/vr/ - Retro Games

How do you feel about RPGs, adventure and open world games locking you out of areas you were previously able to freely access by the end of the game?

I personally hate it. Even if I've done everything there was to do up to that point, I don't like it when a game that used to let you go where you pleased suddenly take that freedom away from you. Maybe there was a sidequest you were meaning to do but put off until you progressed a bit more, not knowing the next story beat would completely lock you out of it for reasons. Or maybe I just want to visit a town I thought was cool and comfy and chill out for a bit, and now I can't. Sometimes there's a good reason for it, such as that the place got destroyed or you end up in an entirely different world with all-new or radically changed locations or whatever, but other times it feels arbitrary as fuck, like in FFVIII and FFIX, which lock you out of a lot of places in the world map that are still technically there, while others remain open. I know with these two it was apparently done for space-saving reasons, but it still sucks. Or take KotOR, which makes it once you enter the last world, all of the planets from before become inaccessible and you're 100% railroaded forward until you beat the game. Even Super Metroid locks you inside Tourian past a specific point.

You might say it encourages replays, now that you know past a certain point you won't be able to access some places and will play accordingly, and perhaps that's true, but on the first go-round it still feels kinda shit, but that's just me.

what was happening in the towns during time compression?

Do un-revistable areas in RPGs make anyone else here feel nervous? Like, so many times, you'll advance the story in a game and not be able to revisit something the way it was, such as a town becoming permanently inaccessable or an area being destroyed and simply a tiny fraction of what it was.

FFVIII was probably the worst about this when you hit disc 4 and suddenly you couldn't enter anywhere that had actual people in it.