A "Walking Simulator" done right

It would like an adventure game, but the choices are about what direction to go. That is, meaningful choices about moving a certain way.

Besides the obvious QWOP and mazes, the only good walking sim one I can think of is I Have One Day.

the first 1-2 hours of this except 70 hours

Under what definition of the term does Pathologic classify as a walking simulator?

Same way you make a move-game good.

First and foremost you need to make a writing/story good since it's a story/writing driven genre. Do that and you'll have already given the player enough reason to be interested. Fuck that up and any competence you show in the other areas won't mean jack.

Already been done. Remember those old childrens' multimedia thingies from the early CD-ROM era, where you explored a massive environment, pawed over all sorts of little interactive elements, and freely played through all the tiny details that had been left for you to freely discover in your own way? No railroaded story rammed clumsily down your throat, no deeper-than-thou "subtext", nothing but the atmospheric mood conveyed through your presence.

I don't think you can have narrative elements like "beginning", "conflict", "protagonist struggle", "ending", etc, in an interactive presentation without adding mechanical teeth, turning it into an actual game, which has to compete with other actual games. Otherwise the player will just be impotently flailing as a movie plays in front of them, at which point you have to strip all the fake interactivity out and turn it into a movie.

Close, but no banana. Myst is a series of pretty fun puzzles wrapped up in well-conceived but excessively sterilized and unreactive walking sim, in other words, a typical point & click adventure game.

This is a good paradigm. A walking sim is pretty much exactly like a museum, science faire, or other IRL "exhibit", except it only exists inside a computer program. All of the basic design principles, with their attendant does and don'ts, transfer over completely intact.

Uncoincidentally, the people who make western "indy" walking sims are the exact same people who've ruined IRL museums, public parks, festivals, and cityscapes!

this is a dumb question, OP.
A walking simulator is an adventure game with the adventure part taken out.

"Hilarious" is pretty subjective, but I will say the Stanley Parable might have been onto something with a walking simulator that had a changing story depending on what you did in the game. Where your actions dictated what happen in game rather than the other way around.

I want a walking simulator that allows me to freely explore genuinely interesting, preferably either hazardous irl or entirely fantastic locales, and makes me navigate in open environments all by myself, uncovering bits of story.

I don't want railroading around a stupid American house to hear an anticlimatic reveal that my little lesbo sister ran away. I don't want a walk in a park where nothing happens and it was all just a dream. I want to pick where I want to go all by myself, not obey to plot.

I remember some 4chan /agdg/ user worked on that Dyson Onion from Blame! setting walking simulator where you just explore procedurally-generated infinite shafts and locales. That's something I wanna play. Hack even Fullbright's Tacoma looks nice but no way I'm buying something from those nepotistic ideologues.

Remember how some Quake/Unreal-engine licensed games, like the Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force and the Harry Potter PC games, had as one of their main features a full virtual recreation of the Voyager, Enterprise, Hogwarts, and Hogsmeade sets from live-action with functional embellishments?

I'm sure there's a market for much more of that, especially with the VR meme as a source for capital right now.

Yup, that'd be awesome, exploring environments all by yourself in 3D.

sounds boring, you'd need guns or something

American game devs are afraid to go crazy with their work. or take a shit ton of shrooms I liked Yume Nikki for the trippy visuals and indirect story line. It should be the base of what a walking simulator should be.

If your intention here is to attract non-gamers, then good luck.

While I think "Adventure game" is a better title, its just when I think of adventure games, I think of games like Banjo kazooie and the Gex series.

Yes other games can give you that same experience, I just think walking simulators get a bad rap for not being like other games.

wot?

Looks more like a jrpg then a walking sim.

Like i said, dialogue that tells the story for you is not the best option. Instead use symbolism to tell a story. Games like Yume Nikki and its semi-successor .flow are perfect examples of this.

It still relies on exploration most of the time. though I guess they both mean the same thing

so gta?

Games like Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force are more action adventure then walking sim.

Sorry for the late reply, it was late when I first posted and I was tired.

Walking sims are okay as long as they're not advertised as games, have comfy music and comfy graphics. I like playing post-Morrowind TES games just to hike around the landscape and look at the scenery, for instance. Problem with most "Walking Sims" is that they often produce something that would be better translated into a VN. Let me try and see if I can articulate what should be a VN or WS.

Walking Simulator

Visual Novel

I actually thought about it a while ago, and I think I came up with a decent gimmick and plot. But just thinking about limiting player input just to walking makes me feel dirty.

Rightfully so. Why the fuck would I want the game taken out of my video game? Not only that, indie devs desperately want walking simulators to be taken seriously so they don't have to work to think of new and interesting game mechanics, or new and interesting scenarios for existing game mechanics. They want the glory that a successful game brings, but they don't want the work associated with earning that glory. It's pretentious, it's lazy, it's garbage that should not exist. Make a video game. If I can take a walk down the street and acquire the same experience from your "game" then it's shit and its fundamental objectives should be re-examined until you make something that works.
Portal. Portal is essentially a walking simulator built around one mechanic. Your gimmick needs to be strong enough that it can carry the rest of the game. Granted, Portal also has decent music and written dialogue, so it's not totally dependent on the puzzle platforming. Make no mistake, if the puzzle element was removed, Portal would be shit.
Journey had great visuals and music, but there was nothing there. Your character could jump and float, but those abilities were never put to the test. Mario in the old 2D games had a very limited move pool, but the devs built a game around those limitations. Mario could swim, jump, run, and use a select special ability when he has the appropriate power up in his possession. Everything in Mario 3 is an obstacle for the player to learn to traverse with said abilities. Journey could have done the same, or something similar, and it would have been fantastic. They could have made a series of single player levels for solo players to traverse, and a separate series of multiplayer levels that require an extra hand to solve. Instead, it's a virtual tour through an admittedly beautiful landscape with a great soundtrack and not much else.

You want to explore? Go play Elder Scrolls. At least in those games you'll fight the occasional bandit/monster/mage/etc. and there are some rudimentary puzzles. Hell, even Minecraft is essentially a walking simulator in which you decide your own objectives.

There is no such thing a as a walking simulator done right, since the only thing you could really do right are things that are universal to every game genre: Optimization, filesize compression, OS availability, etc.. The rest is nothing more than art style and assets that ultimately amount to things you look at, listen to, and walk past. It's like comparing getting a blowjob from a girl with thick thighs from one with skinny thighs, your dick's getting sucked but you're not doing anything with either girl's thighs other than having a preference for one of the two to help you get a better boner.

More accurately they are adventure games with the puzzles taken out. The fact that the adventure was also removed is the fault of shitty devs.

Well for one I think walking sims have potential but they need some sort of kick. Some kind of creative gameplay mechanic that still gets you immersed but doesn't take the entire game out of the video game.
Yes portal has puzzles which makes it good and gives it replay value. But there are walking sims that don't have puzzles that still have replay value, LSD Dream Emulator for instance. Your walking around low res polygon land, but it has trippy visuals and weird things to find and its different every time you restart the game. Or there are walking sims where you have to find certain items and bring them back to a certain point like in Yume Nikki or Layers of Fear.
Unless you count the "walking from village to village" as a walking sim
You can attribute that to having multiple endings that are triggered by doing a certain thing.

Walking Simulators are almost always SJW games.

How would you stare at paint in a way that's actually good? Not some boring bland thing like when I stared at paint before. I want your opinions.

How do you stare at a silver screen or a stage for hours in a way that's actually fun? Immersion, suspension of disbelief, suspense, drama, humor and other elements of an engaging experience don't depend on whether the action onscreen can be controlled with sticks and buttons. The failure of a "walking simulator" depends on factors other than gameplay.

For example, look at Silent Hill. Mechanically, it's fucking atrocious. James controls like a tank and shoots like a blind man. If we stripped away the narrative and exploratory components and made it so you just shoot waves of monsters in a bunch of arenas, it would be a shit game. They actually did this and the result was Book of Memories. However, despite mechanical shortcomings it worked extremely well in the context of a well paced, suspenseful narrative that draws you into the fear and isolation of its main character. It would also still be a solid game if the combat elements were removed. They actually did this, the result was Shattered Memories.

The problem is when hack liberal arts college dropouts make a scene viewer with a voice over track in it and call it "art". It fails not only mechanically, but also by being an unwatchable pile of garbage that fails to arouse even the tiniest drop of investment from the audience. By dismissing their work on gameplay alone you're just giving them an excuse to peddle their sophomoric film school trash as groundbreaking works of genius misunderstood in their time.

True, but do they always have to be?

Give the player a gun and put enemies in the game.

Gameplay is the most important factor. Without it, you've got nothing.
No, it worked extremely well in the context of its atmosphere. The narrative is pretty predictable and doesn't take up much of your time. There are only a few major interactions between a small cast of characters throughout Silent Hill 1 and 2. The rest of the "story" is told through the eerie and foreboding environment. What are you going to remember more, some shitty quote by some character, or that the third floor of the hospital level has that creepy as fuck door you need to pass through? The story has its place, but it merely exists to string the major events together in a cohesive manner. On top of this, Silent Hill 2 has multiple endings, which further illustrates that the game isn't about the destination, but instead about the journey. They obviously want to emphasize that the town is its own character and holds its own appeal, story or not.

Even without its great atmosphere, I'd still take Silent Hill's stiff gameplay over no gameplay at all. You can have the most "immersive" and incredible atmosphere, but if all I'm ever expected to do is walk around without any threat of failure looming overhead or any reason to do anything other than look around and observe shit, then the facade will quickly dispel and any suspense the "game" may have managed to convey will be replaced by boredom.
They don't need an excuse, the lot of them are likely egotistical enough to delude themselves with such grandiose rationalizations to begin with. Obviously a game is more than its gameplay, and therefore other aspects deserve to be analyzed, however interactivity is what separates vidya from other mediums. When that aspect isn't being used to its potential, and is being pushed onto the back burner for the sake of "muh feelz muh story" then it is an indication that developers have their priorities all fucked up.

people unironically calling 'walking simulators' as 'good' are the same people that believe that "altgames" isn't the most stupidest fucking blogger-made name for 'sp00ky games to smoke weed to' (via having a more 'unconventional' aesthetic or having an inherent difference to 'mainstream' indie games)

your thread was Dead On Arrival, OP

To do a walking simulator right, you need to have action combat or some form of gameplay.

1. Gameplay
I know it seems strange to propose adding gameplay to a genre that is practically defined as having no gameplay, but the introduction of a simple fail state can breathe life into it. Games like Slender (love it or, more likely, hate it) were built on the concept of exploration and avoidance. Find what you need, but don't get caught. A gameplay philosophy that couldn't be easier, but it worked because it created a heavy atmosphere of dread and paranoia. Any time spent not collecting a page was time spent wondering if you were being followed. Finally collecting a page meant that you would be entering a more difficult stage of the game.

2. Exploration, Story
This is the stuff Walking Simulators are built on, but what they need is refinement. A walking sim most people here would probably scoff at is Dear Esther, but it was a game that I think had huge potential that it never truly brought out. I remember playing it for the first time and reaching an abandoned ship, where there was no narration. I spent a few minutes looking around that general area for clues on its significance, with no narration to guide me along. It was probably the most memorable moment of the game for me. If the game focused more on moments like that, where you would find something that struck you as unusually conspicuous, and then encourage you to seek answers, then it would be interesting even if the answers you find aren't of any particular importance. "It's about the journey, not the destination", if you will.
In a similar vein going in the opposite direction, there's the story. Something that ties everything together. Give the player a reason to move forward and they will. The problem with stories in walking simulators is just that… they're stories. Linear stories. You don't feel like you are experiencing the story, it's a simple move from A to B to hear some exposition. That's no good. I said Story and Exploration are opposites, but this is why I included them as the same point:
They need to be combined. The player needs to have a reason to move forward, but he also needs to be rewarded for taking detours. A walking simulator should give the player sights to see and things to explore. If you're going to make me walk then make it worth my time.

Walking Simulators are in this strange limbo where, in order to be good, they need to provide the player with an inordinate amount of freedom. However, its core gameplay involves restricting the player (specifically, to walking and possibly interacting with objects in the environment). It's a heavy clash between concept and mechanics that bottleneck the 'genre' and keep it from being something that could be great fun.

I'm really glad that Yume 2kki came out well before the "pretentious indie art game" came into full swing.

Meant to say Nikki, but my point stands.

just say that you want more 1st person Adventure games m8

For a good walking simulator you need

If the player thinks "Why am I doing this?" at any point, you've fucked up. The idea is to make an interesting, immersive world which the player can enjoy.
Half Life 2 did this well. There are parts where there aren't many enemies and you're just walking through the area. In that game the exploring parts are used to pace the game, to give you a break from the shooting. You play through them because you want to see what happens next, and there are platforming and puzzle challenges to give you a reason to pay attention.
Banjo-Kazooie is great for this as well. It gives you nice, big worlds to traverse and a reason to do so. You go around collecting whatever stuff you want at your own pace, and the music, platforming and enemies give you a reason to keep playing.
Mario 64 does this too, but in a different way. Mario 64 makes walking fun, and gives you tools to get around. You aren't just plodding along from point A to point B, you're parkouring through different routes to go where you want. Just moving around is so smooth and fun that you want to explore because of it.

All those games contain walking and exploration. They aren't full-blown walking simulators. The walking is always a means to an end instead of an end in itself. The trick to making a good walking simulator is to have more than just walking, at least throw in a puzzle or an obstacle or something. A game which is 100% walking simulator is like a cake which is 100% sponge, you have to mix in some other aspects or it'll be bland as fuck.

Oh well, I guess its not my fault everyone here is thirteen years of age. At least we can have a discussion about it.

I agree that there needs to be some form of gameplay mechanic as apposed to just walking. Add some npcs in the game, have the player interact with said npcs and vice versa. Or have it so that when a player is holding a specific item that npc reacts in a certain way. Like a passive effect, something that indirectly effects the environment around you with no direct input.

As for the story, you have the right idea of exploring a surreal environment with no narration. like I've stated before, the story must be told indirectly through symbolism no dialogue what so ever.

I could see them being used as educational things, first person tours of art galleries complete with tourguides who will spit out facts about whatever artwork you are looking at or tours of historical sites like the coliseum complete with a time system so you can see what it would look like when in use.

stanley parable

You're sitting in a chair while you play but you feel as if you are walking around the town.

LSD Dream Simulator.

That's it.

All the rest of this shit in this thread is just dumb as fuck.
Go get a PS1 emulator and go download the game and play it.

just make it interesting. funny, weird and or boner inducing, that kind of thing. thats all i ask for in a game like this. im not expecting cutting edge deep game play or the most well written thing. but in a game about walking there better be something to see.

the problem with those games you listed are simply that they just arent interesting. theyre single moms book club tier stories.
im not going to read 50 shades of gray, and im not going to read some trannies blog so youd have to spice it up in some crazy way if you want me to be interested in it. i couldnt really care less what inspired the story.

With more variations in the map, Skyrim could be a perfect walking simulator. I just want a decently realistic looking game where I can simulate the feeling of hiking in wilderness, watching fishes in a calm river and beautiful morning sunshine, visiting obscure countrysides, and talking to complete strangers without shyness or fear. Quests and combat tire me out, I just want to relax like I do in real life places without having to bring equipments and plan the travel.

I can no longer enjoy video game worlds. I can stare at a beautiful scene for a second, or fap to a qt, but mostly I care for and evaluate games based on the gameplay. Everything else is just window dressing to me. I don't see the world, I see the path I will take through it. It wasn't always this way, but as I am now, I would be the person least qualified to design a walking simulator.

That's a sign of autism bro.

You'd probably like Eastern Mind, too.

I think this is the only way to make good story, atmosphere, or walking sims. The world is good except insofar as it contributes to gameplay, and it's just that normally how the world looks has no relevance to the game.

A walking simulator shouldn't contain gameplay. If there's a gameplay, it should be fully sandbox. In fact, I feel like it should separate itself from video game. It should be a showcase of simulated life, life as in how we see the world, not just human or animal life. Like a safari ride, but with more interactivity.

I think a good walking sim has to follow three rules:
1) No gameplay (success/failure states), only perpetual play
2) No narrative story, only setting
3) Must be thoroughly interactive. Ideally creative, but even just omnipresent reactive detail is enough

If it fails #1, you should be making an actual game. If it fails #2, you should be making a VN/choose-your-own-adventure/etc. If it fails #3, go back to the film school you dropped out of and try making an actual movie.

I'm not sure in what game you couldn't see the world as you do.

The term "walking simulator" is dumb anyway. As if the only games that are worth something are the "fast" ones where you run around kill a lot of people/monsters. When I was younger, me and my friends played a lot of so-called "walking simulators" (they were called adventure games back then), but we didn't analyze them that way. They were just games like any other. Analyzing and putting everything into neat categories is the real cancer of video games - just go and play them.

Basically this. Quite much like the survival sandbox games we see today, but without the survival aspect and with more attention to details of the world, and maybe some NPC's. I feel like Bethesda has the biggest potential to do this, but they spend too much time writing shitty quests and lame narrative instead of putting all resource into world design and interactive environment. Other devs wouldn't pull it off as well as Beth.

Any game that shoves objectives down player's throat.

You are explaining the reason right now, because of which RPGs stopped having any role playing elements nowadays.

trends and tropes upset people, if they can identify something theyve seen before it makes them angry about it, for some reason.

not close at all

what's that?

You want a model of the world to have one, not because it shows you something you consider important.

I go for a hike. I see something I can tell is beautiful. I stop to stare at it for a moment because I can tell it deserves to be stared at. Maybe I take a picture. I feel nothing inside. I continue onward and within a minute I can barely remember what I saw.
It's a sign of age. The older you get, the less wonder you see in the world, the more familiar everything seems. Your brain ignores the superfluous bits so it can focus on the predators and the prey.

You've got it backward. A walking simulator is supposed to have no gameplay, and engross you purely within the experience of exploring a virtual world.
Do I have no interest in them because I don't see the virtual world? Or do I have no interest because modern video games are shit and nobody makes interesting worlds these days? Either way, I'm the last guy to say how to make these games. All I want is a new maze to haunt.

Think about some of the more puzzle-light LucasArts ones, like Full Throttle, or especially Loom.

I want the game to give me freedom of what I consider to be important.

Funny, I tend to get bored and ignore my surroundings when I was younger. It's because I used to seek for something interesting. Now as I grow older and have become grateful of life, I can appreciate nature no matter how simple it is. I can even stare at a small pond or a muddy ground all day. I feel like such occasion of being alone with my own mind and nature heightens my state of awareness, it is when all the worries and selfishness disappear and spiritual thoughts arouse.

Of course such small details can't be fully simulated in video games, but I just love the freedom this medium is able to provide.

Still too much puzzle. Imo walking simulator can't be done effectively in 2D either.

A game similar to LSD Dream Emulator created by Osamu Sato, who also did work on LSD. It's less abstract and expansive than LSD, but it's similar in style and tone.

I would make a first person puzzle platformer

Accept that your game is a walking simulator and stop pretending to be an "immersive and exciting action packed horror survival adventure game full of mystery and wonder". These games suck dick primarily because they trick the player into thinking they're going into a videogame with gameplay, only to be left waiting and waiting for it to start and never getting it, or getting some shallow piece of shit and never involving themselves into the "experience" properly like they were supposed to.

I think Firewatch is a pretty good walking simulator. In fact I think it's good enough for me to want to call it an "interactive story" instead. But you NEED TO start calling your game that way and stop pretending to be something else when it isn't.

Old fashioned adventure games but with a more 'immersive' (i.e. first-person) type of gameplay. Think Beneath a Steel Sky level of puzzles but turned into first person.

On the opposite end of the UI bridge, when was the last time somebody tried resuscitating text parsers?

Scrapland?

...

Could luck selling that to a publisher or persuading a streamer to advertise it for you.

This is how to improve walking simulators not what is a walking simulator.

Yeah, you can fix anything like this. You're not "fixing" anything, you're just scrapping it and making something else.

It keeps all the 'good' elements of walking simulators (story, atmosphere, immersion) while adding actual gameplay. Removing the shit parts of the genre is not the same as abandoning the genre entirely.

If it were functional enough, there's no reason it wouldn't necessarily have mass appeal. For instance, Scribblenauts achieved meme status for a while, with something resembling a grammarless parser.

If I were MS I would be working on this for minecraft VR ASAP

this would be cool, I got my nephew a book from Rome that shows what different parts of the city looked like during the Empire compared to what they look like now. The images of current Rome are on paper, and then there's a plastic clear sheet page that you put over the image, and it 'fills in' what was lost to time. So the colosseum 'modern' page shows the ruins, and then you put the clear sheet over it and it shows the 'ancient' colosseum, complete with stuff like the extra walls that it had back in the day.

Actually, a VR museum like this would be very cool, Google already does it with Cardboard, I think they have a virtual tour of the Louvre on that platform.

I hate this "walking simulator should have puzzles" meme. Don't expect to play a video game when playing walking simulator, because it's not supposed to be a video game. Imagine Elder Scrolls, but without quests and without any narrative except for the explanation of the setting (the big scenario) and personal lives of the NPC's you can explore from their activities if you want to.

Walking simulator is the closest to Kino-Oki (Kino-Eyes), but with full interactivity and zero political bullshit. Here's the manifesto written in Vertov's "Man With a Movie Kamera" film:

AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCENARIO
WITHOUT THE HELP OF THEATRE

But, if back in the 1920's people were only able to capture fragments of life, with today's technology we can construct life as a whole and let the audience choose their own fragments.

Arma 2-3 is a good walking simulator

Come on, it is a pretty okay game

First we need an unreliable main character or narrarator. Once we have that we have them take way too much acid in a short amount of time. Then send them off into the woods and the game starts there.