this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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Metroidvanias are defined by gaining new equipment or powers to open new routes - trying to make that experience open world would end up like the new Zeldas, where all the puzzles are kind of flat because the game's designed to allow you to access them in any order. Metroidvanias work best with semi-linear exploration, either the 2d of earlier games and Dread, or the seperated biomes design of Prime.
You can have open worlds where parts of the world are gated by unlocks. That's a feature of a lot of open world games. Even things like GTA have gated the player from parts of the city by having things like the bridges being out until reaching a specific story beat. It's the same principle requiring a specific ability or skill to gain access to a region.
Sure, but you have similar problems of flatness - Look at Arkham Asylum Vs City and onwards - Asylum has a really tight biome-type map that opens up more and more as you get new gadgets, whereas in city you're travelling between different spots on the open map to enter smaller, linear sections that make use of the gadgets you currently have in the story, but don't generally have a reason to be revisited later once you have more gear.
Yeah I agree and don't really have a solution to that.
I think gaming is particularly interesting in how different genres originated from technical limitations as much as anything, and so have maintained designs that simulate situations we now have the technology to just depict in order to preserve the genre - you were kind of right in that metroidvanias are designed to create that perception of a big, open, connected world, and we now have the technology to make open world games, but metroidvanias are actually designed as very tightly developer controlled experiences that steer you through a maze along an ultimately linear path between upgrades and/or bosses. The connection between exploring the maze and unlocking more ways to explore it are really the core gameplay loop, so dropping either part changes the most important parts of the game.
I think open world games can pull some ideas from metroidvanias, but I can't see a way to square the circle of making a maze without the maze.
I don't think they're all linear. Only linear along segments that are strictly limited to requiring a specific tool. Sometimes you can have more than one way to access areas, and thus allow many different routes through the game. In a way BotW 2 enables this kind of approach to breaking the game with the utterly janky physics shit you can pull of in it.