| Tachikoma said:
As for subjective view on scale, I agree, an area where XCX suffers is that the four main areas, and the single city are clear cut in their transition, which makes the world seem smaller as a result of running into different "sections", as you play you start to get into a habbit of blanking out the journey and instead it becomes a chore because beyond killing monsters and grinding exp, theres very little to actually do in the land. Imagine if you would, that Fallout New vegas had the vegas strip city area, and everything outside of that city was just barron land with next to nothing to interact with, just monsters to kill and waypoints to run to if you happened to have a mission. The lack of random encounters for side missions and the reliance on a hub based mission system does the world size an injustice because once youve explored most of the area once, you end up just using the fast travel function to jump to the nearest beacon to the waypoint, but ultimately, that lack of things to do beyond "open chests" dotted around the map and the occasional NPC that only does anything useful if you are on the specific mission which uses them, ultimately makes the world feel empty and lifeless, but more importantly, turns the games central mechanic into a grindfest. Even as Skyrims map is technically smaller, gameplay wise its bigger because the quests that are given by the npcs that fill it, and the locations which themselves lead to their own plotlines, quests and descision making elements, fill the world with life and thus, progression through that world is more interesting and engaging. It takes between 30 and 50 hours to unlock dolls in XCX, but a majority of that time is spent on overly long cutscenes (painfully long, infact), and extremely boring and repetitive hunting and gathering missions, that go out of their way to make the distances between quest steps as long as possible to drag it out as much as they can, combine that with the painful grind for leveling up, and the longer you play the more the hollow nature of the game ultimately detracts from it's own world. |
This sounds very much like the first Xenoblade. Which I was alright with. The over-world is designed around getting good views of the landscape I am assuming (particularly from the preview videos), very much like the first one. Are there secret areas that reward you with experience when you find them? Do collectibles return? In the first game, much of the NPC interactions were in the main cities (Colony 9, Colony 6, and Alcamoth.) I was alright with that because it allowed them to focus on the character interactions there while allowing for world exploration elsewhere. I think with a mission/hub based system there is also an advantage in that you have a sort of direction, whereas Bethesda games are sandboxes that do things differently and thus benefit more from dense areas where people have many choices of what to do. If one thinks of Xenoblade as a sort of off-line MMORPG it is easy to understand how the world was designed.
