The Gamer's Quarter

[david]

This might start out as a Twilight Princess / Zelda thread, but hopefully you guys will take it in other directions.

*** Some overworld-related spoilers follow, but nothing major. Definitely no plot-related spoilers or anything like that. ***

I'm playing through Twilight Princess on the Cube and enjoying that version's controllable camera to take in the sights of Hyrule. I've just gotten to the part where the landscape really opens up, and I've been putting off dungeon three to ride around and take in the sights. The first time through the game, on Wii, I was too curious about future plot events to linger much, so I sort of missed out on the stuff that feels to me the most like "Zelda," which is the freedom of exploring a huge landscape, seeing how far you can go, looking for vistas, looking for secrets, enjoying the sensations of horse riding and battle and all that.

Twilight Princess has the most cohesive, interconnected 3-D landscape in the series. It's something I've been wanting since Ocarina, with its compartmentalized play courses, only a few steps from Mario 64's hub structure. Twilight Princess has multiple entrances to most regions of the map, many views of distant landmarks, and a reinvisioned Hyrule Field which is not a central hub, but a series of plains and pastures that ring the Castle and run over the lake, which you can circuit uninterrupted by a fade-to-black or loading pause.

The most amazing place for sweepng views is the bridge over Lake Hylia, from where you can see the castle, the desert, the lake below, and several adjoining field areas. There are some ruins in the field to the west of Castle Town resembling a Greek theater, with a sort of balcony with a lake view. From the field south of the town, you can dive off a cliff directly into the lake. Beneath that cliff is an underground river spilling into the lake; you can ride that river on a canoe from the valley south of Zora's Domain. (From that point the river also branches towards the northern portion of Hyrule Field, running into Castle Town itself.) The canoe ride takes you through some of the canyons which from above appear black and bottomless. You trace the northern edge of the big open plain north of Kakariko; keep an eye out above and you'll see Eldin Bridge. Discovering these geographical relationships are to me more satisfying than solving any of the dungeon puzzles.

Unfortunately, until I started noticing connections, my impression was that the landscape was pretty fragmented, the customary series of playpens, strung together. The map gives that impression by clearly delineating the edges of each region. Narrow paths seem less like passages carved into the mountains than corridors, contrivances obviously inserted to allow the next area to stream into RAM. There's little illusion that anything exists to the left or right of that corridor; you know those walls are pixel-thin polygons hovering in space. Each area is clearly defined with high, unscalable rock walls, and you know where all the exits are just by glancing at your map. Worst of all, the forests feel nothing like forests, despite some very pretty leaf canopies. There are no hidden shortcuts through the trees, just long gutters leading to the next story landmark.

I would adore a Zelda game that looked just like this, addressed the stuff I mentioned in the last paragraph, and had a much less directed structure, so you would actually discover these things on your own instead of because it was the right time in the story.

Anway, I love games where you explore a vast natural landscape. I even like some of those really awkward yet somehow charming attempts on the PSX and N64. I liked Quest 64! Of course I couldn't play it for more than a couple hours, but the landscape was cool!
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[Dracko]

I'd use to simply wander around whenever I was playing Soul Reaver at first. Thankfully, it was a coherent universe and a joy to explore, and features no loading time in between areas or even between the two planes of reality the game is set in. In fact, when going from one to the other, your environment would warp in real time.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dessgeega]

[Scratchmonkey]

Yeah, pretty much. Maybe he means a nicely-done 3D version of that sort of thing, in which case I would mention that that's pretty much what I want to see too. Shadow of the Colossus kinda sorta does this.

I wanted Oblivion to do this, unfortunately, it didn't come off quite right. I think it's because the forests don't have the right kind of light or underbrush. It feels like other terrain that somebody slapped a bunch of trees onto. It looks good from a distance, not so much when you're actually going through it. It's also because all of the terrain pretty much looks the same.

[Harveyjames]

Twilight Princess has a lot of sudden cliff faces. The whole of Hyrule is just a big craquelature of bottomless ravines. It's a good thing Epona knows when to stop.

The problem with Oblivion's terrain is that it promises things it doesn't deliver. Those mountains look as if you can walk right to them, but before you reach them you bump into an invisible wall. That takes the fun out of proceedings somewhat. If there has to be a barrier all the way around the world, you could at least set the game on an island or something. Don't surround it with inviting, climbable-looking mountains.

[antitype]

Over the last couple of years I've realized that some of the things I look for most in videogames are environmental beauty and a sense of distance traveled. Some games achieve this effect in different ways — I think I mentioned something a while ago, probably at the SB forums, about Dragon Quest VIII and Half-Life/HL2 being games that make me feel like I've come a long way, though they go about this in dramatically different ways: DQVIII feels vast and open-ended, even when the path you should take is fairly clear, while HL2 keeps you on a more or less set path with little room for deviation (though it never really feels more restrictive than it should). Both of these games have beauty of their own, and inspire me to pause and admire my surroundings frequently.

HL2 isn't exactly abundant with natural beauty, though. It's a bit more of that "ruined beauty" thing. Urban decay times 10,000.
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antitype.livejournal.com | last.fm

[DaleNixon]

Please play the first Jak & Daxter. I'm not sure how they did it, but the entire game is one continuous massive level that flows seamlessly with no apparent loading tricks. It came out at a time when ps2 load times were at their worst. I've heard the rendering engine for that game was written in LISP. Surely it would take something this eccentric to accomplish what they've done.

Even if you can't stand the characters or the story or even the devs, please try it out!

[SuperWes]

[Mister Toups]

[D-A-I-S]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this topic, but, ......I think this is one of the very few things that Ultima IX does quite well. Although some aspects of the world are a little too videogamey, there are other areas that are just amazingly fun to explore and find weird stuff in.

Kind of makes me wish the Gothic series wasn't so......broken. I mean, quite possibly even worse than Ultima IX was.