EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
I've argued this before, but I can't simply dilute all open world game design down to "filler/checklisting" bloat when the context and execution is what matters most. Game design in general, especially with RPGs (almost all of which have some kind of "open world" construct), tends to revolve around rudimentary, binary gamestates leveraging game systems as a means of interactivity. What matters is how we interact with that content, if the game systems are fun to engage with, narrative/setting/lore context ascribed to said content, and the balance of reward and distribution to avoid redundancy and repetition.
My issue with Inquisition was that maps are loaded with so much content that the sense of reward is trivialised as going anywhere, doing anything dumps incremental XP growth with no real way to distinguish between major accomplishments and stopgaps. The way in which you engage with much of this content is exceptionally basic; click on something to acquire it. And the narrative context, while present, is frequently thin and (at least for me) uninteresting. This is what defines it, for my experience, as bloat. There's no balance in reward pacing, no sense of accomplishment. There's little challenge in engaging with the content itself as there's so much of it readily handed to you over and over and over again. And much of it is light or outright devoid of narrative context. Despite having "so much to do" it all blurs together into a meaningless nothingness.
It's the same problem I have with Ubisoft games; their open worlds are filled with content that has little narrative context and is tied to incremental XP/economy boosts for game systems that are almost always broken in reward pacing. It's all just repeated junk over and over.
That being said, when given context this open world "stuff" can be tons of fun. In Inquisition I loved fighting the dragons because they were hidden super enemies that utilised the full scope of game systems. In the Witcher 3 blowing up monster nests and whatnot is outright filler, but I adore CDPR's work in narrative context and worldbuilding so finding and destroying them felt valuable.
Open world content is fun to engage with if the core game systems are fun. Let's use Andromeda for an example, with inevitable clear-the-whatever and defend-this-zone combat encounters that are sure to be on the map. The argument that it's filler or bloat is so empty to me. This is literally the game, and the combat itself is fun, challenging, engaging, and rewarding then these encounters serve their purpose. If I can put 200+ hours into the meaningless multiplayer of ME3, or any shooter multiplayer for that matter, then this is just the single player equivalent. Just because it's agency driven and more open in how/when you activate these encounters doesn't, in my opinion, make them redundant or filler.
If Andromeda can ensure the core combat and game systems are fun, distribute its open world content evenly and without excessive repetition, balance reward pacing to feel actually completing this content was worthwhile to some extent, and provide believe narrative context for doing whatever it is you do alongside the more focused, structured missions, then it should be fine. Whether or not BioWare has those chops I do not know.
My issue with Inquisition was that maps are loaded with so much content that the sense of reward is trivialised as going anywhere, doing anything dumps incremental XP growth with no real way to distinguish between major accomplishments and stopgaps. The way in which you engage with much of this content is exceptionally basic; click on something to acquire it. And the narrative context, while present, is frequently thin and (at least for me) uninteresting. This is what defines it, for my experience, as bloat. There's no balance in reward pacing, no sense of accomplishment. There's little challenge in engaging with the content itself as there's so much of it readily handed to you over and over and over again. And much of it is light or outright devoid of narrative context. Despite having "so much to do" it all blurs together into a meaningless nothingness.
It's the same problem I have with Ubisoft games; their open worlds are filled with content that has little narrative context and is tied to incremental XP/economy boosts for game systems that are almost always broken in reward pacing. It's all just repeated junk over and over.
That being said, when given context this open world "stuff" can be tons of fun. In Inquisition I loved fighting the dragons because they were hidden super enemies that utilised the full scope of game systems. In the Witcher 3 blowing up monster nests and whatnot is outright filler, but I adore CDPR's work in narrative context and worldbuilding so finding and destroying them felt valuable.
Open world content is fun to engage with if the core game systems are fun. Let's use Andromeda for an example, with inevitable clear-the-whatever and defend-this-zone combat encounters that are sure to be on the map. The argument that it's filler or bloat is so empty to me. This is literally the game, and the combat itself is fun, challenging, engaging, and rewarding then these encounters serve their purpose. If I can put 200+ hours into the meaningless multiplayer of ME3, or any shooter multiplayer for that matter, then this is just the single player equivalent. Just because it's agency driven and more open in how/when you activate these encounters doesn't, in my opinion, make them redundant or filler.
If Andromeda can ensure the core combat and game systems are fun, distribute its open world content evenly and without excessive repetition, balance reward pacing to feel actually completing this content was worthwhile to some extent, and provide believe narrative context for doing whatever it is you do alongside the more focused, structured missions, then it should be fine. Whether or not BioWare has those chops I do not know.
