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PaperclipPerfector  25d ago (text post)   2789 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 18, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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One of the fantasies I have for a game is some kind of big budget story-game that is set in a truly huge open world.

A problem I find in things like GTA, Skyrim, Red Dead, WoW, Breath of the Wild is that to provide a certain ‘content density’ to the easily distracted player they all have these toy worlds, where towns have ten houses and cities have fifty, where travelling from the capital of one region to the capital of the other takes five minutes by horse but the characters talk about the huge distances in the world. It’s not that I can’t suspend my disbelief, it’s that I imagine sometimes what it would be not to (in this specific way).

I imagine a huge world, maybe fifty or a hundred times the size of Red Dead Redemption 2. The vast majority of it would be empty, the amount of content would probably similar. The major settlements would be mostly the same size, but the smaller ones would be more realistic than a thriving town that has like six buildings. There would be no instantaneous fast travel. You might be able to sail along rivers or the coast, ride a horse, whatever, but these things would all happen without ‘skips’.

Large amounts of the player’s time would be spent travelling, although there would be a lot of dialogue, camaraderie, interesting conversation choices on the road, while sailing, in a caravan, some random events. The game would take the player on a journey around the map, such that you would really feel, when looking at it, the distance traversed. If you wanted to backtrack to a city you were in at the start of the game, it might take several hours of real time to get there, which would require a difficult trade off.

There would be a lot of downtime to get to know companions, or maybe other players if it was multiplayer. You would feel, at times, truly far from civilization, have to prepare for excursions. In remote corners of the world there would be secrets to find that would feel off the beaten track, not like those RPGs where the secret dungeon entrance is spookily signposted fifty feet outside the entrance of the capital city.

Why not just get into bikepacking? It is basically what you're talking about but way better unless VR gets significantly better. Watch some videos of people cycling across the USA or Europe.

I've spent some time toying with a design for exactly such a game, in which a vast world and long-distance travel (on foot or by vehicle) should feature prominently, and of course the difficulty is in making long travel times fun or engaging. You know, actually making players show up and not check out immediately. What I came up with was:

  1. It must have autopilot. You can't expect players to hold W for an hour.
  2. It really should have fast-forward, at least optionally for uneventful travel. Even in real life, your perception of the speed of time varies, and the act of travelling IRL is a lot more engaging than watching a virtual character move through a virtual landscape. No need to skip the journey entirely via traditional "fast travel", but by all means a long trip should flow faster than at real-world speed. Maybe this means having a traditional "fast forward" that tries to run the game at 60x speed (and make it look dumb), or maybe more of a montage mode in which you're only shown representative or exceptional parts of the journey, like watching the fellowship trek through Middle-Earth in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings.
  3. Let the player do things while travelling. Inventory management, interacting with party members, reading maps or other documents, etc.
  4. Maintain a baseline tension. Let there be the possibility of encounters, targets of opportunity, unexpected experiences. Give the player a reason to pay at least cursory attention to signs of anything worth stopping the autopilot for.

Obviously this would be horribly unsuitable for most types of game. But it is something that I like to think about.

I think one of the ways this could work is if it has some kind of base building elements on the vehicle itself. So during the travel you can upgrade or just customize the appearance of it.

There's a few survival games with this type of mechanic. Raft is one of them. Starfield also has customization of the player's ship.

Also, I'm pretty sure that Daggerfall also has elements you're talking about. It doesn't have the 3rd point I'm pretty sure, but it does have the rest.

Yes, I think being able to do other things during travel is important. I remember the original World of Warcraft had ships that you had to take between continents, but they only sailed for a few seconds before the instance cut off and you got teleported to the other zone. It would have been interesting to force, say, an hour’s journey there. You might manage your inventory, chat with your guild, play some kind of minigame of cards or checkers or something with other players, trade stories. Of course, some people would alt-tab to YouTube or TikTok, but not everyone.

I think the game you're describing is The Oregon Trail.

You have died of dysentery.

It might be? Never played it.

I sometimes launch The Hunter: Call of the Wild to walk across one of its massive maps. However, there's a reason why Skyrim is so packed with landmarks or why Firewatch has a tiny map: the walking experience is just not the same.

Modern technology can get your sight and your hearing if not fooled, then reasonably convinced to make the sensations enjoyable. But when you are walking for hours in real life, your other senses are engaged as well:

  • the sense of smell, of course: meadow grasses, pines, wet dirt on the bank of an ice-cold creek, or even the briny smell of the ocean...
  • the sense of temperature: hot sun, cold wind from the glacier, a warm stone you're taking a break on...
  • proprioception: you're walking uphill, then downhill, pebbles working themselves loose under your feet, your muscles slowly growing tired...
  • the senses of thirst, hunger and taste: small sips of water, a protein bar, a warm sandwich from pack

Without this a long in-game walk will feel closer to Desert Bus in experience.

I like the concept, but I think probably the best way to make it work is to make the environment itself dangerous.

Just for an example, imagine a space based game. You’d have to worry about resources, crew morale, environmental hazards like radiation or asteroids or gravity wells or something. And that makes the “boring” bits a lot more intriguing. You don’t just travel, you have to plan the trip knowing that if you run out of food you starve, if you break a critical system, you can’t make it, and if you run out of laser battery power or missiles even a weak attack will kill you. So now, instead of traveling being just a boring trip to the exciting parts, traveling is the excitement and planets and star bases feel like oases in a dangerous world.

Regarding the environment itself being dangerous, how about importing Death Stranding's literal-walking-simulator gameplay? On top of being an RPG world with goblins and such.

Elite originally had Newtonian physics kinda, one of the open source clones has them for real, so the danger is getting your velocity vectors right to reach your destination and not immediately splat yourself into it.

It feels very spread out, for OP if you dont use the accelerated time tools.

Brendan Greene (the creator of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) has been experimenting with this. Primarily using limited procedural generation. His proof of concept for it Prolog: Go Wayback got to 64 km square, and only foot navigable with no fast-travel. He had plans to try and scale it up to an entire world, but unfortunately the company has recently gone belly-up. Sad, I was watching it with a lot of interest.

I’ve always thought an open world horror game where the dangers are real, but few and far between would be fun. Especially a space horror game like Alien. But like many posters have said, balancing that would be a bear.

balancing that would be a bear.

Speaking of bears, I'm kinda thinking that the time is ripe for an Oregon Trail reboot -- one where you might get lost and end up in Texas goes well with this!

Tech has probably reached the point where someone could make a full size map of Israel & West Bank & Gaza.

Then use it to launch the most controversial territory control multiplayer game ever.

I’m surprised there hasn’t been a Call of Duty about the Ukraine war yet, it wouldn’t have commercial implications since they can’t sell in Russia anymore anyway because of sanctions, so there’s no ‘the villains can’t be Chinese’ trade off. The war itself had some interesting things happen at the beginning, like defense of that one airfield against paratroopers, even if the current drone trench warfare isn’t very exciting.

Battlefield: Bad Company already covered the material ten years before it happened.

Back in my day it would have been a mod for Battlefield 1942.

That actually reminds of the Border Patrol map for Team Fortress in QuakeWorld.

Possibly-relevant video: Can You Play Daggerfall Without Fast Travel?

IMO the key to good art isn't only choosing what to include, but what to exclude. Too much will overwhelm the player and take away focus from the best parts. Some of the best art is very simple, e.g. Balatro (one of the GOAT), or has a simple core, e.g. Minecraft or Roblox.

What you're describing sounds like a "life replacement" game. It would probably work better in VR, like Second Life or VRChat. You know Mark Zuckerberg spent billions trying to make VR popular and failed, but he was doing it with a big company and boring mindset, and now we have LLMs...maybe, I'm still not sure how much they increase development potential or if they only reduce busy work.

Except slow travel, I'm very skeptical about that. EDIT: it could be interesting to have the player exercise to travel. But most people can't or won't exercise for several hours and others at all, I think it would work only if it was completely optional.

slow travel

There definitely does exist people who prefer a more atmospheric and slower paced game. Animal crossing, Pokemon Snap, and Firewatch come to mind as fairly chill experiences where the slow pace is part of the appeal. I think a game about exploring the vast areas of a fantasy kingdom and appreciating the scale of it all could work, and that there are ways to design such an experience well.

I think we are unlikely to see this as part of a commercial action RPG though. Mashing these styles together would probably end up reducing the appeal of both to most players. The fantasy of being a powerful main character clashes pretty heavily with the idea of spending multiple real life hours (or days) travelling without defeating a single enemy, or even seeing anything new. And the players who like the slower experience probably don't want that to be interrupted by Draugr or police chases.

That said, I wonder if 2rafa's proposal can't be done fairly cheaply with current technology. Procedural generation is one way, but maybe the simplest would be to create a Skyrim mod where the scale and movement speed of every plant and non-terrain asset is reduced by a factor of 5 in order to make the world feel 5 times bigger without adding anything new.

I think, as I said above, or at least hinted at, is that fast travel really only becomes attractive if getting there is basically a throwaway experience. If I can walk between towns and nothing happens and I experience no problems or dangers, it’s not worth spending time doing that. Skyrim’s slow travel was boring mostly because unless you made a point of going out and looking for something, you really never had to do much more than smack some wolves or low level bandits along the way. And the environment itself wasn’t a danger. You didn have to eat, your weapons didn’t dull or break, and even in blizzard conditions, you didn’t freeze to death (there is a survival mod that adds such things). Making meaningless travel take longer doesn’t help. Making it difficult enough that you’re glad you finally made it to safety helps a lot.

Animal Crossing, Pokémon Snap, and Firewatch come to mind as fairly chill experiences where the slow pace is part of the appeal.

More relevant in the context of long-distance travel are Death Stranding and American Truck Simulator. Note that American Truck Simulator's map is scaled down from real life by a factor of 20, and the largest of Death Stranding's three maps (across which you literally walk) is only about 2.5 miles × 2.5 miles.

The challenging part of this is making the game fun enough for a broad enough audience that you can justify the big budget that you want. Most people want to play the game, not walk for multiple days on end. You would likely have to cut corners somewhere.

Like, maybe you make it a survival/crafting game like Minecraft instead. Different biomes, interesting creatures, maybe some settlements consisting of simple NPC's. Multiplayer functionality to let people play with friends. You could have fun exploring and building, at the cost of leaving behind the more complex RPG mechanics present in games like Skyrim.

Or you lower the budget. Make it an indie game specifically for the kind of people like you who find downtime immersive. Dramatically reduce the amount of available content, but make sure what is left is highly polished. With a great artstyle, banger soundtrack, and few but interesting companions. Maybe change the focus from combat mechanics to storytelling, leaning into a more atmospheric and immersive experience. You could have an entire game where you simply travel from one city to another, occasionally running into people along the way who you ca choose to help, hurt, or bring with you.

How do you reconcile:

the amount of content would probably similar

and

maybe fifty or a hundred times the size of Red Dead Redemption 2

That would make it painfully boring. It's an idea that sounds good on paper though.

It would just have a lot of empty space. Dialogue is pretty cheap, especially now, so recording three hours of interesting conversation while you wander from one place to the next would be the idea.

Valheim has a very big world and most of it is entirely useless and empty. Lonely place though.

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