What if Pikmin 4 adopts Nintendo's new 'open' approach to game design?

[Cap G]

That sounds like a shift for the worse that doesnt add anything significantly different while borking the early game. I don't know if you've played the pikmin series, but they're already pretty open in terms of what objectives you can tackle in any given area. The only major shift would be acquiring pikmin types out of order, but that would just destroy a lot of the early difficulty of the game when you have to think around your limitations, you could just grab the pikmin you need early and roll over the puzzles. Pikmin being "open world" wouldnt make much difference either. Olimar is sloooow, you would be heading to your ship to fast travel more often than not, which segments the world into chunks anyway. The game isn't designed for being totally disconnected from the hub ship/Onions, you still would need to return to them frequently, cutting down wandering and openness.

If you want to make pikmin popular no matter the cost to difficulty, the obvious solution is to get rid of the time of day mechanic and let you wander unrestricted for as long as you like. Then you dont feel any pressure and the game isnt breathing down your neck about what to do when, giving the starting player ample time to learn.

 

[Phendrift]

Well, this could very well be happening given the game was "almost done" 3 years ago. Maybe they decided to go more ambitious.

 

[Lord Azrael]

NO. It makes me anxious as hell, but it's critical to making pikmin a strategy/planning game. I think it would be better to just allow you to play at night and just show how super dangerous it is.

Click to shrink...

I agree. Pikmin without the timer isn't a strategy game, it's a walk around leisurely and pick up some items game. There would be no challenge and no engagement. They can modify it but they shouldn't outright remove it.

 

[The Booktastic Bus]

Pikmin 3 is one of my favourite games ever.

If they fuck up 4 there's gonna be hell to pay.

Such a good series overall.

 

[Bjones]

Ehh I beat Pikmin one but never finished 2 or 3 because I hate the timer aspect.

 

[Conor419]

OMG I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW I WANTED THIS, THIS WOULD BE SO SICK

 

[SpokkX]

Id love for a more open ended game

Land anywhere - collect anywhere
Skip the story stuff completely

Gating would be mostly based on skill level ans number/types of pikmin in store

 

[Servbot24]

I think Pikmin is very well suited to more open design.

At this point though I'm mainly just praying the game is still coming at all.

 

[Sander VF]

NO. It makes me anxious as hell, but it's critical to making pikmin a strategy/planning game. I think it would be better to just allow you to play at night and just show how super dangerous it is.

Click to shrink...

This is exactly what I want in Pikmin:

 

[Kinsei]

No thank you. Free exploration and Pikmin don't mix, it's why Pikmin 2 is the worst in the series.

 

[PenultimateFantasy]

Well they have to do something - nintendo doesn't like releasing sequels with similar formats these days. As tetheyy said they prefer to add a new spin or mechanic.

A change in Pikmin 4 would be a good thing.

 

[Ravenwraith]

I'd like a more open experience out of Pikmin. I liked 3 but it felt too easy and like they were railroading me a lot of the time. A sense of discovery would be nice.

They don't have to go full on BOTW and blow the doors off of any idea of structure of course, but just give us more wiggle room and more of a sense of discovery.

Pikmin 2 is a favorite of mine though so I might be biased.

 

[Deleted member 4247]

Only BotW has actually done that though. Odyssey isn't any more "open" than SM64 or SMS, it's just a safe and natural evolution of that formula. So I wouldn't exactly call it a new design trend or anything. But yeah, I do hope they have the guts to take more series in new directions.

 

[Kino]

I liked what Nintendo did with pikmin 3, so I'd pretty much like the series to continue on in that direction. Giving players the option to explore at night would be the only significant addition I can think of.

 

[papercan]

Really need to feature night time exploration at some point, they have said time and time agin that it's dangerous at night so at some point i'd like to find out for myself.
Not only would it look amazing but they could have so many new features with night exploration being more dangerous with larger predators or glow in the dark animals to light your way or use for puzzles.
And for the 100th time bring back the piklopedia!

 

[beetlebum]

I'm imagining a high production, Don't Starve-esque game in the Pikmin universe and I'm currently trying to preorder that game on Amazon.

Click to shrink...

Don't Starve is pretty much everything I think about whenever I think of where I want Pikmin to go.

If it were up to me, Pikmin 4 would focus not in gathering natural resources to bring back to your home planet, but in full-fledged colonization. Open world, with open-ended exploration and a city-building element. The more resources you gather, the more new facilities and structures you can build in your base, which attracts more and more people from your home planet to the settlement. And of course, the actual pikmin would play a large part in the colonization efforts - for example, yellow pikmin would provide you with electricity.

It's kind of ridiculous how many times I've dreamt of this concept for Pikmin ever since I played Don't Starve. I hope I'm not *too* disappointed with whatever Pikmin 4 ends up being.

 

[Brofield]

I found that Pikmin 3 had the best implementation of the timer, being tied to the food you could acquire in time.

The caves in Pikmin 2 weren't my favourite, but I'd hope there's a way to make them more ideal to explore if it stops the timer outside. I did enjoy the cave aspect in the last level of Pikmin 3 but it was definitely too short to get through I feel.

And for the 101st time, bring back Piklopedia

 

[Ghgghggh]

I would love it. There still needs to be time pressure, as stated by others, that is critical to Pikmin being a strategy game.

As you venture outwards you create new onions/ bases/ Pikmin towns that serve as the regions hub. The Pikmin must return to the hub (or other mini safe areas such as caves) before nightfall.

This time night exploration should be a thing but it is much more dangerous than daytime--basically a built in hard mode. High risk with high rewards.

Like BOTW there should be many natural resources that you can pick up and use to craft different town buildings/ weapons/ devices to help out.

Olimar is the main explorer and he assigns each captain to control a region. The player can take control of any captain--this is the fast travel. And so you have to manage exploring new regions/ creating new Pikmin Hubs and protecting the other regions from attacks.

There should be another force controlling Pikmin so it becomes like a war game. This opposing Captain / Pikmin team are competing for resource collection and will attempt to ransack your towns and steal your resources as well. This would be like Bingo Battle built into the single player game.

Pikmin is one of my favorite Nintendo series. I hope Pikmin 4 is epic.

 

[QuixoticNeutral]

I've been saying for ages that Pikmin should move towards dropping the hard-gated "find a strictly locked key item and drop into a new but isolated zone" if the tech permits it. Pikmin 3 already went in the right direction with a Metroid-like puzzle progression to the zones, but it was still segregated into discrete maps. I'd like to see the strategic fluidity of expanding and claiming new territory on a relatively contiguous map (e.g. exploring your way to new landing sites and securing them yourself as potential landing sites for future days through activity in the world, like claiming beacons/towers in Xenoblade X and BotW). It could be like Metroid where the map is still divided into zones for loading purposes or a sense of environmental identity, but the network of connections between zones is something that you have to discover and push towards yourself, instead of being handed a new landing point smack in the middle of an unexplored location upon an in-game event tied to a specific boss kill or treasure. This would feel sufficiently open while remaining intricately designed.

I also think it's time to bust the 100-Pikmin cap. You can still be limited to a 100-Pikmin squad at any given time, so composition still matters, but instead of building a massive reserve that just sits in your ship, you should be able to delegate or program tasks in areas of the world that you aren't visiting for the day. They don't even need to be on the map; I'd just like the massive Pikmin surplus to be good for something. More RTS mechanics like specialized base-building would be great, too. For all the claims that Pikmin is Nintendo's entry in the RTS genre, it's too exclusively micro-oriented to properly qualify, although the multi-commander management in Pikmin 3 was a promising step forward in terms of delegating tasks outside your range of vision.

Pikmin 3 had a lot of fantastic ideas like maintaining the world state (most notably boss health) to give you an interesting choice at any given time between crunching for speed or progressing broadly and slowly on several concurrent tasks over several days. But there was a mismatch between how the best design was in the overworld, yet the main game was quite short and pushing precise, advanced play was left entirely to quick timed challenges that didn't let you stretch out and explore. I think there needs to be a broader range of goals that pertain to efficiency/economy rather than just speed.

I don't miss the random dungeon-crawling in Pikmin 2 but I desperately miss the Piklopedia. And I appreciate how every game in the series has a distinct structural identity in terms of what kind of game it wants to be.

(Edit: Just saw this was a bump of an older thread and I already posted something to this effect on the first page. Well, it bears repeating.)

 

[impiri]

I don't think it needs to go fully open-world, but there's plenty of room to expand the scope of the individual stages to allow for some less linear play (e.g. stages could have multiple landing zones to capture in whatever order).

One of the games' major strengths is the way it keeps pushing the player forward; if you aren't doing something new, you're losing ground, whether it's approaching a deadline or running out of juice. In an open world, unless you take away that pressure, players can easily find themselves in an unsalvageable situation because they focused on the wrong thing.

Not saying that a big reimagining of Pikmin couldn't work, but there's plenty of juice left to squeeze from the current orange.