Older and more knowledgeable players will surely remember that era when RPGs weren’t full of indicators telling you where to go or maps with dozens of icons on them. According to Matt Firor, the director of The Elder Scrolls Online, today, a game like Morrowind without a map, without a compass and with the missions described only in text, it would not be played very much. That type of design is extinct, at least in the AAA field.
Extinct style
Games that have “neither compass nor map,” where “the quests are ‘go to the third tree on the right and walk 50 paces west,'” will simply never reach a modern audience, Friar explained in an article on modern RPG design for Rock, Paper, Shotgun: “If I made that now, no one would play it. Very few people would have played it. Now you have to give hints and cluesand no one really wants to spend that much time solving problems. They want to be told the story, or interact with another player, or interact with an NPC.”
Boldly invoking Morrowind’s name, Frior added that “Morrowind is obviously a great game,” but “the way it told its story is a little bit outdated for the kind of players we have now… they’re not all die-hard PC or first-gen console players who are going to invest as much time as possible in the game.”
So A designer must make sure that his game is “engaging and funand wandering around a field trying to measure 50 paces from a tree is no longer considered that. Which is a little sad, because I’m an old-school gamer.”
In short, for Friar it is a shame that this is the case and that many players no longer want to experience adventures in a classic way, but there is no other way to avoid disappointing them.
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