Open-world vs. Goal-based games

[TacticalPteridactyl]

I wrote a wholly unpopular post on the “Sheltered” forum about this a while back. My arguments were sound, but the community is so devoted to the concept of an open-world game that my points were not considered seriously. In that particular thread, I criticized Cataclysm (along with other open-world games like Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress) as boring.

I like these games, sure, but they fall flat. I’ve been playing a fair bit of Cataclysm lately, enjoying the new features which have been added since last I played, and there have been improvements. I’ll grant you that. But there are serious problems on a mechanical level with the game.

Specifically, the lack of an end-game. Easy now.

See, I’ve got a successful character that I’m playing now. I’ve got a good safe area built up around me. I am unchallenged and the game is quickly devolving into a skill grind. I feel like the only progress I’m making is in advancing the gamut of recipes I can construct. Ingredients are easy to come by at this point too. I don’t need to go far from base to get basically anything I might want or need. Even wandering spawns have not forced me from my roost. And when I complete the tech tree? I suppose I could explore the bottom of X or Y random-generated map feature. It shouldn’t be hard, given that my access to materials by then should be bound only by the time I can put into the game. And then what? No climax? More of the same?

[Valpo]

I think if you want more endgame content your speaking out of everyones hearts.

A set of things you can do is always good.

Specificly tailored things to atempt for seasoned survivors is realy not fleshed out ingame a lot yet.

i am not sure why you received so much negative feedback . but it might have had to do with your wording.

my opinion is that you can very well play a game with deffinite goals. but they aren t needed at all. all you need is challenging things to do.and perhaps some meaningfull decissions to make for your survivor.

[vache]

In the absence of fully fleshed out NPCs, it’s rather hard to have a fulfilling overarching set of long term goals outside of the explore, kill, loot, craft cycle. End game content without a game end is kind of an impossible concept, you’re just going to reach the point where that content too is trivial for you. It’s like saying “Hey I beat half life and now I’m exploring black mesa, but I have all these experimental weapons and I’m just laying waste to everything, what gives?”

One thing that I think could spice things up would be some sort of mission system that’s not tied to NPCs. If you play with static NPCs, you get one in your shelter who will give you a quest, but you end up missing out on a whole set of other missions that most players never see. It would be nice if there were a way to get and complete some of these missions outside of NPCs while work continues on them.

[TheFlame52]

If you want something bad enough, code it yourself.

[StopSignal]

Well, if you playa roguelike like this one or DF, you know what to expect. They are story creators, not arcadey games!

Between the two types i don’t have a preference. It’s like choosing between playing a story or an experience. Awesome stories are great, and awesome experiences are great too! So they are both good.

Yes, there are games with mixes of the two. But personally I fond that bothersome. “You can do aaalll this, but you have this to do too, if you want” it’s kind of lame.

[Valpo]

it like this already but not tied to story but to simple needs like:

you wanna raid that lab? well get a key card a car or explosives first.

or make a hacking tool.

you wann be a mutant ? well learn cooking find a book and finde a chemistry set.

etc…

[TacticalPteridactyl]

Looks like I’ve avoided a solid lambasting for now, so I’ll just add this: A primary comparison I had drawn was with Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. It’s a solid title. The goal, very traditional for the roguelike genre, is to reach the bottom of the dungeon, grab the Amulet of Yendor Orb of Zot, and escape. In order to do so, the player must explore a number of themed dungeon branches and retrieve a series of runes. There’s something like 8 or 9 branches, but you only need three runes. Collecting the full set and escaping is called an “extended victory”, at which point player scores are compared to see who was most successful, based on certain criteria like # of steps taken and whatnot.

I have never succeeded in retrieving the Orb of Zot despite countless plays, but the game remains interesting because the more I play, and the more I practice, the easier it is to progress. The game becomes increasingly tense the closer I get to my previous high score. And you’re in the hotseat too: Stick around for too long and difficulty ramps up quickly, either through starvation or impossibly difficult monster spawns. Advance too quickly, and you’ll miss out on valuable loot. Often, players will lose for the sake of pursuing an extended victory, when escaping with the orb would have given them a higher score.

So in a game like Minecraft or DF, and in absentia of a scoring system, we can gauge our success by the complexity of the structures we manage to construct before our untimely demise. The mechanical flaw is that the game can be exploited to create a safe zone wherein the player can build or grind skills ad infinitum. Consequently, past the early-game when the player is fighting to get established, the game loses its “narrative” tension.

[Valpo]

I realy don t understand whats wrong with your ideas?
Your longing for a living world that evolves and greats new challenges as the nether insurgence (blob / mycus / whatever else) worsens.
Better npcs and wandering hordes. biomes that overlap your safe zone grow into it if not dealt with (sources like an open portal a fungal bloom triffid grove bandit camp etc)
don t you?

And what exactly do they have to do with set goals?

Your reasoning is sound regardless.

[Wanderer]

I agree with you, more or less: as it is now, after the early game, for static survivors(staying in one place), there isn’t a path of narrative tension. Travel brings it in terms of what you can find, and there are places that can kill you if you’re unprepared/uncautious.

Also, if you keep fighting, your melee combat skills will get higher and higher, and so combat gets easier. Not to the point where doing more damage faster makes it to be a bore against everything, but zombies really aren’t a challenge after a while.

I was in a position similar to you for a while, and was going to start editing the JSON to create new monsters and buff the already in-gam, but my character died exploring a lab, so, yeah. Maybe editing the JSON can make hordes a challenge for you, perhaps? Also, you can edit world values in the options menu, that includes the zombie Spawn multiplier. Both can be a temporary solution while we wait for more paths of narrative tension.(or using the debug menu to Spawn nasty stuff :p)

For now, i agree with Valpo suggestion: if the world was alive, if stuff could happen in a macro-scale, problems SURELY would reach your fort. Merchants, bandits, triffid hordes and so on. Suggestions to how it could be solved? I will think in something for a while.

[vache]

Someone could pick up https://github.com/vache/Cataclysm-DDA/tree/overmap_zone until I have time to get back to it! It’s missing a good way to calculate zone densities and to spread and contract zones.

[Canalan]

I feel that to an extent you’re railing against a game, which in in alpha, for being in alpha. Stuff isn’t in yet, and all your playing is so much bug-testing. As it stands, there are plenty of mods that add content, and plenty of other games like this that are feature complete.

And at its root, this is kinda more sandbox game than not. The challenge is where you find it, and when you get bored/unchallenged… start a new character. I hear the ‘tweaker bad day’ start is pretty hard, and when you overcome that, try something else. Rinse and repeat until the game updates.

[chevil]

In games like DF and C:DDA I judge my success from awesome moments filled of tension. Was there a awesome fight, a mad dash through zombie horde to get something to drink or did a horde come knocking on my door while I was sick with the flu and barely made it out alive. Some of my more successful characters didn’t live very long but suffered a series of dramatic or awesome moments close together. It’s the journey not the destination.

[kevin.granade]

My arguments were sound, but the community is so devoted to the concept of an open-world game that my points were not considered seriously. In that particular thread, I criticized Cataclysm (along with other open-world games like Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress) as boring.

If your tone is anything like it is here, I’m not surprised, you’re leading with a polarizing characterization of your argument, not providing a clear suggestion, characterizing the game with loaded terms like “boring”, and condescendingly asserting that your “argument is sound”. All of that in the first paragraph. I doubt many people even read the rest if it’s that incendiary.

[quote=“TacticalPteridactyl, post:1, topic:8058”]I like these games, sure, but they fall flat. I’ve been playing a fair bit of Cataclysm lately, enjoying the new features which have been added since last I played, and there have been improvements. I’ll grant you that. But there are serious problems on a mechanical level with the game.

Specifically, the lack of an end-game. Easy now.

See, I’ve got a successful character that I’m playing now. I’ve got a good safe area built up around me. I am unchallenged and the game is quickly devolving into a skill grind. I feel like the only progress I’m making is in advancing the gamut of recipes I can construct. Ingredients are easy to come by at this point too. I don’t need to go far from base to get basically anything I might want or need. Even wandering spawns have not forced me from my roost. And when I complete the tech tree? I suppose I could explore the bottom of X or Y random-generated map feature. It shouldn’t be hard, given that my access to materials by then should be bound only by the time I can put into the game. And then what? No climax? More of the same?[/quote]
If there’s a suggestion here, I missed it. “more end-game content would be nice” is of course an unassailable sentiment, but it’s a sentiment, not a suggestion. If you have thematic, fun suggestions for end-game goals that we can add, post away and someone might take it up and add it.

[Horizonfall]

Welp, I find myself heavily identifying with chevil and Canalan. The game is in development so you can expect a rather less-than-fulfilling experience considering the game isn’t fully developed. But, at the same time I feel like this sandbox-ish open-ended game is more of a “what you make of it” type of game. If you want more of the epic struggle to survival, make a difficult character. Personally, I tend to really never make combat orientated characters, because I like the idea of a regular joe struggling up to survival. If you miss that early tension, make some long term debilitation. I have a Frail Albino character, and I’m seemingly always encumbering my character with a raincoat. Sure, I technically could -only- travel at night, but that’s not exciting. I also have my crack-addicted man-whore styled character that only wears Stylish, revealing clothing, minimal armor. Why? Just for the fun of it. Try to play to have fun, rather than to just win. If you’ve played enough rougelike games you’ll generally master the “run-away and re-position” mentalities and can trivialize all but the most deadly sections of the game. So do stupid things with your intelligent mind and see where the world takes you. Decrease the density of loot, pretend the apocalypse is a party you’ve been late to. Increase the density of cities, and cower away from the Z-filled urban dominance. Turn on the Fast Zombies mod and wandering hordes, and feel the burn of the cataclysm! Then when your character is more OP than Chuck Norris make a new character, and a new story to be told! I’ve found plenty of story-telling to be had in this game, but you are going to need plenty of imagination. If your someone who plays rougelikes, I’m going to assume you have plenty of imagination.

P.S. I’m wholly ignorant when it comes to coding, but hey, maybe you could make a Scaling Enemies mod based on days/years/cumulative skills number.

[Abbysynth]

For end-game stuff, you first have to think about solid goals. What sort of goals are there in the Cataclysm? Currently, the only end-game goal really boils down to ‘survive’. Getting stuff like all the coolest mutations or bionics or whatnot is a minor goal, not an end-game one. The name says it all – END game. Should there be a way to say ‘okay, you won, game over, start again’? Obviously if there are, they would be optional – some players like simply to play forever, others like striving towards a specific thing. End game could have a set of generated screens a la Fallout that are based on your activities in-game.

Some examples of end-game goals:

• Portal shutdown – this would probably entail traveling to alternate dimensions and maybe setting up equipment that permanently shuts down the ability to generate portals to our world.

• Cure the blob – Heavy on the scientific side, this would require you to travel to many different science labs and find parts for some kind of weapon that can transport the blob particles back to their home dimension- basically a teleporter gun maybe? Not only would you have to transport the pieces around, you’d have to brave even the cold labs to find them.

• Create a clean environment – Through terraforming and gathering human survivors, you would create an area of land free from infection of all sorts. A fully self-contained environment where the human race can survive indefinitely. Not only would you need to be able to lead such a state (ie. be friendly to a large number of factions), you’d have to gather the equipment necessary for detecting blob infection, gather tons of purifier, etc.

• The end of mankind – Having no humans left on Earth at all would be an interesting end-game scenario. Whether it’s you becoming a Marloss emperor and spreading the fungus, becoming one with the Blob and guiding its sentience, or just massacring a thousand NPCs, is up to you.

• Space escape – If this is the future, what happened to space travel? Where are the orbital shuttles, the spaceplanes, the commercial space liners, the colony pods? They must be out there somewhere. Find one, rebuild the rockets, refuel the engines, gather a group of hardy, purified survivors and abandon the planet to the infected.

[TheFlame52]

I’m still rooting for lab portals that act like elevators that take you down to the lowest z-level, which is the nether.

[Valpo]

meaning we could dig down to the nether?

[TheFlame52]

meaning we could dig down to the nether?

I didn’t think of that. Making the nether on z -9 is just a way to keep from needing a new dimension. Maybe z +9?

[Valpo]

yeah higher then the highest building would proly be safe unless birds learn to fly

[vache]

I was imagining nether would be implemented using overmaps with a separate coordinate system, so they exist independently of regular overmaps and have z levels of their own.