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Beyond Good & Evil 2 is potentially the biggest open world game ever
- Thread starter texhnolyze
- Start date
This game just sounds less appealing (and less like Beyond Good & Evil) by the day. Honestly, they lost me when they dropped more F-bombs in the E3 trailer than a 10 year old who just learned the concept of swearing.
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Yeah but surely we're going to reach saturation point for massive open world and GaaS games? They're so huge, expensive and time consuming for both developers and players that the entire economic model seems to be built around establishing a monopoly, being the only game people play. Obviously this is not sustainable for the industry at a whole, and we'll reach a point where making more 15 hour single player games for half the budget of an 80 hour open world title makes much more sense.
I've never been intrigued and turned off by a game at the same time. Fascinating.
I'm tired of games with huge open worlds, just for the sake og saying "one of the biggest maps ever!". To me that means spending 20 mins going back and forth for missions or whatever, and if it has a bounty system like rdr2.. ugh. (Nothing like going across a map for a mission, only for it to be locked out due to bounty hunters. So fun.)
I'm tired of games with huge open worlds, just for the sake og saying "one of the biggest maps ever!". To me that means spending 20 mins going back and forth for missions or whatever, and if it has a bounty system like rdr2.. ugh. (Nothing like going across a map for a mission, only for it to be locked out due to bounty hunters. So fun.)
I think the stream indicated the whole game is just one solar system, but I'm totally fine with that given what they seem to be putting in that system -- cities and various other locations you explore on foot and in fighter ships.
Exactly how I feel right now. I get why people are apprehensive about big game worlds nowadays, with most developers filling them with busywork or people getting bored with empty space, but honestly I still want bigger and bigger open worlds if they're handled with care, and immersion is a big part of it for me.
Vehicles are an important part of world scale. An open-world built around cars is gonna be different from one designed around horses. In BGE2 they want you to be able to travel thousands of miles on a planet in seconds, so if you have to fly to an objective that's on another continent, it's not gonna be 20 minutes of uneventful traversal.
This game seems like it's trying to be a really interesting mix of procedural generation and a hand-crafted world. Unlike Star Citizen, Elite, and No Man's Sky, it's using that kind of space game tech to make a more traditional story-based experience which I think is what a lot of people have wanted for some time. I get that it could still end up feeling like a typical Ubisoft open world, but honestly the space element alone makes it stand out from Assassin's Creed and Far Cry and Watch Dogs.
I would actually be fine with this being "Assassin's Creed Odyssey but with a space ship."
Exactly how I feel right now. I get why people are apprehensive about big game worlds nowadays, with most developers filling them with busywork or people getting bored with empty space, but honestly I still want bigger and bigger open worlds if they're handled with care, and immersion is a big part of it for me.
Vehicles are an important part of world scale. An open-world built around cars is gonna be different from one designed around horses. In BGE2 they want you to be able to travel thousands of miles on a planet in seconds, so if you have to fly to an objective that's on another continent, it's not gonna be 20 minutes of uneventful traversal.
This game seems like it's trying to be a really interesting mix of procedural generation and a hand-crafted world. Unlike Star Citizen, Elite, and No Man's Sky, it's using that kind of space game tech to make a more traditional story-based experience which I think is what a lot of people have wanted for some time. I get that it could still end up feeling like a typical Ubisoft open world, but honestly the space element alone makes it stand out from Assassin's Creed and Far Cry and Watch Dogs.
I would actually be fine with this being "Assassin's Creed Odyssey but with a space ship."
This game of Beyond Good Orbiter Star Citizens Of No Man's Elite Dangerous Sky or as I call it "WiLD will release in 2000-Never"
The real question is: how much freedom is Ubisoft giving Ancel? Is this gonna be another cut-and-paste Assassin's Creed or Far Cry but in space? Or is Ancel gonna be free to branch off from that? And to what degree?
Like I said though, even if it was just space Far Cry that alone would be a major departure from what Ubisoft has been doing. I pretty much passed up on every major Ubisoft game over the last few years and still want to play this.
Like I said though, even if it was just space Far Cry that alone would be a major departure from what Ubisoft has been doing. I pretty much passed up on every major Ubisoft game over the last few years and still want to play this.
What was BG&E1 exactly?
I'd summarise it as "well this is all pretty boring, I don't care about any of these characters, the gameplay sucks and all the environments are pretty medi- OH SHIT DID YOU SEE THAT WHALE THING JUMP OUT OF THE WATER!! Ok this game is cool"
How can Ubisoft fuck that up? Well they can, and will, but I doubt it is in the way that people are thinking about. They'll just strip it of everything that could possibly be fun, enlarge the map and hope that the terrible monitisation scheme they slap on top will provide enough marketing to stop the game being a complete and utter failure. And also there will be a pig guy in it.
There should be no expectations or disappointment here.
kinda where I'm at as well, though might also be because I'm starting to feel a bit burned out on everything being open world
I honestly don't know. I just think from an investors point of view, they'd rather make a an 80 hour game they can monetise than a 10 hour game they can't
A lot of people play SP games when they're on sale, or even second hand, so short SP games have less potential to make money
The 80 hour RPG might be more expensive to make, but you can design it in a way that will cause a certain percentage of your player base to spend $60 up front and then lots more as they play
AAA developers are moving away from the one and done 6-20 hour game (first parties still make these kind of games though)
I have faith in Ancel, that this will not use the standard Ubi open world template, the last thing we need is AssCreedized BGE.
I read an Ancel interview back in 2003 or so, remember he said something along the lines of having the ambition to make a huge ass game where you could hop into a spaceship and go to space and come back. I clearly remember that as it was the most awesome concept I've read.
So yeah, they're finally able to achieve their original ambitions. I don't care if we get a small scale BGE or the hugest BGE game, as long as the game is good.
NMS is probably the smallest "biggest open world game" when you consider the planets, plant and alien life seem like a slight variation from each other, it's not that unique when you've been to a couple planets.
BGE2 seems to be making faster progress than SC since it was re-revealed last year. SC has been putting out trailers since the start of the gen and still no release date, or any sense of a meaningful progress. I wish both could come out in 2 years time but with SC it seems that after every "releases in 2 years time" cycle it just seems farther and farther off.
I read an Ancel interview back in 2003 or so, remember he said something along the lines of having the ambition to make a huge ass game where you could hop into a spaceship and go to space and come back. I clearly remember that as it was the most awesome concept I've read.
So yeah, they're finally able to achieve their original ambitions. I don't care if we get a small scale BGE or the hugest BGE game, as long as the game is good.
NMS is probably the smallest "biggest open world game" when you consider the planets, plant and alien life seem like a slight variation from each other, it's not that unique when you've been to a couple planets.
BGE2 seems to be making faster progress than SC since it was re-revealed last year. SC has been putting out trailers since the start of the gen and still no release date, or any sense of a meaningful progress. I wish both could come out in 2 years time but with SC it seems that after every "releases in 2 years time" cycle it just seems farther and farther off.
Let me quickly play Star Citizen defense force, so the usual suspects don't have to: It's the game project with the most open development ever, you have no idea about game development, it's made great progress since 2014 and the current Alpha has more content than most AAA titles and you should really be better informed before you come here and spew FUD.
/s
On a serious note, there has been progress (at least changes) between Star Citizen's first alpha in 2014 and what they currently call "Alpha 3.[3|4|...]". At first, it was only a space dogfighting arena, later a "race track" of kinds was added, a small FPS mode on several maps came in 2015 (all separate, isolated modes) and for some time they've been releasing the "MMO" open world portion piece by piece. But you're not wrong, the actual game in a "1.0" capacity with all the meta mechanics in place seems a loooong way off. It also went through tons of scope changes over the years (although some people like to claim otherwise). In 2012, they promised 100 solar systems in the game, as late as 2014 it looked like landing on planets was limited to automated sequences and isolated areas. Since then, they've gone down to maybe a handful of solar systems planned for release with almost fully traversable planets instead. And simulated train commutes. The game's scope essentially went from a multiplayer Freelancer 2.0 + a Wing Commander single player campaign, to a separately released quasi Wing Commander game and a (M)MO seamless space to planet 2nd live sim with purchasable everything. That may or may not include Sandworms.
I couldn't tell how much progress BG&E2 made in a comparable timeframe, since it's not "the most open dev project ever" (read: It's publisher financed, so it doesn't need to continiously sell every new spaceships, ground combat tanks and space motorbikes to backers to keep collecting the 200$ Mio. in backer money SC has allegedly gathered). Since BG&E2's reveal in 2017, they essentially showcased a single city on one planet and a bit of vehicle movement around the city as well as that planet in space. No ingame scenes of the story that I'm aware of however and at best scraps of ingame footage of some activities that'll be available. In that regard, there's been mostly talk and very recently a demo showing some more ingame scenes.
In the end, I still expect BG&E2 to release first, simply because they seem in full production mode at this point and I expect the publisher to have a very real interest to push it out of the door depending on what budget they assigned to the project. Unless they can build a pool of money spending backers with near infinite patience to keep funding their development, that is. While I was hopeful for Star Citizen some yeas ago, BG&E2 being a much more streamlined open world Adventure/RPG game rather than a space 2nd live MMO sim is much more up my ally at this point.
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They are very different projects that have different technical challenges. Most of the differences stem from their design goals. SC is an MMO space sim, FPS and systemic world simulation whereas BG&E2 is an arcade third-person open-world (or rather, open-planet) adventure game with flying elements. I don't want to do any injustice to BG&E2, it's tremendously ambitious and has insane technical goals ahead of itself. I'm just trying to explain the differences in timescales.
For one, the MMO aspect of SC is one that BG&E2 doesn't have to bear. Being an MMO makes everything so much more complex. Then there are the countless things that BG&E2 doesn't concern itself with such as first/3rd person perspectives, nested physics grids, making every spaceship have fully detailed and functional interiors, simulating everything from flight physics to control systems, atmospheres and the overall interconnected item systems. I could go on but I hope you get the idea.
In a nutshell, SC will take a lot longer to release not because of a lack of will or skill but because it's just that hard to build a game like this. It sucks that it takes so long but I don't see how it can be done faster. BG&E2 is a bit "simpler", while being more complex than most of the current AAA production.
That being said, the people behind BG&E2 (at Ubi Annecy if I'm not mistaken? You lucky bastards :p) have done amazingly well. Even with Ubi's shared resources and established tools, building an engine from scratch and getting to where they are in the span of 3 years and about 30-50 people is outstanding, in my opinion. The fact that this project is allowed to exist at all is amazing but they also were clearly short-handed on the asset production side of things. I hope that now that they are entering full production, the world will explode in density and diversity.
I hate these kinds of comparisons because it ends up looking like someone is trying to downplay one project for the benefit of another. I'd much rather be glad to have more games that attempt to deliver that scale and sense of adventure.
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Is BGE2 going to have multi-crew ships that allow you to walk around inside the ship in full persistence with the space outside the ship? Will you be able to walk around in 100% persistence in your big ship to a smaller ship or vehicle and launch out of the bigger ship? Will 6-8 other players be able to do this from 1 large ship? Thats the impressive thing to me about SC (been playing for only a month). And it's working right now you can pay money and play it right now.
It will be interesting to do a comparison to both games on launch of BGE2. SC is going to be developed for decades though. The art style and mood of BGE2 feels different too.
If you think SC hasn't made meaningful progress, you must have not followed the game's development for a long time.
I very much doubt that it will be. That's my point. As you correctly realized, one strives to become a second life in space thingy. The other seemingly aims to be an adventure/RPG game. We're talking about sitting for 20 minutes as gunner in somebody else's ship, for which you'd have to grind for 100 hours to buy yourself (or throw several 100$ at CIG), while they fly from one location to the next and maybe encounter something to pew at vs. the prospect of going from a location beating up a bunch of baddies in third person, maybe with a friend, and taking about a minute to proceed to the next location (BG&E2 footage suggests as much).
That's like comparing ArmA to Just Cause. A more apt comparison would be Elite and Star Citizen, since both somewhat aim to satisfy the 2nd life and (M)MO in space(ships) aspect.
No thanks. I did some years ago and CIG or rather Chris Roberts has lost any trust I had in the game or him since. While the general prospect of SC is still enticing, even if they should at any point in the next six years or so manage to pass alpha stage, I won't touch it with a ten foot pole. It's moved so far towards the 2nd life aspect and continuously selling new 100+$ spaceships to backers has become so integral, that I'm thoroughly put off from whatever game may result from this. Squadron 42 is the only aspect I'm even remotely interested in by this point. The hypothetic 2012 kickstarter was a game I'd have played, but not SC in today's incarnation. Edit: Star Citizen recently even made a big point of simulated train commute for crying out loud. I got enough of that shit in real life and don't think being forced to role play an imaginary space "Citizen" having to take their train to get to their imaginary 200$ (real world money) or 200h grind space ship is even remotely an attractive prospect anymore. Also one of my main gripes with Elite - ridiculous, linearily scaling travel times to locations you previously visited.
That's why BG&E2 looks like a game I'd like to play and SC doesn't anymore.
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I've played it for about 350 hours, so I disagree on that ;) But even if someone find NMS's openess boring, at this point nothing says that BGE2 won't have the same problem. Like I said, it's a lot of work to add meaningful stuff to a world of that size. People like to complain about the procedural generation, but in the case of NMS it was actually exciting to know that not even the devs knew what crazy stuff you could find out there. Minecraft generates the same excitement for me.
People have been saying this for the past four years....it's not coming to fruition.
I feel like this metric gets more meaningless the more copy+paste the necessity for assets becomes the bigger the game world gets. You're teetering into procedural gen almost at that point so who cares how "BIG" it really is, it actually isn't wrt unique locations. Though hey surprise us Ancel and Co. It'd be nice to see a dev of a open world AAA game actually advertise the number of unique locations and style differences between regions, amount of digital space as a draw is frankly whatever at this point.
What if the biggest open world game was actually the game of life we are all playing on this little old planet called earth.
Meh, too much empty space between interesting things. Also the writing is terrible and the protagonist is very unlikable.
I'm holding out for Earth 2.
I don't even care how big or dense the world is anymore.
The big question should be: How much do the systems allow you to fuck around with them to solve problems? (See: Breath of the Wild)
The big question should be: How much do the systems allow you to fuck around with them to solve problems? (See: Breath of the Wild)
Instead of branching out so widely, I'd rather a dev try to just densely pack a single planet or even a city/state. Maybe sort of like Red Dead as a whole or maybe Saint Denis except more wildly built upon. And I don't know if Los Santos really counts. I want something original.
Maybe Cyberpunk will be that game
Maybe Cyberpunk will be that game
I mean this is Ubisoft, they have enough resources that that issue doesn't really apply to them.
They've also already advertised that the world of BG&E2 is multicultural and multiethnic, taking influence from multiple cultures because diversity and storytelling is one of the main mission statements of the game.
Not even close.
Honestly it's not even really about the metric of "how big" anymore, but rather the experience an open world creates.
I've played a ton of No Man's Sky and Elite, and I really like the universes each of those games has created. Not simply because they'e big, not because size means more content, but because they strive to create the experience of seamlessly exploring space and hopping from planet to planet. A game doesn't have to be as content-dense as Assassin's Creed to accomplish this.
If something like BGE2 ends up having only the same amount of content as Red Dead 2 or something, or even less, spread out across a whole solar system, it will still have accomplished the goal of fostering exploration across planets and across space.
I've played a ton of No Man's Sky and Elite, and I really like the universes each of those games has created. Not simply because they'e big, not because size means more content, but because they strive to create the experience of seamlessly exploring space and hopping from planet to planet. A game doesn't have to be as content-dense as Assassin's Creed to accomplish this.
If something like BGE2 ends up having only the same amount of content as Red Dead 2 or something, or even less, spread out across a whole solar system, it will still have accomplished the goal of fostering exploration across planets and across space.
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It's highly related to the game's plot/story. We're supposed to gather the missing crew across the solar system.
I don't understand what about this game needed the Beyond Good and Evil license. This isn't anything of what people wanted a sequel out of.
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Man... that's cool and all but will it matter? The more I see about this game the less excited I get. Forgive me for not expecting Ubisoft to craft a good open world game.
Also, isn't it supposed to be a GaaS?
This sounds significantly more appealing
Also, isn't it supposed to be a GaaS?
This sounds significantly more appealing
Seeing as Destiny 1 had only just released four years ago, no they haven't. And my point is that eventually we are going to reach saturation point. This happens for any popular genres really, but for open world/GaaS it's likely to be more pronounced as these games are so time consuming. Simple economics states that getting to a point where the majority of game players are only playing one game for like three years is going to be incredibly bad for the wider industry, and alongside spiraling development costs, may precipitate a crash.
Stop saying this in response to every fucking post about it being a sequel. People aren't talking about the narrative or the lore, they're talking about it being a successor game to Beyond Good and Evil. Red Dead Redemption 2 is also a prequel, but if it had been based around entirely different gameplay and aesthetics to Red Dead 1 people would've still been really confused and disappointed.
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Lots of people actually have no idea that this is a prequel. Anyway, in terms of combat, it's said that they want to keep the same DNA which probably hints to the classic BGE1 one-button combat. Everything else is also still the same, it's just more ambitious and grand.
Refer to this post for further reasoning.
If you look at revenue it directly goes against the narrative you're stating. GaaS covers a wide away of genres and each pub has their own take on it from Nintendo adding more amiibo support and expansion packs to Zelda to AC:Origin's daily quest system.
"Biggest open world ever" is a surefire way to make me be weary of what the game could realistically bring to the table. World sizes mean absolutely nothing to me anymore after the last decade of them populating the game sphere.
I hope the game ends up being as good as it looks, but I don't know if I've got another 100+ hour open world game in me
I hope the game ends up being as good as it looks, but I don't know if I've got another 100+ hour open world game in me
been a while since i've seen this - looks like its coming together as a game. looks literally outstanding. still, like many, i'm cautious that the size and the scope of the world will lead to a meaningful experience. but man it looks rad.
The bigger the them park the longer the walk between rides.
edit: beaten by like the third post bah
edit: beaten by like the third post bah
Game looks amazing. Call me old fashioned, but I'm much more interested in playing this than a sequel that still feels like a slight progression of a 3D Zelda game from 2005. It's killing me that it's a prequel instead of a sequel though.