Cethin

You aren't out of touch. Even the worst games don't get that poor of a review. When you job depends on being on their side, it turns out you can't voice an honest opinion.

For sure, you can. However, every modern game is trying to be an open world game. It's stupid. We get ballooning budgets and dev cycles for games that don't really get anything from being open world. I'd rather get three great less open games than one open world game that is sacrificing things to make the open world work.

Sure. You can make those, but you have to spend a lot of money and time making the open world just to make places for the rooms to live. Is that worth it? Everything is opportunity cost. Did doubling the cost improve the game that much?

I dont really understand your point. Devs still curate where you meet the enemies. Its not like its procedurally generated map where everything is random.

I haven't played it, so maybe they've done something to control it. I doubt it though. If you can come from any direction, that makes encounters much harder to design. Think about older Borderlands games when entering a compound. You'd come through one main gate and enemies would be set up with cover and you'd have to fight your way through. With open world you could do something like fly into the middle of the compound, and that's has to be accounted for.

Check out Roboquest, for example. It has some really impressive movement options, but it's choice of rooms let's them restrict how much you can abuse them. You'll always be fighting through the enemies from an expected direction.

I cant remember single time in my 20 hours of gameplay where i have tought that i hate fighting here, or that these enemies dont fit here.

This isn't what I meant. There's nuance between liking something and it being the best possible thing. It can be good and still be possible to be better. My biggest issue with open worlds is, like you mentioned at the beginning, fast travel. It takes so much time and resources to make an open world, just for players to fast travel past most of it. Is it really worth the that? Did it add that much to the experience? We could have more cheaper games with tighter designed experiences instead of games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. (BL3 cost $140m, and for cost "more than twice" that, so minimum $280m.)

I don't think people understand that everything is an opportunity cost. If you make an open world game, that's at the expensive of so much more. At minimum, it's going to be less game to play (or longer between games and more expensive). Is getting a lot of space that you hardly interact with worth it?

Yeah, I just have a bias against open world games at this point. Damn near every game thinks they need to be open world, and most of the time it just makes things more tedious and boring. It takes a ton of dev time to make just for players to run past 99% of it. There are some games it really works for, but most would be better off with a tighter design (and it'd also save time and money).

I really don't understand the open world though. I don't think that's the direction they needed to go. I think the best looter-shooter I've played recently is Roboquest. It has all the movement you said (and more), but it's in tight rooms, so the devs have more control of the design. Open worlds means the devs have essentially zero control of encounters and it becomes too easy. The only thing they can do is crank up health of enemies so they don't die as quickly.

I think it was a really good game originally. The writing has gotten really fucking bad though, and the gameplay hasn't really evolved with the times. (I can't speak on the new game.)

Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 2, and Sekiro?

I suspect it won't work for them, but I think the idea that they can't work is wrong. With a really passionate and talented team, I think it could be done very well. It'd take real innovation though, unlike BotW. BotW was innovative for LoZ, but almost everything it'd done had been done before. I would say currently the closest formula they could copy is Elden Ring, and it isn't as much of a Metroidvania as previous more enclosed entries were.

Sure, if it doesn't cost anything and you aren't giving anything up, fine. Keep doing what you're doing. I don't care. If you're buying a game, reconsider. If you're buying an OS, reconsider. If you are tired of having an OS that is literally malware that you don't control and that is constantly advertising and spying on you, reconsider.

My point of the console example was that no, you won't just put up with anything just to keep up. Have some boundaries. Stop just letting them push you around. The more you allow it the more they'll do it. Once people actually start advocating for what's best for them rather than what a corporation allows them to do then things will improve.

What if they had an Xbox and their friends were playing a PS exclusive game? Would you buy them the new console just so they can play that one game, or would you tell them that sucks but they can try to convince their friends to play a game that supports their system?

Most older games work fine. It's usually the newer ones that are the issue, with kernel level AC. For games to not work requires an active choice most of the time now. Of course, there are some exceptions.