What would you guys think of a game that played kind of like Metroid, but was more open world?  Things you do affect other parts of the world, and you can pretty much go wherever you want, assuming that you have the equipment to get there.

Sounds like it could work.  Actually, yeah I would be interested in seeing how that would play out. :)
 
BTW, are you planning on releasing this only on xbox live, or are you also going to release it on PC? :D

Isnt insanely twisted shadow planet doing that? shadow complex? what did you mean by open world?

Like Terraria?

Like Terraria?

@Video_Game_King said:

@bibamatt said:

Like Terraria?

Fuck. You beat me by at least an hour.

I beat your mother.

Wait a minute..... that's terrible :(

I think the problem you get with that is massive loads of backtracking. Megaman ZX was a game that tried to do this, and I ended up disliking many of the levels for this very reason. In an open-world game, usually getting from point wherever you are to a mission isn't the challenging part, it's the mission itself (or should be). The down-time is used for collecting, traversal, ect.

In a 2D game, suddenly you're replaying sections of the game multiple times just to get somewhere and it suddenly becomes a rather large gameplay issue. That's why games emulate what Metroid has done and bases progression on getting items (and not to far off what you said to begin with) and spaces the newer areas in a fashion that limits backtracking to a minimum and usually presents it so that an area you've been has new things to discover.

A purely open world 2D game in the GTA sense would not be very fun, or at least would be stupidly repetitive.

Yep, that's pretty much terraria, you find new weapons, new items that give you different abilities (like double jumping for example), it's open world and you can go wherever and do whatever you want and it has a lot of platforming.

problem with terraria is that there is still not enough to do... yeah you can mine and fight a few bosses but thats were it ends

problem with terraria is that there is still not enough to do... yeah you can mine and fight a few bosses but thats were it ends

@bibamatt said:

Like Terraria?

Fuck. You beat me by at least an hour.

@Torrim:  It seems to me that this could be easily avoided by adding some sort of waypoint system, though I know what you're saying and have put it in the "cons" list for this type of game.    I think I'm going to play Terraria now, though, to see what you guys are talking about.  I've seen stuff about it on GB recently, but have just not had enough time to play anything other than levels I've just designed.  I want to add milestones to the game where, when a player achieves a milestone, it creates a bounty hunter (or maybe something a little more fitting to the story/setting) that is tracked by the engine in real time around the world so you could randomly run into them.  Kind of like what Skyrim will do with its dragons.

This idea is kind of mutating in my head, but I also think that it would be cool to have the bounty hunters be able to track you.  Let's say, for instance, that you have a decent sized battle with a couple enemies and you used an explosive and left behind a body, once again, just an example, so it's really obvious you were there.  The game would then have recorded the direction you went after that, and when the bounty hunter enters this area, it is pointed in the direction you went.
 
The complexity is stacking up quickly, but I think we could also implement scenarios for bounty hunters meeting, since we're tracking them in real time.  We could assign them different values that determine their willingness to help other bounty hunters, stuff like that.  Have a small tree of potential decisions based on a couple different values.  
 
If the player was smart, he could even set up these sorts of encounters.  We'd also have to implement a way for the player to get away and hide if he ran into a bounty hunter he didn't want to fight.

Btw, please everyone check out our site:  Glass Cannon Games website

Are you Peter Molyneux?

No, I just have an over-active imagination coupled with the feeling of limitlessness common to those of my age and inexperience.

The idea is great, but how will you make it not to Metroid like and to tedious to navigate?
I get sleepy by just walking from my base in the middle to the dungeon on the left end in Terraria, and I use the small map type.
Gotta keep it interesting, but I'm so convinced that there's an entire market for sprite games like these, simple yet engaging!

The two ways I can think of to keep things engaging are allowing for fast travel and making the scenery around you epic.  World of Warcraft, Darksiders, and Brutal Legend do a great job of giving you a really amazing looking world to look at and explore.  Everywhere you look, there's something cool to see, so running around it doesn't seem quite so bad.  Travel, though, is a limitation of all games, you can make it better, or put your game on rails.

@ijames428: In what open-world game have your actions actually affected the world? I mean besides a few moral decisions and such...

I just want more Metroidvanias. They don't have to be more open than that because they'd probably just be empty for the most part.

I'm not setting out with this game to break free of some template and change the gaming world forever, and metroidvania games are cool, but it would be nice to see some changes made that allow for some replayability in a sandboxy way.  From what I hear about Skyrim, you can demolish entire economic systems and mess towns up, and those are the kinds of changes I want to see from my actions in a game.  They're not epic, but they pave the way for games that are less linear.
 
I feel as though "empty" is a weird term because I think that the developers of the Metroid games were going for a feeling of solitude, but does that have to be a bullet point for all metroidvania games?   Why not throw some dungeon crawler in there?