>>718262223
It's the entire problem with Open World, because the deeper and more interconnected you make the game's map, especially the larger you make it, the more is required for continuous testing once you implement gameplay and design.
For starters the geometry itself changes for a long time, I assume, and then once they start putting content into it, they're mostly at a "final" stage of the world, so only the content needs to be tested within the world. Shrines therefore can be made in isolation as long as the core mechanics are finalized.
Overall you end up, I assume, very late in development adding "actual things" in the world to go and do, and because it's late and the staff is fully sized up for its production crunch this is why companies always go the Ubisoft route.
They delegate members of teams to a spreadsheet of "locations and budgets" for content, and then very small individual groups silo off and make its content on a conveyor belt. Maybe 5 designers made all the Signpost Dude events in TotK, but that's still a full "mini-game" that pervades the entire map. I think 54 of them? And each one has to be its own challenge like it's a level in Cut The Rope.
Because of this, you end up with this very Spreadsheeted approach. The world is simply way too large to have it be filled out by team members manually going through locations and inventing something "cool" for it. So they find a few Gameplay Patterns and then they exploit those.
This is also why I'm not THAT impressed with Nintendo making these games. they ultimately do just fall into that Ubisoft "solution", but it's the non-linearity and sense of being allowed to always say "fuck the design" that makes the game such an epiphany to many people. And they nailed the sense of "nature" of the world.
But yeah, I wish they could develop a method to make non-trivialized content in this format, so it isn't just "2-7 activities spread through the map".
