When I was into Morrowind I already had about ten years of practice escaping into fantasy worlds via books and games. After listening to The Blindboy Podcast (after art and history, one theme is mental health) since mid-2020 and practicing cognitive behavior therapy to make more time to act between stimulus and (too-often-harmful) response, I no longer feel compelled to escape into games. Perhaps all those hours I spent exploring imaginary spaces helped in some way (I am much more grateful to authors of books, because they helped me develop visualization) and I try not to sink into regret. Having a child was a major contributor to growing up, too, perhaps the top; now I’m more adult and I get to freely enjoy childhood activities again with less risk of dependence.

My point is: it’s okay to grow out of things and move on.

I do get that and I find my ability to escape into fantasy has dwindled in recent years, but I played morrowind at the time when I still read plenty of long winded fantasy books and the other games actually helped lead to my decline in enjoying fantasy.

To counter that. I recently for the first time played dark souls and a couple years back played hollow Knight. I was able to immerse myself into both games because, every single thing you do and find has a point.

Nothing really wastes your time. There's a reason for doing everything in those games. The things you find are worth it and rewarding. Exploring is worth it and rewarding.

I never once really got that feeling from the elder scrolls games, or open world games in general.

They have many, many things to do and find, but none of them feel satisfying.

I prefer games with less things, but each thing feels worthwhile and meaningful. I'd rather find one awesome cool thing that changes the way I play the game or gives me something cool and new for my player over 20 Rusty forks and some apples any day.

I appreciate your comment. In my childhood open world games were - at least in my mind - the non-plus-ultra because the possibilites appeared to be endless. Nonetheless, you are right: Too often those possibilites are trite. I dislike Skyrim and Oblivion for those same reasons but for Morrowind I have a place in my heart because it really felt like you were exploring the world by yourself (not following your quest marker) and the rewards you could get were not just defined by its loot system but designed (so that you could get a really great sword relatively early if you found your way there), but you are right in that the world is rather empty and can be boring for some players like you. Actually, what has not been topped for me personally are 2 games: Might&Magic4+5 (you could play them as a combo-game, changing worlds!) and Fallout 2 because in both those cases the worlds were massive and you could go wherever you wanted to but still had comparatively much and different stuff to do wherever you went. In both cases I was always fixed on finding stuff that usually I wouldn't have at this point in the game and that worked really well, but also the worlds were really interesting. In M&M you had those minigames where you would simply read a text of an NPC and had to answer his question like a puzzle or something; very simple but quite rewarding (however also too easy to look up the answers nowadays ;)) but also you had to learn skills to get to some places in the world like swimming and mountaineering, a really cool feature as well. I don't know if you would like those games, especially nowadays, but compared to 3D games they had the added advantage that walking around didn't take SO much of your time. Which is a dealbreaker for me oftentimes, too.

The first two fallout games were great and even fallout 3 and new Vegas were pretty good. I think the latter two were good because they were smaller and actually did have some interesting stuff to find and do even though they did the open world thing.

I played the m&m series a long time ago, they kind of blend together in my head with bards tale, ultima, those gold box d&d games and games like those. The puzzles in those kinds of games always made them enjoyable.

> They have many, many things to do and find, but none of them feel satisfying.

I’m usually downvoted to oblivion (pun intended) on Reddit for saying: I didn’t like Breath of the Wild for this reason. Empty world, no real rewards, infuriating weapon system, lack of scenario, no memorable music.

Yeah. Breath of the wild seems the same way. I've never played it but i watched my old roommate play it.

Its focus on exploration was cool, but it missed that thing that made zelda 1 fun.(apparently this was the inspiration for breath of the wild)

Zelda 1 was pretty open ended, but again, all the things you found were useful, sure you could do the dungeons in a variety of orders and go wherever, but that's not what made it fun, what made it fun was that you could do that and that all those dungeons had one cool, useful, gamechanging thing to find.

BoTW gave you all the game changing stuff at the beginning and said here...here's a world, ganon's over there, you probably can't get him now, but just wander around long enough and you can, or know what you're doing and you can.

In theory that seems fun, but the lack of structure and progression kills it. That's what made zelda so great to begin with.

I guess it's a matter of personal taste, because for me, the disadvantages you list are what makes an open-world RPG desirable.

I like the feeling of being in a world that feels real independently of you, with its normal citizens doing normal things, its work and errands going on, its cities and spaces, many of them irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but where you may get lost doing some quest or other if you so desire.

For me, it's much better for immersion than most modern games which focus on tight storytelling: you're special, have to follow your destiny, everything in the world is placed there to drive the plot, help you in your quest or entertain you. There are no dishes and food in residences (or maybe, no residences at all) because who cares, that has no bearing in the quest of the great hero. When I play games like that (i.e., most), they feel artificial and limited to me so I don't enjoy them as much.

In fact, for me the best TES game is not even Morrowind, it's Daggerfall (if anyone wants to try it, there's a very good modern remake: Daggerfall Unity) because it's closest to the ideal of the realistic huge world that doesn't especially care about you. I think you wouldn't like it at all because it has the things you don't like about Morrowind, but taken to the extreme :)

Mind you, I totally get why some people prefer the tight storytelling where the experience of following the main quest has been distilled and optimized, and has more detail and uniqueness due to not relying so much on procedural generation and repeated models. It's very personal. So let's hope for plenty of RPGs for every taste in the future.

PS: the kind of games I'm praising often have the massive imbalances you point out, like being able to win with an absurd character (I guess because it's very hard to balance things when you're free to do a wide range of actions in the world, rather than following some predetermined quest lines). Daggerfall also has plenty of that kind of issues, including choices at character creation that feel like exploits and make the game much easier. But for the kind of person who likes this kind of games, this doesn't matter that much. I roleplay my characters. I wouldn't create an OP absurd character because it isn't fun... I just think what kind of character I want to be in the world, and create it.

>I guess it's a matter of personal taste, because for me, the disadvantages you list are what makes an open-world RPG desirable.

Totally agree with it being a matter of personal taste. If people didn't enjoy those kinds of games they wouldn't make them.

>For me, it's much better for immersion than most modern games which focus on tight storytelling: you're special, have to follow your destiny, everything in the world is placed there to drive the plot, help you in your quest or entertain you.

I'm not really a big fan of linear story driven games either to be honest. Most of them go way too far in the opposite direction have have many of those flaws you describe in your post. The modern final fantasy games or the Drake series type stuff all have those problems.

>So let's hope for plenty of RPGs for every taste in the future.

100% agree with this. More variety is always better.

I think where our tastes seem to differ when it comes to these kinds of games is more in the implementation of exploration.

Say, take a game like dark souls. I find its world to be more immersive and suitable for roleplaying a character than something like daggerfall. In dark souls, you escape from a prison, end up in some dying kingdom, get a vague hint about what's going on and you're pretty much left on your own to piece it out and figure out what needs to be done and where to go. But you don't have to if you don't want to hell, you can turn around and play an entirely different main story if you want to and you're skilled enough.

The world and the NPCs don't feel like they exist for your quest, as you wander around you get the impression it really is a dying world full of lost souls awaiting the inevitable. Everything you find feels like an actual part of the world. There's a reason for it to be there, both gameplay wise and usually if you pay enough attention, you can figure out the story of why the item's there, even with random pickups like souls.

To me that feels more immersive than walking into a house and being like, oh ya someone lives there, look their table's set up, or that NPC just told me they need to go take a shit.

Because in the end, it's a video game not a life simulator. The world in a game doesn't need to be a complete reflection of our own mundane world for it to be realistic and immersive. The world just needs to be consistent, well realized and the gameplay and story should go hand in hand. The game shouldn't tell you the story, it's not a movie or a book, you should play the story.

For me, the best balance is games that have a story and structure, but leave it vague and open ended enough for you to create your own story by playing. I feel like those rare games that manage to do that, are the ones that really utilize the full potential of video games as a unique entertainment medium.

If there is one thing that annoys me in games, it is when every NPC only has dialog that pertains to your story. Or when areas are walled off/boxed off/locked away because they are irrelevant to the player's goals. Maybe I have played too many games where the player is the center of the universe, but I am frankly extremely tired of it.

I want to see this minutia, it tells me that the game designers are detail-oriented and it is a huge part of what makes a game world feel real to me. Why does every game have to make me feel super important, when all I want to do is break into houses and steal NPCs' fancy jewelry and silverware?

Also I don't get this argument that dungeon crawling is irrelevant from a loot perspective. With the exception of crafting, and looting autoscaled overleveled roadside bandits (very unfun if you ask me), the best stuff in my game came from dungeons.

>If there is one thing that annoys me in games, it is when every NPC only has dialog that pertains to your story. Or when areas are walled off/boxed off/locked away because they are irrelevant to the player's goals. Maybe I have played too many games where the player is the center of the universe, but I am frankly extremely tired of it.

But I mean, oblivion, skyrim and most open world games have those. If you try to wander into any quest area before you've got the quest, either you break something or you just can't enter or finish the whole area. If you talk to any important NPC, they still treat you like the hero and talk about things only pertaining to you and your quest. Just because it's hidden behind a bunch of other pointless stuff doesn't mean that when it comes down to it, anything important in the game still revolves around you.

They also tend to have the opposite problem, where the world doesn't actually react to what you do.

In new Vegas, I decided I didn't like Caesar's legion, so I murdered them all with a flamethrower. I cleared the entire main legion encampment, all their leaders everything. Then, I went back and continued on my way to new Vegas. Any legion encampments or anything I found were exactly the same. No acknowledgment that I'd obliterated their entire leadership. It didn't matter in the end other than that I'd failed and completed a bunch of quests I didn't even know about. It didn't actually change anything in the game world.

For me, that kills the immersion. What's the point of a big open world where you can do anything if nothing you do actually has any effect or consequences?

Sure, NPC's might wander on a schedule, but they don't react at all to the fact that the slavers are completely wiped out from the area? The other side doesn't start moving in to take over their territory? Not a single thing actually changes or reflects my choices in the game.

In the end, they're still just static worlds with the illusion of giving you freedom.

>I want to see this minutia, it tells me that the game designers are detail-oriented

No it doesn't, it says designers know how to copy and paste $Generic_Useless_Item and reskin it in a variety of ways. It says they can't actually be bothered giving a world real useful detail so they fill it with meaningless padding.

> the exception of crafting,

That's the problem. What you can craft is better than anything you find in a dungeon. So when it comes down to it, you spend several hours messing around in your inventory or gathering mundane stuff so you can craft an item because you need it to go through the dungeon, but then when you go through the dungeon what you find is less good than what you crafted, so you might as well have just not even bothered.

Perhaps you should try a build that ignores crafting, then. In a lot of games it is a potentially broken mechanic.

As for immersion, there are games where behavior changes when you do things like slaughter an in-game faction's leadership. But it's going to be fairly rare, because it's expensive. You might want to check out Kenshi, as that game will appropriately react when you slaughter an entire town -- that factions enemies might move in to occupy it, and game conditions might change. But Kenshi was a one-man project that took something like a decade to complete, and I have even heard that those kinds of meta-interactions are scripted so you can't even take that sort of thing very far.

Also, what you described about Caesar's Legion sounds very plausible in a post-apocalyptic world without reliable long distance communication. In historic times wars sometimes lived on beyond their end as distant, far-flung generals had not yet received orders of a ceasefire. If there is one thing I hate, it is when an entire faction turns against you because you killed one of their dudes in an isolated fashion and yet, somehow, magically, now the whole faction knows? How does that even work plausibly?

Finally, I think that expecting video games to accurately model real life is a fool's errand. We will likely never reach this level of interaction, not without a massive budget and all the other terrible things that happen when you try to reach as large an audience as possible. If you frame your immersion to stick to the limits of the gameworld and the context that is was built under, you will experience far less disappointment.

My point wasn't that I expect those things in a game, it was that the goal of realism through minutae falls apart as soon as you consider anything meaningful.

>Also, what you described about Caesar's Legion sounds very plausible in a post-apocalyptic world without reliable long distance communication.

I'm not going to argue too much about the facts of life in a fictional world because it was just an example. But, the factions in fallout seem pretty organized. I imagine they have runners and messengers much like in times before long distance communication. Sure news might not spread immediately, but at some point, those legionaires hanging out are gonna wonder why they're not getting orders and supplies and the other factions are going to start to notice a lack of activity...

But anyway...it was an example. The overall point was, outside quests and other scripted events, your actions tend to not have any effect on the game world and to add to this, nothing you do in the game really changes the way you interact with the game world.

>If there is one thing I hate, it is when an entire faction turns against you because you killed one of their dudes in an isolated fashion and yet, somehow, magically, now the whole faction knows?

I agree with you there. I recall the soldiers in TES games being like this.

>Finally, I think that expecting video games to accurately model real life is a fool's errand.

But wasn't your whole point that open world games are enjoyable because they accurately model all these minute real world details that make the world interesting to explore?

My point wasn't that it needed to be accurate, my point was that for games that sell based on the concept of a 'large living fully realized world to explore' the game worlds are actually relatively static. In which case, I'd prefer less padding and more actual game. If you're going to get a static world either way, I'd rather less overall stuff in it, but each thing to have an actual purpose. Not necessarily in regards to 'you the hero' just a purpose.

Either through game mechanics or simply world building. I don't need to be able to fill my inventory with every rock, random household item or scrap of animal part and I don't need to hear about Gertrude the milk maid's worries about the health of her calfs or the story about how little Billy fell down the well again for the world to feel complete and fully realized.

The thing is, I don't think it would take all that much to improve at least some of these issues.

For the Elder Scrolls games in particular. A few things I think honestly would have made the games far more fun

Hide the main quest from the player. Make them find it. Both the later two games start off with scripted areas that pretty much tell you, you're the hero, here's the quest. Then lets you loose. You know what you're supposed to do, but it's up to you if you do it or not.

You've basically got two games at that point. The on rails, story driven main quest and the random exploration. Make finding the main quest part of the exploration. Let the players slowly unravel the world and figure out what's going on.

Maybe little Billy falling down the well is actually important? You don't know because you don't actually know what's happening. It gives more meaning to all the meaningless stuff lying around.

Don't be afraid to challenge players. Make them work to figure out what's meaningful or not. Throw some surprises at them. Stick a tough dungeon near somewhere easy to find with the intention of making players come back later. Put some kind of cool treasure just out of reach and make players figure it out themselves. Make it require something obscure or something. Stick a big shiny, unique looking locked door in the middle of a dungeon and hide the key elsewhere in the world.

Let players make their own quests and give them something rewarding when they 'complete' it. Break up the structure of travelling from place to place and just doing the sidequests of the area or wandering around until you find a cave, kill the monsters, walk through the tunnel, open the chest, then waltz back out.

Even side quests, make them impactful. Make how you complete quests, or not complete quests actually have an impact. Like, if you don't save little Billy from the well, expect the townspeople to not be very nice to you. Even just little things like that.

Overall, I've found it's more satisfying when players are left on their own to discover both the meaningful and meaningless things in the game. When there's consequences for the things they do and when they're challenged unexpectedly or forced to be creative.

In the end, the elder scrolls games still want to tell you their stories. They want you to explore the world, find the sidequests, follow the main quest and hear all the cool narratives they've concocted for you.

Instead, they should take that world they've got and do their best to make it as fun as possible for players to play their own stories through the game.

Whether it's the joy of figuring out that strange idol you found in that one dungeon will let you get past that big ass door or those tough monsters that have been nagging at you since you found them earlier, or discovering for yourself, little Billy was actually the heir to the throne in hiding because of some interpersonal struggles in the Royal family you only learn about after journeying there. Learning about some hidden artifact weapon or armour or something and finding out it's actually pretty awesome when you get it.

I think there's a missed opportunity for open world games. It would be cool to see one that unravels like a giant puzzle, rather than simply being a stage for the developers set pieces.