just a map
So people are bored of unlocking the map by climbing towers, which partially exists because the map reveals all game content on it. What about just having a map that is only a map and nothing more?
You can use it to navigate the city but there are no objective icons on it at all. (so, different from the AC1 map)
And just for fun it's an in-world object that you hold in your hands and the camera zooms in over your shoulder when you press the map button. (the overlaid UI like player-set waypoints and player location can be explained as being eagle vision)
When you have a main objective that you need to get to, you're told what part of the city it's in and you look on the map to find out where it is and set your own marker to go there. Or if they absolutely must, the name of the district/section is highlighted in gold. When you get there, eagle vision and contextual clues like the location of the crowd and loud events going on (typically the site of assassinations) can guide your way. Or perhaps an informant can be spawned to show up and guide you in cases where the mission site is less obvious.
Instead of having a minimap you just have the waypoints you set on your screen (makes perfect sense as a representation of assassins having a good sense of direction)
And heck, you could set multiple waypoints like in MGSV, I guess. Would be interesting if it were more limited, 3-4, say.
And then for side stuff they just find more interesting ways to get you to go to places than them being marked out evenly spaced across an entire city map. Like, they trust that you'll stumble upon stuff, or they give you places to go to find out if there's any local happenings going on (bureaus) and they tell you the general area just like in normal missions, since eagle vision can help a bunch on narrowing it down.
And they have only 50 collectibles and they're hidden in interesting places that feel like someone might have actually hidden them there. And they aren't a rotating video game item they're an actual thing that it would make sense you'd collect, or perhaps they're unique treasures that say something about your character, that they'd want this stuff. (in that case maybe less than 50, 20 would do)
End the tyranny of the all-knowing map. Maybe abstraction can encourage making the physical exploration of the city feel more rewarding and intuitive. at present, if finding your way around the city and finding things to do isn't fun, you can just mark what you want and beeline joylessly towards it.
Also, there should be two difficulties, and Fast Travel should only exist on the easiest one. Fast Travel sucks. People shouldn't want to use it but they'll scream if they can't even if they don't want to. compromise because this game still needs to sell.
EDIT:
Don't worry about having a city that is perfectly to scale with the real city, worry about a city that is to scale with the player's ability to nagivate the environment smoothly. If that starts being a problem, the solution isn't to add stuff like the rope launcher (though it can have its uses) nor is it to make everything accessible, but instead to build cities so that the player has plenty of pathways that are suited to their reach and level of control, and also teach them how to recognize what things are BEYOND their reach and level of control.
Not every tower and sheer wall should be inviting: they should be imposing and, even if they are climbable by some narrow means, they should seem perilous and limiting compared to places that are more clearly meant for traversal. No-one should become complacent while climbing a tower or other not-meant-for-climbing structure.
In most AC games when you find something you can't climb it's frustrating. This is because you've been exposed to a climbing ability that is completely unbound by what would make sense to be climbable: you see it applied to ridiculous situations, so you stop thinking about your environment like it's a real place. You lose respect for it because when it logically seems like you shouldn't be able to do something, it lets you. So when it changes it's mind about what is acceptable, the player rejects it and gets annoyed at the inconsistent logic.
This includes things like hay bale dives, I feel: you give the player a shortcut to escape the dangers of heights, and in doing so you never instill in them any real fear or respect for those heights. In the rare moments you die from falling, it seems almost thematically inappropriate, and again, frustrating.
To split off from that, I feel like Eagle Vision is much the same. You have a tool that can identify your enemies psychically, yet the only way you can ever track them down is through the same earthy tools of searching that any normal assassin would have to use in real life. There's a fantasy laid out by the eagle vision: being able to know your target whenever they pass through your line of sight. Yet the game doesn't fulfill this fantasy, because it expects you to accept that the target does not actually exist in the game until the game decides to spawn them. And so the game again makes you take it less seriously, respect its world less.
In Metal Gear Solid V, many missions revolve around learning the location of a person or thing and then attacking/stealing that person/thing. In all these cases, the person or thing exists in the actual game world, and if you are lucky or have played the missions before, you can end up finding the person or thing without going through the steps to learn where it is. This is a perfect fulfillment of the fantasy that was set up: you are looking for something that feels that much more real. (though of course nothing in a game is real: games are about creating illusions)
I feel like this is the game equivalent of "Good Writing" (other than the actual words in the game), though of course this kind of writing is more expensive and time-intensive. But just as a writer must strive to keep their scenarios from feeling too contrived or its drama too melodramatic, game logic has to be complex enough to get the player to buy in to what's happening.
These are the kinds of things that non-gamers pick up on instantly, and drive them away from games. They're also the kinds of things that make avid gamers feel more dissatisfied with games as their game literacy improves, and they start to see how things really come together. From both a pure logical perspective and the perspective of understanding how the sausage is made, you end up with a whole lot of people who can be turned off by "badly written" game logic.
Now, of course in the example of MGSV, you might consider the fact you can memorize the target's location to be a bad thing, and I wouldn't disagree with you. Randomization within a set of parameters that still feel thematically appropriate would be ideal: the target always hangs out somewhere in The Rich District, for example. But the larger thing this opens up is investigation that is more driven by mechanics interacting in the wild than it is by going to a place, getting a cutscene, doing the investigation mission, loading back into the world, and then doing the assassination mission. It can all feel like its own bowl of noodles, just waiting for you to rummage around inside of it.
Systematizing tailing and interrogations could be the most clear gameplay hook that gives direction to those interested in it, and the rest of the challenge could focus on intelligent patrol paths, and perhaps a return to line-of-sight eagle vision which would make independent interpretation of the environment and angles on it more important. After all, you'll eventually end up in the right place, though the target should probably move around between several main places.
Something interesting about that could be a greater sense of planning: instead of finding the target meaning you instantly drop everything and rush in to kill her, you could wait until the moment you prefer: mid-transit, at a less secure location, or in a more public place. The conceit of Eagle Vision could be used to explain your ability to know where they are at all times once you've identified them, freeing you up to go make plans and prepare while tracking their route on your map.
Perhaps you get a sense for what I'm talking about here? A more contiguous structure for missions rather than an emphasis on each part of the kill as a traditional narrative beat or chapter. A themed sandbox rather than an act in a play, with the narrative being the connecting tissue between each mission rather than what defines each mission. And as a consequence, missions that are more far-ranging in terms of the ground they cover, justifying the open world without the need to scatter quite as much supplemental content over it, rewarding the player becoming more familiar with landmarks and locations rather than set scenarios (since the actual confrontation is more unpredictable), allowing missions to overlap or retread certain areas based on how patient or not-patient the player is.
what is so interesting about maps anyways?
They are abstractions that let us understand the world in a way we might not be able to otherwise. But in a virtual space, they are something else: a promise. A promise about what the actual geometry of this space is, that the illusions you see in the world do honestly make up more than just what you can see at the moment. That the simulation is of a space of this size, and all that is displayed on this abstraction is represented through "real" illusions.
Maps represent honesty to players. They represent something that is rigid and inflexible, an absolute quantification of space.
They don't think of maps as abstractions. They think of them as more real than the illusions of the game world are. Because maps in games are almost always too rigid. Too accurate. Too efficient. Too often placed on a separate screen, disconnected from the game world, further heightening the sense of this being a higher, more true illusion.
If you saw a map in your character's hand, if choosing different levels of elevation required them to shuffle through the papers they were holding, if zooming in to look at the detailed layout of an interior required you to acquire the original building plans first, then shuffle through to that plan? It becomes just a map. A promise in a sense, but a dingy, shabby, earthly promise. Not a god to follow, but a tool like any other. Demystification of the planning of navigation.
As you watch your character's hands adjust whilst regarding the map, fingers curling the edges of the paper, pulling it taut occasionally to smooth out the kinks, you begin to feel like this is the lower illusion. You begin to respect the lack of abstraction offered by seeing through the eyes of your character. You don't feel like the cycle of gameplay is laid bare through viewing the map alone. The cycle is something that lives out there, in the complicated and visibly contiguous 3D space the illusion presents itself as.
As darkness falls and your character lights a match or holds up a lantern or clicks on a flashlight in order to continue reading, it is cemented in your mind. You don't feel like you're staring into the soul of the game. You just feel like you're looking at a map.
First let me begin by saying that whether intentional or not, this post channels a strong amount of Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, which I'm reading at the moment. I find that pretty cool.
The map is a big problem when it comes to current open world game design for many of the reasons you explained. Forget the rare few occasions, 99% of the time a player will open the Map, tack a marker somewhere and run to it without really taking in the sights of the world around them. It's like the Metal Gear Solid 1 problem (most gameplay would take place on the Soliton Radar) but exploded out into a much vaster form. The majority of gameplay in open world games these days does take place on the minimap, or if you've put a marker down, by tunnel-visioning onto the marker's in-game appearance while disregarding much else. This becomes a massive problem when your objective is a specific and single entity, and if that objective is resolved by reaching its position without further interaction.
I'm obviously referring to Collectibles and Chests. Just putting them on the map is going to invariably make players tack markers on them and just move to them to pick them up (if they even want the items) but not having them on a map at all will make a huge majority of players super, super angry if you also tie a Completion or Progression score to them. I'm one of those. The comment you made about a game not following its seeming internal logic is why. There is no pattern or logic dictating where chests will be hidden, so if you remove a player's knowledge of their EXACT SPOT, you're going to piss off a bunch of completionists. That's not cool, it doesn't make for an enjoyable experience. If chests and collectibles were only ever hidden around certain unique landmarks or spots that were visible from the top of a viewpoint, for example, that would be fine as long as the game also let you see "2/10 Collectibles Found in X District." Some way of tracking how much content you've experienced, and how much you've yet to experience.
This formula brings in troubles of its own (making content for the sake of filling out a game/players doing busywork/being compelled by icons to 100%) but if collectibles are included at ALL and there's NO way of tracking them, it will always feel like some players will be "missing out" on something unless, again, no Completion score is tied to their acquisition of said items.
I just wanted to get that out of the way.
About maps being held in your hands, and being as much an occupant of the game world as the player character themselves, this is an excellent idea that was first used in Thief: The Dark Project years and years ago. I'm really surprised that it hasn't caught on at all because it really helped to ground the player in the world, and to add an extra element of characterization to the protagonist. You could see Garrett's scribbled little notes, and the only information that existed on the map was the information Garrett actually had. Interiors of houses were never exactly drawn, and the map could only give you an idea of where to go. You could easily get lost with or without it, and especially so in the richest homes. This helped make the player feel the same kind of anxiety Garrett would feel while infiltrating these residences. I haven't encountered another videogame to date that does this same thing with its maps.
Thief had NO IDEA that it was even aware of this, but it totally was, subconsciously; it was aware that if you wanted to have a player not "play your game in the map," then make sure to not let the map be the easier place to play in. Thief's maps are static and non-interactive save for flipping pages. You cannot place markers. You cannot change anything on that map. But you can compare the map to the game world, and that way you can orient yourself where it actually matters; in the actual simulation. Games these days are mostly played In-The-Map simply because that's objectively the best and quickest way to progress in them.
If we can one day see gaming reach a point where, "Open your map screen," will sound like a silly phrase compared to, "Look at your map," I'll be quite happy. Because game maps haven't functioned like real maps for years. Know what they do function like? GPSes. They're hyper-useful, but not very exciting in real life or in games.
You mentioned missions not being constrained by specific narrative beats that must occur during the mission.
Consistency of interaction during a mission has become more and more important to me the more I've played games like Dishonored, MGSV and the original Thief series. For a great example of how a mission can lose much of its tension or weight, look at my most recent Non-Lethal/Target Only video on Unity. That mission has three different cutscenes (effectively) that really break up the flow of the action and the tension that would result from it. Only one of them (the Memory Corridor after stabbing the Target; ie, the CORE action that the mission is "about") should really be there, I feel. I edit them out of the video, but the only time a player should be given that breather is if it's appropriate for it to happen. Any of the information conveyed in those cutscenes could be conveyed in real-time, either as ambient conversation or other happenings. The player's choice would then involve how much to partake of that story, when to move on and such. It's an additional puddle of depth to a game's Interactivity, but it is additional depth nonetheless.
You nailed what it is about maps that's so enticing. I appreciate you expressing that the promise of honesty that maps give is not worth the trouble it causes. "The map begins to feel more real than the Empire it was drawn for." That's pretty much how I eventually started feeling about it.
I think one of the problems AC has is that it knows what it wants to try to do, it certainly does, but technology or our methods of making games just aren't strong enough to really get it done. If we could have massive render distances, if we could have stable frame-rates and a vast array of possible actions a player can perform to interact with the world in a very real way, we would be quite close to the Assassin's Creed game we want.
I want the tech to be good enough to do that, as Matrix-esque and creepy as it would be. But that level of simulation, I'm not sure if that's possible just yet. Hence, the compromises. But those compromises really break the feeling that the games are trying to get across.
Eagle Vision would be an absolutely fantastic way to solve many of Assassin's Creed's issues with just one conceit. Suspending disbelief for a single concept that allows for the consistency of a hundred others is way easier on a player than having to justify over and over again issues brought on by lack of world interactions, or NPC animation cycles interrupting/breaking. Or, worst of all and clearly most tired, the cyclical process of opening your map screen, placing a marker on your map screen, tunnel-visioning in on the marker you placed on your map screen, reaching the marker from your map screen, and opening your map screen to place another one and do it all over again. I feel really bad for the environment artists on dev teams sometimes.
The Thief games and The Dark Mod missions tend to use hand-drawn maps. Sometimes the maps have blank spots, and you certainly don't know what kind of loot you'll find, or even what room the item you need to complete your objective is in. There's something fantastic about making an educated guess as to where you need to go, and then using your shoddy map to sneak your way over there.
@DAZ the Baudrillard references were not intentional though it may have been subconsciously there, now I think of it. I read a thing about simulacra/simulation not too long ago!
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Your point about traditional collectibles is accurate: the worry about tracking always comes from their sole 'challenge' being the absolute arbitrary nature of their placement, and from the worry that everything must be found in order to unlock something or gain something important. This is the trouble with framing them as treasures: it makes sense for treasures to be hidden in fairly illogical places in a game where nothing and no-one can really stop you from going anywhere. If you had the abilities of a normal person in these games, every treasure would be in a locked safe inside a guarded house, but instead they paint a portrait of a world that has adapted to this crazy hungry assassin by scattering valuables to the wind, confident that no-one else will scurry along the rooftops or explore deep into the heart of the sewers.
They're a problem I'd not like to solve, to be honest: just get rid of the idea that your character cares anything for mere objects, what kind of interesting motivation is that? But I'm humoring Ubisoft: obviously they will want some sort of collectible. So if I were to think of the least harmful thing these things could be, the first thing I'd do is strip out any extrinsic reward: no money, no super weapon, no armor as a result of collecting. Instead, make these all solely items that follow a clear and satisfying logic as to their location. Give the player a list that begins with: "A silver plate on the kitchen table of house (x) on (x) street". "A dog collar under the big redwood tree in the park in the (x) district". "A shoe tied to the lamppost at the corner of (x) and (y)".
Now, halfway through writing this I've been struck with something: the context I've imagined for these collectibles would be really cool if it were actually tied to missions, rather than just something you can do at your leisure. I've envisioned these normal items as dead drops containing messages only viewable through eagle vision. Imagine if one of the rituals at the beginning of the mission were to be told of a new location and item, and your character writes it down on their list. They can choose to go find that location and item for some extra information such as building plans or the habits of their target, or they can ignore it and complete that mission on their own. But instead of that thing disappearing if you ignore it, it just stays in the world. And the more missions you do, the more abandoned dead drops exist. If the player feels like it, at any time they can go hunt down those little drops of information they ignored, and think about the ways they could have done those missions differently, or laugh at the things they figured out the hard way.
These "collectibles" end up either appealing to your immediate need of finishing the mission, or to your nostalgia about that mission, one of the defining moments of your time with the game. And they have concrete and defined points at which you learn they've been set in their places: they were added over the course of you playing the game.
Either way, they fulfill what I imagine is the goal of collectibles: getting a bit more use out of the environment, motivating players to move in winding snaking paths rather than just point to point. It's just that in the first scenario, that extra exploration time is added to a main mission, rather than the messing around between.
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You reminded me I didn't talk at all about other games that have done things like what I'm interested in! Thief is definitely a good example, maps as a portrait of the character who owns them are fascinating things.
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I actually don't think Assassin's Creed needs significantly advanced technology to be what it wants to be, just that its priorities have become muddy and gotten in the way. Sacrifices can be made for draw distance and framerate and interactivity: game development is all about sacrificing something in order to do something else. In any case, zooming in over the shoulder of the protagonist onto a high-rez textured map, building a few animations for them as they hold it, adding a lighting source in appropriate situations: these are all the kind of details that take lots of time, lots of work, but aren't especially flashy or demanding.
You can throw a lot of money at game development, but that money can go towards both making your game seem immediately striking and interesting as well as making it hold up when people have a chance to look at it more closely for a long period of time. You need some flashy stuff: these games cost millions and have to sell! But the balance needs to be better.
Screenshot from Syndicate's "Bounty Hunt" screen. If this is all the player gets, and no specific Icon is placed onto the map to find the Bounty Targets, this would be exactly what Jermaine was talking about, and would be a huge step in the direction we want.
This is definitely getting in that direction, but looking at that highlights how important it is to display this information properly. There's something immensely unappealing to me about being shown this through a menu screen like that. Obviously things like this have to be logged away somewhere, not every menu can be represented by physical papers, but that image suffers from the problem of most of the animus databases throughout the series: it is possibly one of the most uninviting methods of reading text I've ever seen.
Of course I can only expect so much from side-targets. It's definitely encouraging to see this, but I hope it's not treated with the same casual disregard as the other interesting and since-absent steps the series has taken.
damnit... even in unrelated topics there are syndicate spoilers now. thanks daz 
it is an interesting idea and i'm interested to see how it plays out in game. it has the potential for a lot of criticism from the objective marker chaser mainstream though... but i think it will be overall well received...
“Force has no place where there is need of skill." Herodotus
people will decide they don't like it because of the lack of marker instead of because they're small diversions without much substance compared to main mission design.
EDIT: and to be fair, this is in the syndicate forums, and not story-related content
Not story-related content. I've never considered by-the-numbers Side Quests to be spoilers. They're only given names for Flavoring, not because they're real characters that will drive the plot in any way. You've nothing to worry about. 
I'm as rabid an Assassin's Creed fan as the rest of 'em, maybe more, in fact. I would never post something that would genuinely ruin someone's enjoyment without marking it off as such a post.
BUT YOU'RE WELCOME >:)
This includes things like hay bale dives, I feel: you give the player a shortcut to escape the dangers of heights, and in doing so you never instill in them any real fear or respect for those heights. In the rare moments you die from falling, it seems almost thematically inappropriate, and again, frustrating.
I'm sick right now and I had a fever dream about being in Syndicate. I ran to the edge of a building but stuttered, refusing to jump across, and bits of dust, debris and pebbles fell off the side in a neat animation. I traced their downward trajectory with my eyes and felt quite nervous. I feel like this would be one of many little touches that would let a player fear and respect heights. It's a really cheap animation trick (the pebble/debris falling a huge distance below the perilous ledge, Hollywood's been using it for decades) but it works. Adds a little more "life" to the world as well. One thing I've noticed in other recent games, MGSV in particular, that Assassin's Creed doesn't have as much is the ability to actually affect the world. There are rarely ever little animations that play when the Ancestor is exerting onto the game world. The closest they get is different running sound effects when sprinting on different surfaces. But on the whole, it feels like the ancestor is not WITHIN the game world, like they're not really, ACTUALLY there. Do you get what I mean? The only times you really get to affect the game world is when Ubisoft gives you pre-determined "pieces" that you can trigger. Like hanging barrels. Or fire-drums to shoot an Opium Dart into. It's stiff, it's pre-set, like Thief 2014's Rope Arrow anchor points. As you can imagine, that does nothing at all to make it feel like you're really inhabiting this place. It's completely static and lifeless because you can't exert any influence over it aside from killing NPCs or messing with the AI which isn't even that much fun because it's not a dedicated Stealth game. (IE therefore it wouldn't have a great depth of AI manipulation anyway.)
The problem, as you put it a long time ago, is two-fold. First, the world simply doesn't react to the player. Second, it's clearly designed from the ground up to cater to the player. This does not work. Dishonored's, Thief 123's and Hitman's worlds are all living systems with or without the player, and the onus is on the player to disrupt or not disrupt those systems as they see fit. This is why, despite those games being ostensibly "less realistic" than Assassin's Creed, they will always FEEL more realistic when PLAYED because their worlds are more consistent. A higher degree of simulation is necessary for Assassin's Creed to achieve this.
Anyway, pull back to the rooftop issue.
Honestly, Dishonored does a way better job of this than Assassin's Creed in my experience, and the easiest mission to see that in is the Assassinate Overseer Campbell mission where you can Blink up onto a roof. It's legitimately scary to look down and see how far below you the ground is. With Syndicate's increased height, I hope being on rooftops hits me with the feeling of vertigo that Unity promised. I won't sweat it if it doesn't, it'll just remain a goal to target for the future. One thing I've noticed from gameplay videos so far is that because buildings in Syndicate are so tall, you can't really see the ground at all when you're merely running between roofs horizontally. You would have to actually look directly down to see the ground, if you're in the most dense neighborhoods. That's pretty cool. Adds to the feeling of, "Wow, the ground is pretty far..."
I think Unity introduced a whole lot of dust and debris effects as a result of your movement, when clambering on stuff and running on surfaces.
but of course that stuff could be improved.
I actually think mgsv goes a bit overboard with the dust cloud impacts and such, it feels a bit unreal and exaggerated. That's a problem I had with AC1, where a single step kicked up huge dust animations that never increased or decreased based on the speed or intensity of your movement.
In general, best to keep that stuff pretty subtle so people aren't asking too many questions about the details of it, such as "where are all these pebbles coming from when I keep running at this same ledge over and over?" Again, it's not about actually simulating a real world, it's about finding simple ways to make the player respect the world and trust that the things that are happening follow a consistent relatable logic.
Sometimes that can be as simple as not giving them a completely safe and easy way to get down from extremely high places: then the subtle dust/pebble effects take on an increased significance despite remaining the same.
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Slightly different: I think it's important to not fall into the trap of seeing other similar games as being inherently "more real" or "more alive" than AC is. Even the original Thief's freeform rope arrows are part of a constrained and designed system that has limits. It is rarely a case of the implementation of a feature being simply "bad" or there being an objectively good philosophy for designing a mechanic. IMO the best way to think is: does this mechanic feel consistent within this game and what it is trying to do? And the answer might be to make it more freeform, more constrained, or replace it with something else entirely.
For example: being able to climb on any surface without any limitations might be a great mechanical implementation for a spider-man game, but Assassin's Creed requires a different take on the mechanic of "climbing" to feel consistent with the illusion of being a normal human being. The mechanic of unrestricted climbing is not at fault, it just doesn't fit into this particular game without a whole lot of extra justification.
All games are objectively still just different configurations of the same kinds of building blocks, even though humans perceive them as being more or less than the sum of their parts. Because we're good at buying into illusions.
I just feel like that's an important thing to keep in mind when considering what other games do differently and why they feel better or worse to us.
re: dust clouds and pebbles
One of my favorite things introduced in ACIV was the way the camera responded to what you were doing... when you splashed in water, it sometimes got wet (I think... maybe i'm nostalgically misremembering); when you ran faster, the camera jiggled/bobbed around more.
“Force has no place where there is need of skill." Herodotus
@McStab, camera-effects like that are always pretty cool. I'm just happy they brought back the different sounds for running on different surfaces in Syndicate.
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The dust cloud was just a single example to get us thinking in a direction. Everything else needs to be addressed as well.
The worlds in Assassin's Creed clearly exist only for the player, and it hurts so much of the illusion that we humans are so good at accepting otherwise.
The idea of it being tougher to get down is a good one, and the way you frame it is strong. More things like that would be pretty cool. Mechanics or world design bringing more weight to visual or aural effects.
You bring up a good point about comparing it to other games, for people who might be getting confused here. I'm not. I don't mean to copy other games, I mean to make Assassin's Creed better within Assassin's Creed's contexts and parameters. Even knowing THAT, many of the things I said still apply, and learning from other games has worked out for other developers more often than not. (Ubisoft rarely learns or "steals" from other games.) Players have had problems with "zombie" NPCs for a really long time in Assassin's Creed games. They've had problems feeling like the world isn't believable, or real enough, or feeling like a glorified level select to navigate through between play-sections. Even those very play-sections don't offer the same level of fluidity and emergent gameplay that other similar games do because of that very same rigid and "pre-set" nature I alluded to. That pre-set nature even extends to the enemy placement sometimes.
It's really strange. In the AC series there's that branch positioned right above the two guys and you know you can take them both down at once because you've done the same thing dozens of time with the same setup: a branch overlooking two guys. We don't do that. We don't use presets of objects, like that cart to that lattice to that gutter. We assemble assets together in an organic way so if you think you can get on the rooftop, you should be able to get there, not because the world is populated with assets you've been accustomed to identify. On the developer's side, it takes a lot more time to make obviously, because it's an old-fashioned hand-crafted process, but the experience is radically different. When you are in our environments, you need to observe, use your binoculars, mark the guys and say, okay, what do I do now? There's no obvious road.
- http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-03-23-stealth-vs-stealth
You can decide for yourself whether or not that particular thing is a problem, but what it leads to is the lack of possibility for certain actions in the game to be fun for their OWN SAKE, instead of being fun because we want to progress. Moving Snake around in MGSV just FEELS SO GOOD. You could enjoy yourself just moving him around an empty room for a few minutes with a few targets in place because KojiPro understand that, "Hey, the player is going to be controlling this character for their entire play-time. We should probably make sure that controlling him actually feels really great, before even considering level design and mission design and all that other stuff." There aren't enough different ways for the player to influence the world or AI organically, and not enough depth in the few ways we do have. The worst thing is when it makes you feel like the choice you made wasn't even really your choice, because OF COURSE you're going to run up that specific wall, or kill that specific enemy placed in that specific way.
On the side, I've been thinking a lot about the things you said regarding Fast Travel, that if Fast Travel needs to be in your game then you've done something wrong. I don't have anything to say about that just yet, still thinking on it, but I do think it raises something important.
the point that developer seems to be making is that they prefer to have fewer options that can play out in many dynamic ways, rather than many options that all need to have fairly defined rules in order to not trip over each other.
Their example is pretty vague about how it works in their game, which is because their game doesn't actually have a direct analogue to an aerial takedown, and that is what informs the difference in their philosophy to Assassin's Creed's. Kind of misleading to attribute the difference in design to an "organic" approach or "lack ofpreset assets", and absolutely ridiculous to suggest that their game has no visual language that players can use to identify viable approaches to a given situation. Just look at the cliff climbing mechanic in mgsv: http://edge.alluremedia.com.au/m/k/2014/09/http-makeagif.com-media-9-18-...
It's kind of an example of what I was talking about. Publishers like to suggest that the difference between games exists on a high level, in the structure or overall design, but most big budget games share a whole lot, and are mainly differentiated on the extremely low level: can you shoot in this game? Can you do air takedowns in this game? Can you drive a car in this game?
What I'm getting at is that there's a limit to what a game like MGSV can teach a game like Assassin's Creed, since AC has to support a wider range of abilities while MGSV is free to focus in on a smaller core moveset. Obviously execution of a given concept is important, but MGSV designers don't really have anything to teach AC's about air takedowns because... well, their game doesn't have them.
What's most relevant about the game when talking comparisons, is how it manages the split between narrative portions and player driven portions, and how it keeps its presentation consistent to and grounded in its world.
And yes, I think its mission structure is a good basic outline of how an open world stealth game should work, but that's kind of a separate issue from basic playability. AC could be structured the way it is forever and still massively improve on the low level, which might seem like a bigger benefit to a lot of people: I know that I always feel like traditonal structures can be elevated easily by fresh and genuinely fun gameplay. Some examples that come to mind: Sunset Overdrive, Titanfall, Halo 5. A typical open world game structure, a typical call of duty style structure, and a typical... halo game structure, but all of them do really interesting things on the low level ("you can grind and bounce everywhere", "you can call in a mech", "you can thruster dodge and ground pound") which makes them extremely fun as games.
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I'm not sure I'd say a game has failed if it has fast travel, simply that it has an unavoidable impact on design and navigation in that game. It usually makes the world feel smaller and traditional travel less encouraged, and if that's your goal as a designer then, hey, maybe fast travel is unreservedly for you!
The biggest lie open world games tell is that they are anything more than games with really big mission areas.
Their insecurity on that front hurts their ability to move their design forward, I feel.