A small intermission on my design diatribes on stuff that could be improved on this game, I just wanna gush a little about two things you folks do very well, and that you folks should keep emphasizing as part of the core of this game:
Your excellent environmental storytelling, and your incredibly engaging emergent combat.
Lemme go in a bit more detail on each topic:
[ Environmental Storytelling: ]
For bystanders unfamiliar with the concept, environmental storytelling is when one uses the scenery, the props, the background to tell the story, rather than dialogues or even action. It’s the simple things, like “an abandoned house full of claw marks on the walls suggests some beast attacked”, or “a trail of blood leading to a corpse hugging a rifle, opposite to a handful of broken runners, suggests somebody died in a last stand”.
And this game is FULL of those. Almost every single village, sometimes almost every single house feels like a hand-crafted diorama that tells a story; a family that left in a hurry, a paranoid hoarder that died before even reaching his guns, a letter left from father to son with a fun a riddle to a gift rifle.
It’s these kinds of things that make this huge “geographically huge” map actually feel “psychologically huge”, because it’s not just a bunch of repeated assets and empty traversal space. There’s narratives to be found, stories to be understood. It’s not only charming, it keeps the map engaging even after hours of exploration.
…The only small criticism I’d do here is that, as with any kind of environmental storytelling, you folks should be mindful of negative possibility space, or by not trusting the player to engage with that – or conversely, to engage too little.
I’ll post about those two examples in a separate thread, but these are, respectively, the “Treasure Hunt” sidequest (where a quest has all of its instructions told environmentally, yet the game ruins it by putting a huge quest marker on the location anyway) and the “An Invitation” side quest (which I’ll go into detail in another topic, but that gives too little information, forces an uninformed decision, and wastes a few excellent opportunities for setup and payoff).
Otherwise, you folks are amazing at this. Better than what I’ve seen in other open worlds, such as Elder Scrolls, the Fallouts… heck, I’d put it on par with stuff from Obsidian or Guerrilla Games’ work.
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[ Emergent encounters ]
AI for enemies in games is good and stuff, but it doesn’t mean anything if it’s not used to make the game engaging. That’s usually challenge number one of modern encounter design, and there’s a whole rabbit hole of stuff to dig into.
…But when we’re talking about extensive sandboxes, a second issue comes to mind: how to keep encounters interesting, as you have to fight over and over, in multiple, often hard-to-script locations?
This is the territory of “emergent behavior”: where the systems pre-programmed in the game “create” something by the way they interact as the player is… playing.
It’s your fight with a Tank that gets interrupted by a swarm of hunters.
It’s when you’re hiding behind a tree, waiting for a Harvester and a Wolf to weaken each other so you can ambush them, only for you to hear the turbines of a Firebird coming to ambush you.
It’s all those unpredictable behaviors that weren’t scripted directly by the programmers, but by carefully balancing their AI scripts, behavior trees, pathfinding algorithms, dynamic spawn points… all of them to work together as instruments in a symphony that creates a unique “song” to in the form of a different fight. A… “systemic reaction”, if you will.
I have no negative things to say here, other than please keep giving us more of this, as well as more types of machines (specially boss machines, like the Reaper) so we can have even more of these neat opportunities.
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…The TL;DR here is “just keep doing the amazing job, Systemic Reaction”.