Recent inspiration struck in the Multiplayer comments section: how much better would open-world games like "Grand Theft Auto" or "Fallout 3" be if they included Digg? We've got three prototype images.
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In an era of massive open-world video games that offer more content than a player can find in 50 or 100 hours, would a video game version of Digg be helpful?
Big games have more content than most gamers have time to discover. They are played on PlayStation 3s and Xbox 360s that are tethered to a network of millions of gamers. So why not let those gamers pull up an optional display and "favorite" the best content in the game?
This idea popped up in the comments section of my Video Game Diary on Monday. Reader Zukalous wrote:
General Question to everyone: Do you feel that you beat the game if you didn't play every quest? What if you spent only 10 more hours above the main storyline but you were playing only the best of the best quests and skipped all the boring ones. People are always spoiler adverse but would you be willing to know which missions were good and which missions were meh all in the interest of saving a little time? Or would that ruin the hook of this game - that you create your own narrative through discovering new places.
To which I responded:
I'm imagining a Digg-like system in "Fallout 4," one that allows every user to vote parts of the game up or down, that way we'd all know which quests were most worth our time. How about that?
I asked a colleague who is more skilled than me with Photoshop to create a few sample images using shots of "GTA IV" and "Fallout 3." In these pictures you can imagine that people would be able to vote up or down on how interesting non-player characters are, locations, articles of clothing. Imagine this also applied to quests, weapons, enemies, etc.
Would you want this in your games? Would you use it? Should I keep my day job?