Travel is gonna become boring if you have to travel the same road multiple times in the course of the game even if you have a bunch of cool stuff along that road. Eventually, I won’t give a shit about that stuff since I’ve seen it a million times. So I would hope there is still some kind of fast travel to go between places I have already been if the world is super big. Otherwise it’s just gonna feel like you’re padding the game for time to inflate a 10 hour story to take 40 hours to finish.
I think the better way to help fix this issue is random encounters, spawns, and a world that changes as the game moves along.
Moving along the same road can be made interesting if different things are happening every so often as you come through. New friendly encounters, new fights with different enemies, maybe randomly spawning treasure or scripted puzzle sequences that can appear dynamically around the whole world. Add to that a world that becomes modified by story events, maybe that road gets blocked and a different passage opens up that takes you to the same end destination, but with a new path and things to explore.
It's not an unsolvable problem, but it is something that goes by the wayside often.
One thing to consider too is scheduled events. Imagine a couple towns get together and throw a fair along a route that connects them, and you get to see celebrations and games and vendors who might sell trinkets that are hard to track down otherwise. Perhaps the local monarch goes on a hunt with the massive party of servants and knights that might entail, with different practices for different cultures. A band of cultists clears an area for several days leading up to their yearly ritual. It’s migration season for a certain species of animal/monster. There are so many possibilities!
Even just vendors passing through can be made more interesting. Do they carry their wares via backpack or cart? Are they being attacked by bandits? Wild animals? Are they trying to smuggle goods or services somewhere?
It all has to be programmed of course, which is the main holdup on what makes it so hard to flesh out those parts of the world.
I do also see weight in the idea that, past a certain point, traveling is just boring, especially if the only thing of importance is the Main Story Quest. Travel is also often boring in real life too but we can tune it out, or find little ways to pass the time and entertain ourselves during the more mundane moments. We’re not frequently afforded that luxury in games. When you’re playing a game and dealing with the downtime going from point A to B, often there is literally nothing to do except hold down the movement keys and deal with the occasional path change/obstacle.
The point of games is to be engaging, and if there’s nothing to do while traveling but look at the scenery and surroundings it will eventually get boring. Even if the travel gets interrupted occasionally for an encounter, I think it’s arguable to say that the content is literally not travel anymore and in fact papering over a bad travel system (if the only thing interesting is the stuff you find that you have to stop and take care of). Adding more unique/transient stuff along routes is only half of the battle; work has to be put in to make traveling enjoyable in and of itself for players to want to do it instead of skip it.
But as always, the best solution to our problem is to simply add more trains.
To add to this, DD1 has quite a number of NPC's that travel between regions and you can come across them. As you progress through the game their patterns and locations change.
I actually am ambivalent on the latter mechanic as it really makes it a pain sometimes, but it still has lots of ways that it can work well.
Depends on the reason for traveling. If you are headed down the road to a goal and keep getting sidetracked by random encounters in a way that is distracting you from the thing you want to do then they just make travel tedious.
It all comes down to why am I traveling and why are encounters on the road more engaging than the reason for being on the road in the first place.
And for the record, Itsuno does say that he thinks fast travel is “convenient” and “good” when done right.
Based on Dragon’s Dogma 1’s use of Ferrystones, as well as this mechanic returning along with oxcarts in the sequel, I think this director understands that there needs to be a balance. It’s good when it’s both properly implemented and has a purpose. You’re right that nobody wants to run up and down the same roads countless times, but it’s up to the devs implementing limited fast travel to make sure you won’t have to. Then it’s up to the player to decide whether fast travel is worth it for any given situation. Knowing when to use your fast travel and how to maximize it is a skill that you develop and should be rewarded for mastering.
But it also needs to have a purpose. In more arcadey games, I don’t like worrying about resources like that. But in more grueling games like Dragon’s Dogma, where the journey is often a very intentional part of the gameplay loop if not the main challenge itself, it fits right at home.
So the CEO makes a shit decision, quits and leaves with his millions of dollars and now a bunch of employees get to lose their job. Capitalism is so disgusting.
Will definitely check this one out (I think it’s coming to ps+ premium or whatever the 2nd tier is and gamepass), but I swear that article read like 2 different people wrote it between the first and second halves.
With all the emphasis they seemed to have running up to release on how they crafted the environments and moving through them I’m a little disappointed there doesn’t sound to be much in the way of exploration. But the combat system sounds unique so I’ll play it just to experience that aspect alone.
I watched two of the three, and really enjoyed them. Sure, I'd much rather see more gameplay, and they didn't do anything to sell me on the game itself, but they were enjoyable nonetheless
Maybe they should remove the big Early Access banner from the store page if the game is actually finished. I liked it when it first launched and had the free play weekend, but I wasn’t going to spend the $30-40 it cost for a single map on an unfinished game.
And I mean even back in the hay days of Tribes 2, it was sort of a niche game.
I was interested in the game, but for me the problem really was the skill level of the player base. Getting killed 20 times before getting a kill is no fun at all. I played during the test period, and I think it definitely would be fun with other noobs, but every game just has people in it who are miles above the rest.
They actually had a neat solution to that in the form of some basic bots to help fill in for under-queued matches. Not too different from what Splitgate had going on (man, I miss that one too!) It gave beginners something to chew on a little bit. Would have been nice to have custom server options to tune bots and matches, like in Tribes 2. Apparently that kind of thing is simply too much to ask for.
Yeah the bots were fine. I definitely liked splitgate more than the new tribes though. Even against humans I felt like I had way more chance to get some kills and overall the game felt more polished.
To say that EVERYONE saw this coming may be an understatement. The moment the devs teased taking out the Honorball game mode and spinning it off into a completely separate game, the writing was on the wall. Possibly my favorite shooter series and it seems to be stuck in development purgatory. Even the unofficial Tribes-likes and other FPS-Z games can’t ever seem to find their footing.
A good Tribes game is not in the cards right now. Players should try harder to be entertained.
(this is a play on a quote from the admins of an old Hi-Rez game called Global Agenda. During the nightly clan vs clan competitive “global map” window, the game was broken, matches wouldn’t load or crash part-way through. Players submitted a ton of tickets, and some of them were not constructive and just said “Fix the game”. Admins got butt-hurt and spammed the entire player-base with “Fixing the game is not in the cards right now. Players should try harder to win.”… I am still very salty about that…)
Edit: Oddly enough, this was right after they launched Tribes: Ascend, just to bring the leap of context full circle.
If you release in early access, perhaps expect players not being ready to jump into a buggy, in-development competitive shooter?
Only early access games I’ll pick up are ones where it’s not PvP and I doubt I’m alone in that.
Bizarre they’re effectively treating the game as “released” and studying telemetry yet when players see “early access”, they see it as “beta” and not actually released.
I think you’re hitting the nail on the head. A lot of publishers are blatantly misusing EA to put out an unfinished piece of software to socialize the testing, and hope for a more understanding playerbase because of the EA status. Not only is it manipulative, it also skews reception like it does here. Personally, I categorically skip all EA because I only buy finished products. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be interested in a good tribes game.
I mean, isn’t all AI in games limited by design? What’s the issue with that?
"Designers instructed us not to improve [the AI] in certain ways, because they believed that players enjoyed being able to dominate the AI and that we shouldn’t deprive them of that.”
This is true. Wait what? What’s the issue? If you make the AI un-defeatable then players won’t have fun. I can see where some limitations may be annoying to very advanced players, but most normal players typically struggle vs AI in strategy games at high difficulty settings. This is where Age of Empires 2s latest settings that include tunable options for AI are the ultimate way to handle AI. But the AI being limited by design isn’t really a problem IMO.
The only time it was challenging was back when AI factions had a hate boner for the player and ONLY the player. Like how they would leave their settlements undefended to march halfway across the map, through territory belonging to a faction they were at war with just to sack the player’s settlements.
The devs said “improve AI” I don’t understand it as make it godlike and unbeatable.
I disagree completely with your perception of AI in games.
I think AI are way to weak and primitive in this day and age. And it shouldn’t. It should be scalable and able to challenge players who want to be and be braindead for others.
Right now in most game AI is borderline braindead.
An old game like FEAR has much better AI than most modern games and it’s from 2005.
So yeah, I think AI being very limited in most modern games is definitely an issue and unfortunately nothing specific to the game in this topic.
No, it’s not. The problem with bad AI in strategy games is that ultimately, what ends up happening is the AI doesn’t follow the same rules as the player and gets a ton of unfair advantages. If you were to play a total war game on the easiest difficulty, it’s just CA’s brain dead AI on equal footing with the player, which allows the player to stomp them out of existence with ease. But when you scale the difficulty up to normal or higher, the AI doesn’t get smarter, because it’s limited. So instead the AI gets a ton of money and resources for free even though it would be otherwise impossible for it to given its position.
For example, if a player was limited to one province, it would put the player on the back foot and is very tough to recover from. If you beat an AI back to one province however, the AI will be able to field an otherwise impossible two full stack armies in an alarming amount of time.
This hurts the experience beyond just “difficulty”. Strategy games are often intended to be deeper than just being about military power. There are often economic and diplomatic mechanics you can use to defeat enemies with, but those often break in these cases because unlike a player, even if you deprive an AI opponent of all of one resource, they’ll probably still have it anyway because it just cheats.
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