Location abandonment

[Messier-31]

How do you feel about location abandonment? It is something that happens to early access areas, that you visit in a open-world game (most notably sandbox, but not only), and for the rest of the game you have no true purpose to visit them again. I mean, why bother?

 

How many of you backtracked to Goodsprings or Primm in Fallout: New Vegas?

What business you had to revisit the people of Nashkel in Baldur's Gate?

 

These locations are fine and well written, but after you leave them behind, there is no sense in coming back. Ever. Vendors and shops are not adequate to your level, quests are long gone, NPC's haven't got anything new to say...

 

Is it a good thing, a bad thing, or more of a don't-give-a-crap thing?

[Sensuki]

Depends on whether the designers create quests that go back there later on in the game, or whether you didn't finish something and need to come back to it.

 

In the E3 interviews Josh said you can do a fair amount of back tracking in PE.

[rjshae]

That'll be something the modding community could address, assuming Obsidian doesn't.

[AGX-17]

How do you feel about location abandonment? It is something that happens to early access areas, that you visit in a open-world game (most notably sandbox, but not only), and for the rest of the game you have no true purpose to visit them again. I mean, why bother?

 

How many of you backtracked to Goodsprings or Primm in Fallout: New Vegas?

What business you had to revisit the people of Nashkel in Baldur's Gate?

 

These locations are fine and well written, but after you leave them behind, there is no sense in coming back. Ever. Vendors and shops are not adequate to your level, quests are long gone, NPC's haven't got anything new to say...

 

Is it a good thing, a bad thing, or more of a don't-give-a-crap thing?

Why should there be any call for backtracking to minor places simply because they are minor? Shouldn't any/every bandit encampment have at least 3 high level quests tied to it even after cleaning it out at level 2? Your logic, not mine. A video game is a video game, not a realistic simulation of a universe. They can't produce a sentient, self-aware AI for every NPC (or any NPC for that mnatter,) and allow you to type in any possible dialogue such that you can play with it like you're on a star trek holodeck.

 

Have you ever gone on a road trip? Why didn't you stop to set down roots in every podunk little dying post-agrarian town you passed through on your way to your destination (if you have been on a road trip)?

Edited June 27, 2014 by AGX-17

[Jarmo]

Depends.

 

If the game is built like a road trip and you're not assumed to go back, then no reason really why there should be extra content later on.

But if the game is more like "adventures in a living world" kind of thing, it's a lot more living if places don't turn into frozen in time zombietowns

after you've done all the relevant quests.

 

New Vegas. Primm.

No reason to go back, though it would have been fun to go tell them not to worry about powder gangers anymore since I've deadified all of them.

(maybe also warn them every place is now crawling with cazadores and stuff, sorry for leveling up)

 

Generally, I like it when there's a reason to go back somewhere and the place has changed a bit since the events.

Edited June 27, 2014 by Jarmo

[Chilloutman]

How do you feel about location abandonment? It is something that happens to early access areas, that you visit in a open-world game (most notably sandbox, but not only), and for the rest of the game you have no true purpose to visit them again. I mean, why bother?

 

How many of you backtracked to Goodsprings or Primm in Fallout: New Vegas?

What business you had to revisit the people of Nashkel in Baldur's Gate?

 

These locations are fine and well written, but after you leave them behind, there is no sense in coming back. Ever. Vendors and shops are not adequate to your level, quests are long gone, NPC's haven't got anything new to say...

 

Is it a good thing, a bad thing, or more of a don't-give-a-crap thing?

Good point sir, It struck me as well why some places are not reused in later parts of game. Seems like waste of efford. Would be nice to have purpose to go back to Nashkel once you find some relation in Baldurs gate quest for example

Edited June 27, 2014 by Chilloutman

[Mr. Magniloquent]

I found the centrally located Nashkel and Beregost very useful as hubs for my fores into the surrounding areas. I think it would be better to have larger cities positioned like this rather than be a an end location--as they often are. In having your largest cities be the focal point of your game, you don't have to worry about PCs out-scaling the location's quests or merchants. Smaller villages can then be wholly designed as foils for whatever purpose desired, and are ideal for not being revisited.

 

Baldur's Gate II did this very well. Athkatla was without question where your party was based out of. Almost all of the high end vendors were located there. The other surrounding areas had a major quest path, but were peppered with minor quests which interlaced through multiple surrounding areas to organically draw the player into the wider world. Areas were multi-purposed, but did not out-live their usefulness. Given that PoE shall have two major cities, I am confident they will follow similar suit.

[Randomthom]

It depends on how it is done.

 

Dragon Age 2 (rightly) received a lot of criticism for the absurd re-use of areas. Some of them were using the same designed area twice to represent two different areas and hoping the player wouldn't notice/care and some were actually the same location at different points in time.

 

Either way, it wasn't well received.

 

On the other hand, going back to a location that has people who have moved on in their life since the death of their son or the loss of their business or since getting married gives the world a real life and a sense of time passing. Or perhaps a keep that you cleared of undead might get taken over by the bandit group if you spared their leader when you raided their camp and made him promise to turn himself in to the authorities.

 

I'd love to have a reason for going back to the various locations but usually there isn't one...

[Lephys]

It depends on how it is done.

 

Dragon Age 2 (rightly) received a lot of criticism for the absurd re-use of areas. Some of them were using the same designed area twice to represent two different areas and hoping the player wouldn't notice/care and some were actually the same location at different points in time.

The biggest outrage was over the technical re-use of areas. The literal re-use of the same virtual content.

 

The main notion brought up in here is the functional/interactive "re-use" of locations. Basically, instead of that village you interacted with and produced results in staying exactly the same for the rest of the entire game ("Oh, thanks! Those bandits are gone! And now we live in peace in our little 10-square-mile plot of the world, for all of time, ^_^"), things actually change in various places throughout the world as you progress through it and stuff (not always directly caused by your hand) happens and affects things.

 

And it's not so much that every individual area, on a checklist, just gives you very specific reasons to return there at convenient intervals. "Oh, DIFFERENT bandits are now attacking our town!", or "Oh, it turns out our mayor is an alien!". Just that, stuff changes. There is some reason to actually reside there again, as opposed to no reason at all (everything's exactly the same, no one says anything different, there are no quests or pieces of quests or people who will supply you with any info whatsoever, and the vendors don't even sell anything useful there anymore.)

[Sarex]

Those areas are blank canvas for modders.

[Karkarov]

I don't really see a problem with this myself.  Nashkel for example.  The main issue was the mine closure and miners disappearing.  Once you solve that the mines reopen and everything is happy days again other than maybe a bounty hunter hanging out or minsc needing a hand.  So why should I be there again?  I am an adventurer not a tourist.  I want to go where there are problems to solve, wrongs to right, and monsters to slay.  It makes no sense to go back to a town where everything is now nice and peaceful and things are going great.

[AGX-17]

People constantly leave places behind completely in reality. Some people move out of their podunk dying country town to the big city and never go back; some people are born in the big city and finally get the chance to start a ranch in the middle of nowhere, whose nearest settlement is the aforementioned podunk dying country town.

 

Video games are fundamentally limited in scope; they cannot depict every aspect of a world in a constantly changing state unless they are fundamentally simple or abstract.

[Zwiebelchen]

Backtracking is one of the things I've never seen in western RPGs. However, for some reason, older eastern RPGs did this a lot.

 

Terranigma is probably a game everyone knows that had a LOT of hidden backtracking content. It basicly had a whole hidden mechanic that is city progression. Depending on some choices you did on sidequests in the several towns in the game, the cities would evolve in a different way and unlock new hidden sidequests if you ever went back to them. The most prominent example here was the city in france (I don't remember it's name). Depending on which mayor you supported, the town would either stay small and remain in a fantasy setting or would develope into a big-scale futuristic city ... with other flaws, however.

 

Chrono Trigger also had a lot of backtracking content, where you could re-visit older towns and discover some new secrets and mini quests.

 

I think some kind of backtracking is a cool thing for every RPG to have. It makes the world feel more alive and believable. However, it shouldn't be used as a way to make content production cheaper, but as a way to show the player "what happened when you left us". You know... like a side-quest of a corrupted mayor taking control over the city after the local lord had been killed through the main story-line.

Edited June 30, 2014 by Zwiebelchen

[Labadal]

I don't mind location abandonment. Revisiting a couple of times is no problem, but generally, I like to progress on to new areas.

[Kjaamor]

Generally I like to go back to earlier places. Fallout 2 did this best for me where quests in new towns would take you back to earlier ones, and being higher level would in turn open up new options while you were there. The political changes of the wasteland was a key theme in Fallout 2, though, and its concepts lent themselves well to re-exposure and comparison between places. In many respects, Fallout 2's towns have such personality and three dimensionality as to fill the role normally left for characters.

 

However, I very much doubt that PoE will aim to acheive the same thing. It strikes me as being much more BG/PST in location style.

 

If you're going to encourage backtracking on any level, I think you need to give some (even the slightest piece of) evidence that things have changed and time has passed. The idea that if you killed the army of bugbears who had been slaughtering the local villagers, then people would talk about other, more mundane things or at the very least stop going on about the bugbear threat. In an ideal world, you might seem a new building or two spring up - although this is probably an inefficient use of resources in PoE's case. Maybe if things do not go well, a couple of buildings get torn down.

 

If there is nothing to indicate that any change has occurred as a result of your heroic (or at least, significant) actions, then you end up in mmo land where your activities exist in a vacuum and have seemingly no impact on anything. If the game is linear, then it matters less because you're pushed on to something else without having to seem the crappy harvest.

[Lephys]

Yeah, you always see the two extremes, it seems:

 

Either absolutely nothing happens, or the results of your actions are that the entire town metamorphosizes into something else. Depending on the scope of the quest/event (replace "town" with "NPC," etc.).

 

It's just nice, regardless, when, if you take out some bandits that have been terrorizing the area, the local town actually shows some reaction to that, other than "a bunch of nameless people who have supposedly been killed by them are no longer being killed by them." Maybe a new shop person in town, or prices decrease, or you see people from that town in other towns, now that the roads are safer, etc. Just something beyond "Oh? Thanks for that. We'll just go on about our business, now."

 

It's a little weird when you find out the local mine is haunted, and completely exorcise it of ghosts, and solve some mystery, and the only change is "Steve the NPC is found at the mine now, instead of at his shack. Oh, and now he says 'Thanks for fixing the mine!' when you talk to him, instead of complaining about not being able to work in the mine any more."

[Tsuga C]

Is it a good thing, a bad thing, or more of a don't-give-a-crap thing?

Let Obsidian do as they see fit so long as they give me proper warning that I'll not be returning to that particular area.

 

Edit: Should we be able to return to areas later in the game, some level of change would be welcome as an indication that a few months have passed--verisimilitude and all that.

Edited July 1, 2014 by Tsuga C

[Zwiebelchen]

"Steve the NPC is found at the mine now."

 

I see what you did there.

[Infiltrator_SF]

I like how this topic is done in PS:T. With new powers/abilities, old areas are suddenly key peaces of the puzzle that you didn't notice at first. I'm not sure if the same will apply to PE as I doubt it's as character-focused as PS:T, but at the very least I think that is a good example of how to make a player go back without making the area(s) feel redundant.

[Namutree]

Lunar Silver Star Story Complete had story based dialog progression. For example, as you got further in the game some NPC's would have new things to say based on game events. I went back to a lot of older cities to see the new dialog. I don't see why Obsidian couldn't do the same.

[JFSOCC]

Location Abandonment is actually one of my biggest gripes in many games. the "you cleared this area now there is no reason to go back here" is as immersion breaking as it gets, the world will be stale and stagnant if going back to a location seems purposeless. You can solve this in a few ways, one is making the location unavailable, which I think is a shoddy solution, especially if there were still unresolved side-quests.

Another solution, by far my favourite, and one I've arrived at through discussion on these forums, is that each area, or at least each quest-hub area, unlocks new content based on progression. Meaning that there are several points in the game where you can return to a previously "cleared" area to find it populated with new quests, more appropriate for your current standing in the world, or perhaps a narrative progression of a side-quest line, where the result of previous quests, combined with game progression has unlocked the sequel quest. remember that palace you couldn't enter in Defiance Bay when you were just a lil' tyke? Now that you've established some presence in twin elms, and upgraded the prestige of your stronghold, you may find it's open 20 hours into the game.

Repeatable quests or content (like arenas) is another option, not really my favourite because it doesn't deliver you new experiences and who wants to do a repeat of anything other than for grinding?

Important however is that if you do choose to keep an area accessible, that there is something for the player to do there, or a reason to move through it.

[Lephys]

"The whole world is in danger! But nothing's really affected those first several villages you've come to since, what... months ago?"

 

Yeah, you could always just consider even a small village to just be a tiny quest hub. Instead of "Okay, I'm here, what all problems exist? Okay, cleared those up... MOVING ALONG! *dusts off hands*", you could just have a small village be a small hub for various quests/situations arising over time. After all, why would all of a given village's problems conveniently all be present at the exact same time you happen through that place for the first time? They probably wouldn't.

 

Doesn't mean the main questline has to send you back to every small bit of civilization you've ever stumbled across, every chapter. But, there should at least, ideally, be some reason to visit places more than just once (places of a population greater than like... 3).

[Mr. Magniloquent]

I think that tiny villages should be abandoned if the scope of the game is beyond them. It's natural for an adventurer to exceed the little hamlet, otherwise they wouldn't be adventuring. Hamlet/village would be self-defining as a small place of humdrum and little importance. Leave the hubs to major cities which can keep pace with the development of adventurers. Small villages should be a foil for whatever substance it provides. By having it be narrowly defined, it can excel at one thing rather than be mediocre at many.

[Lephys]

To be clear, it's perfectly fine for things to be abandoned. It just needs to be pretty rare that it's after the one-and-only time you visit. It starts making everything feel very "the only purpose of this was to present you with appropriate-level quests and equipment, at the time. It's done its job... NEVER COME BACK HERE, for the rest of the 40 hours of your playthrough, u_u... No one here could ever have any relevance to anything else in the world, ever."

 

And it's not that every single place SHOULD have you coming back multiple times. It's just that, every single place shouldn't only having you go there only once just because it isn't some huge quest-hub city.

Edited July 7, 2014 by Lephys

[Chilloutman]

I aslo dont like 'use-once' locations. Problem with reusing them (eg. putting new quests in them) is that some people just dont know 'when' is time to go back to check if something is new. Best solution are 'Chapters'. Once you complete chapter 1 i would expect that it took some time and new quests/dialogues/stores should be presented to locations which we already 'solved'