A Valley Without Wind's Switch To Side View -- The Big Picture

[Ozymandiaz]

I got a strong bias for FF7 as the best FF as well, but then again it was also my first FF game ever

I agree on the characthers , to me its not that they are masculine, but they seem less "generic" to put it like that. Some later FF games tend to have somewhat generic characters that I can not relate or feel all that well to.

[chemical_art]

After playing 10, 12, 13 I found 12 my favorite. It seemed to flow the most naturally for me despite the obvious magical and supernatural entities in it. I found myself enjoying the middle and end more then the beginning. 10's story was enjoyable until the ending few hours. 13's story went from neat to unbearable to mediocre as the game progressed from start middle and end.
All had unique and distinct battle systems.
As for voice acting...13's sounded great but was simple, 12 sounded horrible yet was deep, and 10 sounded great when the characters used their large blocks of time wisely.

[superking]

go back and play 7 

[zebramatt]

go back and play 7 

Amen!

[RogueThunder]

go back and play 7 

Amen!

Dont forget 9 either! Damn fine game.

... 8... You can maybe forget 8. It wasnt so much bad... As simply didn't hold a candle to 7, much less 9

Then again 9 is my second favorite next to 6.



In a more related to the threads original topic.
Like the change to side view. I actually found the game before looking kinda. Ugly. Now its just a strange taste I cant quite tell if I like or not. And the gameplay looks far more fun. Gameplay being what matters more anyway. Yayz.

[V22 Osprey]

Sorry, haven't visited Arcen in a while so I'm a bit late the show.

I can honestly say I liked the old way better. It felt more like an actual world. I just don't like side view. The old felt like a large world that I could go anywhere, like a free roam game, but now it feels limited.

I was really looking forward to this game, but now I'm a bit worried. I've loved Tidalis and AI War(I have all the expansion and greatly enjoy them), so I trust that you guys will make a good product.

[zebramatt]

I've been playing a lot of Metroid recently and I for one see no reason why a well designed 2D world can't be every bit as expansive as a 3D one - especially since I'm led to believe in the case of AVWW we're talking about behind-the-screen interiors and whatnot too, right?

Regardless, I'm keeping my eyes on this one!

[x4000]

especially since I'm led to believe in the case of AVWW we're talking about behind-the-screen interiors and whatnot too, right?

Yup, exactly right.

I can see why some folks get nervous with the switch to side view in terms of the game feeling less expansive, but I hope to put a lot of those fears to rest with an extensive gameplay video coming up before too long.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, we were recently talking about the interiors stuff internally (no pun intended) and one of the recent questions was "is 300 chunks in an apartment building too much?" (a chunk would be like a room or hallway in that case).  Yes, it's too much

Honestly, making the world expansive for exploration isn't a big challenge here, and indeed the sideview adds more variety within an environment due to gravity and different strata and so on.

It's a bigger challenge to keep even small areas of world-map-area from having _so much_ inside them that you can't reasonably explore them fully.  Infinite breadth is a good thing (and we have that with the world map), and occasionally infinite depth, but if every single square on the world map had 1000s of chunks, you might not feel like you were ever able to make much "progress" on the exploration front.

[x4000]

Yeah, that's the genesis of this thread, too: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,8783

Basically, figuring out ways to "dial it down" so that you can feel like you have infinite space to explore without it being too massive.  For instance, consider the block on which you live, or neighborhood, or town: would it be fun to explore every last room in every one of the buildings in that space?  That's what we're able to simulate here, but that's just insanely too much.  Who wants to spend so much time on a block, in a neighborhood, or even in one town?  An adventure game should be about crossing towns and eventually continents, etc.

So that's been our challenge of late, is figuring out how to make sure that there's a balanced amount that is really fun to explore, without there being so much that it becomes overwhelming.  I've been working on a model this morning with destroyed rooms in buildings to keep the chunk count lower, and so far that's looking really promising for keeping a good balance of "still way larger than any other game with building interiors" and "still fun."

[Flatfingers]

Not to belabor the point, but I suspect that what concerns V22 Osprey is not "how much stuff exists to be explored," but rather "how big is the window onto the world?"

"Expansiveness" is partly about the absolute size of a world -- how much stuff there is to see -- but it's also about how you experience that stuff. A top-down view could be any size from just big enough to hold a character to many hundreds of miles. That's "expansive."

A side-scroller, on the other hand, pretty much has to be zoomed in enough to allow you to see whatever stuff the character has to climb or jump over. By comparison, it's a more restrictive window onto the game world than a top-down (or 1st-person 3D) view.

I don't know that this perspective has much utility, since the choice to go with side-scrolling 2D seems pretty much set. I mention it only because it looked like we might have been using two different definitions of "expansiveness," and the differences between the two (valid) perceptions actually suggest an interesting question of game design: what's the most effective way to make a gameworld feel big?

[x4000]

Not to belabor the point, but I suspect that what concerns V22 Osprey is not "how much stuff exists to be explored," but rather "how big is the window onto the world?"

That's an interesting view of it (along with what else you said), but that's not what I understood at all (as you saw).  It's an interesting point, but I will say that the window to the world is identically-sized as before.  And if you want a larger window, you can actually play with a larger screen resolution, if we're being literal about this.  I just switched to a larger monitor size of 1920x1080 up from  1280x720, and I can tell you two things for sure:

1. I can see a ridiculous amount of the game (see the last trailer).
2. The game is running at a great framerate in the side view, but in the old top-down view it would have been chugging performance-wise because of having to draw so much grass.

I'll also mention that the decision to go side view isn't "pretty much set," it was pretty close to set in stone a month and a half ago.  Not to belabor that point or be rude, either, but it's important to note I think.  We just aren't capable of making the game in a way that we feel that is attractive and fun from a top-down view at this point in time, and the side view is coming along absolutely swimmingly.  I'm not really addressing you with this note, Flatfingers, but there do seem to be some folks (not here, mostly elsewhere) that think they can convince us to go top-down again.  That's just not in the cards, because with the staff we currently have, and the technology we're using, etc, that game simply isn't one we can make in a way that lives up to the quality standards we are looking for.

Anyway, I very much understand where the fear is coming from for those players who have only ever played games of this sort that are top-down (or those who have bad memories of, say, Zelda 2).  Or those that think any game that uses this perspective in an infinite world instantly becomes Terraria-like.  Our goal is to put those fears to rest both with beta and with our upcoming videos.  Stay tuned!

[zebramatt]

Not to belabor the point, but I suspect that what concerns V22 Osprey is not "how much stuff exists to be explored," but rather "how big is the window onto the world?"

For what it's worth, this was part of what I took Osprey to mean - and I stand by my point. The claustrophobic nature of my view into Samus's world actually makes that world seem bigger. (Part of the reason the switch to first person for Prime worked so well.) Certainly scaling large cliffs without being able to see what might be up there until I'm right on top of it makes relatively small individual rooms seem much bigger. And that necessarily makes the world as a whole seem far larger indeed, when scaling said cliff may open up a corridor into however many other such rooms!

By contrast, my recent playthrough of A Link To The Past had me oft remarking on how small the world felt coming back to it after so long.

That said, the zoom level of the camera in a 2D side-scroller can definitely be restrictive in other ways - an ability to zoom right out in AVWW, if it could be made to remain useful for manipulating the character to some extent, would certainly be a welcome addition.

[x4000]

I'd be worried about performance when zooming the camera out in AVWW, but it's a possibility.  At the moment I don't think it's really needed, and we gave a "look ahead" option instead that accomplishes much the same thing.

[Flatfingers]

That makes sense to me.

A zoom-out feature seems at first glance like it could help alleviate claustrophobia, but it's tough to see how to zoom out and still be able to move effectively. Moreover, pull out far enough and you're really talking about a map, rather than immediate terrain. (A top-down view also has the latter problem, but not the former problem as obstructions can be abstracted away on a overworld view -- gamers are accustomed to that.)

Some form of lookahead should help with the "stuck in a box" feeling, though. And occasional recourse to the overworld/region map should be enough to restore the feeling of being part of a large world, but I'd like to hear what others think about that.