This thread is interesting!
So, I've been kicking around some terminology distinctions lately, and this discussion seems relevant to that.
Namely, I find myself wanting to distinguish "games" from "simulators".
Call of Duty is objectively more realistic, more complex, and more optimized based on <mumble mumble corporate number crunching> for mass-market enjoyment, as compared to Duke Nukem 2. I do not care and I like Duke Nukem 2 and wish I could get my computer to play it without having to set up a complicated chain of MSdOS emulators, never mind the inaccessibility.
DN2 is a game. For these purposes, CoD is a simulator--yes, I know it has a single player campaign, but even then, it seems more sim-like to me. While I don't think this is what the developers of DN2 were aiming for (see Duke Nukem 3D), it's what happened, because DN2 came out in, like, 1993.
(OK, DN2 is a bad example. It's divided into 4 "episodes", and you are under no obligation to play them in order. But you are limited to the highest level you've reached within each episode, so there's that, I guess.)
This game -> sim distinction is not something I made up, of course. It first came to my attention... OK, it first came to my attention regarding rides vs simulators, at Space-Camp. But game-wise, there was once this big quality debate over the ps2 era Dragonball Z games. The old-school gamers were largely disappointed with the SPARKING! series. Someone who is more of a sim guy pointed out that the SPARKING! games aren't really games, so much as DBZ simulators.
Of course, people usually use simulator in a narrower sense, and I think some of that has to do with what you're talking about, Caccio. Aprone's games do an interesting job of riding the line, so to speak--Swamp is more or less a Zombie Survival sim, but he's always tried to focus on the more game-like elements over the sim-like elements (I think a lot of the feature-demanding and so on are from more of a sim-based mindset). Similarly with Castaways and Lunimals.
But I also think Swamp is a middling example of what you're talking about: on the one hand, it is not very linear and the player is given lots of freedom (Ur, ignoring 3.5), but lots of areas, missions, items, etc are level-locked.
Whereas it sounds like you want something that is truly free-roaming, without any restrictions aside from those which define the world. If nothing was level-locked in Swamp, I get the impression it'd meet your requirements (disregarding how you feel about the ever-present zombies).
I am of two minds about this. I have abused the level select codes in Sonic the Hedgehog since I learned them, because I had more fun exploring the Sonic games than trying to complete everything in order. (Well, and let's be honest, that box puzzle in the second zone? In a game with no saving and finite lives? That's bad enough for fully sighted players! It's like trying to play the Lion King without cheating--you spend so much time failing at the second level that you don't get to see anything, linearly or otherwise. ... Yes, I am aware of the second level in Redsword. It has a cheat for exactly this reason.)
On the other hand, I like the sense of progression and story, and the feeling that there is some direction, so you aren't just wandering around in the hopes of stumbling upon something interesting by chance.
I feel like the best case falls somewhere between a no-cheats Sonic and Skyrim, and the mainstream is still struggling to find that spot (and taking a while, because they don't have to hit it to redecorate their homes with Benjamin Franklin wallpaper).
Consider Mortal Kombat: Deceptions. Forget for a minute that Konquest is effectively inaccessible. You have, what, half the playable cast locked by default, and must complete bunches of easy-to-miss quests to unlock everyone? And the beginner area becomes inaccessible upon leaving, but you must leave and complete several other tasks before the other realms become accessible.
Mortal Kombat: Armageddon makes the unlocking seem more like prizes than a necessity, what with most characters being playable from the beginning. Exploration is still bound by plot, but the idea was always that you had to work for the best things--it's just that now you don't have to work for everything (presumably, you did enough of that to make the money to purchase the game).
And I don't even know who is and isn't available by default in MK9 and MKX, because they dropped the adventure mode entirely, so I just dive into the story and finish it on the Saturday that I start it. Although MKX has an interesting Krypt, I suppose.
This question of how much freedom to give the player has been one that I've thought about for quite some time, since I tend to design story-heavy games, and too much player freedom can seriously mess up the cohesion of the story. (Umm, I haven't... finished most of these story-based games. This might possibly maybe a little have something to do with it.)
Also, if the player can go anywhere they want, then I have to make everywhere. . This isn't as big a deal now as it was when I started on these things... during the Bush43 administration... but it's still a ton of work for an individual.
So, I think I have two questions:
1: how do "tutorial" / "beginner" / "introduction" areas fit into this? Ex, the Island where Sora, Riku, and Kiri live in Kingdom Hearts, which is effectively gone after you complete the introduction. And you must complete the introduction in order to access the rest of the worlds. It's kinda impossible to get away without an introductory section (to the extent that TV Tropes has a page for Green Hills Zone), and letting the player wander off into the ending before proving that they know how to climb is a bit... well, actually, I kinda like this idea, because I don't really like mandatory tutorials all that much, but is it an acceptable design decision?
On the other hand, games like Kingdom Hearts are only somewhat picky about where you can go when, except that there will be some major plot areas that only show up when the plot has sufficiently advanced, and sometimes they disappear afterward (which is very unfortunate for those dalmation puppies we missed in the belly of Monstro. Sorry, Pongo and Perdita.).
Also, compare Gauntlet 4 to Gauntlet Legends. Gauntlet 4's quest mode has only 1 of 5 areas locked by default, that being the final castle, because, well, you win when you complete it, so what's the point of the others if you can skip them? Meanwhile, Gauntlet Legends gives you a whole 1 place you can access at the beginning--you have to go through and unlock everywhere else by completing the others. It's not especially plot-heavy, so there aren't really many reasons to keep harder areas locked by default, other than that they want to force you to play in a certain order.
2: How about online / offline restrictions? I kinda feel like games which force you to do so many tasks in one mode to access the features of the other are kinda... well, it's a questionable decision, and if both modes can stand on their own it shouldn't be necessary. On the other hand, if this is a game with a story unique to the game (and not, say, an adaptation of a book, film, TV series, etc), leaving an unrestricted, free-roaming mode (online or offline, it doesn't matter) presents the potential for messing with the story.
I feel like Dragonball Zenoverse is in a risky spot in this regard. True, the story contains original content (well, it was original when it was in Dragonball Online, but that saw a very limited audience outside of Korea), but it's still majority rehash of the exact same story and fights that every Dragonball Z game since Legends has forced players through so as to unlock characters and such. And that little amount of original story is not very relevant to online mode--just the prologue, which you get just for starting a new game. So, IMO, online should have few, if any, restrictions by default. The premise-establishing scene is all it needs.
(Of course, DB Zenoverse has a very content-poor online mode that is mostly just the DBZ equivalent of WoW's random raids, but that's beside the point. )
What about a game where a free-roaming mode would spoil the story mode? Do we do something like Kingdom Hearts, and make most of the world(s) accessible most of the time, no strings attached, but restrict when you can access the plot-dependent events? The answer to this depends on how loosely we define "plot-dependent", I suppose. And I think, after reading this discussion, I'll probably raise the bar for what qualifies as a plot-dependent event in the future. But stumbling on the climactic information too early is still a problem, and so is returning to places which you last saw being reduced to cinders. (... Huh. Didn't realize I had so many places being reduced to cinders in my plans. Currently up to 5 that I can recall, ATM.)
看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
George... Don't do that.