Designing coherent spaces is useful for game world designers to think about, but it could have been 5 minutes long and gotten the point across.
setsneedtofeed
The atmosphere, taken moment to moment, or at individual locations was good. The coherency of the explanations behind a lot of things and the coherency of the world as a whole was pretty disjointed.
Both games do environmental storytelling, but with vastly different goals.
Obsidian approach is very constantly supporting a consistent tone and overarching setting. It is more desolate and feels more desolate because that’s what a lot of these in-between little areas are supposed to be. But the details in each area that are there so tell a story about what the area is like and how it function, they give a history to what you are seeing but it often isn’t over the top and full of little cute mini-stories you can follow. It isn’t bad storytelling, it’s telling a story you’re not into.
The Bethesda approach is often much more varied. Each settlement or location can have all these environmental stories, often will little miniature running plots. The variety extends to tone, and type of story. This does come at the expense of some coherence if you step back and start putting a critical eye to everything as a whole.
They are trying to give players different experiences. FNV a player can travel through a bleak desert, maybe only with hostile encounters as the Jungle Jangle radio plays until they finally hit a settlement and it feels like an actual refuge from the sun and rad scorpions to the player. The desolation builds that. Fallout 3 and especially 4 don’t want the player getting bored, so there is something interesting and different every ten feet to check out.
I suppose it says a lot about me that my Fallout 4 modlist turns the world into an extremely dangerous, ghoul filled place with dark nights, and rad storms. All of which makes travel on the overworld terrifying, and settlements feel extra secure in contrast.
I had multireddits for my subscriptions, but I liked discovering new things. With the extreme amount of trash filtering I did to r/all, it allowed me to discover interesting places I’d have never found on my own.
If the volunteer mods hold their ground and force Reddit corporate to oust them, Reddit would need to step in to fill the void.
When Reddit forcibly opens everything back up:
knock knock
“Who’s there?”
”Mods. Hired mods.”
“Hired mods?”
Oh clearly I’m not. I just don’t understand the thinking of people demanding access. It’s like the kind of person who pounds on the door of a closed restaurant because they can see the employees inside.
I opened Apollo once and got a special splash screen. I moved Apollo off the front page of my phone display.
I see this as a positive aspect of the protest.
I am also amused that random people are pounding on the door for access, as if they think approved submitters are having a private tea party inside.
I’ve continued to tell people: This won’t kill Reddit in the sense of outright turning it into a ghost town. If your only goal is to make Reddit collapse overnight, you’re going to be disappointed. The quality content that many people here enjoy is not what makes up the frontpage of r/all or what a huge amount of passive users consume. Reddit has more than enough low quality trash to backfill the frontpage and keep users occupied.
Anybody migrating should focus on porting quality content. Let reddit live long and be a dumping ground.
This is why Apollo was the only thing keeping me on the site. I took advantage of its filters. I had an extensive list of keyword filters, and over the years had filtered probably several thousand subreddits. I could actually browse r/all and find interesting and unique new to me subreddits. It was great.
I can’t get a handle on the gameplay. It is kind of broken in turn based mode, which is a shame because I’m not good at real time tactics mode.
I’ve only gotten through like half the game, and that was after a lot of struggle.