A so of course we are exploring. Imagine how boring the game would be if we just explored really lifeless places.
Now, the one argument that one could make is that the outcasts were in a few laces ahead of us but even then, we explore things on behalf of the Initiative, so whatever we find is new information for them (and for us, the audience).
The one point I would concede is that exploration is a bit boring if you don't discover anything really interesting and with e.g. the Angara being like humans in costume there might be some truth to that but then we already start to get into the "matter of taste" arguments about content, in general terms, exploration is definitely happening in ME:A.

It's the same in NMS by the way. The exploration in NMS is not bad because there are aliens on the planets, the exploration is bad because after 3 planets, you figured out the procedural algorithms that govern everything and efter that, further exploration is meaningless because there is only the same algorithmic content to discover over and over. But that argument "someone has been there already" doesn't matter at all as long as we didn't know that someone yet.

EDIT: Aaaaaand ed.