@joej said:

replicating real world stress is not necessarily fun. Similar to how collecting resources to craft a shelter for survival often isn't fun either. Or many quests like hunt 10 deer often feel more work than fun.

Reality is a terrible template in general, imo.
We better invent an imaginary, alternate reality. Similar enough to ours it feels meaningful, but different enough to level out ethical / moralic constraints hindering us to do what we'd like to do.

Yes. Making a world with its own rules is viable. As long it’s something consistent enough to enable mastery.

Another common way is to introduce new tools or skills after the player has mastered a certain skill. In the beginning, they may not know what herbs to pick or how to make the food, so it would be a long and involved process. After a while, when they mastered it, they often get something enabling them to get more of the ingredients faster, and thus not having to spend as much time doing the same thing. The process transitions to incorporating and combining the things they learned with other things. This continues in a way that every moment in the game is part of something they are still trying to master.

I also think that boring things should be skippable. In a story game where you are invited to live out a fantasy, the consequences of actions should be something they can intuit from real life or similar stories from other media. Story games often include cutscenes of you or somebody else getting hurt in a way that limits their actions. For this to be a story in a systemic game, it should be consistent. But it should not turn into something where you have to do a lot of steps before or after “the fun part” just for realism. For other musings around health, I have an article at https://blog.jonas.liljegren.org/health-in-games/

Health here is just an example, this goes for everything. Some actions have some level of intrinsic value and can be repeated as long as it doesn't get boring. For those things, the boring thing could be made more fun rather than skippable. But many times, I would like the upgrade in an open world with resource collection to just have one action for filling up all resources from the area without having to go search everywhere.

I’m not using reality as a template, but rather movies and TV-series. Anything boring is skipped with a time jump. That is one of the things single-player games enable. 2 years of bed rest can be skipped in 2 seconds. Uneventful travels can be skipped. I like the fast-travel in Days Gone. You would have to “clear” the area, but that is not enough. Even if the place where you are and the place you want to go are both safe, you still can’t fast travel if any point on the calculated path between the two is unsafe.

Another method from the older RPGs are the random events while traveling on the worldmap. The travel is skipped up to the point where something interesting is happening.

@joej said:

Regarding companion relationships, that's something idk. I never manage to play those RPGs long enough, and i never encountered their built in dating simulators yet.
But it's surely possible to combine this with a forceful and primate depiction of society without looking silly.

Systemic story can be used in any game that has story elements. It's just different themes, genres, topics and tone depending on how much action and killing it contains. Helldivers has a certain tone than doesn’t exclude story content just because all your teammates are dropping like flies.

But if you are a player that never was bothered by the lack of choice, you could keep playing linear story games or the games that aren't story-driven.

I’m wishing for AAA immersive action-adventures that allow me to find non-violent solutions, and with interesting meaningful themes and evolving relationships. Those games aren't being made. So I don’t have something to fall back on.

E.g., you have mentioned Campbells hero and character archetypes. This would give a story like Star Wars maybe - quite low brow and shallow, but accessible to a majority and potentially successful. Star Wars or Indiana Jones do work quite well with some love story added to the mix of force and violence. It's just that neither topic is handled in some deep or realistic sense.
And it can work with some deeper, more realistic, intellectual story as well. Like Blade Runner maybe.

The Hero's journey or monomyth has influenced and merged with the dominating way to tell stories with the three-act structure and all its variations. Most stories follow it, regardless of if the author consciously follows the structure or not. You can see it clearly in more than 90% of popular films and tv-series.

Games can usually better be compared with TV-series or even procedurals, where each quest is an episode. It is its own format and can do things that will not work in passive media. More important is that the player is in charge of the pacing. But there is still a lot to learn about the questions that drive the player forward, the buildups and payoffs, and many other things. The Monomyth works since it touches on a lot of universal themes that are common for many stories.

The video games industry just lacks experience and competence on those things, i think. But they're constantly improving. Their art becomes better and better in general, including stories.

Writers and story-tellers are hired with experience from other media. The problem is that you can’t do it without making the story linear. Not until we start using systemic stories.

@joej said:
‘systemic’ as i got it is much more a philosophy than an actual design recipe i could follow. For example, coming back to the example of using fire, barrel of water, and finally smoke to sneak across some guard, that's not necessarily a bunch of systems which interact with each other, emerging a rich set of combinatorial options. To me that's just one system: A physics simulation of rigid bodies and fluid, also modeling chemical reactions somewhat realistically. The option for the player to utilize the smoke is thus just what physics simulation adds to the table by default. And to describe this, i do not need the new term ‘systemic’ i have just learned.

I’m a generalist and tend to relate concepts by their similarities more than dividing them by their differences.

I think Aleissia Laidackers description was pretty good, by the use of matrices for seeing how interconnected the systems are. That was the thing I was talking about in relation to NetHack. There are lots of verbs, states and objects. There are probably millions of combinations. All the interactions should be sensible based on the properties of the things involved. You could possibly come up with some measurement of how systemic a specific game is.

For a chandelier, the non-systemic implementation would be to “if hit by an arrow, move it to this other location and play this animation”. There are a lot of degrees to how this can be generalized and connected to other systems. It can be a container that holds the individual candles, that each can have its own properties. It can use a rope system for the hanging part, giving the rope some “hit points” and having physics rules for how it will fall when the rope breaks. Divinity Original Sin does not use a physics engine. The behavior is based on the properties of the objects.

Using physics simulation would be nice, but would that include the individual candles and the situations in which they will blow out or what would happen if an arrow hits it? Physics simulation will probably be combined with other systems. In Baldur's Gate 3, the chandelier would probably be implemented as a specific type of object that can fall if its support is broken. It has a defined weight that will determine how much bludgeoning damage it will deal to the things below it. You could also determine the sound produced by the impact from the floor material, the chandelier and the impact damage. This will determine what other actors heard the crash.

There is another system for containers and what happens when they break. Liquids will create surfaces. Objects will be spread out on the surface. Some of the damage may be transferred to the content, possibly destroying some of the contained objects. The material of the container determines what type of damage it’s susceptible to. Wood can be damaged by fire.

The surface has properties that influence the things on it and the NPCs. Many games have similar elemental interactions, but often are not interconnected in a way that they actually influence every other object in a logical way. In NetHack, liquids in glass containers will boil and break. Other things may catch fire. Divinity Original sin uses these surfaces; Fire, water, electrified water, blood, electrified blood, poison, oil, lava, web, ice and frozen blood. The clouds used are fire, steam, electrified steam, blood, electrified blood, poison, smoke, explosion, frost explosion and death fog. These can also be blessed or cursed. You can probably guess how some of these interact and transition, and the effects they may have on actors and objects. They all give different types of states like blind, stunned, suffocating, poisoned, slowed, frozen, shocked, knocked down and so on.

@joej said:

To give the philosophy a purpose, i would need examples which work for my genre of interest - action games.

The things used in action combat are often less systemic. You can often break structures, create fires, explode barrels and so on. You can use the environment for dealing damage. But the rubble or effects often just vanish after a couple of seconds. There are also often systems for hitting specific parts. Knocking off helmets. Shooting legs to make them fall or slow down. Shoot arms to make them drop weapons or disable their ranged attacks. The Horizon is absolutely amazing in this for how parts of the machines are tied to different types of attacks. By learning the machines and your tools you can combine elemental attacks in interesting ways to dominate in combat.

Maybe Deus Ex is an example. I don't remember it well, but when it came out, i liked the promise of ‘you can play the whole game without killing anybody’. There must be a lot of options was my expectation from the promise. But then, when i've played it, it was like a typical FPS, and i've killed any enemy as usual. It worked, so why should i spend time on figuring out complicated and abstract stuff like various electronic gadgets, augmentations, etc. There was no need to explore those options, and they did not feel accessible enough to make the exploration fun. The game was not a disappointment btw, it was good.

Having different paths increases the games supported playstyles. It will not necessarily be different from a dedicated FPS game if that is how you choose to play it. Other games may encourage or force the player to engage with its different systems by making certain styles unavailable in certain scenarios. But many players don't like that, such as forced stealth sections.

Horizon Zero Dawn can be a radically different experience depending on how you play it. The average gamer coming from action games can usually go through most of the game without engaging with most of the tools and intricacies that makes the game stand out. They could just run into battle, dodge attacks and shoot at the enemy until it dies.

That playstyle makes the game totally different from how I play it. And the difficulty is adjusted for the average gamer, and how they enjoy playing the game. That makes it a bit strange, because the thing that makes the game great is almost invisible to the player unless you crank up the difficulty. In order to actually engage with the game as it was created to be played, you should use a difficulty two steps above the one you usually play at. That will make all the systems and tools relevant for progressing in the game. All the different elemental arrows, canisters, traps, potions, and the intricacies of the machine's behavior.

Dues Ex, like many other games has adopted the three path approach where you should be able to fight, sneak or talk in order to resolve encounters. I like that, since that gives me more options to not hurt people in the game. I can play the game and it can still be sold to others who don’t care about pacifism. But Deus Ex and many other games have a big problem with judging when talking is a viable option. Most of the time it’s safer, for how I play, to stealth kill everyone. Because if the talking goes bad, I will be surrounded and have a hard time. That is one of the things I want to fix with systemic story games. (I played DeusEx Mankind Divided.)

But it is maybe a good example for the primary problem i see: The interactions of various systems are not obvious, do not feel useful or profitable, and thus i could just make a dumb FPS for the same fun and invest my time on better enemy behavior, level design, and what not.

A systemic story game is going to need a systemic environment. Not for the actual combat scenarios, but for the story progression.

You should generally not start with the systems and try looking for a use for them. Cut the things that are not needed for the player's experience.

Many single-player games are story-driven, even if they are action games. But if that story just exists for the mood and tone, you don’t need to give the player the choice to influence the story. If it’s not a game where you get annoyed about your avatar making stupid decisions in cutscenes, you could keep using traditional game design.

Systemic story games, is for the type of games there you would consider using story branches. That has no direct connection of if it’s a FPS or farming sim or anything else.

Maybe the new Prey is another example? People say it's the best immersive sim ever. So i tried to play it two times.
But it's boring AF. The enemies suck and it's no fun to fight them. And i can't find anything i could do in this game, which i could not already do in Quake, more or less. It's just bad in every sense imo.

Immersive sim games are probably not for you then. Or it could be that you didn’t play it on a difficulty high enough to force you to find new approaches. Many players don’t like standing still for minutes while observing the situation and thinking out plans. That’s ok. There are other games they can play.

@joej said:

Static animation.
They can't do much, because they just play back static animations all the time. Adjusting footsepts with some basic IK does not fix anything.

Working on robotic ragdolls, i think i can break this limitation.
And then - trara… they will be able to do anything, and they will just do, and it will make my game oh so much better! \:D/

Love systemic animations. Have you looked at Overgrowth?

we are probably both just naive, and our stuff won't work as well as hoped at all.

However, that's imo just how gamedev works. So let's continue… : )

It's clearly a lot of work.

Some games have done parts of it. The coming game Judas has some parts. His Narrative Lego is one of the first videos in my list. The Watch Dogs Legions has done a lot of stuff in the manner similar to what would be needed for a systemic story. I really really hope they have the opportunity to continue to innovate. I should buy 100.000 copies of the game just to encourage them, even if it didn't work out that game. It's on the right path.

But if AAA don't want to innovate, somebody else has to.

@joej said:

Stealth gameplay in action games does not work at all for me, because the generous help from the devs makes the whole mechanic totally unpredictable to me.

The Frictional games like Penumbra or Amnesia did it the best imo. It's a primary mechanic in those games, and it works. But without the horror, it would break down as well.

So yeah, that's really something i want to improve. Because like you, i want to avoid the twitchy and chaotic action. I want it steady and slow, and i want to feel safe and secure. I want to control the situation.

To make this possible, we need to address the oversight problem, which is again the cause of all evil.

The normal games are horror enough for me. I’m really scared to get caught and would rather turn around and go home again.

Steady and slow is easy. Just make it turnbased.

Also like steady, slow and safe control. Games like Horizon works because I can run and hide if things get chaotic. I hate it when I can't get back to a state with NO time pressure.

There are lots of ways games have tried to help with tactical overview. Having ways to keep track of enemies even when they are out of sight, by marking them, detective vision, or similar. Having all kinds of ways to signal the enemies plans, with icons, barks, attack telegraphs, and so on.

Some games have real time with paus, like the Dragon Age games. You can pause and overview the tactical situation when needed. Baldur's Gate 3 is built for a zoomed out camera. You can zoom from top-down all the way down to 3rd person view. It’s real time, but can be paused at any time and will pause during combat. You can look around with the camera by panning pretty far, but are limited to what the player characters have perceived.

Ubisoft games has the option to get an overview look. In Assassin's creed it's an actual bird that provides the birdseye look. In Watch Dogs or Ghost Recon, it's a camera drone. I have played quite a bit of Ghost Recon Wildlands and enjoy the drone, but think that the enemy should have the ability to see it more easily than they do. I would have to float in the air in front of their eyes for a whole second or something for them to notice it.

I also enjoy just scouting the environment the normal way. I usually climb up to a vantage point to get a good look. For enemy bases, it becomes a game of finding the right angles without getting spotted.

Games in 1st, 3rd (and 2nd) person view needs to compensate for the limitations of the screen interface. People usually have a better awareness of their surroundings, such as a feeling of somebody moving behind them. For that, some sort of awareness indicators are needed. Audio and or visual with some way to indicate the direction of the threat.

Btw, the definition of action adventure to me remains Flashback. Maybe the last 2D game i had played before the rise of 3D has erased all memories on other games for a decade or two.

Like the movement and interactions. It's similar to why I love Tomb Raider (1996). It's grid-based with defined footsteps for doing short or long jumps. One of my inspirations for the ideas for world interaction with the control scheme.

Some years ago i have tried the game Shadow Complex, just out of boredom. Ik's similar to Flashback or maybe Metroid i guess. And it blew me away. This made me aware of the oversight problem.

Uncharted and even Tomb Raider will zoom out the camera in certain sections just so that you can be more aware of the surroundings and also see all the cool stuff.

@joej said:

A better example: Your game has destruction, and you destroy an entire building.
How do you feel if you came back and it's restored to its initial intact state?

Surely one reason we do not see serious destruction features in open world games.
(Also one reason why static worlds as actually a useful limitation. Once we lift it, we could no longer tell minimum storage space requirements.)

Depends on the estimated time to rebuild. But it wouldn’t be the same after reconstruction anyway.

Don’t care too much about the space limitations. Changes should be able to be optimized to be similar to other original parts of the world, and be shared between save files, like a git archive.

New console generations also no longer show massive increases in power. Speculated PS5 Pro update is quite subtle.

It’s supposed to be the same platform as PS5. The PS4 Pro was the same but with 4K support. PS5 is the same but with new upscaling capability. And just enough extra CPU to deal with the new feature.

Either way. The home computers/consoles have had the capacity for the last 20 years or more. But everything went to push pixels.

My mentioning about 2035 was just for the length of implementation. We are talking about what I called 5th level implementation of systemic story games. That is at least 5 games in the future. But that’s also because I’m leaving the 3D graphics part to others.

One of the best games I played recently was Darkside Detective. And that is about 320x200.

There is a reason for generating the world instead of having it static. The hero pushes forward, wounded and getting ever more close to death, certain she will find the hidden safehouse. Now, at the moment of last consciousness, she finally reached the door. And, with the ability to change the world, that door could be something that would fit the story, instead of just the laundromat that was placed there as a static world location.

Every bit of content that’s fixed is just another rope that ties the storyteller's hands.

@joej said:

The only counter example we have is Rage, which used unique textures everywhere. So no spot looked like the other, and there was no repetition.

Love John Carmack.

If you can have unique textures everywhere, you should be able to have uniquely generated things everywhere.

Ideally, I wouldn't want a single pixel that wasn’t systemically connected to everything else in the world. And my way to do that would be to just don’t have any background details. Just plain single color surfaces. I love a rich environment (like Horizon or Witcher) but I don’t want to see a thing I should be able to use but can’t because it's just dead geometry. If I see a branch on the ground, I should be able to pick it up and use it to reach something.

Systemic story games can have any type of graphics. But for me, if there is graphics that I can’t interact with, it’s a bit less systemic than I would wish.

You should be able to carve your initials in the rock. And since you use unique textures, that shouldn’t be a problem.

Sounds like you are doing interesting work.

Would very much like to have better terrain generation that includes geological processes like landslides, erosion and more.

From my perspective, the computer should have lots of time to work on simulations and generations since for the type of game I envision, I would sit around with my virtual friends, in the same spot, and not demand very much from the 3D engine.

But why not use the cloud also? When you could take even more time to simulate thousands of years of subtle changes.

aigan said:
Another common way is to introduce new tools or skills after the player has mastered a certain skill. In the beginning, they may not know what herbs to pick or how to make the food, so it would be a long and involved process. After a while, when they mastered it, they often get something enabling them to get more of the ingredients faster, and thus not having to spend as much time doing the same thing. The process transitions to incorporating and combining the things they learned with other things.

Agree about introducing skills slowly and one after another, but crafting is again a bad example, since it requires no mastery. Its an abstract mechanic, taxing the players memory, and it is no fun to hang out in inventory screens, combining things while interrupting the actual game. Crafting is really a fallacy of modern gaming imo. Anything that requires a minigame like an inventory screen, implementing abstract mechanics which are not backed by the actual simulation of the game, is pretty much tabu for me. That's no mechanics. It's just bolt on complexity bloat, and desperate but failed attempt to add depth to a game.

It worked for point and click adventures, or round based games, since they are constantly in pause mode, and simulation is abstract entirely. But mixing this with realtime action games simulating laws of physics just does not work.

So we either need to find ways to implement crafting in the game, not it's menu,
Or we need to focus on other systems which build on top of the actual simulation.
But so far, nobody could solve either of these problems well, although they are really obvious to see.
So maybe it just isn't possible, or we are all blind since decades to see a potential which hides in blind sight.

That's also the reason why i can't befriend ARPGs, btw. They add abstract mechanics and games of numbers and stats, borrowed from round based board games, to a video game doing a realtime simulation of reality. But it does not fit together. It isn't intuitive at all. It's nonsense and does not work.
But obviously that' just me, since those broken games are the most successful currently.

aigan said:
But many times, I would like the upgrade in an open world with resource collection to just have one action for filling up all resources from the area without having to go search everywhere.

It's not your fault.
If such feelings arise, the game is either torturing you on purpose,
or you have just experienced bad game design. : )
The higher the complexity, the richer the options, the more often bad things will happen. Your director will make many mistakes, annoying and frustrating players by accident.

I guess we can not avoid this entirely, but we can try to compensate with good things.

However, collecting resources is just boring AF by definition. Its work, not fun. Another fallacy of modern games we should get rid of, imo. Pretty much the same issues as mentioned above on the crafting example.

Our inventory should be filled with tools, not with passive and boring bloat for a ridiculous illusion of complexity following abstract rules which are not intuitive and hard to remember.

What should i do? Contrary to you, i just don't have any fun anymore with Playstation. Presentation is great, but modern game design suffers to much from enforced, desperate progress which goes nowhere.

aigan said:
Another method from the older RPGs are the random events while traveling on the worldmap. The travel is skipped up to the point where something interesting is happening.

If i can notice the event is generated randomly, eventually even using enemies which are spawned out from nothing, it's just suspension of disbelief.

But i know you work on that. : )

Metroidvania is probably the genre showing how to make traversal enjoyable. (I just never had a Nintendo.)
If i have to track back, but i have a good reason to do so, it's fine. But the game should look good along the way to please my senses.
If i have cleared all enemies from the area, so there are no events along the way, that's no problem. It is my reward for the work i have done before. It shows the world is persistent and thus could be real.

If the way is just too long and becomes boring still, that's clearly a design mistake then.
Fix the reasons, not the symptoms by halucinating meaningless random events.

aigan said:
But if you are a player that never was bothered by the lack of choice, you could keep playing linear story games or the games that aren't story-driven.

Yeah, i am like this. So i'm not your target audience.
But if you get it right, i would not be annoyed about your system, like i'm about crafting, collecting resources, or leveling up RPG characters.
So my feedback is still useful i guess.

And i'm still interested in the general systemic idea, even if i probably sound dismissive.
I just focus more on the problems than on the goals, since that's where the work is usually spent.

aigan said:
I’m wishing for AAA immersive action-adventures that allow me to find non-violent solutions

Yeah, seconded. For me it's not about ideology or ethics of players, but about enabling creativity.
That's what made playing Lego so much fun for me as a kid. I could build anything i wanted.
But in games i can only do what they want.

So the goal is the same, just expressed differently. Avoiding violence is the most fruitful toy example to come up with related options.

Another example is being 'insidious' (hope that's the proper word). I want to be unfair in games. I want to beat enemies using bad, ‘unethical’ practices. (I really lack the vocabulary) E.g. using traps, but ideally implemented using emergent, situational options from the simulation.

So, ideologically that's actually a counter example, but it's still the same goal. Call it freedom, options, individual playstyle, or whatever.

Another example would be to use a point and click adventure way, instead going the forceful action way to achieve some goal. E.g. by making deals with somebody from the enemy camp, solving some puzzles to open doors. etc. This could include conversations.
But at this point, unlike you, i did not consider a emergent / procedural approach would be possible. I thought this needs to be set up manually, using the usual linear / branching limitations, and causing a lot of work.
Now you have changed my mind on that, but i will not try to implement such thing, because lifetime is finite. I have too much other things on my plate. And if i can make one more game at all, i wont use a public game engine. I have too much custom tech, so doing it from scratch feels easier to me, but i'm still years away form the point to start work an a game for real.

aigan said:
You can see it clearly in more than 90% of popular films and tv-series.

Yes. But personally i like the other 10%, i guess. : ) (Idk Campbell myself, but other gamedevs mentioned it to me)

I'm a niche. But i'm convinced niches are the future. Generative AI will destroy mainstream with procedural boredom and repetitive, predictable content. Recipes that previously worked will be dismissed, even from people who do not care or think about it a lot.
So we need new and aggressive ideology and ideas. Star Wars, Bladerunner, Lord of the Rings and Dune - it's all gone. We need new stuff, no longer the SciFi helmets and trapezoid doors, swords and pointy ears, which look the same in every game.
HZD tries pretty hard in this sense, btw. It's refreshing, if there were not those silly hairstyles. :D
But the real example is Scorn. It's stealing Giger or Beksiski artstyles, but does nto matter. The result is you explore a world you have never experienced before. And this alone makes the game a masterpiece, while CP2077 is just a lowbrow cliche and stereotypes (but at least not as bad as in the Witcher before).

Scorn is not that successful, but also not that costly to produce. Most people don't like it, but some love it.
And thats a valid future: Reduce costs and serce a niche well, instead trying to serve a statistical average of a thoughtless teen player which does not exist.
At least i hope so. And no matter what - that's what i will do. ; )

aigan said:
Love systemic animations. Have you looked at Overgrowth?

Hehe, you just call everything you like systemic, i get it. ;D
Yeah, played it. It's very good, and maybe the more ambitious attempt to replace animation so far.
But it's also my no.1 example to show that you can not make a game these days avoiding voice acting anymore. It's storytelling cutscenes are very bad.

Besides, Uncharted 4 is my other favorite example showing complex character animation.
Pretty impressive.

But both games also look ridiculous from ignoring the laws of physics.

aigan said:
But if AAA don't want to innovate, somebody else has to.

Yep. I'm afraid they have not enough time for research.
But they may get back on track once they figure out how to reduce costs and still making good business.

aigan said:
Steady and slow is easy. Just make it turnbased.

Nah. I' from the reality simulation camp. Turns are for board games. >:D

I'm sure i'll get stealth right.
But i'm worried about melee combat. Physical character simulation is super hard technically, but also i don't know anything about Bruce Lee or Street Fighter.
I hate melee combat. But due to naive enthusiasm on ragdolls, i think even that could become lots of fun.

aigan said:
There are lots of ways games have tried to help with tactical overview. Having ways to keep track of enemies even when they are out of sight, by marking them, detective vision, or similar. Having all kinds of ways to signal the enemies plans, with icons, barks, attack telegraphs, and so on.

That's all crap. The only thing that worked is a rotating map. In Magic Carpet, you could make the map big and play basically entirely using the map, ignoring the 3D view for most. That worked. But only for games which are flat, and thus have no real point to be 3D at all.

To give oversight for 3D games we need to scroll the camera back a lot, keeping the avatar small but horizontally centered. No skewed over the shoulder perspective. We need to solve the clipping problem, and we need to design so all interesting stuff is in close range. This means reducing the tempo and caring more about details, and we need animation that actually works for interacting with those details.

The reason this has not been done for interiors is the clipping, which is not trivial, ideally using manifold geometry with no overlaps. Then it works, but people might be still confused from it. There are side effects, but to me it feels promising after a very basic prototype.

aigan said:
Some games have real time with paus, like the Dragon Age games. You can pause and overview the tactical situation when needed. Baldur's Gate 3 is built for a zoomed out camera. You can zoom from top-down all the way down to 3rd person view.

Cumbersome crutches to hold up the crap. :D

aigan said:
In Assassin's creed it's an actual bird that provides the birdseye look. In Watch Dogs or Ghost Recon, it's a camera drone.

Much better. It works for what it is, but does not solve the problem at all. We need oversight for moment to moment gameplay, not while interrupting it.

aigan said:
People usually have a better awareness of their surroundings, such as a feeling of somebody moving behind them. For that, some sort of awareness indicators are needed. Audio and or visual with some way to indicate the direction of the threat.

Clumsy workarounds which make your game look like a traffic sign in the middle of your bedroom. : )

My no.1 rule of amateur game design: If you can't do something well, then just don't do it.
It always works, and never fails. Pro tip. \:D/

[is it just me or is this forum shuffling posts randomly while i try to quote them in order?]