/svidya/ - Strict /v/

Items because it brings out my inner kleptomaniac.

Unique items or nothing.

Item collection, hidden areas.

What I loved about Xenoblade Chronicles was it had a beautiful world, and it encouraged you to explore every nook and crany of it by giving you bonus XP for exploring and finding beautiful sights.

Cleverly concealed areas with varying difficulty of discovery and appropriate loot/lore (or absence thereof.) The kicker is the gameplay has to be enjoyable otherwise the extra stuff won't feel as meaningful. I've always enjoyed trying to go places you weren't supposed to, and nothing feels better than discovering well hidden secrets.

Freedom of doing things at your pace

Finding things and details many times after you revisit

Hidden areas from time to time or simply places that have curious sights or secluded from everything

Also lootable things

It's a combination, IMO the most important are the first two

For me all I really want is large areas to look at and fuck around in, secrets and easter eggs are just icing on the cake. Two things I hate are TURN BACK OR DIE and barriers that actually push you away from the invisible walls. Freedom to fuck around is why I think goat sim, a game pretty universally hated by /v/ is actually pretty damn awesome.

>>16919

Hidden areas and content that actually matters in gameplay are very important for me. Dark Messiah of Might and Magic does exploration just about perfect, since the hidden areas have all sorts of unique environments, items, and enemy challenges in them. They also afford you XP for discovering them, so the game encourages you to explore and find stuff.

The lack of meaningful content was something that bothered me about The Wind Waker HD, as much as I adore that game. Finding treasure out on the great sea was kind of meaningless, since my money was capped half the time. It did make up for it with unique vistas in a few cases, though, like on Diamond Steppe isle or Needle Rock Isle. Wish the game had more unique content like that and less stuff like the reefs.

Like, most of the time you invest into exploration in The Wind Waker, you just end up with money, which you might not even be able to carry. I don't expect them to litter the game with pieces of heart, of course, but I would like something more substantial to discover. The game's minimalist approach to lore hurt it in that regard, since discovering ancient Hylian scrolls would have been really cool.

>>16923

Yeah, photogrammetry is a really cool technique. I would like to see more devs use it, assuming it isn't prohibitively expensive.

It's the fact that the area is unknown. The more mysterious the environment, the more entertaining the exploration.

Exploration is nothing without dank rewards.

>>16919

All of it plus exciting dangers/challenges. For me, STALKER has done this successfully and is what should be used as a base for exploration. What I'd like to see added to that would be semi-random loot/loot location generation where caches/chests are moved from playthrough to playthrough and their contents are shuffled around but never downgraded in terms of quality.

>>16919

You make the place in the end worth the excursion so the player feels the need to go out of their way for things more often, leading to a chain reaction of finding neat little hidden things. If you want to do something cool with making your player explore, have a bunch of enemies in front of a hallway that looks like it leads to nothing, and then have a turn that was just out of view so they either feel the need to explore and are surprised by how partially a thing was hidden, or make the player have to go backwards, so they have the possibility of seeing a hidden thing that leads them on an exploratory adventure. Usually it's just because the devs made it and I want to see what they did, and if I'm not impressed by the exploration, I get a little mad at the devs.

Unique items in rpgs are especially needed; if you have a single weapon all game, it's fine, but the little variation can be tiresome unless the gameplay is extremely fun. If you mean unique as in they do unique things, the fun is in the variety.

If the game is beautiful it gives my art boner a pop

Bonus characters is kinda vague. Playing as bosses is fun because you get to have that super power they have at least.

>>16993

When I say "bonus characters", I had Final Fantasy 6 in mind, really.

Like, who the fuck would have figured out how to get Gogo without being told? Who lets themselves get eaten by a monster to unlock a secret dungeon?

>>16994

that kinda stuff is player guide bait

Simplest answer is unique items. Even with everything else done right, exploring seems pretty hollow if there's nothing to find in area A that is only in area A. Maybe it's a totally unique item, maybe it's another piece of heart, point is you're never gonna get everything if you don't visit area A. Which is why MMO's get very little credit with me for having huge maps, there's rarely anything that can only be found in a certain place.

The other issue is that the layout itself needs to be at least moderately interesting. If the map's huge but it's just more and more of pretty much the same terrain an in-game half mile later, bleh. Again, MMO's seem like the biggest offender there.

The last thing is that background interaction helps spice up exploration, and the more the better. It's way more fun to explore places by jumping, climbing, hookshotting, etc than just walking and walking and walking and walking.

>>16919

Exploration

Yeah, procedurally generated worlds suck. Sure, you're never seeing quite the same thing twice, but ultimately, the differences are so inconsequential it doesn't matter. And procedurally generated worlds often completely fail at giving you reason to explore all that space anyway. And if they do make really rarely spawned stuff, the lack of proper map design means that it's like finding a needle in a haystack, since it's hard to make the procedural generation smart enough to build in the kind of little clues a hand-made map could have. Speaking of which, they just lack that purposeful feel a hand-made map would have in a way that's hard to put my finger on.

Though that's not to say I think procedural generation is a completely bad idea now and forever, it's just nowhere near there yet. But maybe someday somebody will make a vastly more complex system that addresses those problems, and if so, that'd be cool.