Quote:
Originally Posted by QuickSciFi
My Friend is Native or Native American as people understand it better as a term. He has real issues with the game and its presentation of things that misrepresent many aspects of native cultures and such. It makes a whole lot of sense when he talks about it as a game developer himself but it's not something he expects most people to understand. While I don't fully myself, I do understand what it's like for people to not understand things you go through or explain to people and they don't get it. So I respect him and emphasize. Anyway, it was an offhand comment I just won't go into another thread about that. Tired of it. Prefer to talk about game design instead. Not focusing on this bit anymore even if more people want to do a shit post driveby.
There is one thing I truly do understand. Horizon has much less freedom compared to BotW (yes I know people can love both and not trying to be a vs topic) and personally I prefer an exploration focused game. I kinda like to just wander and do almost nothing in some games for hundreds of hours before I get back on track of the main quest or even a side quest. Now I can enjoy games with less freedom as I do many games but sometimes feel some games get caught up in the illusion of a fully open map but in reality are just large corridors and/or pockets. Most likely don't notice nor care and that's fine. I just personally think many developers can move to modern game design and not just rely on just pretty visuals as the only real noticeable difference. Just so happens most games with issues in game design that focus more on visual appeal than mechanics happen to be AAA games and mainly western ones with exceptions like Square with FFXV. I'm not Jim Sterling who loves to shit on all AAA games. Plenty I enjoy and even many western and Japanese ones but even in games I liked, I can be hypercritical of specific aspects. Open world design is just maybe the one I focus on the most because so few devs fully get it right.
Even GTA still suffers from PS2 era open world design. Not played RDR so can't comment on that. Just the most recent example of a perfectly designed open world then it's Monolith Softs work on BoTW. They fix the tower thing Ubisoft never did. They fix the icons on the map. They fix the out of nowhere invisible walls and no areas teasing you and build on what they did with Xenoblade X. Make the map as much vertical as it is horizontal in exploration. That is only talking map design not diving into the game and mechanics/narrative as there are issues. Just the map is perfectly executed in a true open world than then a game like FFXV that claims to be but functions like an old-fashioned overworld just more interactive..sorta kinda.
