Witcher 3 did it really well by having the “end of the world” stuff being centered around Ciri, and Geralt is just kind of along for the ride and isn’t really entirely sure what is happening, and his impact on whether she succeeds is rooted in whether he supports her as a father figure. Most of the game is Geralt not really having any idea that this end of the world stuff is happening to Ciri at all, until near the end.
On the other hand, it would be nice to have an RPG with lower stakes. Like I’ve always imagined a modern-day RPG where you have to do things like scrounge through your couch for change to buy a soda. The mundane RPG.
I feel that. I’ve been playing satisfactory since way before 1.0 released, and my head canon was “Boring Interplanetary Camp Job”. but when 1.0 came out suddenly I have to sAvE tHe WoRLd too. gah.
It’s one of the great things about Deep Rock Galactic, in so many ways there’s very little story other than deep lore, and the Dwarves aren’t saving the world, they’re getting drunk and doing their dayjobs.
Hoxxes IV doesn’t need saving, it needs mining.
One of my least favourite things about DRG is the inability to crouch. ;-;
I didn’t really have any kind of urgency based on the story, but I do think the story fell short of being a good story.
Spoiler warning: Satisfactory endgame and story
spoiler
They built up so much with the aliens talking to the pioneer and Ada acting as a translator, then towards the end it just stops happening. Then you build a ship and the story is done. Most anticlimactic ending for such a huge game
Funnily enough The Witcher 3 is one of the games I always think of for the trope of not following the plot. Often I think of the ludonarrative dissonance specifically between Gestalt’s paternal drive to find and protect Ciri Vs Gwent.
For large scale, AAA open world games, I mostly think of Breath of the Wild, which transparently sets itself up as being about taking as long as you need to get strong enough to save the world and Red Dead Redemption 2, which doesn’t care about the stakes of the world.
I sometimes can’t wrap my head around the fact that Witcher 3, BotW and RDR2 were each two years apart. I don’t feel any open world game has occupied the cultural space those games did since.
