POLL | Open world. Yes or No? Then, how?

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@jpcerutti1 wrote:

Qualified yes. As an adventure game it is leaps and bounds forward... but as a roleplaying game it feels like a step back.

The two do not have to be mutually exclusive but you can feel the shift of focus. It isn't fair they have to try and jump over the bar set with the ME series but they set it that high themselves. I would personally hate to have to have everything I produce be compared to my best work for expectation. Hopefully they now have standing in the shadow of the original ME series out of the way and can run with this one.

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I agree with you about them taking the ME series in another direction.  More emphasis seems to be placed on combat/ game play and less on the RPG aspect.  Story/character/choice and consequence is the ONLY reason I have bought Bioware games in the past and it appears to me that they are moving away from that formula.  If that is indeed the case then I won't be continuing with the series.

AS far as Open world goes, I'm fine with it as long as other parts of the game don't suffer because of it, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Yes.

True, some smaller quests are buggy, but that is not a problem with actual open world mechanic.

YES

Firstly, the open areas are largely optional content, why complain about something you don't need to do?

Secondly, it's nice to just drive around and enjoy the worlds, they are very pretty...

Yes to the open world setting, no to how it was implemented. You plunk down a colony, and it's fully built after a cutscene. That's totally not realistic. It should start out small, and necessitate you coming back later to see it built up some more. The map should noticeably change, each time you come back after some time has passed. Missed opportunity after the Kett base is destroyed on Eos, for example, for Initiative forces to be picking it apart for tech and intel, or attempts to be made to recover/salvage the first two sites. Prodromos doesn't visibly grow since you initially plunk it down, and it's like that for every colony.

How they handled viability is also kinda dumb. It shouldn't be a static value that you reach and that's it. It should drop over time (and never reach 100% until just short of endgame), with new objectives to complete that simply weren't available before, and not simply walled-off by insurmountable waist height fences/radiation hazards. Reaching 100% viability should be an indication that you're literally done with the map, and have zero reason to ever go back there.

Honestly no, not in a million damn years will I agree that any more games that they make should be done open world style.

By creating an OPEN world they needed to understand that there are multiple types, and the one they chose is the EXACT SAME * ONE that Inquisition and the new Metal Gear used. Both look cool but they are empty and boring. The only way for it to work at all is to make the game like Rockstar makes gta, it's a an open world, with the game set on top of it, not in it.

THEN we have to look at everything else that goes into making this *, by having something be open and "showy" you have to take away from something else. IN this case it was the story same with MGS TPP. However without a some what linear approach to this game and DAI you just end up wasting time with tish things to do. "Let's just put an * ton of fetch quests...that's what people want." (WoW proved that wrong and changed a lot of the gmae design because of it). I don't care if a game has 200+ hours of gameplay...because 30% of it is what really matters instead of all of it mattering.

The trilogy...i felt like every damn thing I did meant something. EVEN the part of choosing your backstory, that was up until ME 3...when i just decided "Sorry Edi, and Legion...but the sacrifice of the few for the many is what has to be done." the reason I say that is because of the "synthesis (aka forced indoctrination) ending" basically made every little thing you did wrong in the WHOLE series erased.

We lost too much game wise once they started to head open world, if you don't see that then I can't help you, but if you do and it DOESN'T leave a bad taste in your mouth you might want to sit back and look at it all again.

tl;dr lost major stuff for open world, does not support.

Definitely yes, I approve of the new "open world" structure of MEA.  Can it be improved upon?  Yes, again.  But I think Bioware took a step in the right direction by going this route over the previous games that were very linear in where you could go.  Looking back at those maps now, they were basically tunnels that you could travel through a static environment.  I'm not knocking the original trilogy, I loved those games, but there was always this tight restriction on where you could go.  This was true in Dragon Age 1&2 also, but Bioware changed their approach to game worlds with the advent of Inquisition.

There also seem to be degrees of "open worldness" in different games.  Inquisition, Witcher 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Two Worlds, and even going back as far as Gothic 3 (there are others but I can only comment on those games that I've actually played) all have their own approach in how open the world is.  There will always be barriers of some type, where the open world actually ends, some type of barrier, whether it be natural or invisible.

MEA has made a good start, but there are always improvements to be made, such as how certain quests/tasks require you to cover ground you've already discovered.  Also someone previously mentioned how expansion was handled in Inquisition, with troops/citizens occupying new territory once it was safe.  I'd like to see something like this, give the world a little more population as you achieve 100% viability.  Get a few more out of Cryo.

YES

Short and simple, I love the open world feature of this game 🙂

Btw, you see a lot of people talking about the Mass Effect franchise, but this is the Ryder story, it might take place in the Mass Effect universe, but in truth it could also just be viewed like the "Rogue One" story of Star Wars and whether it was intentional or not there is nothing about the ME:A story that prevents the Shepard story from being able to get picked up again, it is actually kind of genius if it was done on purpose, even though the story takes place in the far future from the Shepard story, it doesn't have to mean that this is also the future of Mass Effect. who knows, maybe there will be a Mass Effect 4 one day, I doubt not even EA or BW could say with 100% certainty this couldn't happen 🙂

So in other words:

ME:A open world style?

- YES

ME4 corridor style?

- YES

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@Psych0_Trauma wrote:

We lost too much game wise once they started to head open world, if you don't see that then I can't help you, but if you do and it DOESN'T leave a bad taste in your mouth you might want to sit back and look at it all again.

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Nice to know that your opinion is the only one that matters, since those of us that don't agree with you apparently have something wrong with us.  Would encourage you to express your opinion in the future without criticizing the rest of us.  Unless you just like being a troll.

I believe Open World is the right way to go.  But as others have stated already, it has to be handled properly.  Fallout 4 is a good example of people who complained that it lost its RPG element.  I love Fallout 4 though.  Have 900 hours in it.  Even develop mods for it.  The problem is that Bethesda failed to strike the right balance between open world and RPG elements.  They made the game available to a new group of gamers, but closed it to another.  MA:E did the same thing.  They opened it up to gamers like me, but closed it to others because they failed to strike a right balance.  I personally don't like playing the previous ME trilogy.  Would love the RPG elements, story line and conversation, but I really don't like the game mechanics and other things that I feel are limiting after having played games like Skyrim, Fallout, Witcher 3, etc.

There have also been some great points about how certain elements in the game weren't handled well beyond just the RPG elements.  The colonies being insta-built:  totally agree.  They should have done it in stages, something like the Helgen Reborn mod for Skyrim.  The fetch quests, which plague even games like Witcher 3 and GTA V, probably need to go away completely in the industry across all these games.  I don't think I've ever seen anyone say anything positive about their experience with them other than marking off a completionist checklist.  Several of us understand why they are there, and even take the time to do them all, but that doesn't mean we like them.  Variety in the worlds is another issue.  Eos, Voeld, and Elaaden do seem like carbon copies where the only difference is one being radiated, one being cold and one being hot.  For me, I didn't mind that so much tbh.  But I can see how others would be bothered by that.  Havarl on the other hand was very different.  No Nomad exploration.  You can't explore without constantly being attacked by something.  Very enclosed spaces with lots of little secrets.  The use of vertical in addition to horizontal space.  And of course, the plant life, colors and sounds.  It was different.  Kadara was different as well, but not as much.  So, they didn't do it entirely wrong with regard to the worlds, but they could have done it better.

Open World games that allow modding do even better because modders can utilize that in a variety of ways, including removing fetch quests, adding depth, and fleshing out more of the existing content.  I actually now have more hours playing LSPDFR (a police mod for GTA V) than GTA V itself.  Unfortunately, even though the ME trilogy can be modded, it's very limited overall.

🐲 YES! I love open world! 🐲

Open world gives the feeling of being in a "real world", not a computer / console game. ("Linear level" are like: This is a game, you see it all the time.)

It's hard to make a great story in a Open world. But Bioware have done it great in MEA (after my personal opinion).

I love the Open world in MEA, I even would love a BIGGER world. The blue-border where the maps ends gives me a bit an "artificial feeling". I would love a bigger world and an other art of frontier, but I can't say what sort of. Sorry, have no idea. 🤭 (Blue)curtains and mountains are a bit boring as a "limit".

I also loved the open world in Dragon Age: Inquisition. 😃

No.

That being said, I don´t mind the open world being there as long as I am not forced to gather, fetch or do pointless tasks. ME: Andromeda doesn´t really force anyone to do any of the grinding, you can follow the story line and be done with it.

Why did I answer no then? Because all the resources used to create the open world take away from what could have been added to quality content. I would prefer Mass Effect to stay true to the trilogy and focus much more on heavy story telling with quality dialogue and options.