where's the skinner box?
I love the skinner box
skinner box is my friend
pls, sir, introduce skinner box
Oh no, this is making me want to rant. Don't take any of this as a manifesto and I'm not judging anyone, I just have feelings about this particular subject, and strong preferences.
I think this is the reason Breath of the Wild is the only "open world" game I remember enjoying.
The main appeal of an "open world" is the exploration aspect, right? But most open world games just give you a list of objective markers or make you collect useless shit, or give you XP for discovering more of the map or generally attach an external "reward" to the exploration.
Breath of the Wild rewards the exploration itself. Meaning, if you go out of the way to check something out, your reward is likely to be "cool thing that only exists in this part of the map" where the cool thing in question does not translate to "better equipment" or "XP points to level up" or anything like that. It's literally just neat. It's a cool glowy deer you can ride for a bit but as soon as you get off, it disappears. It's a fun bit of geography that is repeated nowhere else. It's a small puzzle you can solve. Discovering the thing is the reward in itself and it's so much more fun than walking to a new part of the map that looks almost the same as the other ones just so you get the extra 100XP when the map unfogs itself
