What I'd Like To See In Open World Games (Monday Musings 68)

I've only played three open world games: Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Breath of the Wild, and Horizon: Zero Dawn, but playing just these three games, I can tell what I like and not like in Open World Games.

Horizon: Zero Dawn and Odyssey do so many things right (click link for reviews), such as having a compelling hero, NPCs, story and lore, beautiful graphics, incredible combat that's precise where you have to use strategy, dodging, parrying as opposed to tanking through. They both have RPG elements, and I hope that their next games would have even more extensive leveling systems.

In this post, I'm adding things that would improve these games' experiences.

Overworlds and Dungeons
First, all three of these games have overworlds that have some verticality such as mountains and building structures, but mostly are areas where you can easily beeline to the next objective without getting lost (just look at map and go from area A to B in straight line). 

I would love to see an open world game that has the level design of Dark Souls 1 where the areas are so complex that you get lost. In other words, each area is distinctive and unique in the ways you need to get around, with complex verticality, multiple ladders and shortcuts that you need to find. You easily fall to your death as there are tricky holes and traps.

I feel the reason why these open world games don't have this bespoke maze-like structure is because they're so large, so it's hard to come up with mazes that are extensive enough to cover that amount of area. Dark Souls is very compact but even so it takes a long time to find your first Blighttown bonfire because how confusing Blighttown is.

Is there a way in which an open world can have a smaller map? Or if you want the map to be larger, you can just make the space from start of the area to a special key that'll open a shortcut 500 yards away as opposed to 50 yards. In other words, just scale up. Dark Souls can be extremely large if they have you walk more from one area to the next.

Within the complex, labyrinthine overworld, you then have the huge dungeons, hopefully at the level of Zelda dungeons (Ocarina of Time through Skyward Sword).

The issue is that designing something as complex as Dark Souls overworld and Zelda dungeons is extremely difficult and it's much easier to just throw in some mountains and buildings across a flat land. 

Quality of Life and Customization
I very much appreciate Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Horizon: Zero Dawn for all their quality of life features, and ability to customize. Their controls are very intuitive that I just used the default controls. Even so, it's vital that you can reassign buttons to fit your playstyle which these games allow.

I love how both games allow you to skip cutscenes and respect your time. I also love the options of turning on and off notification systems like enemy health, meters, markers and the like to customize how you want to play the game.

For instance, as an old time Monster Hunter fan, I don't want to see enemy health bar, but find knowing damage numbers crucial so I don't have to break immersion and find out where the monster hunter weak spots are. You can easily tell that through damage numbers and it can gauge which type of weapon is best against that monster (i.e. elemental).

In other words, it would be nice for those who want enemy health bar to turn on, and I can turn off. If you don't want to see damage numbers, you can turn off. The more customization, the better.

I wished these open world games have a Monster Hunter: World system where you can easily equip and load your armor pieces, so that if you want to use your Lance offensive build for Pickle, you can just click on that set.

In Odyssey, you have to put on the individual pieces each time. so if you want to use your more Assassination appropriate armor, you have to manually put on each piece. This is a drag and time-wasting, so it'll be nice to just click on your assassin armor/weapon build.

I appreciate Assassin's Creed Odyssey for their overlay/transmog system so you can have Fashion souls, but using your best armor pieces. This is a must for all games, not just open world. No one wants to look like trash!

The fetish now in gaming is to make the world as realistic as possible. I think that's a great goal, but not at the expense of gameplay. Swimming is slow in real life, but in gaming, you don't have to make swimming this slow. It's a drag to spend 5 minutes just going from A to B. This is a video game, and it's not realistic that your hero can do these physically impossible things, so why does it need to be realistic in terms of swimming?

If you want to fit fast swimming in the lore of your game, you can have your hero be an Olympic swimmer (but multiply the speed x 10 at least), or your hero stumbles upon a propeller device that he or she can use at all times. I always cringe in games when there's swimming involved, because it's always so slow.

Choices
I know there are some open world games that if you make a choice, it may lock you out of quests. This is a huge problem because you don't want your choices to prevent you from doing a potentially exciting quest. This will lead to immersion breaking as you'd look up guides to see how to avoid missing a potential quest, and you may stumble upon spoilers.

I would make sure that the game never locks you out of any specific quests.

I'm also very salty about multiple endings, because I always get the bad ending. Therefore, I read guides on how to get the best ending, and by doing so, I see all the spoilers. I prefer Horizon: Zero Dawn's structure where you get the same ending regardless of what choices you make. That prevents immersion breaking and spoilers.

However, as you make choices in the game, I'd like to see it affect the world. For instance, if you help someone clear out evil oppressors, when you come back, the town is rebuilt with home improvements, nice shops and booming economy. Or, if you help a woman with her finances, you come back and notice her playing with her children instead of laboring away at the fields.

So if you don't do these missions, when you come back, you'll see how miserable the NPCs are in that oppressed town, and the poor woman working, her children crying because they're left alone at home.

Since your choices will change the world, you may end up looking up the consequences of your choices, but at least it would just be for those particular quests, and won't spoil the content of other quests.

Since I've only played 3 open world games, I'd like to get more ideas on what you'd like to see in Open World Games?

The How of Happiness Review

Improving Stream Content (Monday Musings 67)

Since streaming for a few months under FuzzyJCats, while learning how to improve, I never understood when people advise, "improve your stream content". What does stream content mean?

Especially, as you can see from my past stored broadcasts, I focus on talking to chat rather than gaming, and thought stream content was how to be more entertaining to your viewers. In which case, by improving stream content, I thought the advice meant that you need to be more entertaining, but again, that's a very vague notion.

For instance, what are the prescribed steps to being entertaining aside from having the requisite high energy and enthusiasm? Do you prepare topics to talk about, make up jokes before stream and the like?

Sifting through the advice to get more information, there's the very vague idea that stream content is just picking out the game you want to play. But, this is not quite the helpful advice I need, because of course, if you're going to stream games, you have to decide on which game you're going to stream!

Now that my goal is to truly enjoy the process of streaming (letting go of the notion of chasing viewer numbers), finally knowing AND feeling that deep down, I'm now focused on "gitting gud" with streaming, and of course being with my community.

I always love the challenges of improving myself as I find reaching goals very refreshing and satisfying. I think that's one of the reasons why video games are so addictive, because who doesn't want to rise to the challenge of fighting a seemingly impossible boss, staying up until 3 AM, until you beat him. And how satisfying that is when you do!

At any rate, with this new focus on one of the more important aspects of streaming ("gitting gud"), prior to my last broadcast, a light bulb went off, and I sort of got a sense of what stream content infers.

Stream content is not just thinking about what game you want to play, but how to present it in the most entertaining way. For one, we need to think about what parts of the game are the most intriguing, two what do you want to accomplish in the game, and three, how do you showcase that?

Interesting Game Content
Viewers most likely want to see the story and missions such as the cool boss fights, rather than the grinding aspects of the game such as inventory management, collecting resources, and watching me fight trash mobs hours and hours on end to level up.

Even though I love grinding, inventory management and the like, they may not be as exciting as fighting an epic Boss. An analogy is watching a football game. You want to rewind past the ads (organizing inventory) and watch the football action, preferably a touchdown (Boss fight). 

Sometimes, though, I think it does help to show the UI of the game, customization, as well as any really cool quality of life experiences the game offers, such as Odyssey allowing you to turn down the frequency of repetitive music (thank you Ubisoft!). 

What Do You Want To Accomplish?
Since I'm streaming Assassin's Creed Odyssey, there are so many things to do in this game, which was one of the astounding things about this game, so my main overarching goal is to show all these elements.

I want my viewers to see all the things this game offers, so they can get a good sense of the game. And, if they're on the fence of whether they should get the game, they can see if it's a game they'd like to play.

Therefore, I made a checklist of the pertinent gameplay elements, and my aim is to show at least one example of each. In other words, once the viewers get a sense of a bandit camp, there's no need to tackle bandit camps endlessly, and you can move onto one of many other things you can do in this game, such as puzzles.  

Spoilers of a general list that I want to present so far:

Show the many customization options
Go over the abilities and builds
Showcase all the weapons move sets, including ranged and elemental build-up
Clear out 1 Ancient Stele cave
Clear out 1 elite animal cave
Clear out 1 bandit camp
Clear out 1 military camp with brazier (trap the brazier stat)
Clear out 1 underwater location
Do 1 ainigmata puzzle
Upgrade ship x 1, and show the cosmetic choices
Kill 1 bounty hunter
Do 1 Naval battle
Take out political leader
Do 1 battle conquest
Arena quests
Defeat at least 1 of the ancient relics from the 3rd story line (i.e. minotaur, medusa, sphynx, cyclops) - open up at least the Minotaur Silver Islands Thaletas/Kyra side quest
Track and kill 1 cultist leader, Kirstjen Nielsen
Diana the hunt legendary animals
Finish the good ending family

Other things that another streamer may want to achieve are challenge runs, such as no-death runs. Quite a few streamers have gotten extremely creative about these challenge runs, like this Dark Souls 3 banana run!



But for mere mortals like me, coming up with a run of the mill objective like showcasing the diversity of Odyssey is a good starting point!

Showcasing by Prepping Pre-Stream

Odyssey is such a long and rich game that I already have 200 hrs. However, I'm only streaming 1 to 2 times a week for about 1 to 2 hrs each stream so it will take well over a year to finish the game if I don't prune content!

Realizing that streamlining is crucial, I then see where I am in the game, and determine what I want to accomplish for that stream.

For the last broadcast, I wanted to get my money back from Marcos, so my title reflects that purpose:



I then do some prep work pre-steam, such as opening up the map. This means going to all the question marks on the map, which then pop up to show if they're camps, quests and other markers, so that we can easily go to these locations during stream.

By opening up the map before stream, the viewer doesn't have to see us running back and forth to all these locations. Further, not knowing what's there, we want to avoid going to the wrong location to save time, so we can focus on the story and quests.

Another consideration is that if I'm on my way to a boss fight, and I notice I'm under-leveled and we don't want to keep fighting this same boss 100 times over until success, I can always level up before stream. Therefore, when stream starts, we're at the boss fight, ready to go!

In other words, you can easily plunge into your objective, without having your viewers suffer through the trek to get there. 

In this specific example of Marcos, now prepped, I stream until we get our drachmae back from Marcos, and that took about 2 hrs or so. I was side-tracked due to all the missions in the game, but that's okay. At least, we have a general sense of what we want to do, and although we'll invariably be side tracked, this will also showcase the game.

The tricky part here is to come up with enough gaming that will span your entire stream. So if you're going to stream 4 hours, you may want to plan more of the interesting and complex missions to do, maybe planning on doing a few boss fights as part of your content.

This clearly assumes that you know the game already and know what it offers, and what the exciting quests are. But, even if you're streaming a game for the first-time, you can do some prep.

Looking back at my Borderlands 2 first-time walk-through experience, I know I have to be well-equipped to beat missions and chapters. Since I know that I'm a bit under-leveled, I recalled grinding a few areas before streaming to be able to tank through a story chapter or side mission.

While leveling up, I also got more resources along the way.  Therefore, after this prep work is over, we can head to side or story missions for the stream, making sure the character is right near the start of the objective.

Exhibit A: One Twitch Tag is Farming

Twitch has a relatively new Tag system that helps to describe your stream content, one of which is farming (see Exhibit A). But I think viewers would prefer to watch Dark Souls' notorious boss, Ornstein & Smough, rather than whacking Balder knights until you get the rare Balder Side Sword?

If you're doing one of those ridiculously hard challenge runs like a no-death run, then clearly, you need to show the whole thing to "prove" you didn't die. But if you're a streamer who doesn't do such challenge runs, prep work can help.

In conclusion, I think this is what is meant by stream content. You figure out what goals you want to meet during stream, doing any necessary prep work before stream (if you have time), and what's the most entertaining way to present the game to your viewers.

If you're a Twitch streamer, does this make sense? Any other stream content considerations we should be thinking about would be much appreciated!

The How of Happiness Review

Monthly Progress Report For My Twitch Channel FuzzyJCats, September 25 through October 24

FuzzyJCats Twitch Channel

During this period of time, I was burned out, but in denial, and pushed through streaming. After hearing about my friend's illness, I took time off to be with him and his family, and having this time off, it led me to rethink streaming.

During my first week off from streaming, I was so burned out that I made peace with quitting streaming entirely, and I was okay with it! However, after taking more time off, I forgot how much I loved streaming.

I remember when I first started streaming, I loved it so much to the point where I was counting down the hours to stream, but I didn't stream extra than my schedule because I didn't want to overdo it. I tend to get very obsessed with things, overdoing it until I burn out completely. So I actually held back from doing extra streaming during the first couple of months to avoid my tendency to crash and burn!

I also noticed that during the time I wasn't streaming, I wasn't exercising because I wasn't doing anything that mentally challenging. When I was streaming, I really forced myself to exercise.

Putting all of this together, I realize that I love streaming. I also find it healthy both physically and mentally to continue, as long as I don't take streaming seriously. In other words, don't worry about the viewer numbers!

Also, I started out too hard and too fast by streaming 4 days a week for 4 hours a stream. It makes more sense when you start a project that you've never done before, to take it one step at a time, slowly mastering each step until you take the next step.

So, it makes sense for me to scale back until I can easily do 1 hour per stream without strain, then add 30 minutes slowly. Perhaps streaming 1 day/week to start out with and increasing slowly. I think max 3 days/week.

Don't be upset if viewer numbers drop drastically as I'm no longer going to do the ridiculous networking.

Work on:

• Return back to streaming slowly to avoid burn-out
• One day a week to start, for 1 hour until that's really easy, then adding another day for 1 hour up to max 3 days/week
• Stream longer than 1 hour if I really want to
• Move schedule to mornings, better time for me

The How of Happiness Review

How To Increase Your Twitch Viewer Numbers Without Burnout (Monday Musings 66)

Avg viewership drop!

At one point, I was thinking of writing down steps that will guarantee increase in your Twitch viewer numbers, but the problem is these steps may lead to burnout.

Once you burnout and take time off from streaming, your viewer numbers will decrease, so following the "fastest" techniques of gaining viewership may in fact backfire.

Sadly, it seems to be true that if you take 1 to 2 weeks off to refresh in a sudden and unannounced manner, your numbers may drop when you return.

The other unfortunate news in focusing on viewership numbers is if a crisis happens and you have to take time off, your numbers will drop. The conclusion is not to worry about the numbers, but if you really want to grow without burning out, this post is for you!

In other words, we need to find ways to avoid the inevitable burn-out of streaming so that you necessarily do not need to take too much time off from streaming, as consistency in following a schedule is the best way to gain and increase viewership.

These steps may lead to very slow viewer number increase, but it's better than crashing and burning like what happened to me. Indeed, coming back after a few weeks of re-evaluating things, my viewership numbers dropped by a whopping 50%. Note how it says -9 from last stream, total of 9 (exhibit A)!

Enjoy The Game
The first step is to play a game that you truly enjoy and find fun to stream. I decided to stream Borderlands 2 as a challenge to myself as I never succeeded in FPS games, and my community loves this game (a lot of Dark Souls fans also love Borderlands 2). Also the game has perfect Twitch game statistics (see below for details).

However, Borderlands 2 was a struggle to play, leading to many deaths and cringe-worthy gaming, and I wasn't enjoying streaming the game. My streams call to mind the unjust stereotype of women being bad at games. Although I recognize it as a masterpiece, it was not fun to stream for me, because of the demanding nature, and definitely a game that's more fun to play off-stream, which I intend to do.

Therefore, if you're a new streamer, it's so hard to focus and concentrate, not to mention on a game you're not familiar with. In other words, chose 5 games that you're really good at and that you love playing to start out with, and that your community would enjoy watching.

If you're a seasoned streamer, ignore this step and play whatever game you want as long as it falls in the "correct" Twitch game statistics if you want to continue to gain viewer numbers.

Twitch Game Statistics

Next, go to Twitch and type in the title of your games in question. If it's Fortnite Battle Royale that you're thinking, you'll see that all the large streamers will be on the first 20 pages, and then we relatively small streamers will be buried in the 5 trillionth page. No one is going to scroll through all those pages, rather, they'll click on the top page of streamers. You want a game where you will be near the top of the list.

Now, if the game you want to stream is Duck Tales Remastered, you'll see that there's a total of 0 viewers, so no one's looking for this game, except if a well known streamer like Shroud is somehow playing the game then there might be 30,000 viewers plus. But they're just watching the game coincidentally because it's Shroud, and not the game for itself. That again is a bad choice.

However, if the game you love and know very well like the back of your hand is Borderlands 2, that's a superb choice because it has a good number of viewers who actively look for the game. If you go to Twitch, you'll see that the top 2 channels will have about 50 to 75 viewers, then the next few channels will be around 20 to 30, and then your channel will be in the first page. Therefore, viewers looking for the game might chose your channel.

If they like your stream, you'll most likely get a follower and possibly loyal viewer. That'll surely increase your views, albeit very slowly.

Facecam
If the viewers looking for Borderlands 2 are looking at channels and see you on Facecam, they'll more likely click on your channel then a channel without, all things being equal (obviously a streamer like Lirik who doesn't use Facecam will get almost all the viewers, but Lirik is the exception).

Schedule
I thought an afternoon schedule would be just as good for me and my viewers, b/c it's a good time for the UK/EU audience who'll watch after work. However, I'm more of a morning person, and prefer to get all my "chores" done so I can have the rest of the day off.

It may seems like a red flag when I call streaming a "chore" but the reality is, even though it's fun (as long as I don't worry about viewership numbers), streaming is work being so demanding. It takes so much effort to play the game well, and read and talk to chat, being entertaining.

Indeed, engaging your audience will keep and increase viewership numbers. You can't expect to play a game without discussion, unless you're one of the few absolutely incredible challenge runners, and even then, they talk to chat.

After moving to morning schedule, it worked better for me because I don't have to fret and worry until 1 PM EST (that was my past schedule) about streaming. I can get it over and done with and move on.

When you start out, feel free to experiment which schedule works the best for you which may take a couple of weeks or so, and then try to pin down the exact hour you want to stream and stick with that schedule if possible. Indeed, anytime you change hours, your viewers will drop, so it's okay to experiment with your schedule when you start out with streaming.

Certainly, once you really like your schedule and you feel comfortable with it, keep that schedule until something comes up such as new job and the like.

In your channel panel description, I would recommend adding the stream elements or streamlab schedule countdown.

Mention in a "Schedule" channel panel that you'll stream one hour for the day(s) you're interested, in case there are days when you don't feel like streaming the "ideal" 4 hours or more. The mistake I made was starting out 4 days/week at 4 hrs/day. However, even though you note you're streaming 1 hour, you can always stream longer than 1 hour.

Once you feel that streaming 1 hour is "easy" then you can advertise that you'll stream 1.5 or 2 hours and so forth.

The rationale is that you can always stream longer, but you can never stream shorter than what your viewers expect per your schedule.

The reason why you want a set hour is so your viewers will know when to tune in when you're streaming, much like television shows. Even TV has recording and your videos can be re-watched (on Twitch dashboard, channels, turn on store past broadcasts), but the issue is you need live viewers for them to count in the demanding Twitch world.

Time Off?
Once you notice that you have a few viewers (or more) who chat in your channel and are at your streams faithfully, I think you can take time off, maybe 1 week at most, and your viewers might not drop that much when you return, because your faithful viewers will return to see you.

"But it's only 1 week," you ask, but in the world of Twitch, taking a week off is like an eternity.

Make sure you announce in advance that you'll be taking off and you'll be fine when you return.

Taking time off is crucial in preventing burn-out and then quitting streaming entirely, so if you feel burned out the 2nd or 3rd month of streaming, make sure you announce a 1 week vacation to your chat constantly so they're aware.

Again, the fact that maximum of 1 week off may be considered even "too much" if you want to keep your viewers, demonstrates the ultra-competitive nature of Twitch streaming.

Conclusion:

1. Find a game that is easy for you to play and that you absolutely love so your enthusiasm shines through in your streaming.
2. Make sure this game will have your channel in the top of streamers streaming the game, with adequate number of viewers watching the game (type the game title in Twitch search bar).
3. Facecam
4. Set schedule that works for YOU.
5. Time off when you notice you have a handful of faithful viewers, but if you start burning out before then, take time off, maximum maybe 1 week.

I'm hoping that these relatively painless steps will improve your viewership numbers but without the burn-out.

I can write about how to network to gain viewers, but I find it unhealthy so if I ever do, it'll be a huge caveat for that post.

However, the best advice I can give is to not worry about your viewership numbers, but rather enjoy the process of streaming, improving content, and being with your community, which is what I'm focusing on now and loving it!

Are you a streamer, and what other painless tips will help improve viewership numbers? Do you want to read about networking to increase your numbers in a future post?

The How of Happiness Review