Over the past few years i played a lot of open world games ranging from smaller ones like Arkham City/Knight to huge ones like Assassin's Creed Odyssey and everything between. But out of all those games i played in only one i felt like i am actually exploring the map and discovering things naturally. That is Red Dead Redemption 2. In all other games after like dozen of hours you saw everything and rest of the world is content that repeats. Many of those game also have content that makes no sense in context of the game and even more of those games have need to push content to your face every few minutes.
Simply entire world in most of the games i played just felt like huge checklist. But that is not case in RDR2. From the moment i started playing that game and for the next 80h or more i spent in that world i felt like i am really exploring that unknown world. And no matter how long i was playing it i was discovering new things and secrets. There were no PoI markers, random events every 2 minutes (and those tat are in the game are far more varied than in any other game), no waypoints. It is just you, and decently sized map designed expertly. Stumbling upon may of the cottages in the game that tell different stories, abandoned US Mail wagon with interesting letter, cave with statues where you need to solve puzzles, guy in a cave that thinks he is devil... Or simple small tings like giant skeleton after you heard from some random person in the town nearby about it.
And don't make me start about treasure maps. They are proper treasure maps where you actually need to know landscape and map to find treasure and not some glorified waypoint.
Every second you spend in that game and in every direction you go there is something to be discovered. It could be big or small but one thing is sure it will be unique. There are some checklist items in the game like Dreamcatchers or Dino bones but even those don't feel like checklist because you actually need to find them in that huge world without any help.
So my question is why can't we have more games where designing map and filling it with content feels more like RDR and less like Ubisoft game? IS players attention span that low these days or developers/publishers have some kind of need to make players don't miss anything and make everything in games so obvious?
And what other games you feel that have similar exploration like RDR2?
Simply entire world in most of the games i played just felt like huge checklist. But that is not case in RDR2. From the moment i started playing that game and for the next 80h or more i spent in that world i felt like i am really exploring that unknown world. And no matter how long i was playing it i was discovering new things and secrets. There were no PoI markers, random events every 2 minutes (and those tat are in the game are far more varied than in any other game), no waypoints. It is just you, and decently sized map designed expertly. Stumbling upon may of the cottages in the game that tell different stories, abandoned US Mail wagon with interesting letter, cave with statues where you need to solve puzzles, guy in a cave that thinks he is devil... Or simple small tings like giant skeleton after you heard from some random person in the town nearby about it.
And don't make me start about treasure maps. They are proper treasure maps where you actually need to know landscape and map to find treasure and not some glorified waypoint.
Every second you spend in that game and in every direction you go there is something to be discovered. It could be big or small but one thing is sure it will be unique. There are some checklist items in the game like Dreamcatchers or Dino bones but even those don't feel like checklist because you actually need to find them in that huge world without any help.
So my question is why can't we have more games where designing map and filling it with content feels more like RDR and less like Ubisoft game? IS players attention span that low these days or developers/publishers have some kind of need to make players don't miss anything and make everything in games so obvious?
And what other games you feel that have similar exploration like RDR2?
