The Witcher games, and 3 in particular, did things differently enough that I don't believe it's fair to bundle it together with AC or Skyrim. It had it's fair share of problems but overall it's a positive landmark within the gaming industry. Although, to be quite honest, I preferred the tighter and more "linear" approach of The Witcher 2 to the sprawling beautiful open world vistas of The Witcher 3. It fitted the narrative, world and characters better.
It's funny that you mention Skyrim, which is a terrible game imho, since i think the open-world patient zero of terrible game design is Oblivion, and it's success affected all the subsequent AAA industry output. I'm sure we can make a list of all the usual open world faults and trace them back to Oblivion, like level scaling enemies, empty maps, quest markers, copy/pasted enemies, fetch quests, escort quests, gathering trash for selling/crafting, etc... The only thing missing seems to be collectibles, It's almost unbelievable to think the same company made Morrowind only a few year before.
I consider The Witcher 3 to actually be
worse than even Assassin's Creed in the loot design. Until Origins, I mean.
It actually feels like the progenitor of the last two AC, with question marks everywhere and awful, awful quest design. Reach a ?, use Batman sense (or don't find what you're looking for at all, fantastic design that fucking thing), kill hte baddie or find the item, go back for a reward.
And that's where the entire open world aspect is pointless: get a random reward that is a literal copy/paste, the exact same sword that you own, but 42-44 instead of 40-42 damage.
The handful of unique armor recipes are especially relevant here, they make 99.8% of the entire game not exist. Of course, the mission design for those is just as terrible, however.
And combat is the worst of the AAA RPG market. Again, progression is paramount: you literally don't get anything of value until the DLC once you've once unlocked your two little sword skills.
Do the same shitty combat for every encounter, with random animations activating without consent, against enemies that... never do anything different. Fight a level 2 ghost, it's the same as a level 40 ghost. You have a giant bestiary which is cool... and ultimately the number of ennemies is ridiculously low because everything is a palette swap. And it's not like there's a big difference between a human and a drowner, everything may as well fight the same.
Without even talking about how broken the combat controls are, get aggro? Time for the crab walk because running and rolling are on the same button and Geralt has to face the incoming monsters!
Combat is literally broken in that game.
Oblivion may have been very influential indeed.
But... I think that started before that. The first two Elder Scrolls games? Well, they're just as terrible. Incredibly large world, mostly... randomly generated in every way. Talk about empty in Daggerfall! Nothing has value, only the text is important. Morrowind was definitely a fluke (but also had horrendous combat even for its time), and only in writing.
Though it would have looked interesting if it wasn't drowning in fog. It does have a cool design... and that's pretty much what every game is doing now isn't it? Looks cool, nice story maybe, and for the rest, let's scrap the bin to finish our game.
I would even argue that Bethesda never made a good game in their entire lifespan. All of their games shit the bed in one way or another, with blatant failures of design galore.
Fallout 4 is probably the only game that has pretty good combat, but we all know how everything else fell apart. Well the same can be said for all their other games! If dialogues are good, all the rest is crap for the time. Not sure why people are more worried about dialogue choices when the end results is press LMB for twenty seconds or don't. Dialogues are great yeah, combat should be too when it's most of the results.
Worst thing is, their games could have been good. The complete conversions Nehrim and Enderal are actually good games made from Oblivion and Skyrim.
I mean, the combat is still wank, but at least it's more balanced (like magic not scaling in any way was a
fantastic idea in Skyrim, it takes about 1 second to see the issue), and the world has a reason to exist, items are a lot more unique (less of a fan of armor sets, it's very gamey however), and quests have more interactions than just another marker on the map.
It even has collectibles! When you don't have them in every corner and they do something, it's not necessarily bad.
But like of the open world elements, it's all about using it correctly. Which is clearly not what the public wants when you see the sales of pseudo mobile games with big budgets in the visuals. Or the AAA industry, one and the same with GAAS now.
The vast majority of the market wants their shitty stat grinders. That's where the money is, especially in Japan.
I can only see those RPGs elements continue to rot away until nobody will even remember what a named item was. It already happened in the MMO space, where now if you don't get +1 to awesome from your 4 person instance, people complain that's it's not an MMO. Everything that existed in the genre do not even exist anymore, and the absolute opposite became requirement. Stat sticks is all that's left of them.
Wouldn't even be surprised to see people starting to complain about dialogue choices if a bar don't go up when they do so.
github.com
