Solos

How did you help Marcian launch his forums career? Was it your idea to pretend to be a girl?

I think this is a special case because people really wanted to know what happened. The other problem was the story was just plain boring. You can make an RTS where the player's actions meaningfully impact the story.

I can't really understand what you're saying with your vague descriptions so if i'm totally off the mark then please send me a PM, where you could be a bit more precise. From what i understand you're asking if having the "open world" tag on your game can excuse shoddy gameplay by saying "Hey, you can do all this other neat stuff!"

My opinion is yes and no, in certain ways. Like i said before, since developers have finite resources you can't expect an open world game to be a super polished shooter. However, you have to be careful not to make the game a themepark. By this i mean it's bad to have a game where you can shoot people OR race cars OR play basketball OR do some gardening OR play cards OR go miles out of your way to babysit the protagonist's annoying NPC friends every time they get bored. All your doing there is making a really expensive version of a Wii waggle game. The game has to have some sort of focus that you concentrate your resources on.

The open world aspect has to come from player agency. How do you as the player go about completing your goal? As a player i understand that in a game where i'm a private detective trying to catch a serial killer that it's unreasonable to expect the developers to devote resources to allowing me to abandon the case and start up a jet ski rental shop in the Caribbean, but at the same time as a game the strength of the medium is giving the opportunity for me to go about solving the case how i think is best. I might feel it's best to sneak into a gang hideout on a lead rather than going through the front door guns blazing for instance. What i don't want is a linear railroad because a movie provides for that experience much better, and i don't have to listen to idiots talking about how games are art or epic win gaming culture. Another aspect of the game design, using the example of stealth/shoot, is i think it's important for the game to be designed as an either/or choice. All your doing there is creating two games which aren't going to be anywhere near as good as if you devoted all your resources to one of them.

The other issue you brought up was the issue of game mechanic design (to use your example completing the entire game using the grapple hook to stun before shooting them). That's just an issue of pure mechanical design, and i'd assume you'd go about avoiding it by play testing with the kind of people who try to "solve" games. In relation to open worlds, if anything it's worse because people will naturally gravitate to the tried and true method rather than using all the tools at their disposal, which is the main strength your game has as an open world rather than a linear experience. The most obvious solution is to vary the obstacles (be it enemies you have to kill, terrain you have to traverse, whatever) so that the same tactic won't work every time. You have to be careful that it doesn't degenerate to rock, paper, scissors though because that's just as boring as the original scenario. Off the top of my head i'd say what makes games interesting is the variation in the environment in which you are facing the obstacle. So to use a very basic example, your grapple hook might be great if you're against a lone enemy, but if you try to use it to kill a bunch of guards you get shot to pieces as you try to use it, so you would use a grenade in that instance. You then run into the problem of the game feeling too "artificial" if your game is just lone enemies and groups huddled together, because then you just have 2 mindless activities you can engage in that's little better than one. I can recognise set pieces designed to be tackled a specific way and i think most other people can too. Don't just put them in a big puddle that you've already established allows me to insta-kill them with my lightning gun. The player agency and fun comes in when players have to actually have to think about what they're doing. If there's a bunch of guards spread out across the room does the player try to isolate them and pick them off with his grappling hook technique or does he try to lure them together so he can take them all out at once with a grenade? By varying the environment that encounters occur in a way that changes the viability of the player's weapons they can't rely on one gimmick to get them through the game.

Also i'm not a game designer so i'm probably just talking a load of ****. I also realise that most game designers don't intentionally make bad games, i'm just discussing things from a completely theoretical idealistic standpoint. It's a lot harder to put good design into practice than posting a couple of paragraphs about it on an internet forum.