Quote:Original post by zealotgi
I know this may sound a bit weird, but how about giving the player the ability to purchase short stories, that pertain to the storyline, that the player can read when going to their destination?

The library serves a similar purpose for me. :)

I love the Final Fantasy games, I have not played too many of the newer ones but they had you staring on foot where each location was in a somewhat linear path so you really did not need to go back to the beginning.

When you needed to cross bigger spaces, they gave you faster vechicles such as a dune buggy, boat, etc, and eventually an airship, spaceship.

As far as Zelda Windwalker Game Play Cons are concerned, I wont touch the cell-shading topic:
There was just too much ocean.
That awful wind changing whistle made navigating that sailboat horrible.

I gave up on the game after having my life up to 5-6 hearts. I remember getting to the underwater Hyrule Castle.

Quote:Original post by Way Walker
I interpret this to mean that there wasn't much "game" in the first place. Taking out the travel time in Fallout wasn't a problem because there was so much to do at your destination. Seriously, if there's not much left after taking out the "hold left for five minutes", then there wasn't that much to begin with.

Well, I think that can be turned around to answer your own question. If you're saying that sometimes exploring is fun, but you want to speed up the parts where you're exploring a boring area, then the better solution is to just stop making big, boring areas. If you're going to fill a game with huge boring areas that you need to travel through, and then decide to reduce the tedium by making it really fast, then you're left with something that's fast, but still boring.

I really liked walking around and exploring new areas in Wind Waker. I agree that the sailing was pretty boring. But this doesn't mean that it would be solved by making the sailing go by faster, it would be better solved by either putting more interesting things in the ocean, or getting rid of the sailing entirely.

Quote:Original post by makeshiftwings
Well, I think that can be turned around to answer your own question. If you're saying that sometimes exploring is fun, but you want to speed up the parts where you're exploring a boring area, then the better solution is to just stop making big, boring areas. If you're going to fill a game with huge boring areas that you need to travel through, and then decide to reduce the tedium by making it really fast, then you're left with something that's fast, but still boring.

The question was more to make a point than anything else. In any case, I disagree that even if you make it fast it's still boring. Well, to some extent. Take Fallout. It was fast, there were vast areas of nothing, but it didn't seem boring and still felt like a world full of things to discover and explore.

Quote:Original post by Way Walker

Quote:Original post by makeshiftwings
Well, I think that can be turned around to answer your own question. If you're saying that sometimes exploring is fun, but you want to speed up the parts where you're exploring a boring area, then the better solution is to just stop making big, boring areas. If you're going to fill a game with huge boring areas that you need to travel through, and then decide to reduce the tedium by making it really fast, then you're left with something that's fast, but still boring.

The question was more to make a point than anything else. In any case, I disagree that even if you make it fast it's still boring. Well, to some extent. Take Fallout. It was fast, there were vast areas of nothing, but it didn't seem boring and still felt like a world full of things to discover and explore.

I guess it depends on how you play... My experience with Fallout was, upon getting to the world map, thinking "Wow!! This game is huge!!", then after figuring out that most of it was empty and randomly generated, thinking "Eh, that's a little lame..." and then not really caring about going anywhere that wasn't marked for a quest. I guess the illusion of having a big world was nice, even though in reality it wasn't exactly true; I guess if your intention is to be similar to fallout, ie, creating big, empty areas that are there just to be travelled through as fast as possible on your way to somewhere fun, then yeah, you had better not make the player trudge through all of it manually. But Fallout's an extreme example; not all games have such big empty zones that only exist to make the world seem big.