• Hello everybody! We have tons of new awards for the new year that can be requested through our Awards System thanks to Antifa Lockhart! Some are limited-time awards so go claim them before they are gone forever...

    CLICK HERE FOR AWARDS

KH4 open world? (Fun discussion)



REGISTER TO REMOVE ADS

vaderskywalker

Active member
Joined
Oct 9, 2022
Messages
757
Awards
2
Age
30
What if the worlds become more explorable, like for example take San Fransokyo and the Caribbean, they were pretty much open world (one of them was a small open world though), but they do that for every world this time, or maybe a game after KH4 that's like say breath of the wild but for Kingdom hearts, what are your thoughts?
 

MATGSY

Silver Member
Joined
Nov 28, 2005
Messages
6,783
Awards
8
Quadranum for sure is. The rest kinda depends on the world in question. Tangled wouldn't have worked as an open world and was better off as a linear path.

Monstropolis on the other hand should've had a smaller factory and the actual Monstropolis city to explore.

-Zootopia=yes. I want the entire city as explorable.
-Soul=nah. No one part of the film is big enough to warrent it.
-Luca=yes, the island village and surrounding underwater areas is a good size for it.
-Lightyear=No. Too much boring wasteland.
-Coco=I think everyone wants that open world.
-Wreck-it Ralph/Ralph Breaks the Internet=Would be very segmented/mutiple zones by nature.
-Endor=Could work. Exploring the forest would be a big part of it.
-Ecanto=Might as well, it's not that big of a world to begin with. TBH, Ecanto doesn't strike me as good materual for KH.
-Onward=Kinda 50/50 on it. Like Tangled, the journey aspect lends better to linear Point A to Point B design, but the world's interesting enough to wanna see it be more explorable. Maybe a hybrid approach for different areas.
-Moana=Well yeah, it'll be Carribean v2.
 
Last edited:

Elysium

Be Wiser Than the Serpent
Joined
Nov 4, 2012
Messages
3,772
Awards
37
I would love this for a Kumandra (Raya) world in particular.
 

Face My Fears

She's not an "it"!
Joined
Apr 9, 2007
Messages
5,386
Awards
19
I think The Pride Lands, Atlantica, and NeverLand (the actual island) should be open world.
 

Face My Fears

She's not an "it"!
Joined
Apr 9, 2007
Messages
5,386
Awards
19
Only if we get the fun 1st half Pride Lands and not the dull Scar-fucked-it-up half.
I'm guessing it will be post-KH2 The Pride Lands, so everything will be fixed.

I do hope they let some worlds be like San Fransokyo. It gives it a whole different feel compared to other worlds. I think at this point in the series, since platforming is basically gone, they should come up with more creative ways to explore the worlds and having some open world (one giant box to explore) might be a possible solution (one it fits the world).

San Fransokyo really felt like the Batman Arkham games where you can fly around the whole city and explore every nook and cranny. So that helped make it feel like a superhero world.
 

MATGSY

Silver Member
Joined
Nov 28, 2005
Messages
6,783
Awards
8
I'm guessing it will be post-KH2 The Pride Lands, so everything will be fixed.

I do hope they let some worlds be like San Fransokyo. It gives it a whole different feel compared to other worlds. I think at this point in the series, since platforming is basically gone, they should come up with more creative ways to explore the worlds and having some open world (one giant box to explore) might be a possible solution (one it fits the world).

San Fransokyo really felt like the Batman Arkham games where you can fly around the whole city and explore every nook and cranny. So that helped make it feel like a superhero world.
I want Turning Red just for this boss:
turning-red-red-panda.gif

They already got the ball rolling with that Darkside, now follow it up with Disapproving Mom!
 

Zettaflare

Shibuya
Joined
Jan 2, 2013
Messages
11,819
Awards
5
Location
California
I don't know how likely it is compared to recent material but Atlantis would also be great for an open world environment. The lost civilization from the film is pretty big and has both the city, hidden caves, and underwater ruins to explore
 

Launchpad

i remember the OLD khinsider
Joined
Jan 2, 2013
Messages
4,049
Awards
21
Age
27
Location
xigbar's apartment
Some worlds are more suited for a point A to point B adventure, like Monstropolis, others are more suited to slightly more open design like Olympus, with the large city and mountain with branching paths, and then some rare exceptions work like Caribbean, with a large world containing islands with somewhat linear exploration on them.

What won't work, I don't think, is large, fully open worlds that you spend a long time in. Kingdom Hearts is a game that's fun to play over and over again, and I think overly large (to no benefit) areas can hamper that breezy sense of replayability. Sure, they've flirted with bigger and bigger worlds, but the content spread itself is relatively the same across all worlds. Caribbean has a lot of islands, but none of them are massive-- You can consider the ship sailing a simple minigame that takes place in-between islands.

As far as a massive city like Quadratum goes, I remain unconvinced of the Kingdom Hearts team's ability to make the scope feel meaningful AND fun to explore. In KH3, Sora's room-to-room movement was a lot of fun to use, but the larger scale movement option was just aiming at a warp point and instantly airstepping to it-- not exactly a robust or interesting movement mechanic. There are other massive games that make the act of getting around a lot of fun, like Spider-Man, GTA, and BOTW, but I just don't feel like it's in the KH team's wheelhouse to do something like that.

And, if San Fransokyo is anything to go by, with a large world comes incredibly helter-skelter enemy placement. When there are dozens of possible roads between Objective A and Objective B, it becomes impossible to place well-balanced enemy encounters along all of them, and can instead turn into an enemy spamfest with Heartless that snipe you, or, alternatively, appear without any option of keeping up with you.

I think Olympus and Toy Box are the perfect types of worlds-- Grand adventure from the beginning to the end, or a large area that keeps you looping around a few times in different sub-areas. Giant worlds? Too difficult to develop AND make meaningful.
 

Face My Fears

She's not an "it"!
Joined
Apr 9, 2007
Messages
5,386
Awards
19
Some worlds are more suited for a point A to point B adventure, like Monstropolis, others are more suited to slightly more open design like Olympus, with the large city and mountain with branching paths, and then some rare exceptions work like Caribbean, with a large world containing islands with somewhat linear exploration on them.

What won't work, I don't think, is large, fully open worlds that you spend a long time in. Kingdom Hearts is a game that's fun to play over and over again, and I think overly large (to no benefit) areas can hamper that breezy sense of replayability. Sure, they've flirted with bigger and bigger worlds, but the content spread itself is relatively the same across all worlds. Caribbean has a lot of islands, but none of them are massive-- You can consider the ship sailing a simple minigame that takes place in-between islands.

As far as a massive city like Quadratum goes, I remain unconvinced of the Kingdom Hearts team's ability to make the scope feel meaningful AND fun to explore. In KH3, Sora's room-to-room movement was a lot of fun to use, but the larger scale movement option was just aiming at a warp point and instantly airstepping to it-- not exactly a robust or interesting movement mechanic. There are other massive games that make the act of getting around a lot of fun, like Spider-Man, GTA, and BOTW, but I just don't feel like it's in the KH team's wheelhouse to do something like that.

And, if San Fransokyo is anything to go by, with a large world comes incredibly helter-skelter enemy placement. When there are dozens of possible roads between Objective A and Objective B, it becomes impossible to place well-balanced enemy encounters along all of them, and can instead turn into an enemy spamfest with Heartless that snipe you, or, alternatively, appear without any option of keeping up with you.

I think Olympus and Toy Box are the perfect types of worlds-- Grand adventure from the beginning to the end, or a large area that keeps you looping around a few times in different sub-areas. Giant worlds? Too difficult to develop AND make meaningful.
I think Olympus and Toy Box work for the films they're based on. The same way that San Fransokyo works for Big Hero 6.

What KH1 and KH3 did with the worlds was impressive. Those games actually captured the feeling of being in those worlds effectively. I think the variety of world types adds to the game as well. I wouldn't want every world to be like Olympus/Toy Box or like Monstropolis (one of my fave worlds in KH3). I want a variety of worlds that give a different feeling throughout and I think that should be considered during world selection.

That's why I think some worlds should get the open world treatment, but not all. For example, even back with KH1's limitations, Atlantica was probably the world with the most open spaces - which makes sense for the ocean while Halloween Town was cramped with different ways to travel around the small world.

I suppose Quadratum could be open world, but if it is, it should really have the feeling of one of those hub locations in a Final Fantasy game. It should also have areas that get unlocked as the game progresses and there should be loads of side missions that NPCs can give you. Nomura needs to bring back purpose for a hub world in KH games. Ever since he made the Moogles available all over, there was no reason to go back to a hub world to buy/upgrade/synthesize items and all those other things that you needed to go back to Traverse Town to do.

It would be really lame if Quadratum is this huge open world and then there's nothing to do besides fight heartless. Speaking of, Nomura really needs to give us more reasons to revisit the worlds and spend time there after we clear the main story. The hidden Mickeys were great and made you explore the worlds, but NPCs could ask you to do things or there could be secret heartless to beat. They can be very arbitrary things, but really there should be more to do in the DISNEY worlds. They're huge and it would be so easy to let them be reused. The DISNEY characters can just have text boxes saying "Hey Sora, we heard of something strange over there, do you want to check it out?" and that initiates the side quest.
 
Back
Top