^ One very fine rant indeed and fits this topic like a glove. Take my +1

The ol' Fallout 3 Paradox. How did this wasteland get so... densely populated?

I'm currently struggling with this problem. There is a fine line between Stuff! Everywhere! and a hiking simulator. I don't want either, and I'm not finding the middleground. The game I'm working on is a horror-themed adventure game and it just seems so jam packed. "Where's the windmill I read about in the journal? Literally right over there. Mystery solved."

Some parts of Fallout 3 had the ability to wander nicely, pick some crafting ingredients, kill the odd radscorpion. But agreed that most areas weren't like that. If you looked at the world map when you were a decent way through the game... wow. The city portions drove me nuts with how buildings collapsed "just so", turning huge areas into mandatory "go back in the tunnels with all the ghouls" sections.

The ol' Fallout 3 Paradox. How did this wasteland get so... densely populated?

I'm currently struggling with this problem. There is a fine line between Stuff! Everywhere! and a hiking simulator. I don't want either, and I'm not finding the middleground.

The Elderscrolls 3: Morrowind had alot of travel between different towns and dungeons. Sometimes it'd take 15-20 minutes to hike to a location you were needing to go for an optional sidequest or that you happened to read about and wanted to visit. But it didn't feel too much. Maybe it was slightly nearer to the 'hiking simulator' than it should've been, but overall it was a good balance. (Warning: It's been nearly a decade since I played it, so my memory might be influenced heavily by nostalgia)

Morrowind had limited quick-travel, which I thought was cool. You could only quick-travel (via Mage Guild teleportation) to major cities, or quick-travel by boat to (some) coastal villages, or ride on silt striders to (some) towns. A good portion of your time was spent walking around exploring and traveling, but in an actually enjoyable way.

There was really only one thing that made the travelling not enjoyable - that lack of variety of enemies to fight. Sure, you'd encounter the occasional bandit, but mostly you just got woken up at night by rats that you can 1-hit KO, or get attacked by the most annoying flying creatures ever that'd always interrupt your travels with non-challenging and purely annoying inconveniences. Rarely did you encounter an exciting travel enemy.

This kind of open-world game doesn't work as well for heavily-linear plots.

The Myst series, especially the latter titles, offers a lot of coherent environments.
But I'm not sure if you will find kitchens or bathrooms in there.

To quote a professor, "a game should not be more realistic than it is fun."
We're dealing with video games after all, a product of entertainment.

This may be useful: http://vgmaps.com/

I'm replaying an old game at the moment, Dragon's Dogma or something like that.

It has some awful design decisions plastered all over it.

The quest system has you trudging from place to place all the time, similar to Morrowind. You have the ability to fast travel between certain key locations, and you have a mechanism that allows you to teleport back home to rest and sell goods. Then return to the same location.

However they have made the monsters location based.

So every damn time I walk from A to B I have to kil the exact same monsters at the exact same place. This was challenging at the start when my puny little level 6 character had a rusty blade and no armour. Now I'm a level 36 bad ass with a blade sharp enough to split stone and armour tough enough to deflect a nuclear blast....... bit boring.

Early on in the game getting from A to B was a nightmare, some monsters are location based one shots. You could walk around the corner and have to fight a Griffon.

A Griffon is a special moster, they have a few, where the normal hack and slash is not enough. You have to do things like climb on it's back, hit it with spells etc.

A fight with one of these special monsters can easily take 20 minutes of real time. This is enough to send the game from early in the morning to the middle of the night. Sadly the low level location based monsters respawn at dusk and dawn. So you often find yourself killing a load of low level monsters twice while still fighting the one special monster.

It's details like that which for me ruin what otherwise could be a good game. They offend the programmer in me

They offend the programmer in me

But isn't that game design decision rather than programming decision?

Eventually this might help us creating more immersive themes and levels for video games.

Many of the things you list don't really hurt the immersion. Before you started to think whether you could use the empty barrel to jump on that fence and jump that awning so you can walk the rooftops to a building that had the door locked the immersion was already broken.

I actually didn't meant to leave the impression that the tropes I'm mentioning are hurting immersion. They are limitations in design which are caused by the underlying technologies, the focus on the game's narrative and intended experience, as well as limited resources in the development process. You can however design themes for a

game, which can either completely avoid showing these limitations or integrate them in a native way. Portal for instance might be one of a few FPS games with a theme which perfectly explains why your interactivity with its world is limited.

Indeed the more you know about game development, design and business the harder it is to relax and sink in to a game world while you are distracted by various things that peak your professional interest.

I acknowledge that. The majority of tropes I pointed out also probably don't come to the attention of most of the casual players. So the thread is also a bit of an academic discussion.

In modern video games, the contrast of pseudo-realism and the emptiness behind it’s surface makes suspension of disbelief hard to maintain. Welcome to Uncanny Valley!

(This is from a rant that I wrote a while ago but I think it fits this discussion, so excuse me for not trying to reword it)

Well said!

Portal for instance might be one of a few FPS games with a theme which perfectly explains why your interactivity with its world is limited.

Because Portal's game world where the player completed puzzles was in fact made to be just that: an artificial environment where the subject completes tasks that test thinking and timing. The AI could very well be talking directly to the player instead of the player character. Portal eliminated the need for real world environment by making their game about imprisonment and cruel experiment where the environment was built specifically for the testing purposes.

Another such example would be Tranquillity Lane from Fallout 3 that is a virtual world where people were being trapped. The player character knows it's not real so in this limited cases there's no room for immersion in terms of assessing the plausibility.

While these are nice examples of how some games with unique starting points were made quite plausible not every game can be about forced experiment, oppression and imprisonment to justify obviously limited environment. In a game where you want to involve realism, adventure or free will / open world themes it's impossible to find a comparable plausible explanation for the limitations in game world such as absolute boundaries the player is contained within that the he eventually bounces against.

Because the criteria for plausibility is not simply "imprisonment" like in Portal's case, but something much more complex. "There are no toilets in these shopping centers". "Nobody would want to live there next to motorway." "Where does the mailman deliver the mail in this city block?". "There's not nearly enough parking space in the city." "The cars never stop driving." As the game developers seek to emulate a city or other set that is involved with huge amount of people going through it in various roles it's bound to be incomplete and unrealistic when the viewer gets critical enough.

Portal was ingenious in many aspects but I wouldn't have all games try to find a reason for the unavoidable limitations in game design. I value the illusion and rather play games where I think I have a huge amount of choice than games that were reduced to environment that directly states there's only one thing for the player to do (as there mostly actually is).

So you want the players to create assets for the game. How could that work?

Let;s look at the process for say a single character.

Start with a good 3D editor. We are talking 3ds Max or Maya for most of the industry. We create the mesh, attach a skeleton, attach cloth meshes, create collision meshes, create animations, create hair meshes. etc.

Then we attach the relevant parts of the mesh to the various physics systems, and we have a useable character.

Then we tell the game about it, put it into the correct place in the file system, link it to more physics systems, link it to audio systems, etc etc. and we have it in the game.

How could we do that outside the development environment?

Well we cannot assume anyone outside the industry will have a copy of max or maya, they are just too expensive for the common man to use. So we would have to support other 3d editors , That is nightmare number 1

Then we have to expose interfaces to all the physics components to the whole world, not something I would like to do as it opens the system up to abuse. Nightmare number 2

Then we have to get it into the file system. This is not a trivial task. How do you get a user created asset onto an Xbox, or a Ps4? Nightmare number 3

Then finally we have got a user created asset into the game, and the game crashes. Who takes the blame for the crash? Obviously it's very probably the player that created the asset, but I bet you a years salary you would get technical support calls along the line of "I've done this and it's perfect, so you have broken the game and what are you going to do about it" Nightmare number 4

Allowing players to mod PC games is perfectly reasonable, and often actively supported but doing the same for modern AAA games on games platforms is probably never going to happen.

You can do in game editors for simple stuff, Little Big Planet is a good example, but they are the exception and will stay that way.