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What crpg has the best exploration aspect?

zwanzig_zwoelf

Guest
Demise: Rise of the Ku'tan

"What if M&M6 were structured like a Wizardry dungeon?" - the Game. Good times. Red-eyed, sleep-deprived times. If only it didn't turn to adventure-game-on-acid kind of suck with the post-game! (alternatively: pretend post-game doesn't exist, make up a 'final true ending' in your head, everyone's happy, good night).
Go fucking play Mordor: Depth of Dejenol, it's way better. Demise is a piece of decline compared to it, it was supposed to be 'Mordor + graphics', not 'Mordor + graphics - difficulty - proper interface'. Or even a better way, go play Mordor 2 beta to ensure the least painful transition (Mordor gameplay, Demise dungeons). It's way better than Demise, actually. Too bad it wasn't finished.
MordorAni.gif


EDIT: get both at Decklin's Decline: http://www.decklinsdemise.com/
 

DraQ

Arcane
Joined
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Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
Now, another interesting question would be: How do you make interesting exploration in isometric or top down view?
If you make maps with explicit borders like in IE or any amount of terrain that is small enough to be combed exhaustively you lose.

If you don't you probably lose too, but at least you may try.

I guess that if you closed maps, you need to make some of the treasures, locations, NPC and so on not completely explicit and force the player to use his own intelligence and the PC skills in a smart way to uncover them. The problem in that case is still how to initiate that discovery. Pixel hunting sucks so we're left with the highlighted interactive spots. Maybe a way to deal with that would to take a note from old adventure games were you need to figure out wich particular action and object works but with some kind of limit to avoid the try-every-single-combination-possible gameplay. What you think?
Basically, as you have noticed, in order to make exploration work as proper gameplay instead of dumb busywork you need to make just combing through everything unfeasible and give some alternative based on smarts rather than persistence.

First person game makes it much easier to inflate search space because of its very nature - it's 3D, you have whole extra dimension, you typically place objects near surfaces so instead of just searching 3D space player has to search a very complex and massive 2D surface (the surface of the entire level geometry), you have spatial relationships to play with like objects occluding objects, you have all sorts of niches too small to accommodate a character (alternatively you can just interpret this all as 5D search as not just 3D location but also rotation will determine what player sees), you can freely rob the player of means of reliably determining their own location and orientation in space and you're not limited to spaces that can be mapped onto a plane.

With any sort overhead view you don't have much to work with - you have to make your map possibly borderless, large, and hopefully you can try to cram as much z-axis into it by sandwiching many 2D maps together and linking them in many places.
Borderless because the borders provide very definitive boundaries fully enclosing the available content, so maps with definite borders can be searched inwards. Note that even with large map with definite borders you won't be able to replicate the overworld exploration FPP allows. First person is neat because it isn't just about seeing VS not seeing something - you can see a scene or object from far away, but you can only se the details up close - in FPP you often have to make your decision about going somewhere based on coarse, distant visuals - hard to replicate it with overhead where you always see stuff with same acuity.
With overhead you can't really play games with disorientation and reachability either - there is a reason why AI in 3D games still can't jump most of the time - navigating space by jumping is much harder than just finding unobstructed path on the ground.
 

Visperas

Augur
Joined
Nov 5, 2013
Messages
509
I agree with all that. I was trying to further detail a method to base exploration on smarts rather than persistence in a iso or topdown game.
 

madrigal

Augur
Joined
Oct 23, 2012
Messages
249
Might and magic 2 and others to lesser extent until VI, Risen, Betrayal at Krondor and one of the unmarked quests in Dragon Age gave me hope that the game might be interesting to explore until reality hit soon after.
 

Johannes

Arcane
Joined
Nov 20, 2010
Messages
10,487
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casting coach
Vogel's older games are pretty good actually. Exile / Avernum 1-3 (and Blades of Exile/Avernum), and Nethergate. Shitton of hidden passages, both on the outdoors and locations maps. Some locations only reachable by boat or by flying with the Orb. Or stuff blocked behind barriers you must use Piercing Crystals to pass, or cast the earthquake spell to bring down crumbling walls. And gathering hints for the locations of the legendary uber items (in E/A 3). Just a ton of shit scattered everywhere that's very easy to miss at first.
 

mondblut

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2005
Messages
22,205
Location
Ingrija
All of them. Finding a +5 sword tucked into an outhouse is the whole point of it all. The fog of war needs to be gone, everywhere.
 

Xathrodox86

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 27, 2014
Messages
760
Location
Nuln's labyrinth
I find that i enjoy exploration more in first person rpg's, like Skyrim, New Vegas and Morrowind, than on isometric ones. The environments in first person look more immersive and you just want to go to interesting places you see on the horizon, while in isometric rpg's the field of view is very small and you will never see much more than a few meters around your party.

That's what got me hooked up in Fallout 3... for a time at least. Now I'm playing Skyrim and feeling exactly the same.
 

DraQ

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I find that i enjoy exploration more in first person rpg's, like Skyrim, New Vegas and Morrowind, than on isometric ones. The environments in first person look more immersive and you just want to go to interesting places you see on the horizon, while in isometric rpg's the field of view is very small and you will never see much more than a few meters around your party.

That's what got me hooked up in Fallout 3... for a time at least. Now I'm playing Skyrim and feeling exactly the same.
Modded Skyrim - so that it has hidden unique loot - is actually pretty good in that regard, even vanilla was workable - no hidden uniques, but there were rares and some chests and items were hidden out of the way.
Shame about linearity, though.
 
Joined
Jan 4, 2014
Messages
795
Now, another interesting question would be: How do you make interesting exploration in isometric or top down view?
If you make maps with explicit borders like in IE or any amount of terrain that is small enough to be combed exhaustively you lose.

If you don't you probably lose too, but at least you may try.

I guess that if you closed maps, you need to make some of the treasures, locations, NPC and so on not completely explicit and force the player to use his own intelligence and the PC skills in a smart way to uncover them. The problem in that case is still how to initiate that discovery. Pixel hunting sucks so we're left with the highlighted interactive spots. Maybe a way to deal with that would to take a note from old adventure games were you need to figure out wich particular action and object works but with some kind of limit to avoid the try-every-single-combination-possible gameplay. What you think?
Hmm I'm trying to think back on all the games I've played so I can play the same note you two are. Ok, yes, I remember Diablo did not automatically outline the items on the ground - that happened in Diablo II. In Diablo I you had to either eyeball it and then move the mouse over somehting to see if it was indeed an item or you just try-every-sinngle-pixel-possible. Most of the time I just eyeballed it because there was no named killed but sometimes I would move the mouse around if there was a named. Generally, I knew where the items were.

Hmm. This discussion is NOT unique. I recall the same discussion in a Thief thread in another forum. Essentially it was about whether something was lost when all items on the screen are glowing? Some posters commented in the original Thief items didn't glow and important items could be buried in a desk. Some said they liked it that way, but it seems most agreed it just led to try-every-single-container-posible and were thankful it was abandoned. The watershed moment was when someone said you could just turn off item glowing. Of course there was a counter argument that newer games are designed for glowing items and so turning off the glowing item feature led to a les than stellar experience versus the older games which were designed around the lack of glowing items.

You know I think this boils down to minimaps, radars, automarkers on maps, glowing paths, linear maps and other such things. I may get flamed for saying it, but I think the crucial element in exploration is NOT being shown where things are and furthermore not being excessively nursed by the game designers with the intention you follow the correct path and hence don't get lost.

Do I like getting lost? Do I like having to look for things? Maybe I do. I think I just feel more immersed when I have to look at my surroundings and have a internal sense of direction. When I have to guess where items might be or evne see them it makes me feel like I have to pay attention. For whatever reason, I like having to pay attention that way. I like it even more if the designers are intuitive - as in, notes are in desks, not inside shoes. Some intuitiveness is appropriate. Sometimes notes might be in shoes and still be intuitive. When I guess correctly, it feels even more like a reward because -I- did it.

But I'll add sometimes games can have toooooo little intuitiveness and too little playtesting. When I play a game I eexpect it it be well made and not rushed. Just because I like to feel like -I- am doing the exploring, doesn't mean the designer can be lazy and not put thought into things. He/she still has to help me. For example, it's conceivable a real thief might store a note in his shoe and I'd never look there and get frustrated. It's the designers job to ensure: a) I feel challenged by exploring and finding clues b) I have a reasonable chance to find my quarry. They do have to baby me a small amount.
 
Last edited:

Jive One

Educated
Joined
Nov 15, 2008
Messages
91
Sid Meier's Pirates!
Star Control 2
Space Rangers 2
King's Bounty series

In all of which you improve your ship/character directly via exploration.

QFG series aren't open world, but damn if it isn't fun to explore.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2007
Messages
33,052
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Now, another interesting question would be: How do you make interesting exploration in isometric or top down view?
If you make maps with explicit borders like in IE or any amount of terrain that is small enough to be combed exhaustively you lose.

If you don't you probably lose too, but at least you may try.

I guess that if you closed maps, you need to make some of the treasures, locations, NPC and so on not completely explicit and force the player to use his own intelligence and the PC skills in a smart way to uncover them. The problem in that case is still how to initiate that discovery. Pixel hunting sucks so we're left with the highlighted interactive spots. Maybe a way to deal with that would to take a note from old adventure games were you need to figure out wich particular action and object works but with some kind of limit to avoid the try-every-single-combination-possible gameplay. What you think?
Hmm I'm trying to think back on all the games I've played so I can play the same note you two are. Ok, yes, I remember Diablo did not automatically outline the items on the ground - that happened in Diablo II. In Diablo I you had to either eyeball it and then move the mouse over somehting to see if it was indeed an item or you just try-every-sinngle-pixel-possible. Most of the time I just eyeballed it because there was no named killed but sometimes I would move the mouse around if there was a named. Generally, I knew where the items were.

Hmm. This discussion is NOT unique. I recall the same discussion in a Thief thread in another forum. Essentially it was about whether something was lost when all items on the screen are glowing? Some posters commented in the original Thief items didn't glow and important items could be buried in a desk. Some said they liked it that way, but it seems most agreed it just led to try-every-single-container-posible and were thankful it was abandoned. The watershed moment was when someone said you could just turn off item glowing. Of course there was a counter argument that newer games are designed for glowing items and so turning off the glowing item feature led to a les than stellar experience versus the older games which were designed around the lack of glowing items.

You know I think this boils down to minimaps, radars, automarkers on maps, glowing paths, linear maps and other such things. I may get flamed for saying it, but I think the crucial element in exploration is NOT being shown where things are and furthermore not being excessively nursed by the game designers with the intention you follow the correct path and hence don't get lost.

Do I like getting lost? Do I like having to look for things? Maybe I do. I think I just feel more immersed when I have to look at my surroundings and have a internal sense of direction. When I have to guess where items might be or evne see them it makes me feel like I have to pay attention. For whatever reason, I like having to pay attention that way. I like it even more if the designers are intuitive - as in, notes are in desks, not inside shoes. Some intuitiveness is appropriate. Sometimes notes might be in shoes and still be intuitive. When I guess correctly, it feels even more like a reward because -I- did it.

But I'll add sometimes games can have toooooo little intuitiveness and too little playtesting. When I play a game I eexpect it it be well made and not rushed. Just because I like to feel like -I- am doing the exploring, doesn't mean the designer can be lazy and not put thought into things. He/she still has to help me. For example, it's conceivable a real thief might store a note in his shoe and I'd never look there and get frustrated. It's the designers job to ensure: a) I feel challenged by exploring and finding clues b) I have a reasonable chance to find my quarry. They do have to baby me a small amount.

The thing about Thief is that it's first person while Diablo is isometric: highlighting items in Diablo makes sense because there's no real searching involved, just mouseover to find them and pick them up. In Thief, you actively explore a space. You look behind beds, below tables, maybe even use a rope arrow to look if there's anything on the rafters. If you add glowing to the loot, it ruins the exploration, especially if most items are not hidden in a devious pixel-hunterish way (some fan missions do this and it's fucking annoying) but are rather logically placed, or have hints that help you find them, like a note that tells of a secret compartment behind a painting, or a note somewhere telling the cleaning woman to keep her hands off the landlord's favourite desk (so the player thinks, hm, maybe there is something special there?).

Thief, and many of its fan missions, excel in exploration because there is no handholding at all. Loot items have a distinctive enough look to them so if you glance into a room and there is a valuable vase on the table, you spot it immediately. Some things are hidden, but there are either visual clues like a piece of wall obviously looking like it could be a secret door thanks to different texturing/misaligned texture, or there are notes you can read that give you hints, or maybe some guards have a conversation that gives you a clue.

This encourages the player to explore everything and look everywhere, and to feel accomplished when he finds something that was hidden. This is how intelligent exploration is done. Adding loot glow or other handholding elements just ruins the whole experience because you are no longer exploring by yourself but just following the quest compass. No, "I wonder if there is some loot hidden in this room", merely "let's see if something glows".
 
Joined
Mar 13, 2012
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3,438
Location
Lost Hills bunker
Fallout 1 & 2, Arcanum, and Star Control 2 if it counts as a crpg. There are a few more games whose exploration I like but I don't think they gave me as much joy exploring the world as these.
 

Cyberarmy

Love fool
Patron
Joined
Feb 7, 2013
Messages
8,452
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Smyrna - Scalanouva
Divinity: Original Sin 2
Gothic games (3rd one is the worst due to fucking chest thingy...)
Fallout games, even the latest ones had their moments. (again 3rd one is the worst)
Baldurs Gate 1 and Arcanum, both for first playthrough. After that they've lost their exploration charm for me.
 

naossano

Cipher
Joined
Aug 26, 2014
Messages
1,232
Location
Marseilles, France
I enjoyed The Witcher 1 exploration last year.

You aren't overwhelmed by filler empty non inhabited generic scenery lands.
Instead, you are actually exploring a living city with people full of non generic dialogs that let's you explore a actual society.
And they were clever enough (at the time) not to bother you with open-world crap. They crafted what was important and didn't bother making miles and miles of useless lands.
 

DalekFlay

Arcane
Patron
Joined
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Messages
14,118
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New Vegas
First person game makes it much easier to inflate search space because of its very nature - it's 3D, you have whole extra dimension, you typically place objects near surfaces so instead of just searching 3D space player has to search a very complex and massive 2D surface (the surface of the entire level geometry), you have spatial relationships to play with like objects occluding objects, you have all sorts of niches too small to accommodate a character (alternatively you can just interpret this all as 5D search as not just 3D location but also rotation will determine what player sees), you can freely rob the player of means of reliably determining their own location and orientation in space and you're not limited to spaces that can be mapped onto a plane.

With any sort overhead view you don't have much to work with - you have to make your map possibly borderless, large, and hopefully you can try to cram as much z-axis into it by sandwiching many 2D maps together and linking them in many places.
Borderless because the borders provide very definitive boundaries fully enclosing the available content, so maps with definite borders can be searched inwards. Note that even with large map with definite borders you won't be able to replicate the overworld exploration FPP allows. First person is neat because it isn't just about seeing VS not seeing something - you can see a scene or object from far away, but you can only se the details up close - in FPP you often have to make your decision about going somewhere based on coarse, distant visuals - hard to replicate it with overhead where you always see stuff with same acuity.
With overhead you can't really play games with disorientation and reachability either - there is a reason why AI in 3D games still can't jump most of the time - navigating space by jumping is much harder than just finding unobstructed path on the ground.

Good post.

I think it's also worth mentioning that quite a lot of people, such as myself, would count NPC interaction and faction play as part of "exploration" in a sense. You couldn't really look behind the sarcophagus for a hidden glove of lust in Fallout, but you could find that one out of the way NPC who started a new weird quest. If you were diligent about exploring the town you could find the guy who gives you a bit more context about a certain quest or game world issue. That kind of shit is something the 2D games did well, and an area they can compete on fully equal terms with a Morrowind or Gothic.
 
Joined
Dec 17, 2013
Messages
5,110
- Gothic 1 and 2: really amazing hand-crafted worlds with tons of things to find that all feel unique and different
- Baldur's Gate 1: some people here will claim that you can't explore in 2D maps or dislike the lack of depth in its encounters, but nevertheless, it has great exploration
- Betrayal at Krondor: the primitive graphics and interface get in the way, but not only does this old gem have a large relatively open world to explore, exploring is actually an important part of progressing the story and the completing side-quests, as many key puzzles involve exploring the world
- Fallout 3/New Vegas: huge open worlds with tons of stuff to find. Eventually though, the things you find start feeling samey.
- Divine Divinity: the first map is large and open, providing a lot of interesting stuff to find
 

Lord Andre

Arcane
Joined
Apr 11, 2011
Messages
3,716
Location
Gypsystan
I would love to be able to play Gothic 1&2 like it was the first time again and these people never played it because of controls while discussing the exploration qualities of BG1. :negative:
 

baturinsky

Arcane
Joined
Apr 21, 2013
Messages
5,526
Location
Russia
New Vegas "exploration aspect" is getting a bit annoying after a while, btw. Game turns into 80% scavenge hunt for skill books and craft recipe components.
 

Crevice tab

Savant
Joined
Jul 4, 2013
Messages
224
In no particular order:

TES: Morrowind, Daggerfall and Skyrim, Gothic 1&2, Baldur's Gate 2, the early Avernums and Nethergate, Arcanum, Betrayal at Krondor and Fallout: New Vegas
 

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