Music used 0:00 - Dishonored Main Theme 0:02 - Soul & Mind - E's Jammy Jam (Featured in Getting Over it) 0:26 - Hardcore Disco Music - Disco Elysium 0:39 - Welcome to VA-11 HALL-A 1:10 - Yuuki’s Theme - 100% Orange Juice 1:54 - Wall is Stop - Starting off - Baba is You 3:13 - Cleric Beast Music (Used for some other bosses) - Bloodborne 4:01 - Kyupita’s Theme - 100% Orange Juice 5:25 - Deep Breath - Persona 3 5:38 - Malo’s Mart - The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess 5:53 - The Trapper - Inscyption 6:01 - Shifu’s Theme - 100% Orange Juice 6:28 - Isle Delfino theme - Super Mario Sunshine 7:26 - Kingdom of Uraya (Night version) - Xenoblade Chronicles 2 7:55 - The Whims of Fate - Persona 5 7:59 - Beneath the Mask (instrumental) - Persona 5 8:26 - Blooming Villain - Persona 5 8:50 - Wailers and Waterwheels - FFXIV: A Realm Reborn 9:52 - Answers (Reprise) - FFXIV: A Realm Reborn 10:26 - Answers - FFXIV: A Realm Reborn? 10:36 - Kiriko’s Theme - 100% Orange Juice 12:17 - Battle On - Sea of Stars 12:55 - Slave Knight Gael - Dark Souls 3: The Ringed City DLC™ 13:03 - Arthur’s theme - 100% Orange Juice 13:43 - Saki’s Theme - 100% Orange Juice 13:59 - Snowfall - VA-11 HALL-A 15:10 - Lamb Game between Man and Woman - Catherine 16:54 - Devil Trigger (Tropical Devil Night Remix) - DMC V 17:05 - The Mastermind - Metal Gear Rising 17:10 - Kyoko’s Theme - 100% Orange Juice 18:29 - Specialist - Persona 4 Dancing
I sure do love how every zone since Shadowbringers has been mostly empty space cut in half based on story progression, all of them being a pain in the ass to get around without flight, then you unlock the other half, can finally fly there, and will never actually go there again. Truly the mmo of all time
Since Stormblood more like. I've been so dissapointed when I couldn't go to second part of the Fringes right away. It's your first zone of the expansion and you're not letting me to go see it all.
Funny enough, this isn't my experience with things. The never going there again thing. I run around doing a lot of fates and such, and I do a lot of gathering, so I'm going allllll over the map. But it makes a lot of sense that the average player probably isn't, and is instead doing things like duties. I think that the massive map sizes probably serve more for players like myself who love there being so many different places to do fates and do gathering. Or how I'll just go and hang out in the various settlements and ruins and the like. I'm not a fan of open world games, generally speaking, but I *am* fond of the XIV maps (most of the time) because they're juuuuuust big enough for me to feel like I'm gathering in the wilds.
It's amazing how relatively speaking, the world of Baldur's gate 3 is definitely smaller than a large portion of games, but its so packed with content that the game feels like the biggest and most ambitious game I've played in a long time.
You can replay the game many different ways with many different outcomes. When a game is worth replaying you know it's a dense chonker tempting you to master it.
man im ngl i've got like close to 3k hours in xiv at this point, having started in ShB, and I have to say there is really something special about walking through the ARR zones. God damn they were so well done.
Took me 2k hours to finish most of the game up to Endwalker and there is still so much I've never even touched. Evergreen content that is populated with other players is crazy good.
Omg this. I always cringe when I see people asking for or offering rides to get all of the aether currents in an area. You’re going to spend the next two years before the next expansion flying over everything anyway! Fucking just walk around it this once! You already paid for the game anyway, why don’t you want the content?? Aether currents are one of my favorite parts of a new expansion. I said what I said.
It's part of the magic why Classic WoW is still so endearingly popular. You and the world are intrinsically bound to each other. Flying just negates all of that to travel from A to B the fastest most convenient way, removing level design, immersion, threat of enemies and environment, engaging with other players (compared to literal flying traffic), stumbling across ingame things and community. It literally turns players into instruction following bots going between waypoints.
I spent 10 hours in Hogwarts Legacy exploring the castle and 60 hours exploring the rest of the world and I think I can speak for everyone who played the game that the castle was the more fun memorable part of the game.
Why is that? I haven't played the game yet but I will eventually. Its in my backlog at the bottom. If you only spent 10 hours exploring vs 60 what makes the castle better?
@@rebralhunter6069 I imagine it was something like, the castle was smaller but filled with cool stuff while the outside was massive and empty/repetitive.
Big feel. I love me some epic scale games every once in a while, but the reason most of them remain unplayed is because I just don't have time, to the point that I'm actively starting to seek out smaller, more condensed experiences. But that's also assuming games are complete playable packages. In the modern day, footprint and play time bloat are just a means to the end of figuring out how to shove in a battlepass and other abusive monetization that inverts the whole core engagement loop into an extrinsic treadmill for rewards. Games should end. Let me finish a game, feel like "That's it, I'm done," and move on to the next one, happy with my purchase and time spent. I'm not a 10 year old whose mom only buys me 2 games per year who needs to make them last forever anymore.
I have time but even I don't want to play games that are essentially an exercise in filler and grind. Doing the same thing 100 times over like an Ubisoft game doesn't make a game better, you're just doing the same thing 100 times, which often ruins the original experience of you doing it the first few times. If I wanted to do mindless busywork I'd just go back to work.
Think of it like movies: you had to know camera tricks and manipulate perspective and lighting and all these complicated things to make it work on top of having it be entertaining enough to get to 90 minutes. Now you just throw everything in a computer and an intern who hates their job shits out a mess because it's gotta be done by Tuesday and it's Monday night
Or they outsource the process to a small army of poorly paid people in Asian countries to make shiny CGI do the fight thing x1000 in every western movie, feeling incredibly disconnected from whatever was filmed and created in Hollywood.
I have an example of what you talked about, featuring two games you mentioned: Xenoblade and FFXIV. In one of the Xenoblade zones (around level 55-60) you come across a massive bulkhead door. You push some buttons to unlock it, and eventually walk across a bridge toward it and see it open up. I’m not doing it Justice, but it’s one of the most visually impressive parts of that game. That long walk towards it, seeing it slowly grind open, it felt like you were just this tiny piece on this massive world. And to this day it’s something I highly associate with the game. But in FFXIV, you get almost the exact same set piece in the Aetherochemical Research Facility. And I still loved it, despite the dungeon being a fraction of the size of a Xenoblade zone. And even if the actual door is a loading screen into the elevator, it’s still a powerful image that sells the scope. I love both games so I don’t want to say one is better than the other, but you really don’t *need* a massive footprint to effectively convey size and scale.
FFXIV is a great example of conveying size and scale with a small footprint (likely due to technical limitations of being on PS3 to begin with)! Whereas in WoW, the player characters can basically fly to any location they can see, it is far more limited in FFXIV with a lot being inaccessible background. The world is able to go on far beyond what you can reach, and towers can loom over you beyond what you can climb to. Xenoblade does this too! In 1 with the Mechonis, and in 3 with landmarks like the Great Sword (and 2 with the Titans but they're more disconnected)!
@@jafd239 Honestly it's almost painful to see FFXIV copy WoW, first with what worked in Classic with the tight refined world where all enemies and environment has to be considered a threat, then with what doesn't from the huge bloated world designed entirely around flying from A to B ignoring all the set dressing. Spent plenty of time running through the ARR zones becoming intimate with the environment, but it's clear that from HS onwards you are meant to fly through it all.
It has such good atmosphere, don't it? Almost makes me wish the second game was similarly etherial in quality but the pirate fantasy was done so well there as well that I wouldn't want it to be changed either. I love these Infinity Engine knockoffs ♥ Man, I wish Obsidian would make an isometric CRPG again
I don't know why but I feel like I like cat girls more after watching this video.... Also I think the best example of a game with large scope and small footprint would be Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask. Three day cycle, NPCs all have schedules and various conditions which actively affect their later day cycles, and various side stories that reward the player with masks that open other side quests or areas(Garo mask and gibdeo mask) or allow you to approach the game differently(stone mask letting you be completely invisible in the pirate fortress or the transformation masks actually changing the mini game shop prices).
Regarding large footprint, it can open space for some gameplay mechanics - namely those that are focused on traversal. Now, that requires those mechanics to be done well first and foremost, but I think it's a design space worth exploring. For example, GTA would need a fairly big map, so you need and want to use the vehicles to get around. You kinda touched on this mentioning Sonic, I suppose, but I think there's a distinction between just "players moves fast" and "player may need to go pretty far, and there's some interesting mechanics that help with that" Now, making a big game, and have the player fast travel everywhere, does seem like a waste to me. Yes, looking at you, Bethesda.
That shot of the Xenoblade game where they're running across a long natural bridge gave me an idea. That segment could be taken from "hold forward for 5 minutes" to something fun and memorable by just adding some interesting traversal options. Like imagine if you could snowboard on those kinds of surfaces like shield surfing in BotW. Even if there's not much challenge to it the simple fact the player has to be engaged in snowboarding right vs walking forward could add a lot.
You like Catgirl, this is all the reason to earn subscribe. Am I also Nekopara enjoyer? Not really, I preffer single player games with their inclussion(I don't exactly consider vn a game like what I am looking for), so I am only left with Xenoblade or Ys IX to scratch that catgirl itch. I am not going to play mmo, so ff XIV is not an option for me, even if them catgirls there are mighty appealing.
0:13 HOLY SHIT THANL YOU FOR SAYING THIS!!! I AM SO SICK OF HEARING "Its a step in the right direction!!! :) LIKE NO, JUST SAY IT WAS BLAND AND MEDIOCRE!! This is always said about Sonic or Pokemon. JUST SAY IT WASNT INTERESTING, JUST SAY IT FUCKING SUCKED. HOLY SHIT, ITS BEEN A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECCTION FOR OVER A DECADE, MAYBE THEY JUST DONT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING!
haha you gave good laugh when you described the game cube, good one mate, was decent system but i barely had any games on it, i mostly got it for RE1 and RE zero and Tales series back in the day
Yeah I got a Chair suggested video thats not FF14 in the headline! Tho still ff14 to be found here 😅. Like your take on this. Open world should always be an artistic choice. After an MMO or open world game I always love to switch it up with more linear games like (recently for me) God of War Rag and Ratchet and Clank. So nice to know that left is the main path, so I go right and collect everything and move on. Open world and MMO always envoke a FoMo in me.
The thing about Baldur’s Gate that grabs me is some mechanical details of the spells. Dungeons and Dragons, for all its popularity, has some pain points and I think the biggest general point is the list of spells. You can fall into it and never return. You can really feel the turns of the contractors when you get a spell called Sunlight that does not actually produce “sunlight”, but a bright light like day time. And yet hear there are so many good details. Silence actually effectively produces Silence! You can use it to ambush an entire room of guards together, and if you’re fast enough they won’t be able to alert everyone, effectively allowing you to carve encounters apart.
Spells are clearly not balanced in D&D but that's also what makes them so powerful and fun. You can break and manipulate the game in so many ways to your advantage, but so can the enemy if they use them (blessed be thy save scumming). The balance of limited uses does not apply when you find so many camp supplies so just go wild.
Open world has been the obsession for so long by AAA it's like they've forgotten how to do the fundamentals on making a good game first before trying to expand it further. Japanese games seem to have this well planned out creatively beforehand so they mostly still work out well, but western games just seem to spiral out of control into blatant copy pasting, it's like the keys to the engine room were handed over to the marketing people, causing these cynically produced games that are wide, grey and hollow like an abandoned city with flashing sign posts to distract you.
So, I already subbed like 5 mins before you brought up your 'politics' (I can't believe that 'I want the people who make things that bring me joy to be paid well for their work and not pushed to burnout and beyond' is political, yeesh!) but now I want to sub twice.
Although the best areas in Elden Ring are the large scale dungeons, I think you are ignoring how cool it is that you just seamlessly walk into those zones from the big open world. Elden Ring is essentially what the original vision for what dark souls was going to be and its world is definitely an artistic choice.
Elden Ring's design fundamentally changes how many players play the game though. Before you had to defeat bosses to progress, practising your encounter skill and knowledge or grind monsters to level up to make it easier. Now you can just nope out and go somewhere else, which somewhat takes away from the "you must master to proceed" linear structure of the original games.
@@cattysplatin the original dark souls you can get pretty far without killing any bosses. You can clear blight town completely, go into Ash Lake. You can reach Pinwheel. You can clear darkroot basin and even new londo ruins.
I disagree, liminal spaces in video games are important, they play the connecting thread serves as the ligaments to a framework of a game. You said as much yourself with your examples of shadow of the colossus and journey, that they serve to strike an emotion or mood, but a little bit before that you say (paraphrasing here) " it's almost like the open world is the filler to the interesting parts of the game" , which you do imply to mean as a case by case basis but it plays over elden ring here, I'd disagree here specifically the grand scale of the world serves to distinguish each region in a meaningful way the approach to the acadamy of raya lucaria is enhanced by the time it takes to get there, you are searching for a needle in a haystack, or more obviously either of the two means to get to atlus plateu. Even if it's surprises run out at a certain point - for me personally the underground areas were not a surprise turned boredom and I don't believe the comparison to koroks to be aptly applied here, upon the second underground area a player reaches they may now wonder if there is more out there that you can't see, they assimilate with the regular gameplay loop of finding new interesting locations. I wish to ask what do you believe a valid reason to use liminality and at what point to simply be more succinct, genuine question with your repeated point of "stuff", implying it feels like blatantly artificial content compensating for a bad design choice, if I were to place a comparison to show - disco elysium's revachol is an INCREDIBLY tight and densely designed world to serve its narrative, you are a cop solving a seemingly innocuous case compared to the witcher 3, you are involved in much more that has you crossing the continent, the large times spent traveling display this things are far away but still are able to impact each other - in both cases their scopes serve their purpose, changing the witcher to take place over a smaller area would likely weaken this point a little, as you pointed it you CAN use smaller denser worlds to still design it doesn't mean its always better to. Apologies, I meant to show any derision in my points, I agree there is an over saturation of a certain kind of large scale game design in the AAA space, what I do not agree with is the idea games already having realized their open world well did it wrong intrinsically, that should they have had a larger scale realized in other means - like persona for example - it is strictly better. If I were to sum it up here is a somewhat disconnected point - imagine the game tightly designed in a very short length with a large footprint but small scale to be like a poem and something with a larger scale to be a prose, neither is inherently better but obviously both come with the given the pieces are well made. Might be fighting nothing here, as I'm not even sure that is even the point you were making here and I might've just completely misinterpreted what you're saying.
also lots of big open world games are just filled with meaningless busy work instead of engaging gameplay, its borderline just a check box at some point ( ubisoft is the best example for this)
10/-10 Hit Expectations by not being something which is exactly what it was gonna be.., Me------- Thank you for the wide and deep swamp water. Can we ave some oar.
Great vid overall but I do feel like you reasoning was a bit inconsistent when it came to Elden Ring and BOTW compared to Shadow of the Colossus. I think a good criticism of all three is that the open world is basically filler for the games more interesting content, which you point out for BOTW and Elden ring, but say that SotC’s open world is good because of the feeling of isolation and immersion. I really think that’s a praise that’s also applicable to all three, even if the feelings they create aren’t exactly the same. For example BOTW was really trying to use its open world to give you the feeling of being lost in nature, and I think in that regard it succeeded.
Ty! Please don't forget Pillars of Eternity. The world was so interesting, and the characters memorable. I would definitely like to return there (avowed is apparently in that universe but I'm very skeptical of that game at this point) Also DS 2 > DS 1 (≧▽≦)(≧▽≦)
Your issue is that open worlds aren't good, but that's not true. The point of open worlds is that it's a game that you can get lost in, and do a bunch of stuff. The Witcher 3 is a good example of a good open world. It has a massive world with plenty of stuff to do. Your argument only applies to games like Assassin's Creed Odyessey, Valhalla, and any modern Ubisoft game where it's a barren open world. You sound like you're upset it takes so long to make it through a game, but that's the point. You're supposed to be into it for hours on end.
Except there's plenty to do in Assassin's Creed. Hundreds of map markers everywhere, pining for your OCD attention with their everpresent greyness on your map. Witcher isn't all that different in that manner. Anybody who's tried getting all the damn Skellige barrels can attest to that. The point more so is that it's primarily unnecessary fluff that, at best, serves as contrast to the better parts of the game. Is the third Witcher's open world a necessary component of its identity or could it get away with the footprint of the original while still getting all that good stuff in? Do you need to have four hundred miles of monsters you don't have to fight, terrain you'll mindlessly skim over, loot you'll just sell anyways in an economy where there's practically nothing to spend it all on in between the fun side quests or the main story objectives? Same thing as what he said about Elden Ring. What does it add and what does it lose in the process?
This video articulates so much why I do not enjoy the open world format. I do not understand the hype around them, and Breath of the Wild was a bland and empty shell of an experience.
he's so fucking correct and he does it all while having banger editing and script writing. truly the most misshapen chair of all time
Absolutely. I found this channel about a month ago and I absolutely adore his content.
Music used
0:00 - Dishonored Main Theme
0:02 - Soul & Mind - E's Jammy Jam (Featured in Getting Over it)
0:26 - Hardcore Disco Music - Disco Elysium
0:39 - Welcome to VA-11 HALL-A
1:10 - Yuuki’s Theme - 100% Orange Juice
1:54 - Wall is Stop - Starting off - Baba is You
3:13 - Cleric Beast Music (Used for some other bosses) - Bloodborne
4:01 - Kyupita’s Theme - 100% Orange Juice
5:25 - Deep Breath - Persona 3
5:38 - Malo’s Mart - The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
5:53 - The Trapper - Inscyption
6:01 - Shifu’s Theme - 100% Orange Juice
6:28 - Isle Delfino theme - Super Mario Sunshine
7:26 - Kingdom of Uraya (Night version) - Xenoblade Chronicles 2
7:55 - The Whims of Fate - Persona 5
7:59 - Beneath the Mask (instrumental) - Persona 5
8:26 - Blooming Villain - Persona 5
8:50 - Wailers and Waterwheels - FFXIV: A Realm Reborn
9:52 - Answers (Reprise) - FFXIV: A Realm Reborn
10:26 - Answers - FFXIV: A Realm Reborn?
10:36 - Kiriko’s Theme - 100% Orange Juice
12:17 - Battle On - Sea of Stars
12:55 - Slave Knight Gael - Dark Souls 3: The Ringed City DLC™
13:03 - Arthur’s theme - 100% Orange Juice
13:43 - Saki’s Theme - 100% Orange Juice
13:59 - Snowfall - VA-11 HALL-A
15:10 - Lamb Game between Man and Woman - Catherine
16:54 - Devil Trigger (Tropical Devil Night Remix) - DMC V
17:05 - The Mastermind - Metal Gear Rising
17:10 - Kyoko’s Theme - 100% Orange Juice
18:29 - Specialist - Persona 4 Dancing
Thank you very very much for taking the time to type it out
typing out the music credits so we can find songs this is the greatest gift I’ve ever received in all my years of parasocial relationships
king
I appreciate the apolitical stuff, but next time don't mention you want Sonic's feet in your mouth either please.
I sure do love how every zone since Shadowbringers has been mostly empty space cut in half based on story progression, all of them being a pain in the ass to get around without flight, then you unlock the other half, can finally fly there, and will never actually go there again.
Truly the mmo of all time
Since Stormblood more like. I've been so dissapointed when I couldn't go to second part of the Fringes right away. It's your first zone of the expansion and you're not letting me to go see it all.
@@Hatfright Sea of Clouds in HW I'd posit as the starting point of that trend tbh. But Stormblood absolutely pushed that much harder
@@just_d3spairity Oh yeah, I forgot about Sea of Clouds. But you're right. SB with half of its zones being split by story progression takes the cake.
Funny enough, this isn't my experience with things. The never going there again thing. I run around doing a lot of fates and such, and I do a lot of gathering, so I'm going allllll over the map. But it makes a lot of sense that the average player probably isn't, and is instead doing things like duties.
I think that the massive map sizes probably serve more for players like myself who love there being so many different places to do fates and do gathering. Or how I'll just go and hang out in the various settlements and ruins and the like. I'm not a fan of open world games, generally speaking, but I *am* fond of the XIV maps (most of the time) because they're juuuuuust big enough for me to feel like I'm gathering in the wilds.
The new MisshapenChair video really makes you FEEL like a misshapen chair.
A tru breath of fresh chair
It's amazing how relatively speaking, the world of Baldur's gate 3 is definitely smaller than a large portion of games, but its so packed with content that the game feels like the biggest and most ambitious game I've played in a long time.
In a way, it is. All that writting and world design took effort. Unlike the terrain generation tools big open world games use. Well, more effort.
You can replay the game many different ways with many different outcomes. When a game is worth replaying you know it's a dense chonker tempting you to master it.
man im ngl i've got like close to 3k hours in xiv at this point, having started in ShB, and I have to say there is really something special about walking through the ARR zones. God damn they were so well done.
Took me 2k hours to finish most of the game up to Endwalker and there is still so much I've never even touched. Evergreen content that is populated with other players is crazy good.
Stormblood zones take the cake, especially Gyr Abania. Emptiest field of barren fucks in the entire game.
Finally, someone who liked smaller zones without flying
Omg this. I always cringe when I see people asking for or offering rides to get all of the aether currents in an area. You’re going to spend the next two years before the next expansion flying over everything anyway! Fucking just walk around it this once! You already paid for the game anyway, why don’t you want the content??
Aether currents are one of my favorite parts of a new expansion. I said what I said.
It's part of the magic why Classic WoW is still so endearingly popular. You and the world are intrinsically bound to each other. Flying just negates all of that to travel from A to B the fastest most convenient way, removing level design, immersion, threat of enemies and environment, engaging with other players (compared to literal flying traffic), stumbling across ingame things and community. It literally turns players into instruction following bots going between waypoints.
This is the dark souls of video essays
I spent 10 hours in Hogwarts Legacy exploring the castle and 60 hours exploring the rest of the world and I think I can speak for everyone who played the game that the castle was the more fun memorable part of the game.
Why is that? I haven't played the game yet but I will eventually. Its in my backlog at the bottom. If you only spent 10 hours exploring vs 60 what makes the castle better?
@@rebralhunter6069 I imagine it was something like, the castle was smaller but filled with cool stuff while the outside was massive and empty/repetitive.
thank you, ellie
Big feel. I love me some epic scale games every once in a while, but the reason most of them remain unplayed is because I just don't have time, to the point that I'm actively starting to seek out smaller, more condensed experiences.
But that's also assuming games are complete playable packages. In the modern day, footprint and play time bloat are just a means to the end of figuring out how to shove in a battlepass and other abusive monetization that inverts the whole core engagement loop into an extrinsic treadmill for rewards.
Games should end. Let me finish a game, feel like "That's it, I'm done," and move on to the next one, happy with my purchase and time spent. I'm not a 10 year old whose mom only buys me 2 games per year who needs to make them last forever anymore.
This is exactly why I hold Metroid Dread in such high regard
I have time but even I don't want to play games that are essentially an exercise in filler and grind. Doing the same thing 100 times over like an Ubisoft game doesn't make a game better, you're just doing the same thing 100 times, which often ruins the original experience of you doing it the first few times. If I wanted to do mindless busywork I'd just go back to work.
Think of it like movies: you had to know camera tricks and manipulate perspective and lighting and all these complicated things to make it work on top of having it be entertaining enough to get to 90 minutes. Now you just throw everything in a computer and an intern who hates their job shits out a mess because it's gotta be done by Tuesday and it's Monday night
Or they outsource the process to a small army of poorly paid people in Asian countries to make shiny CGI do the fight thing x1000 in every western movie, feeling incredibly disconnected from whatever was filmed and created in Hollywood.
I have an example of what you talked about, featuring two games you mentioned: Xenoblade and FFXIV.
In one of the Xenoblade zones (around level 55-60) you come across a massive bulkhead door. You push some buttons to unlock it, and eventually walk across a bridge toward it and see it open up. I’m not doing it Justice, but it’s one of the most visually impressive parts of that game. That long walk towards it, seeing it slowly grind open, it felt like you were just this tiny piece on this massive world. And to this day it’s something I highly associate with the game.
But in FFXIV, you get almost the exact same set piece in the Aetherochemical Research Facility. And I still loved it, despite the dungeon being a fraction of the size of a Xenoblade zone. And even if the actual door is a loading screen into the elevator, it’s still a powerful image that sells the scope.
I love both games so I don’t want to say one is better than the other, but you really don’t *need* a massive footprint to effectively convey size and scale.
FFXIV is a great example of conveying size and scale with a small footprint (likely due to technical limitations of being on PS3 to begin with)! Whereas in WoW, the player characters can basically fly to any location they can see, it is far more limited in FFXIV with a lot being inaccessible background. The world is able to go on far beyond what you can reach, and towers can loom over you beyond what you can climb to.
Xenoblade does this too! In 1 with the Mechonis, and in 3 with landmarks like the Great Sword (and 2 with the Titans but they're more disconnected)!
@@jafd239 Honestly it's almost painful to see FFXIV copy WoW, first with what worked in Classic with the tight refined world where all enemies and environment has to be considered a threat, then with what doesn't from the huge bloated world designed entirely around flying from A to B ignoring all the set dressing. Spent plenty of time running through the ARR zones becoming intimate with the environment, but it's clear that from HS onwards you are meant to fly through it all.
"absurdly long video essay" *looks at the two 9.5 hour video essays she just finished watching*
Who's she?
@@agent7142 me
@@agent7142 Simone Biles
6:52 putting RWBY right there was a pretty sick burn, pretty good
And they are still making the game better.
About that end note, I'm currently 60 hours in to my first Pillars of Eternity playthrough and loving it.
Great video as always
It has such good atmosphere, don't it? Almost makes me wish the second game was similarly etherial in quality but the pirate fantasy was done so well there as well that I wouldn't want it to be changed either.
I love these Infinity Engine knockoffs ♥
Man, I wish Obsidian would make an isometric CRPG again
bro 8:00 how dare you use my government against me.
Anyone know the game at 14:47?
I was fishing in sea of stars when the combat theme started in your video. was very confused
Me named Daniel who literally just played persona 5 for the first time a month ago: 😳
I do remember the opening. Thank you for calling me personally chair.
Kinda unrealted, but I have always admired how Mr. Furniture uses random game footage to convey every single fucking clause he be spittin'.
12:40 what game it is?
Chair flexing his Ozma mount...
Eyy i just started pillars of eternity. Is that going to get a video?
Misshapen Chair have you played Crosscode?
I feel like you would enjoy it :)
Also if you do play it and also happen to stream it let me know. ♥
Good shit chair
Appreciate the Dragon Quest plug in there as well. Friggin love me some DQ11
I don't know why but I feel like I like cat girls more after watching this video....
Also I think the best example of a game with large scope and small footprint would be Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask. Three day cycle, NPCs all have schedules and various conditions which actively affect their later day cycles, and various side stories that reward the player with masks that open other side quests or areas(Garo mask and gibdeo mask) or allow you to approach the game differently(stone mask letting you be completely invisible in the pirate fortress or the transformation masks actually changing the mini game shop prices).
Misshapen Chair's videos are secret subliminal Cat girl conditioning.
Regarding large footprint, it can open space for some gameplay mechanics - namely those that are focused on traversal. Now, that requires those mechanics to be done well first and foremost, but I think it's a design space worth exploring. For example, GTA would need a fairly big map, so you need and want to use the vehicles to get around. You kinda touched on this mentioning Sonic, I suppose, but I think there's a distinction between just "players moves fast" and "player may need to go pretty far, and there's some interesting mechanics that help with that"
Now, making a big game, and have the player fast travel everywhere, does seem like a waste to me. Yes, looking at you, Bethesda.
That shot of the Xenoblade game where they're running across a long natural bridge gave me an idea. That segment could be taken from "hold forward for 5 minutes" to something fun and memorable by just adding some interesting traversal options. Like imagine if you could snowboard on those kinds of surfaces like shield surfing in BotW. Even if there's not much challenge to it the simple fact the player has to be engaged in snowboarding right vs walking forward could add a lot.
You ok babe? You haven’t taken a bite of your new Misshapen Chair hot take video critiquing video game design.
You like Catgirl, this is all the reason to earn subscribe. Am I also Nekopara enjoyer? Not really, I preffer single player games with their inclussion(I don't exactly consider vn a game like what I am looking for), so I am only left with Xenoblade or Ys IX to scratch that catgirl itch. I am not going to play mmo, so ff XIV is not an option for me, even if them catgirls there are mighty appealing.
Shout out to 13 Sentinels. People do NOT discuss that game enough.
if only it's not console exclusive
@@shira_yone Maybe for you, plenty of people have at least one tho.
appreciate the va11 music
As someone named Daniel who also played Persona 5, I can confirm that I remember the beginning of Persona 5 (like everyone else).
Good video. Feels very relevant and gives some food for thought
0:13 HOLY SHIT THANL YOU FOR SAYING THIS!!! I AM SO SICK OF HEARING "Its a step in the right direction!!! :) LIKE NO, JUST SAY IT WAS BLAND AND MEDIOCRE!!
This is always said about Sonic or Pokemon.
JUST SAY IT WASNT INTERESTING, JUST SAY IT FUCKING SUCKED. HOLY SHIT, ITS BEEN A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECCTION FOR OVER A DECADE, MAYBE THEY JUST DONT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING!
17:30 im not even listening the song hitting too hard
Ellie is an absolute chad!
Great video Mr. Chairman
another day another chair banger
I will never, for the life of me, understand why I enjoy listen to Chair's opinions. Anyway, time to go play BG3.
#1 place for game crit and nekopara fandom.
haha you gave good laugh when you described the game cube, good one mate, was decent system but i barely had any games on it, i mostly got it for RE1 and RE zero and Tales series back in the day
Yeah I got a Chair suggested video thats not FF14 in the headline! Tho still ff14 to be found here 😅. Like your take on this. Open world should always be an artistic choice. After an MMO or open world game I always love to switch it up with more linear games like (recently for me) God of War Rag and Ratchet and Clank. So nice to know that left is the main path, so I go right and collect everything and move on. Open world and MMO always envoke a FoMo in me.
What game is at 17:38?
looks like 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
@@YuushaBlues That looks correct! Thank you so much!
I scared my bf with how loud I laughed at the N64 joke
Very nice video Mr. Chair
The thing about Baldur’s Gate that grabs me is some mechanical details of the spells.
Dungeons and Dragons, for all its popularity, has some pain points and I think the biggest general point is the list of spells. You can fall into it and never return. You can really feel the turns of the contractors when you get a spell called Sunlight that does not actually produce “sunlight”, but a bright light like day time.
And yet hear there are so many good details. Silence actually effectively produces Silence! You can use it to ambush an entire room of guards together, and if you’re fast enough they won’t be able to alert everyone, effectively allowing you to carve encounters apart.
Spells are clearly not balanced in D&D but that's also what makes them so powerful and fun. You can break and manipulate the game in so many ways to your advantage, but so can the enemy if they use them (blessed be thy save scumming). The balance of limited uses does not apply when you find so many camp supplies so just go wild.
Open world has been the obsession for so long by AAA it's like they've forgotten how to do the fundamentals on making a good game first before trying to expand it further. Japanese games seem to have this well planned out creatively beforehand so they mostly still work out well, but western games just seem to spiral out of control into blatant copy pasting, it's like the keys to the engine room were handed over to the marketing people, causing these cynically produced games that are wide, grey and hollow like an abandoned city with flashing sign posts to distract you.
So, I already subbed like 5 mins before you brought up your 'politics' (I can't believe that 'I want the people who make things that bring me joy to be paid well for their work and not pushed to burnout and beyond' is political, yeesh!) but now I want to sub twice.
great video misshapen chair
babe wake up, new chair video dropped
Although the best areas in Elden Ring are the large scale dungeons, I think you are ignoring how cool it is that you just seamlessly walk into those zones from the big open world. Elden Ring is essentially what the original vision for what dark souls was going to be and its world is definitely an artistic choice.
Elden Ring's design fundamentally changes how many players play the game though. Before you had to defeat bosses to progress, practising your encounter skill and knowledge or grind monsters to level up to make it easier. Now you can just nope out and go somewhere else, which somewhat takes away from the "you must master to proceed" linear structure of the original games.
@@cattysplatin the original dark souls you can get pretty far without killing any bosses. You can clear blight town completely, go into Ash Lake. You can reach Pinwheel. You can clear darkroot basin and even new londo ruins.
i waited 19 minutes for this bozo to say 'yeah totk was just ok' like in the thumbnail. instead i got masterfully baited
ellie has good taste in avatars!
I disagree, liminal spaces in video games are important, they play the connecting thread serves as the ligaments to a framework of a game. You said as much yourself with your examples of shadow of the colossus and journey, that they serve to strike an emotion or mood, but a little bit before that you say (paraphrasing here) " it's almost like the open world is the filler to the interesting parts of the game" , which you do imply to mean as a case by case basis but it plays over elden ring here, I'd disagree here specifically the grand scale of the world serves to distinguish each region in a meaningful way the approach to the acadamy of raya lucaria is enhanced by the time it takes to get there, you are searching for a needle in a haystack, or more obviously either of the two means to get to atlus plateu. Even if it's surprises run out at a certain point - for me personally the underground areas were not a surprise turned boredom and I don't believe the comparison to koroks to be aptly applied here, upon the second underground area a player reaches they may now wonder if there is more out there that you can't see, they assimilate with the regular gameplay loop of finding new interesting locations. I wish to ask what do you believe a valid reason to use liminality and at what point to simply be more succinct, genuine question with your repeated point of "stuff", implying it feels like blatantly artificial content compensating for a bad design choice, if I were to place a comparison to show - disco elysium's revachol is an INCREDIBLY tight and densely designed world to serve its narrative, you are a cop solving a seemingly innocuous case compared to the witcher 3, you are involved in much more that has you crossing the continent, the large times spent traveling display this things are far away but still are able to impact each other - in both cases their scopes serve their purpose, changing the witcher to take place over a smaller area would likely weaken this point a little, as you pointed it you CAN use smaller denser worlds to still design it doesn't mean its always better to. Apologies, I meant to show any derision in my points, I agree there is an over saturation of a certain kind of large scale game design in the AAA space, what I do not agree with is the idea games already having realized their open world well did it wrong intrinsically, that should they have had a larger scale realized in other means - like persona for example - it is strictly better. If I were to sum it up here is a somewhat disconnected point - imagine the game tightly designed in a very short length with a large footprint but small scale to be like a poem and something with a larger scale to be a prose, neither is inherently better but obviously both come with the given the pieces are well made. Might be fighting nothing here, as I'm not even sure that is even the point you were making here and I might've just completely misinterpreted what you're saying.
also lots of big open world games are just filled with meaningless busy work instead of engaging gameplay, its borderline just a check box at some point ( ubisoft is the best example for this)
Man Misshapen chair has non XIV content and it's fuckin awesome
I love chair
Congrats now I want to make an open world horror game that is actually scary 😑
not my kind of Jam, but i can see were the praises to BG3 comes.
if Baldur's Gate 3 is so good why can't you romance Chocola
i liked, then disliked, then liked again, then disliked once more, then re-liked another time... beautiful stuff. instant classic chair vid
You posted a different opinion from mine, we are now sworn enemies even though you'll forget me by the time you're done reading this.
10/-10 Hit Expectations by not being something which is exactly what it was gonna be.., Me-------
Thank you for the wide and deep swamp water.
Can we ave some oar.
good shit
Armored Core VI
GAME OF THE YEAR SUCK IT NERDS
All hail Gridania
Great vid overall but I do feel like you reasoning was a bit inconsistent when it came to Elden Ring and BOTW compared to Shadow of the Colossus. I think a good criticism of all three is that the open world is basically filler for the games more interesting content, which you point out for BOTW and Elden ring, but say that SotC’s open world is good because of the feeling of isolation and immersion. I really think that’s a praise that’s also applicable to all three, even if the feelings they create aren’t exactly the same. For example BOTW was really trying to use its open world to give you the feeling of being lost in nature, and I think in that regard it succeeded.
Ty!
Please don't forget Pillars of Eternity.
The world was so interesting, and the characters memorable. I would definitely like to return there (avowed is apparently in that universe but I'm very skeptical of that game at this point)
Also DS 2 > DS 1 (≧▽≦)(≧▽≦)
Armored core 6 god
I agree with this video a lot, so much that I don't have anything to complain about in a youtube comment
I wish you success, money, and happiness
I don't want to remember Pillars of Eternity.
When you were talking about how the story needs to be the most interesting part of your setting and showed RWBY, I felt that
First UA-camr I’ve seen to randomly mention Neon White. 10/10 game ❤
video good
Your issue is that open worlds aren't good, but that's not true. The point of open worlds is that it's a game that you can get lost in, and do a bunch of stuff. The Witcher 3 is a good example of a good open world. It has a massive world with plenty of stuff to do. Your argument only applies to games like Assassin's Creed Odyessey, Valhalla, and any modern Ubisoft game where it's a barren open world. You sound like you're upset it takes so long to make it through a game, but that's the point. You're supposed to be into it for hours on end.
Except there's plenty to do in Assassin's Creed. Hundreds of map markers everywhere, pining for your OCD attention with their everpresent greyness on your map.
Witcher isn't all that different in that manner. Anybody who's tried getting all the damn Skellige barrels can attest to that.
The point more so is that it's primarily unnecessary fluff that, at best, serves as contrast to the better parts of the game. Is the third Witcher's open world a necessary component of its identity or could it get away with the footprint of the original while still getting all that good stuff in? Do you need to have four hundred miles of monsters you don't have to fight, terrain you'll mindlessly skim over, loot you'll just sell anyways in an economy where there's practically nothing to spend it all on in between the fun side quests or the main story objectives? Same thing as what he said about Elden Ring.
What does it add and what does it lose in the process?
i dont really know what you mean by all that footprint and scope stuff but i agree
Lol balurs gate 3 is not small and or compact
This video articulates so much why I do not enjoy the open world format. I do not understand the hype around them, and Breath of the Wild was a bland and empty shell of an experience.
9:00 ARR sucked ass and didn't feel magical to me, there is a reason why I bounced off like 5 times since 2.0 came out to even beat it.
Too long.
Didn't watch.
Big games suck because it's 512 diversity hires working on them.
I would much rather a game shoot for the moon and fall short rather than have no ambition at all
Well then...MAYBE CHANGE YOUR RTX 2080 SUPER'S FUCKING THERMAL PASTE...