Victor Tombs wrote:Etsu wrote:The Elder Scrolls have spoiled me I'm afraid.
I feel the same way. I end up doing the same sort of comparisons when looking at games like this.
Now I'm going to digress a little. This is the kind of thing I like to think, but may not be what people want to read. Don't know.
The thing here is what the game is about. The focus. (I'm not saying I know.) If this were a story driven Point & Click adventure game for example then sitting in every chair could be out of place. (And would be confusing for the player if the game is about solving puzzles, because the player may think that sitting in chairs is part of the solution to something when is not.) That kind of game is more about what the character wants or needs to do than what you the player want, and part of the fun is trying to figure things out.
The Mafia games are story driven open world games, and this seems to be the case as well, however there are some differences that make me consider this a different kind of beast. (In Mafia you can explore, but there is not much to do, which is perfect considering what the game is about, but it bothered some people because they were expecting a GTA kind of experience and it wasn't the case.)
I think about Deliverance more like a game of you are there, do what you want, so all kind of exploration (like sitting everywhere or collecting vegetation) becomes important. The "problem" with this set up is that makes telling stories problematic. Like: You are in a big quest (looking for the murderers of your family or even just trying to catch some notorious criminal) but you can take your time to do some pointless activities (like learning how to make potions or trying to do some secondary quests to earn some money), forgetting almost completely about what you were supposed to do, and the world just waits for you.
I have no problem with this. I can separate what is fiction of what is gameplay very easily, but not everyone can or want, and to make it right it requires a very specific kind of storytelling. (Not every story, not every setting or situation is well suited for this kind of game without revealing some parts of the Matrix, which is not necessarily bad but explorers don't usually like.)
A possible solution for example -apart from having an appropriate story that doesn't make silly that you can take your time- is being contextual. For example, if you character is in a quest and is supposed to do something now and he can't wait, then you can't either, so the character refuses to do so. ("I can't stop to collect this freaking plants. I have work to do.") That kind of stuff. (Again, this is perfectly regular stuff for story driven games, but it could be unacceptable for exploration games, when what you want is freedom.)
However, in my opinion this could even be beneficial for the game in the sense that it adds variety to it. (In The Elder Scrolls games you get this kind of variety when you explore a dungeon for example, which sometimes may feel like a complete different game with different rules, and you are absorbed by it, until the point that when you finally emerge to the light again -maybe after hours of exploration- you feel that you are actually emerging from the depths of the earth.) It may be refreshing to be part of some important quest for a while and when you are finished you can come back to all that pointless activities that you love, like collecting flowers.
Alternatively you may want to restrict yourself and don't do things that don't feel right but gamers are not very good restricting themselves. (Like those players that complains that you can steal stuff in The Witcher 3 without any long term consequences. I just don't steal, in the same way that I don't kill random people in GTA.)
But I think that as part of good game design you may want to consider this as part of your game logic. Is your game about freedom and your writing has to take that into consideration, or is freedom just one of many elements that make your game better, but not the absolute focus of it? If the story is your focus then you don't want to add things to your game that are detrimental to the appropriate enjoyment of it. If you are trying to do everything at once however then you have to accept that there is a price to pay and players may lose focus very often.
"Playing" is not simply a pastime, it is the primordial basis of imagination and creation. - Hideo Kojima