/v/ - Video Games

>>241699 (OP) 
does boldtext ever fucking work

I think there's too much emphasis lately on letting players do whatever they want in a sort of sandbox. Yeah there may be some intended path but it's like they enjoy exploring but not adventure itself. It doesn't have to be puzzles or keys or whatever, and exploration can be part of an adventure, but an adventure should emphasize the adversity and progression of the game elements over miscellaneous quests/errands to give players something to do while they wander an otherwise redundant and pointless world until they eventually get bored and finish the endgame.
I'm not inherently saying survival games or whatever are inherently bad, just, people conflate a lot of modern open world games with adventure games. Even if adventure os attainable in an open world, the adventure itself should be its own constant goal.

>>241699 (OP) 
>can't vouch for La-Mulana yet
The "trick" to La-Mulana is it tells you everything BUT the clues are all over the place. You must write everything down so you can read what you need to figure things out. Once you find a clue it's extremely direct on how to proceed. If you don't write things down/screenshot you're not going to get far.

>>241700
Yes, yes it does when you notice that it's two double-quotes instead of multiple single quotes. It's been changed multiple times at this point, what you tried used to be right but was buggy if I remember correctly.

>>241705
I feel like La-Mulana 2 was more like what you describe, while the first game had a few more things you had to notice or weren't painfully obvious from the hints given. Plus in one case you had to RTFM to get a hint instead of it being in the game.
But La-Mulana was more about being an homage to old adventure games than being intended as an adventure itself. It's adventure by proxy, kind of akin to how if you wanted to make a tennis game you wouldn't try to recreate Pong, but if you wanted to make a Pong homage you'd get a game that's like tennis by proxy. In a way it's similar to people trying to do retro 3D art on purpose, while the actual art they eant to emulate was trying to do the best it could given the hardware available to them. I love La-Mulana, but wouldn't describe it how OP describes Tunic and OW.

>>241700
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>>241702
Sandboxes are always at their most fun when played with friends, so it's especially bizarre to design singleplayer games with those mechanics.

To your point, it is the greatest weakness with TotK. While BotW has some sandbox elements, it was always to interact with what was ahead of you. Assembling objects on the fly and then having like five or six different currencies on top of that ruined TotK's game design.

>>241699 (OP) 
I think the important thing is that the world has to be crafted with intent. Outer Wilds is only a single solar system but each planet is unique in that it truly feels like you are exploring every nook and cranny. There is a need to travel to every planet and even revisit planets given new information. By the end of the game you feel accomplished having uncovered the secrets to the solar system and the universe.
No Man's Sky is the perfect example of bad design. The devs hide the lack of content by overwhelming the player with billions of planets that could be reduced to a few dozen unique ones. Your sense of adventure fades away as you realize more and more the lack of purpose and intent. The planets all have the same fauna/minerals with random names so you can "discover" the same ones 100 times over, NPCs, enemies, weather, events, and even terrain generation. It is more like a bad fever dream of repeating yourself over and over while being unable to stop. The sense of adventure is killed once this is realized as you have already explored all there is to offer. In fact, the end game is about finding out that nothing you do matters and you should give up. As even the devs have baked their bad design into the story itself.

>>241848
It's funny that you identify NMS as being the repetitive one when Outer Wilds literally resets every 20 minutes, and even funnier that it's true. Outer Wilds has quite a bit more going for the space part by having orbiting celestial bodies, orbiting satellites, gravitational variance, and phenomenon like black holes and supernovas in addition to the planetary quirks unique to its universe while NMS is just planet hopping. I don't fault the idea of procedural generation especially when it comes to terrain, I think it needed to be heavily tuned to make life and interesting geography infrequent so the really cool planets pop. The real culprit is the lack of objective and the fact that what you can already do at the beginning is not so different than what you can do at the end.