Thread by @rdonoghue

The heart of this article is this: "Give me a massive world full of waypoint markers and I will just go to those markers without thinking."

For me, I LOVE exploration, and it's not the waypoints that get in the way. I don't use them until I need them, but I WANT them when I do.

https://twitter.com/thegamerwebsite/status/1353679401897103360

I find waypoints to be FAR less of a problem than the question of how much/what there is to discover in the spaces in between. This is hard (probably not impossible, but hard) to automate, because that tends to produce very banal rewards, or it otherwise bollixes the game.

Rewarding explorers without hosing everyone else is definitely tricky, but possible, because we're so inclined to make our own (often non-completionist) fun. Trick is just to realize that collectors and explorers overlap, but are not the same group.

CP2077 is chock a block full of problems, but as a place to wander around (by foot or by car) it was remarkable. A huge amount of my time in play was just wandering around. I do this in most games, and support is intensely variable.

But for all that? Sometimes I just want the Ubisoft checklist simulator. Flexibility is good.

To unpack a little bit on exploration vs. collection. If you hide 20 cool figurines in the world, and I find 17 of them:
* As an explorer, that's a cool detail and I love the continuity.
* As a collector, I have an incomplete checklist.

If they were placed randomly, the collector is now infuriated because the only way to find more is a RNG grind.

If they aren't random, and the collector hasn't been tracking from the beginning, the GREAT BACKTRACKING now begins.

But the explorer is still happy. The jerk.

If anything, I find the collector rewards are more of a deterrent to exploration than waypoints, because they introduce the idea of a "wrong" way to play things.

For example, in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, there are lots of restaurants to eat at, with hidden rewards:
1) Certain menu combinations give you buffs
2) There's an achievement for trying everything on the menu.

This seems pretty cool at first blush, but in the end it crushes you.

Because eventually, the right answer is to just walk in and buy one of everything on the menu. What had been kind of a fun choice of neat menus becomes an exercise, because you have places to be and things to do.

This is hard to fight. In a game of any length, almost anything that's fun and novel at first can become an exercise in grind after hour 25.

I mention Yakuza because I love the games greatly, but they also can really highlight the problem.

On one hand, they are GREAT environmental storytellers. Exploring the cities of the series is an absolute delight.

One the other hand there is so much"I have 49 of 50 widgets, WHERE IS THE OTHER ONE!?!?"

The Yakuza series is all about the fine line between "Diverse Fun" and "Player Punishment"

For the unfamiliar, the Yakuza series is an open world brawler (Or more recently, turn based RPG) which contains an almost preposterously deep bench of minigames, which are in turn surprisingly deep.

The minigames are mostly firewalled off from the game at large, so you can *usually* opt to play them as much or as little as you like. This is good, because there are enough of them that it's hard to like them all.

But you will sometimes encounter situations where the game (directly or indirectly) forces you to play the minigame. If it's a minigame you like? Awesome. If it's one you hate? Infuriating.

Any game which ever depends on me to do well at an indoor batting cage is a game I am likely to ragequit.

(To this day, despite 3 playthroughs, I do not have perfect completion of person 4 because of the damned fishing)

All of which is to say, it's awesome to serve many different play styles, but MAN do they step on each others toes sometimes.

(Also, it points to one of the strengths of tabletop. It is genuinely not as good at the ACT of exploration as video games, but it's vastly better at the *rewards* of exploration)

Though that has me thinking about how much collecting is an artifact of video games. It can be a plot thing in tabletop & stories, but never to the extent of knowing you have 7 of exactly 20 widgets. Even when giving bounties, that top number is usually not in play.

I'm not saying that dismissively. I'm just now wondering if it would actually *work* at the table to say "There are 19 more journals to be found"

I feel like not, because one advantage of tabletop is a high confidence you will find the *right* number of journals.

Which leads to the question of "What is the value of the unfound journal?"

It has one, clearly. It motivates completionism play. In a human run game, it's money left on the table, and a GM is unlikely to let is go to waste if it has intrinsic value. But beyond that?

Is there value to the idea of the complete set that we're *not* leaning into at the table? Or is it just that this is something computer games need to do to address what is a solved problem for people?

My gut says the latter, but I really want to inspect that.