Is there a worse case of 'illusion of choice' than the open world rpg with no secret areas?

Deep Sea Research Facility (aka Battleship island) and The island closest to Hell are two separate places. There's also an The island closest to Heaven.

And yes it does suck that these are gone.

I think a major reason for why these type of things have disappeared is from design decisions themselves. RPGs tend not to have a separate world map view anymore. Even in JRPGs the world is basically one big continuous "dungeon", so everything has to be given a (semi) logical continuity. Field/World screens function like a free roaming hub world. And they make the game feel bigger too.

Your standards already had to be rock bottom if you expected anything good out of bioware.

I remember that crap, this is the reason why games might have awesome long intros but short and forgatteble endings.

I've been playing games for the ending instead of the journey since the NES Ninja Gaidens.

You didn't play Witcher 3?

I dont like the Witcher, i tried the first 2 games a dozen times each because Holla Forums kept repeating "it gets good if you stick with it" or "skip the first, the second is god tier" and i found both tedious and boring.
I understand it is the greatest pride of slav anons but i just dont experience fun with the witcher games, just an increasing feeling that im wasting time i could better spend playing something else.

Tomb Raider 2013 is probably the biggest offender.

It pretends to be an open world game with crafting, collectables and shit but you can only progress through areas with set gadgets and there is a predetermined 'path' on what loot you can get where. You need certain parts to upgrade a gun, for example, and normally 1-2 of those parts cannot be found out of order (and you can't get to where they are without the relevant gadget from a mission…). The only way you could have a different experience to another player is if you were fucking blind and missed one of the pre-determined pieces of loot and that's next to impossible.

It claims to be open world but it actually just reuses the same few maps to save dev time.

As it happens I think open world would be a poor idea for a TR game anyway but still.

shit taste confirmed

Tomb Raider was 'ludonarrative disonance: the game'

I cant remember the last game ive seen where gameplay and story is so fucked over.

Poland pls.

Trolling is against the rules, buddy.

They're pretty much games where you run around and talk to people. I love them, but if you can't get into the world or the characters then there isn't much left to go on. Kind of boggles the mind that the series ended up being some GOTY award winning AAA franchise, when you think about it.

Cant expect every game to appeal to you yknow? much as the tumblcore audience believe its the case.
Games would be even shittier if everything tried to appeal to the same audience because it shares a genre with other games.

Just look at how every 3rd person cover shooter is so similar they even start with the same button keybinds as default.

And that is one of nearly 100 problems in the game that broke the final thread of my hope for vidya

It was a pile of shit in almost every conceivable way frankly.

lara's new gf was cute
heard she's dead or something in the new one lol

I dropped the game after 30 minutes. it was trash.

LOL, a Polfag here. Don't jump to conclusions. I don't give a fuck if you like Witcher games or you don't.

You can't spell poland without pol. Nice try Kvassmancer. Your rubber first of SERBIA has no power here.

I finished it but then I made the silly mistake of paying for it before trying it out.

Legend is still the best game in the series. Well at least in my heart. I think it has some objective flaws.

Best tits at least.

I did finish Legend too, it wasn't bad.

Huh? Do you want me to type something specific at >>>/k/? Posts there are flag-tagged automatically.

Mógłbyś przestać rżnąć głupa, co?

I didn't mind new Lara's actually.

For some anons, myself included, Legend seems to hold a special place above its actual quality. I suspect it might be because of the dire state of the series before it came out but it's one of those games I just love to replay on a regular basis.

when you live in bongland new lara is kind of a downgrade, kind of like an average uni girl -unless you live down south or near birmingham.

If you look at the goals that RPG developers had in the past, it could have included:
This lead to games with a whole bunch of shit crammed in them with new concepts at the time. Kids and adults alike could appreciate the high amount of content in each game.

Now think about how those goals may have changed in the current market of game development. I don't think I have to say that the general attitude of game development today is not to make wonderful games, but profitable products.

This shift in the game development industry away from "fun" and towards "profits" might not be even true, but this is Holla Forums so that's the model of this post. Combine that shift with the creative peaking of the RPG genre (and video games as a whole) and you get a stagnation that isn't really anyone's fault. You could look at the classics and pick out something that they each was among the first to do, in other words the RPG genre was still growing. The peak I'd say was reached at the time Final Fantasy 12 and Dragon warrior 8 came out, but that's just my opinion. After that, games have been good but not delivering anything truly wonderful besides improved graphics.

I normally lurk and never post but I felt the same problem as you OP. Hope I shined some light on it.

Anyone remember Serious Sam?
It was an arena shooter, but it was an arena shooter with two secret levels, dammit!

Regular threads about it on Holla Forums user.

Also secrets out the ass in the game in general, of course.

Some of the strangest secrets as well

Sadly the ones that fuck with the game's physics don't work in the HD versions.

Its a shame indie rpgs are lost now too. Ever since hipsters discovered rpg maker and "the feels" its been downhill ever since.

This was the game that made every SJW reviewer stop using the term "ludonarrative disonance." Up until TR2013, they couldn't use it enough to shit on anything they didn't like.

Well you cant keep using it when a stronk female based game shows up as the new textbook example of it.

and they can always fall back on judgemental opinion pieces ending in "and thats okay".

Remember Cave Of Trials for Star Ocean The 2nd Story?
That shit was awesome.

I know I'm opening a can of worms by saying this but: Wouldn't Undertale count?

The entire genocide route was basically made under the assumption that most players would find out about it through the internet. The game doesn't drop any hints to its existence at all in the other routes.

Premade D&D modules exist.

Thats largely doing the same path to the end bar doing the fights different.

I'm talking about games with a big overworld where there are areas you are never told to go to that have hyper bosses, ultimate weapons, god tier drops and so on.

I similar example that comes to mind on a smaller scale in terms of enemy power and reward would be in Pokemon Pearl. There is a mansion deep in the woods on one of the routes which looks like an empty home but if you go there at midnight there are ghosts in the other rooms -people not ghost pokemon- but investigating leads to a one of a kind per run ghost pokemon called Rotom that changes its type.

Still the best examples i can think of are things like Final Fantasy or to a lesser extent Zelda.

the Gothic series understands this, every game in the series is full of secret forgotten places, some so huge you have to first hunt down the map of the place to explore it properly.
It's just the way game design is nowadays because of braindead normals

can confirm,this is actually taught in game designs classes, this is why exploration is non-existent,multiple endings don't exist and Easter eggs are in plain sight

basically most players won't see the content so future "devs" are told its a waste of time/effort

and yet the big kickstarter successes are always things that take design notes from the past.

its like cal arts and animation all turning into adventure time clones again.

i've yet to see any kekstarters actually deliver on this, saying your going to use designs from the past and actually doing it are two different things

most new game devs and devs in the industry are $15 steam game tier or $60 empty promise skies tier,

its like how art can't be taught because the real artists are long gone, you've got shitty game devs teaching bad principles creating more shitty game devs

everyone's so out of touch and stuck on good graphics and appealing to the lcd that everythings become stagnant and dead

does anyone has the screencap of the user who playtested a game and tried to find secret areas only for the devs to think the user didn't knew which way to go?

Seriously?

Shovel Knight, user.

Xenonauts did though it wasn't massive (under $200k kickstarter and an unknown amount of pre-orders for beta access through their own side).

I think thats another crux of the problem. So many devs are consumed with 'success=immediateprofit=widest market appeal=diultion of niche audience appeal'

Which means in many cases games make less money each sequel. theres stand outs like call of duty but on the whole the 'wider market appeal' has lead to the complete destruction of games ips from the past like warcraft or final fantasy once considered standard setting ips.

thankfully capcom and squenix ,while remaining jewish as fuck, at least understand lots of small niche products that mean garuanteed income are better for keeping the consumer coming back than one big game that might flop.

Telltale Games "games" have the worst kind of illusion of choice imo. It's supposed to be a "game" based on player choices but the choices don't do shit. Each episode, and the "game" itself will always end in the same way.

I will never understand the small but very die hard fanbase on Holla Forums telltale has.

Shit at least in fucking gone home and slender you can actually go "what am i looking for, what am i doing wrong?" in telltale any true fail state is just a soft reset. All the 'blank will remember this' or 'you made a mistake and X character died!' just means what model/voice audio file is loaded in for a cutscene later, the ending remains unchanged.

and if you have to be compared to gone home to illustrate how badly you fail at the videogames then jesus fuck you did some shit wrong.

There's no Telltale fanbase here. You're shitting me.

Both Capcom and particularly Squenix are some sort of strange mix of competent development held back by truly idiotic business practices. Not even just greed either. I swear Squenix actually want to go bankrupt. Fucking Triad Wars and the new Deus Ex game's silly preorder nonsense, for example.

The simple fact of the matter is that Episodic games and "Choose your Own Adventures" are a terrible mix. Because each chapter is by definition self-contained, each part has to have the same general starting off point.

For all the shit Heavy Rain gets, it actually achieved a pretty impressive level of story permutation. And in Until Dawn, characters could die at almost any point, but that wouldn't affect their contribution to the story if they survived (unlike Walking Dead Season 2, in which if a character can die but survives, they cease contributing to the story and are eventually killed off anyway).

Too fucking right.

If someone only plays the game once and doesn't see picrelated they'll think it's amazingly able to respond to their choices and still provide a consistent plot etc. I did until I accidentally crashed halfway through and decided to choose different out of interest. Once you see behind the veil shit falls down.

do you have adblock on? they even pay for banner ads dude.

Don't remind me.

Of course I have adblock on.

i think he means the ads about some telltale games general

I turn it off every so often to see what shits being pushed and everytime i see that gross hispanic gooch or 'telltale general'.

They got so tired of getting shit here they made a quarantine board.
i mean shit if they are contained and happy i dont really care, but still for Holla Forums anons to love them that much just goes to show how varied user as a collective must really be.

Morrowind had so many dungeons that where hidden would only be found if you really had a passion for fucking around and exploring. Like the deep sea Dwemer dungeon, also contained the only piece of Dragon Armor.

Even story/quest related places had so many small things and loot just waiting to be found and required the use of your agility and magic.

To this day I still find stuff I never found before

Anons as a collective hivemind are pretty cool guys, like that Holla Forums fellow for instance, but individual Anons are always massive fucking faggots

Too bad Meme Knight sucks ass.

Any way to set these up with modern settings and better controls? I couldnt get into them even if I tried.,r

Everything you said I am utterly convinced of. There often feels like some real genius on the S.enix team and at capcom (whoever is making the MH games is a flock of golden geese). But that whoever is calling the shots is high half the time. Or just has no idea how the industry works.

One of the worst aspects of some RPGs is when they allow you to skirt by with any character build regardless of how shitty it's built, thus removing any meaningful choices when managing your character. How is it acceptable for an RPG to completely remove any skill involved with using it's core-fucking-mechanic? It would be like an FPS that aims for you, or a Bullet Hell that auto-pilots.

Or possibly both.

In addition to what other anons have said, modern "design philosophy" probably has a lot to do with this as well. According to what a lot of devs are taught, secrets that you're not told about are examples of "bad game design" because some players may not find them.

Someone got PTSD from Symphony of the Night or something i swear.

The ideal RPG would somehow be like three great games in one. A great stealth game for thieves and thief like characters. A great melee combat game for warriors. A great shooter with some awesome physics and variety for magic casters.

Its a shame open world RPGs are largely shit now. I guess because everything is open world all of a sudden and the uniqueness those games offered take a back seat so they can try and be the next Far Cry of DutyCraft.

She was a grade A cunt, and so was Carley technically, it was bound to happen sooner or later.

That's not how RPGs work.

I'm triggered.

Let's fake a study where most people complete games then, it should be easy everyone does it. Let' crank up those peer reviews.

So something like Deus Ex or VTMB with a competent engine?

Pre-built engine could come out with native stealth and combat in it, stealth is character vision with parameters for their vision radius and distance, vision is block by objects, and obstructed with darkness, camouflage, distance and being at the periphery of one's vision. It's the kind of thing that could be programmed once and be used by all games that have stealth.

Combat is about the same thing but more complex and need to be more flexible, it's placing hitboxes that yield various effects on contact.

...

I only finished G1 and 2, and just recently started a playtrough with the expansion pack. While I do agree that there are a lot of caves and some abandoned houses with enemies and loot, I don't remember any noteworthy place that wasn't part of the main quest. Could you refresh my memory?

I was 11 when I first started playing G1, with no instruction manual and in ten minutes I figured out the controls, in one or two hours they felt natural to me, git gud.

Mass Effect 3's ending

why people keep asking obvious things? it's not for you. you're not their target demographic, and gaming in general is not a niche hobby anymore. big companies like Bethesda and Bioware have recruited whole masses of mouth-breathers to the genre who don't care about that stuff, and smaller companies follow suit because their see how easy and profitable the mainstream market it.

Trouble is the niches still exist and the income may be smaller but its garaunteed.

I dont know any normals that can name an ip without thinking of a streamer or felicia day or will wheaton talking about it first.