ahhhhhrhgghghr. I finally got around to digging into a Switch game for the first time, because someone wanted me to hack one, and the first thing I see is a filename:
img/unity_logo.png
Do Bethesda style open world games really even need a main plot and an ending of sorts? I gotta admit, even though I've played Oblivion, Skyrim, and more times than I can even count Morrowind, I've only finished a main quest in any of them once, and it was in Morrowind with a character so fully tricked out that it was trivial to stomp through the main quest to finally see what all the fuss with Dagoth Ur was about
Like. Would it actually detract from the experience at all if they just said "hey, here's a cool sandbox full of quests and places to explore, go nuts" and there wasn't a main quest?
@eniko@opponent019 I think the main problem with that is that, after a certain amount of quests done, "Do this quest, and we'll give you gold and/or new equipment." becomes less of an incentive to do any particular quest.
A main quest helps solidify "There will be another quest after this related to this one, and here's why you'd want to do this quest." - to some extent, the Guild Quests in Skyrim sort of fill that role as well, just...to a lesser extent.
something on my timeline is making me want to make a better spreadsheet software than excel. i bet i could do it, too. probably make more money than any of the games i have and will ever make combined
@eniko@lapingvino I think the one cautionary tale that comes to mind is that I think most people forget just how many domains Excel covers; for stuff that does "some stuff better", there's almost certainly one "Wait; why is that an important feature? What do you mean you use Excel specifically for that?", And probably one "Wait - why does it even do that? No seriously; that means we need to remap this whole thing in genetics because you keep converting them to dates!" thing.