Install Age of Origins for FREE: bit.ly/3C9QiVE and build your city today! What do you think about Fully Enterable buildings? Would this be good or bad for open-world games? Is it even possible? Is it worthwhile? Let me know if I got something wrong, or you think you have better ideas- I just thought it would be an interesting topic. It seems like games these days focus more on building “in-game stores”, rather than advancing the industry forward with new revolutionary features.
Not sure if this genre can be qualified as open world, but Immersive Sims tend to have every interiors being enterable, that being seid the map is not that big compared to the usual open worlds but, it's still a large chunk to explore and you are free to go anywhere during the particular chapter until the game moves you to another map.
@@DarkSpaceStudios Deus Ex Mankind Divided, it's a pretty desolate genre as of right now, if you want another there is Deathloop lol but i strongly recommend Mankind Divided instead, insane amount of interiors, and has some side quests too, but the map as you expect is small, Prague is just a few blocks away, the other area (i forgot, the name but it's look like china's kowloon walled city) is much more vertical, then there is the end-game area in London, which takes place on a whole single building. Edit: I just saw you mentioned Dishonored lol, i am sure Deus Ex would be familiar
I remember playing GTA IV for the first time and accidentally finding so many enterable buildings. I’ll always love the abandoned casino, lawyer building and sprunk factory. So many fun times with friends and cop fights. GTA V disappointed me with the lack of buildings enterable
Interiors were a big part of Saints Row 2's charm. You had multiple multi-floored cribs that could be rag-to-riches upgraded, multi-floored nightclubs, 2 huge museums, a community center, a gambling den underneath it, a playable hotel casino, dozens of hidden locations, quickie marts, restaurants, airport, and every SR2 purist's favorite: the underground mall. Most of these were all a part of the main map and you could walk through the door. The mall has an elevator that ports you in that literally only lasts a second, but even then; you could drive down the parking garage and enter it manually/seamlessly. GTA V may have tons of instanced rooms, but SR2 is the only non-MMO game I can think of that lets you flow through the veins of an open city.
I remember being 13 and absolutely nutting when I realized you could enter the Police HQ still after the Campaign ends. Also to this day, crashing a plane and leaping out and landing perfectly on the top floor of the Ultor building in one go is S-Tier gaming. Saints Row 2 and GTA 4 will still be in my mind at 70 years old
@@liamc4809 forreal man, i think i was 13 or 14 when GTA 4 came out , then saints row 2, man those were the golden years of gaming. The secrets in saints row 2 were awesome as well just like that mission in the police station!
So glad u mentioned project zomboid, it is one of the best examples imo of the potential of a open world survival game with fully interactible and explorable buildings.
I miss when gta 4 had missions where you're required to go inside buildings and kill people but you get to choose however you wanna escape you can shoot your way down or use the elevator outside
This is why I love Star Citizen, regardless of the controversies. Every vehicle has a usable interior, like a bed to lie down on, a kitchen, a toilet, a ground vehicle with its own usable interior in the hangar etc.
This is why the "Clean House" mission is one of my favorite missions from the Call of Duty Franchise. It has you entering a building and going up the stairs while enemies or regular civilians could be behind the door, and it adds an element of surprise.
On a smaller scale, Deus Ex and Yakuza games offer a lot of interiors since they have small hub style maps, they have a lot of environmental storytelling mainly, and yakuza just offers a view into the lifestyle of japan like no other.
The reason why Yakuza's open world works so well is because of how walkable Tokyo and Yokohama are, compared to Los Angeles which is a city made for cars and hostile for pedestrians. Playing Yakuza made me realize how badly designed even my city is when it comes to walking or cycling, but even then my city is still better in that regard than 99% of American cities.
This is something I really liked when playing 7 days to Die. You could enter big buildings like the hotel, office building or hospital and spend so much time exploring and looting each location.
This is a well researched and documented case study into the future of games, although I do take issue with some parts of this video, particularly in the section where you question if it's possible. As a software developer in the industry, rendering millions of polygons on screen nowadays isn't the real issue. We have been able to render millions of polygons since Xbox 360 & PS3 days. The real issue is that developers are subject to CPU budgets and memory budget, by that I mean, the length of time it takes for an instruction or function to be processed. If you have to instruct the CPU to get X texture for Y object and it's not in CPU cache, then it needs to request the cache of the system memory, and this is where real bottlenecks can happen because if the system memory doesn't have it cached either, it then needs to go to virtual memory which is stored on the system storage device. All of this adds precious milliseconds to an instruction set before the CPU can move on to the next instruction, and a delay in that can cause things like lagging. CPU budgets for texture fetching could be as small as 50ms which is challenging if the CPU has to go all the way to virtual memory on system storage. Most studios/developers are focused on modern systems like the PS5 or XBSX however when you need to support a PC platform then you add a different layer of complexity because now you need to deal with minimum & recommended requirements. A minimum required for PC might be that the storage has to be an SSD, but you can't guarantee that particularly in countries where things are expensive like Brazil or India. So these users that use a HDD instead of a SSD then add more time on to the budgets if the CPU needs to request from storage. Another real issue is that developers are often bounded by the amount of bandwidth they can use between CPU & memory, as well as the amount of memory on the GPU. On platforms like PS5 & XBSX this isn't too much of an issue as they can code for those platforms specifically as they know the hardware limitations, however again on PC where hardware varies greatly, assumptions need to be taken. What if little Jonny who has a PC only has 4GB of GDDR5 GPU memory but the PS5/XBSX platforms have 16GB GDDR6 memory? That is a HUGE transparency, and as a developer you aren't going to target the highest end systems, you would target the lowest common dominator which will set limitations for how you go about building a game. All this is to say that the speed at which textures, objects, shaders, etc, can be fetched from memory greatly affects the ability of developers. The new consoles set a nice new benchmark and have forced a lot of PC hardware vendors to come up to the same standard however we still are seeing new GPUs coming with only 128mb busses or only 8GB of GDDR6 memory or caches not yet big enough to contain enough memory addresses for each texture. Developers are now starting to take advantage of technologies like Resizable BAR support, NVMe drives, etc, so these issues will become less of a problem, however I still think we're ways off yet before we see fully modelled interiors for buildings, it just doesn't make sense when you have to worry about stuff like drawcalls, texture size/memory limits, amongst other things. There are more ways to make a game feel more immersible other than just vertical height of buildings. 3D audio, real-time cinematics, VFX are just a few I could name.
My ultimate ambition is a game with very simple stylised graphics, but every object and nearly all rooms are fully interactive and functional and destructible, and you control the arms of your player and can pick up and throw with each hand, health is dealt via "realistic" physics systems so weapons work how you'd intuitively expect. Think human fall flat without the fuckyness and with big open world locations with mission dispersed within, free to be approached however the player sees fit. Also a big emphasis in my game design philosophy is player provoked experiences and stories. I have many ideas for control schemes and platforms and styles and stories, etc. Does anybody on this planet feel like helping me try to complete this ambition?
I wouldn't lean too much on the cloud tho. It's a great solution for the computer power needed to render complicated fully-detailed worlds, but it comes with planned obsolescence (the servers won't support your game forever), privacy concerns (tracking tools could be embedded for marketing purposes) and 100% reliance on an Internet connection. If the game company goes belly-up, your game could also be lost forever. I think current computer power should be more than enough to render a decent-sized map with fully-enterable buildings without needing the cloud, but developers these days have become too lazy and don't optimize their games as they used to.
That's simply not true. Most inhouse developed engines today are optimized for every single computation in the rendering pipeline to the fullest. Although some more optimizations could be done in the area of compiler optimization (working with cache tiling, blocking etc.) that would come at a great cost of long installation times. A counterexample that cloud based services for gaming indeed work is Microsoft Flight Simulator. It streams the scenery data from Bing maps directly to the user and therefore reduces storage usage significantly. There is a disbalance between the development of user storage (has been stagnant for years now, mostly due to the emphasis of developing faster tier 3 storage rather than more) and the storage needed for new games. Cloud based services are definitely the way to go, even though it might come with negatives.
The main issue isn’t them closing. It’s them being stable. MSFS is one of the first games to FULLY do this and because of server instability it has lead to numerous CTD issues.
Gta San Andreas graphics and modern day game engines and consoles could easily run a San Andreas sized map with fully enterable buildings. The sad truth is modern graphics take up way too much space
"your game could be lost forever". Most people don't play one game for a long time anyway. I'd rather be able to explore and interact with a living city, than a flat ground with decorated rectangular prisms in the way
Something I'd like to add, a few games do have textured buildings and whatnot one being Assassins Creed Unity, it may not be super immersive but its a nice touch and are heavily detailed for late 2014.
Gun battles in interiors are much more fun because it’s close quarters and there are usually plenty of blind spots and places to take cover. I hate getting into a pvp situation and the other player is sniping from 3 blocks away or using an oppressor to control the fight.
"fake the space" this went on to inspire another video by Jacob Geller talking about faked space. this is an amazing concept, thanks for bringing it up!
Artificial intelligence is going to be the next step of game devloppement especially in environement and decor generation. Beside moders already opened the possibility to open all buildings in games like GTA for instance. Again the gameplay is more enjoyable on these maps when you are Role playing of having different missions related to travel and entering building. More space is not always enjoyable.
cyberpunk 2077 did a pretty good job of making buildings enterable without loading. the only loading screens are during main story quests/missions/tasks/whatever
Kingdom come deliverance is so good with this. Every building is explorable and every NPC has a life. They don't just spawn in but they are real things.
I think Minecraft build server is a great example of why while this idea is great but the limitations is also greater. After like 50 rooms/space it's hard to make rooms that feels unique. And it's not like we will explore all the floors and all the rooms and buildings. The amount of data needed to save and render the building would be astronomical
Also the developer keeps in mind that most players wont stand and stare at the textures or model for more than 1 second to complete whatever task they are working on that is why we have things called hero assets for example a gun in a 1st person shooter. In 3d movies we only model what we see there is no point in going further why work harder? 🤷🏽♂️
Interiors could be procedurally generated with a seed when needed. Would save on drive space and add variation within realistic reason. nvm, was just mentioned in the vid.
Kingdom Come Deliverance I believe had fully enterable buildings atleast for the most part you could go inside every building without any loading screens and even caves and mineshafts were fully enterable only time a load screen happened is if it was a cutscene or you were fast traveling
from what I understand, a gpu only renders what is shown on screen, but if cpu only processed what is shown on screen, then games could have more details
For some reason I think you have not seen Gothic 3 (2006). Open world game with every building that exists could be entered, it is all seamless along with caves. It is of course old style fantasy with small houses and won't see skyscrapers or massive cities over 100 population. When I played the game back then in its buggy early days I still wondered why other games weren't made seamless like it considering it was out in 2006.
i feel like the game that will localize explorable buildings will be gmod, since most of the maps in the game has buildings you can enter. and it made that idea a general thing in the game itself.
Like with any mechanic it's about utility. Hitman works because the levels are small and condense a lot of content into that small space. Battle royale's work because you never know where the enemy is and you need to gear up. These are both games with a huge incentive to explore but also don't require you to explore every room of every building. My concern with making every building in a map like GTA V have explorable interiors spaces is that you make a lot of negative space. Space were there is nothing to do or find. And while that does sound great on paper by the 500th similarly decorated apartment in the 2,000 apartment building its starts to get boring quick. I think the solution would be to scrap what we think we know about design and make a totally new experience. Something with a smaller but way more condensed open world map. One that didn't just have all the cool stuff you mentioned but rather made it a big focus.
One of my fondest memories playing RDR 1 Online was sneaking around a one of the houses you could go into with two of my friends looking for me to kill me but genuinely not being able to figure out where I was because I would sneaking out one of the windows of one room and moving while crouched on the roof to another window to a different room. There were a few places like that and it was always just so exciting to have that tension and element of surprise when I’d attack one of them when they split up. It was 100000x more fun than generic “HEY THERE IS GUY IN FIELD I SHOOT AT HIM” shit.
Once developers figure out how to procedurally generate the interiors I can see this becoming a thing. I don't think any company is going to spend hundreds of man hours creating interiors for every skyscraper in their game.
Developers don't do it because its genuinely distracting from gameplay. We already could do this a long time ago actually, but theres a reason beyond "technical limitations" for why devs chose not to do it.
The fact that game devs are failing to fill even the most basic open worlds with fun things to do I doubt this will make games any better, probably just more full and boring that ever before
when i was 10 i saw gta 4 gameplay and i thought u could enter every building and wished to play the game but it wasnt like this when i got to play the game
In Assassin’s Creed Unity, a decent part of that game’s map of Paris had fully modeled explorable interiors. I remember parkouring from the roof of a building into the window of another building, running around its interior, then jumping out of another window onto another building. Granted, many of these interiors were copied and reused across the map (I think they may have used procedural generation or something similar but I’m not 100% sure of that) but they were still able to maintain the illusion.
@@DarkSpaceStudios Have you checked Deus Ex or Cyberpunk? those games also had insane amounts of enterable buildings, and Bethesda games too (but they had loading screens when you go in/out)
@@i7583 actually not, i believe Rockstar realized how they were loosing players about 1-2 years ago, and are sorts scrambling to make GTA 6, since most content has been new vehicles, and the Cayo heights was sorta low effort to retain players
This is what I like least about gta5's map, almost nothing has any interiors, and exploring the world gets boring quick because there's only one major city and nothing to really do in it. Rdr2 definitely fixed that issue and I hope to see GTA 6 take the route rdr2 took with random houses, saloons, and shops all having interiors.
Yet people say GTA V has one of the most lived in open worlds. It doesn't. GTA IV, RDR1 and RDR2 all beat the sh*t out of it in terms of open world, whether is interiors, NPC AI, NPC activities, density, etc. GTA V just pales in all these regards in comparison.
@@youmakenosense7437 yeah I've also seen san Andreas's map and it not only feels bigger, but you could buy tons of properties and garages in multiple cities. Seeing what rockstar is capable of, GTA V is probably their most overrated game. In 5 there's one city and a useless desert above it. Do a full loop of the highway and you've essentially seen everything, and the few buisnes there are in story are useless and all in los santos, and you can't go inside them anyway... Unless you grind tirelessly in GTA online to get what people could get from just having fun all the way back during GTA San Andreas.
GTA 5 is still a great game and better than most of the other GTAs. Yes GTA 4 and SA did some things better but I don't see that being a reason to call GTA 5 a bad game
@@victordunjic9351 Nope GTA 5 feel really boring most of the times. As an example I played GTA San Andreas for 4-5 years without getting bored, GTA 4 for 5 years too, I never got bored of the city in thoses GTA Games but with GTA 5 I was bored of the city like 1 year after the release the game already left a bad taste in the mouth, like if it was way way overrated. Yeah there is cars customisation, weapons customisation, a tons of cars, of planes, etc... but the city is dead, no interiors, story is not really the best, police AI are dumb compared to GTA 4, for me GTA 5 is definitely a downgrade !
@@victordunjic9351 GTA 5 is definitely a nice game, don't get me wrong, but the people above are right. It has a pretty bland map with not nearly as many activities to do as GTA San Andreas, a game that is MUCH older. The fact that GTA SA is even being SLIGHTLY compared to GTA 5 says a lot about it. Not only that but, in GTA SA, there is a PC mod from 2014 that makes basically every building enter able. Meanwhile GTA 5 doesn't have that. You have to admit, recent open world games have been lacking content
@spartanguitarist6579 Boston in Fallout 4 is way bugger than any Elder Scrolls city. It's not reasonable nor realistic to expect every multi-story building there to be fully explorable. I don't think you understand how much that would add to the development time.
Fallout 4 Is just your Base Building Game with Console Commands where you can Build on Any Location but yes most Places are very Small and there is nothing Special about them.. Once you Exit you will probably never come back. A Scout system where players need to hide from Toxic Rain or Hordes would be ok Barricade for some Ingame Hours and Hear if the Noices are gonne if you dont want to look out of the Door.. @@spartanguitarist6579
This was one of my big fantasies when I was a kid. I sort of just thought of all buildings as "real" and enterable, but maybe not for the PC. I remember just being blown away by GTA because you could exit the vehicle.
@@oldcat1790 It's not especially needed to do like every floor of a building enterable, just adding like 2-3 floor for a majority of building on the map could be already insane. Plus devs don't need to add everything at launch, they can simply do that like for GTA Online by adding DLCs with time.
Same when Vice City was out...the thought of being able to take any car and do anything was awesome..but if the next one leaned in on more interiors the community would love it because we've been asking for it forever now..
One of the reasons I loved playing fallout 4 so much was the fact that many of the buildings could be entered and explored, and all of them felt unique. It felt like there was always something new to see.
@@martinpalm5the problem is that the interiors of SA were in a separate space, so it felt isolated from the world. GTA 4 did it much better, except that the average player didn't really care so they had a middle ground in GTA V where there's interiors but they get locked outside certain events.
It looks like parallax interiors are going to be a main stay in a lot of games as not only was it used in Marvel's Spider-Man, and The GTA Trilogy, but now in titles like Saints Row the reboot and The Last Of Us Part 1. So I definitely expect more devs to utilize this technique in the future.
You should look into parallax mapping, because it has far more history than the games you listed. If I'm not mistaken, the effect used to make false interiors has been utilized even during the 7th generation of consoles.
@@spudman1734 Yep, am fully aware of parallax mapping its been used in gaming titles for quite some time. I mentioned these specific games because they utilize Paralex Interiors.
@@jwalster9412 And that's by design, parallax interiors are not full 3D modeled interiors or anything, there point in games like Spider-Man PS4 is to make the world feel more alive.
I think you've put your finger on a good example. Elder scrolls games have always let you go everywhere but as the writing got worse they became less engaging and compelling. Fallout is another good example the isometric games are still an experience that sucks with you longer than the vast majority of the content in the 3d ones (New Vegas excepted). Having a technicality impressive world where all the interiors are modelled and every pollen grain is fully modelled and simulated doesn't mean sh*t if the game is bad. You PLAY games, you feel and remember the story and characters no amount of ray traced ambient occlusion with nanite powered algorithmically generated (the only cost effective way) locations will fix that. Dwarf fortress was an ASCII art game for years and it will give you experiences you'll be telling people about untill you can't talk and no round of modern warfare 2 remastered can give you an experience that the original couldn't, sure it might look better but everything is HD in your memory. What makes the Elder Scrolls games great isn't just that if you can see it you can visit it, it's that it's worth visiting.
I always dreamed of a GTA Game that would be explorable in and out. From building interiors to accessible means of transpors(busses, boats, planes, cruisers...)
Even if you’re able to go anywhere, the main problem of a world feeling empty isn’t solved by this. There needs to be uniqueness incorporated into every location in the game. It requires some combination of painstaking manual work or an incredibly well designed procedural generator to make these large worlds feel alive.
The thing that I loved about Ghost Recon Wildlands is that literally every building in the map had an inside, and while a lot of the buildings were generic copy/pastes of others, it allowed for much more dynamic gameplay especially in big cities
This makes me want a Die Hard-style game which takes place entirely inside a single building, but every aspect of that building is fully modeled and realistic allowing for countless approaches to a single objective
@@MisterMelvinheimer kinda. I enjoyed Prey for sure but a more grounded experience would be awesome to see. I want a titanic game where you can explore the whole ship and try to survive the sinking
I remember True Crime NYC tried doing this by having 100 enterable buildings with a random side mission attached. It was the same interior with a different texture set and the RNG missions were repetitive but it was really trying to make NY in the game feel real.
I absolutely loved that game i would spend hours simply driving around the streets i really loved that i want a remake! Didn't care much for LA it was NY for me ❤
I tried replaying it sad it never got a remaster like you said random missions were awesome and some had different interiors there was clubs, gas stations, offices, apartments
@@hawken796 who is that? But game concept is amazing if that game was remastered you could play it forever really just driving around waiting for crimes arresting people pulling people over checking there trunks shit was beyond its time
I remember when there was a bug in gta 5 that was discovered around 2015 that allowed you to enter a specific floor of the FIB building by parachuting in. It was hard and it took some effort to get in, but when you were in it felt amazing and like you were exploring a part of the map you couldn't enter under normal circumstances (because you can't). I remember having a blast with my friends trying to get in and defend it from the inside while also exploring it. It was probably the most fun I ever had in that game....then they patched it out. Why? You already had the floor created and it still takes up storage space since it's part of a mission in the story mode. Instead of updating the building to have maybe more floors or make it a more fun place, they let the floor be see through by the glass but impossible to get in. Another boring building with no purpose but to look nice from the outside.
There was a user curated deathmatch game in that building, we had amazing times in that. Most of us just rocking the automatic shotgun and having fun in an enclosed space.
you can still get into the FIB building today, through the skylight. that glitch has been in the game unpatched for years, and I agree, very fun to explore.
@@mynameiswalterhartwellwhite420 do you mean being hijacked and thrown out while being in a heli next to the skylight? last I checked it didn't seem to work for me
Just land a bobcat on the roof window in some way that you can go underneath, aim your gun and roll forward and you will be pushed through the glass inside the building.
What if we just had everything enterable with lower texture quality overall so we can make the indoors a bit better and put tons of details that don't decrease performanc
Star Wars Galaxies allowed fully enterable buildings nearly 20 years ago, they did it by having instanced interiors of a few set rooms with different furniture arrangements (set by the player). There was some lag and the interior furniture and decorations sometimes took a while to load, but players could build cities multiple kilometers across with every building enterable (if they made it public).
@@Xero_Wolf They also used this instancing system to create Starship interiors, so you could walk around the inside while it's moving without any issues. Because the interior instance wasn't moving at all. Though the biggest ships available for this were roughly Gozanti sized, the idea of having corvettes or even Star Destroyers flown this way was a dream by both players and devs alike. I Think combining that with Portal style portals (along the hangar entrances and airlock doors) would be a brilliant way to implement Seamless capital ship integration and docking to a game. like a cross between Star Wars Galaxies and the OG Battlefront
There's also the limitations on human creativity and capabilities of making a game like that, that's worth playing. Many games have made something so vast and explorable, but it doesn't mean much when it all feels so empty.
I think that's cyberpunk 2077. It has SUCH an incredible world and it "feels" like a lot is going on in the city. But once you start exploring, trying to go into buildings but can't and interacting with NPCs is basic as hell, you realize it's just a facade.
Yeah, if you include the constraints of 1) a regular sized development team and 2) a reasonable amount of time, there’s a proportional relationship between the sheer size of a game world, and it’s detail and interactivity. Ubisoft games might be large in size, but tend to have few details in that size, much of it feels like it was terrain painted. Immersive sim-type games are the inverse. The levels are a lot smaller in size, but can be incredibly complex in their interactivity and responsiveness to player action. The classic im-sims are perfect examples of this. Thief 1, Thief 2, and Deus Ex all have small levels, but those levels have extensive gameplay options. You can usually tackle a problem in numerous ways. Deus Ex’s player reactivity is still impressive now. The Arkane games are like that as well, Dishonored 1, 2, and Deathloop take that idea of small levels with well thought out layouts and complex player decision making, and run with it. R* games like RDR2 are big, and have a respectable amount of interactivity and detail, but they still don’t have the same level as im-sims. They also take a massive team, with a lot of crunch, a long time to make. Procedural generation is truly the only way to do something like that without the time, money and manpower of R*. Microsoft Flight Sim’s model for that is excellent, because they are continuing to work on it. The game is out and playable, and they can spend their time now taking the big cities and making them detailed, removing the procedural generated buildings and replacing them with accurate ones.
even games like immersive sims where everything is explorable and worthwhile, are immensely difficult to make. i can see that being worthwhile if there is massively multiplayer involvement in the game where you are allowed contribute to changes in the game
10:16 Forza Horizon 5 also has buildings with 3D interiors, despite being a driving game where you spend most of your time going at +300 KPH, yet the devs took the time and effort to details those buildings, wich i thought was amaizing
That would just have been done with Interior Mapping (the interiors are not really there its just a tricky texture that makes it look 3d but its a flat surface) really cool tech that doesnt require heaps of your devices resources
One of the reasons that "The Elder Scrolls" is my favorite Video Game Series, is because every single location is enterable. Sometimes it will say a door can only be opened with a Key, but obtaining that Key is not impossible or anything, just locked behind a Quest. Every Building, every Cave, every Castle. Now, we just need another Elder Scrolls game in the next 200 years, but other than that...
Something more modern its ok using elder scrolls as an example but if its set around the time where your only buildings are castles and barns/shacks then its not very interesting is it..
@@ThatCarGuy1983 The same can be said to any modern day games, it's just another random corporate office #3921, another apartment complex #4171, and bunch of houses and shops. You probably didn't even play the game, i saw your other comment saying Yakuza is bad because the lack of cars.....
@@blueborb8581 I agree. People are saying Starfield isn't up to snuff on graphics (Beth's newest RPG if you're unaware) but I don't really care because I love Bethesda's products so for me, if it's made with love and it's an open world RPG and it's made by Beth, then i'll play it. But nothing beats the old Scrolls and Dragonfires, if you ask me.
we can easily make a game where every building can be enterable etc, it's just graphics always take a priority, if the games graphics wasn't such a clutch and it was all about gameplay it could easily have been done by now.
WRONG. Skyrim already pulled of the every building can be enetered with great graphics for the time. The graphic is not the problem. The gameplay is. There are very few games out there that actually need interiors for gameplay. Why should a studio spend money and crunch time on lavish interiors for a spiderman game. RDR2 on the other hand does need interiors because it makes sense. Both games have great graphics
It's already been done. For example, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is not only infinite in size (to the limit of your hardware), but every single building, structure, vehicle, cave, and other feature is both explorable and destructible. Of course, it doesn't use graphics beyond simple sprites, which is why the cowadoody crowd will never even know it exists, much less evince interest in playing it.
@@wasteurtime5677 having small enterable buildings isn't even a remotely comparable to having fully rendered skyscrapers With thousands of rooms per skyscraper. You are a perfect example of the dunning Krueger effect.
This is one of the highest quality video on the subject of video game essay! Amazing editing, great writing, I truly appreciate the effort. You deserve more subs! And I'm here for it. Keep up the GREAT work!
This was my first thought. Feed an algorithm some common architectural building layouts and then have every wall and door generated in a space. Then populate it with pre-made furniture assets and other stuff based on the type of building/room it is. (e.g. If it's a living room, 100% chance of a couch present, 40% chance of a coffee table present, 10% chance of a soda can present on coffee table)
AI is computationally heavy and not likely to be utilized in real time by end users. It will, however, play a massive role in generating large open worlds in the development stages.
While most aren't enterable, the shops and other buildings you can enter in Yakuza Kiwami 1/2 really added a lot to the game for me, like fighting thugs on the street and the fight being dragged into these buildings was always a really cool concept to me.
Man Saints Row and especially Saints Row 2 was a great jump with it's interiors. Another example is Red Dead Redemption 1 & 2. Even though 2 was somewhat downgraded with the interiors unfortunately, but still was interesting to explore houses in your travels.
@@flynnmiddleton7102 I agree rdr2 has more detailed interiors. Yet rdr1 has more interiors (at least I think so) Quality vs Quantity. Other than that though. Rdr 2 still did a great job especially with the homes you find out exploring. I was a little disappointed with St. Denis though wish there was more enterable buildings other than the shops and bars.
@@Youraveragegamer_97 Yeah I remember that article. I wasn't really surprised there were interiors that weren't enterable. But somewhat disappointed that they did seem to have less to an extent.
For those interested, in Project Zomboid all of the buildings are enterable and furnished. Not a fully 3d game (its isometric) but its map is a pretty accurate to scale map of the area around Louisville, Kentucky. Great game if you like zombie and or survival games.
@@RusticRonnieyeah it should be quite simple to do this. It could be just like minecraft terrain generation, but for interior. As long as you have the same seed for each building, it will create the same interior. So, you could make it so that the specific rooms of the interior are generated only when you enter them. Simple as it’s possible but yeah it does take time and money to implement. It’s not really that much of a needed feature in games too.
Gta IV and its dlcs were the best for exploration, save for a few interiors that were only available during certain missions they were ALL accessible in multiplayer and I use to love spending hours exploring mission interiors again
Sometimes I wonder, what if instead of invisible barriers, players who reached one-end of the map will find themselves on the other side, as if the world is spherical?
If you look at Arma 3, almost every building is enterable on Altis, Stratis (both of which are based on real locations, 1:1 scale. Altis being based off Lemnos, I dont know about Stratis) and Malden. They aren't furnished, but they are enterable, which adds a dynamic to the game, especially where destruction is concerned. That game came out in 2012/13 (I don't know which but it doesn't matter). Later they added Tanoa where most buildings aren't enterable because it would be too difficult and demanding because of the number of trees and other details. *Edit- Altis and Stratis are not 1:1 scale, but otherwise fairly accurate.
@@jan_the_man and at that, they are well furnished, even with different style based on where they are, city houses have modern interiors while village houses are more rustic. really excited for the future of arma.
This is one for AI to solve. Not just bland, basic procedural generation, but advanced offline ML models infering what interiors should look like and how you can interact with them; paired with a vast amount of variables and finishing touches by artists/devs. Wouldn't be surprised of we have a large open world game doing this by the end of the decade.
I remember playing Skyrim and imagining being able to walk out of a door and not having to load, look through windows and seeing the inside/outside of a building, and having realistic movements for the character. Then RDR2 came out and I was living my dreams
Any GTAV building with glass windows allows you to watch real life going on outside, high end apartments and similar, offices, agencys, also CCTV systems exist in many organizations buikdings.,
State of decay 2 is another great game, pretty sure you can enter every single building in that game, every room as well. They aren't multi story buildings with the max being 3 I think but it's a zombie survival game, maybe 3 might have a mini city with every building entreable.
This has been my wish for years. Tried making towers and maps with at least 3 floors back in Halo Reach and 4, but always hit the asset limit. Then i considered making a game packed with content and features and larger maps but with older ps/n64 graphics. But now im glad were at the age where my dreams are more than just wishes, and im pretty excited for it.
I've thought about the same thing many times; I mean, compromising and using only "old-school" graphics but just filling every inch of every structure with interiors. Trouble is, like others have said in other comments here, that it would all have to serve some kind of in-game purpose. I used to play Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, a cool top-down ASCII style zombie/crafting/survival game, and it has procedurally generated towns with full interiors. The items and furniture etc found inside though are used mainly as equippable weapons or crafting materials. Not exactly riveting stuff. I feel like as we speak, companies are working on using the latest AI tech to generate everything from better interiors to much better NPCs.
This is one of the reasons I love 7 Days to Die (PC version) - there are so many buildings to explore, and they continue to be filled out and detailed and have variations so it’s not the same exact building each time. And they’re all destructible!
I love 7 days also. My problem with the game is that, with the way I play it at least, I get to a point where me and my buds are self-sustaining inside our impenetrable base, and have little reason to explore after that. The game becomes more of a tower defense base building game at that point. And then, once the game starts sending so many zombies our way during the blood moon, that our computers can no longer handle the amount of zombies on screen, it becomes unfun to play. After that, we stop. However, during the time before that point, it's definitely a blast. The exploration was always cool.
@@ShadeSlayer1911 to me, having a story in 7 days would be great, or creating incentives to build multiple bases and having to travel would be cool too. Some mods make the hordes much harder and more fun (darkness falls, war3zuk and apocalypse now) I think with more progression, more things to do (more than fetch and/or clear missions) and more variety in the zombies would go a long way
Probably one of my favorite things about the game “Project zomboid” probably one of the most in-depth survivals games. Completely feature rich, every building is enterable. Gotta Check it out!
State of decay 1 and 2 also allow you to enter every building. They are small towns and most buildings don't have more than two floors but it's still pretty immersive.
@@csam9167 CDDA is leagues deeper tbh. That game on experimental has a complex skill system that focuses on proficiencies on top of practical and theoretical knowledge. There's also a player camp system that's still being fleshed out. Pretty cool stuff.
State of decay does a good job of having decently large map areas where all the buildings can be entered. Now if they made it to where you could change your surroundings more, like being able to move cars off/onto the roads or fortify random buildings/expand your base, THAT would be amazing! Also having weather/seasons would be nice. As for RDRII. I'd just be happy with private lobbies so I could actually play with my friends.
When I first played Grand Theft Auto 5, (Around the time when they first implemented Online) I went straight into my first public session. Unused and unfamiliar to the maps, I dreamed of VS missions, of one team of players trying to secure an objective, whether it be territory or an object, while the other team prevents them. Utilizing each room, of each building and skyscraper to to get a vantage point and the like. Sniper battles could be sudden and unexpecting, distracting the team from the less guarded objective, and many other 'plays' being made from that. Then... the usage of aerial or ground attack vehicles, such as the buzzard or the tank, could lay waste and destroy these buildings, the rooms of where these snipers would be perched, ending the engagement outright, while also drawing attention to themselves. Basically... a fully fledged 'Battlefield' destruction experience, with the freedoms of Grand Theft Auto, with the unrealistic 'at the time' concept of room to room interiors. I relished ideas like these, and had blast sharing them with my friends. Granted... I was a bit disappointed when I first played GTA Online, but still had some fun with the game. Fingers crossed that fully rendered, decorated, and filled building interiors will someday soon be the norm 😁👍
Repent and follow Jesus my friend! Repenting doesn't mean confessing your sins to others, but to stop doing them altogether. Belief in Messiah alone is not enough to get you into heaven - Matthew 7:21-23, John 3:3, John 3:36 (ESV is the best translation for John 3:36). Contemplate how the Roman empire fulfilled the role of the beast from the sea in Revelation 13. Revelation 17 confirms that it is in fact Rome. From this we can conclude that A) Jesus is the Son of God and can predict the future or make it happen, B) The world leaders/nations/governments etc have been conspiring together for the last 3000+ years to accomplish the religion of the Israelites C) History as we know it is fake. You don't really need to speculate though because you can start a relationship with God and have proof. Call on the name of Jesus and pray for Him to intervene in your life. - Revelation 3:20 Revelation 6 1st Seal: White horse = Roman Empire conquering nations under Trajan 98-117 AD & Gospel spreading rapidly. 2nd Seal: Red horse, bloody civil wars with 32 different Emperors, most killed by the sword. 185-284 AD 3rd Seal: Black horse, economic despair from high taxes to pay for wars, farmers stopped growing. 200-250 AD 4th Seal: Pale horse, 1/4th of Romans died from famine, pestilence; at one point 5,000 dying per day. 250-300 AD 5th Seal: Diocletian persecuted Smyrna church era saints for ten years, blood crying out for vengeance. 303-312 AD 6th Seal: Political upheaval in the declining Roman Empire while the leaders battled each other. 313-395 AD Revelation 7 Sealing of 144,000, the saints, before trumpet war judgments, which led to the fall of the Roman Empire. Revelation 8 1st Trumpet: Alaric and the Goths attacked from the north, the path of hail, and set it on fire. 400-410 AD 2nd Trumpet: Genseric and the Vandals attacked the seas and coastlands, the blood of sailors in water. 425-470 AD 3rd Trumpet: Attila and the Huns scourged the Danube, Rhine & Po rivers area, dead bodies made water bitter. 451 AD 4th Trumpet: Odoacer and the Heruli caused the last Western Emperor (sun), Senate (moon) to lose power. 476 AD With the Western Roman Emperor (restrainer of 2 Thes. 2) removed; the son of perdition Popes took power. Revelation 9 Two woe judgments against the central 1/3rd and eastern 1/3rd of the Roman Empire. 612-1453 AD 5th Trumpet: Locust & scorpions point to Arabia, the rise of the Muslim army. Islam hides Gospel from Arabs. 612-762 AD 6th Trumpet: Turks released to attack Constantinople with large cannons (fire, smoke, brimstone). 1062-1453 AD Revelation 10 The little book is the printed Bible, which was needed after the Dark Ages when Scriptures were banned by Popes. Revelation 11 7th Trumpet: Martin Luther measured Roman Church; found that it’s an apostate church, not part of true temple. The two witnesses are the Scriptures and saints who proclaim the pure Gospel and testify against the antichrist Popes. Papal Church pronounced Christendom dead in 1514 AD. Silence for 3.5 years. Then Luther posted his 95 Thesis, which sparked the Protestant Reformation and brought the witnesses back to life. Millions of Catholics were saved. Revelation 12 Satan used the Roman Empire to try to wipe out the early Church, Satan was cast down as the Empire collapsed. Revelation 13 The antichrist beast Popes reigned in power 1,260 years, 538-1798, is the little horn of Daniel 7, son of perdition. The false prophet Jesuit Superior General rose to power from land (earth) of Vatican and has created many deceptions. Revelation 14 Points to great harvest during the Protestant Reformation & wrath on Catholic countries who obey antichrist Pope. Revelation 15 Overcoming saints victorious over the beast. Prelude to 7 vials and judgment on those who support Papal Rome. Revelation 16 1st Vial: The foul sore of atheism was poured out on Catholic France, leaving them with no hope, led to revolution. 2nd Vial: The French Revolution started in 1793, killed 250,000, as France had obeyed the Pope and killed saints. 3rd Vial: The French Revolution spread to rural areas of France, where Protestants had been killed in river areas. 4th Vial: The bloody Napoleonic wars shed the blood of countries who had revered and obeyed the antichrist Pope. 5th Vial: Judgment on the seat of the beast. Papal States invaded in 1798, Pope imprisoned, removed from power. 6th Vial: The Turks vast domain dried up, they were only left with Turkey. They lost control of Palestine in 1917 AD, Israel became a nation again in 1948
10:15 I remember first seeing this in the original Watch Dogs and just being blown away at how much it did to make the world feel a bit more real. Like I am just a smaller part of a much bigger city. It only did the ceiling and would sometimes look wrong at the corner of buildings but being able to look upwards at a building at night and seeing floor after floor was really cool.
This is why i always prefered mutiplayer in GTA 4 over GTA 5. You had so many interiors you could enter in Liberty city. The highrise project tenements, The hotel with lobby, and penthouse interiors, you had several window washer elevators on the sides of buildings, several enterable hallways of apartment buildings, the casino,the ship, all the subway stations, the maintenance subway entrance, burger shot, Cluckin Bell etc. It was fun, you really could hide in buildings and have shootouts all the time.GTA 5's map felt like a huge downgrade from this.
I totally agree with you, I have the same feeling, I remember playing GTA 4 without always to be in a car, a lot more times at foot than in GTA 5, in GTA 5 there is nothing enterable (or it's just our own buildings, like Night Club, Bunkers etc...) so you just fly accross the map because there is nothing to see in the city.
LVL designer here. In my personal experience the best way of doing an immersive world is the way that Deus Ex series did it. Basically, hub worlds with a huge number of details and levels layered on top of each other with multiple connective paths, some available only if you have a required skillset or are in the certain point in the story/ made a "correct decisions". If done in this way, there is a lot of density and interactions as well as a bunch of NPC's but since this hub is separated from the rest of the world, resource need is lower. This also helps the designers focus on one area at a time, giving it more details, making it generally look and feel more realistic. Aside from that, no need for procedural generation... The movement between the hubs and the loading can be done through animations or separated smaller linear maps with low resource requirements, making the player move through the path whilst the new hub is loading, bypassing the need for a loading screen. In that way, from a players perspective, there is no difference since they cannot be disrupted by loading of the next hub... Basically, the best way of doing it in my opinion is by concentrating on smaller worlds that are packed with life in stead of using simple fetch quests and similar methods, unless of course the point is to make a played feel small, like the way S.T.A.L.K.E.R. did...
Deus Ex was not an open world game, none of their games were, they were all limited space areas that literally birthed the desire for open world games.
@@SherrifOfNottingham True, but because everything was so detailed and behind almost every door is an NPC with a quest (Just like in Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines, also area based) it feels like it's way more open than big empty maps with a lot of useless travel times
The issue has never really been hardware or software, it's always come down to time, making every building in GTA V enterable with an interior is entirely possible, it just would take forever to do, to model unique interiors for every single floor of every single building, to add different elements to every individual home and room so not to have them all repeat. There are some games that prove this would work, fortnite for example has pretty much every single building enterable across it's large map, Minecraft allows the player to assemble massive cities filled with unique custom buildings and their interiors, space engineers offers the same option with large scale spacecraft with advanced destruction physics to boot. The one issue that would crop up in some cases would be load times, with the question being, how do you get all the internal assets to load in a world like GTA without taking forever or lagging every time you enter a render chunk. Simple solution for this is to just have junk assets only spawn when a player is either inside or just outside a building, this obviously applies more for online play as during single player the game would only need to load what is relevant to the player location. The next step from this would be adding destruction elements to this fully explorable world, in an online game like GTA the destruction would have to be limited in some level to maintain lobby playability, if you could destroy everything then you could enter a wasteland of a map instead of a city This could be achieved with two methods, either reducing the availability of extreme destruction tools or having a suitable retaliation method for the AI to enact upon player terrorism acts. Additionally for the sake of world life, instead of simply making the building respawn, having construction workers show up and repair it over an ingame day or so would be pretty cool. These kinds of games are entirely possible just at this time they'd end up being sandbox games which is the only downside. Though I'd love a good survival game with those features.
This world is rapidly passing away and I hope that you repent and take time to change before all out disaster occurs! Belief in messiah alone is not enough to grant you salvation - Matthew 7:21-23, John 3:3, John 3:36 (ESV is the best translation for John 3:36) if you believed in Messiah you would be following His commands as best as you could. If you are not a follower of Messiah I would highly recommend becoming one. Call on the name of Jesus and pray for Him to intervene in your life - Revelation 3:20. Contemplate how the Roman Empire fulfilled the role of the beast from the sea in Revelation 13 over the course of 1260+ years. Revelation 17 confirms that the beast is in fact Rome. From this we can conclude that A) Jesus is the Son of God and can predict the future or make it happen, B) The world leaders/nations/governments etc have been conspiring together for the last 3000+ years going back to Babylon and before, C) History as we know it is fake. You don't really need to speculate once you start a relationship with God. Can't get a response from God? Fasting can help increase your perception and prayer can help initiate events. God will ignore you if your prayer does not align with His purpose (James 4:3) or if you are approaching Him when "unclean" (Isaiah 1:15, Isaiah 59:2, Micah 3:4). Stop eating food sacrificed to idols (McDonald's, Wendy's etc) stop glorifying yourself on social media or making other images of yourself (Second Commandment), stop gossiping about other people, stop watching obscene content etc. Have a blessed day!
I mean, they may be working on it in gta 6 because they started working on the game after gta 5 (2013) release and they would finish in 2026, hence why they took so much time and work to finish the game, but hey, I may be wrong tho 🤷♂️
That's one of the thing's I loved about the Original Shenmue on Dreamcast. Especially around 1999, a game where you could enter a plethora of buildings.
Although it didn't have Skyscrapers, I always liked how Zelda Breath of The Wild allowed you to enter every single building. The exceptions only being things like a shed behind a house in Hateno Village, and locations buried in Rubble.
I remember playing kingdom come deliverance and being so immersed in the world. I couldn't figure out why it felt so real at first until it finally occurred to me that it was because every building was enterable. You walk down the streets of Rattay at night and you can see the candle light coming from the windows of buildings. When you ride your horse around the country side and stumble upon a cottage it feels exciting because you know it's more than just set dressing. It's shelter, a place where you can potentially get food and water and have a rest until the sun comes up. KCD is such a good example of how a detailed living world is almost always better than a massive one. The world is really quite small but exploring it is extremely engaging nonetheless because of how detailed and alive it feels.
The first game that comes to mind when I think about this is skyrim, I don't think there are any doors that don't lead somewhere in skyrim, you can enter any house in any town, any cave or cavern, any ruins or watchtowers. Truly an open world game
Agree 1000% percent that Features are much more important than Graphics. Seems like the industry intentionally forgot that (to sell hardware) after the 90s and early 2000s, except for the Indie sphere. But I don't think this would work for GTA gameplay in it's current iteration. Maybe if it was geared more towards simulation and sandbox instead of linear storytelling. But I don't see that happening, unless Rockstar or other developers somehow get a core team capable of honestly revolutionizing not just the entire genre but open world gaming as a whole. Which would take time and money that almost nobody is willing to risk. Battlefield and Battle Royale's on the other hand might make it work, but it would be a tough balancing act to make it fun in actual gameplay. Especially destructible buildings. But not impossible. As for using all of these ideas in classical open world games (except destructibility, that's too big of a Pandoras box)... Maybe if a developer opted for long term and used modular release windows. Let's say Cyberpunk. Instead of the entire city, just one district. Or use mega-skyscrapers instead of districts. But you could find things to do around almost every corner. And the entire 3d space of the district would be used, from the rooftops down to the subway and sewers. Architecture is one of the more interesting aspects of cyberpunk cities after all. And a year or a bit longer later, they release another district. And build the city little by little. This would require a good long-term team of developers of course. And good core gameplay, because without it, it's just a walking simulator. Though a good walking simulator of a cyberpunk city with the right music and vibes might not be a bad idea, sometimes you just wanna see stuff. Or a multiplayer community built city. Expand a city organically, just like in real life. Not sure how gameplay would work though. A city of just Bob the Builders??? Not sure how marketable any of these ideas are, but it's fun to dream.
I don't care about entering random ass buildings as they would be copy pasted and boring. I indeed think it would work within a game set in the wilderness, with small amount of buildings. Like RDR2.
On one hand I fully agree with you. A single player experience with fully explorable interiors/buildings is a great evolution of the open world genre. A PVP experience within that world sounds fucking awful. Simply put - having to worry about an enemy behind every window of multiple skyscrapers sounds like an unimaginable nightmare.
In online multiplayer they can keep private lobbies n allow players settings to let only who they allow in they can also make player properties the only indestructible properties lol
![Fully Enterable Buildings In Gaming [Future Of Games 1/6]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
