STEALING EVERY MUG IN THE EMPIRE

In Part I, we left off in the late 90′s as technology began to offer larger worlds. As time went by, the open-world game continued to develop, and each successive iteration brought new elements, improvements, and occasionally, missteps.  The first game I encountered that truly felt like it contained pure exploration for exploration’s sake was The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind (let it be noted here that I did not play Daggerfall, the prior installment, until after Morrowind).  Released in 2002, Morrowind put you in the role of a prisoner shipped off to the outskirts of the kingdom of Tamriel.  Once you finish the character creation process, you are given a simple quest and, beyond that, complete freedom to do whatever you wanted.  Vradenfall was a large, open place, with an estimated 6 square miles of terrain to explore.  Within the bounds of the island were plenty of caves, ruins, and points of interest of all types.  On top of that, Morrowind was styled in the Ultima mold, with individual locations being incredibly detailed; searching almost any home would quickly show you that you could pick up most anything (whether they were useful or not), and poke your nose into every nook and cranny that you so pleased (until the home’s residents noticed you…).

Morrowind really struck a chord with me, being the first game to marry a first-person, graphically detailed presentation with a richly detailed world.  I spent my first few hours of the game just wandering around the starting town and the surrounding lands, seeing where various paths led or what lay beyond seemingly innocent-looking doors.  In the end, I spent far more time in the game ignoring the actual story and simply striking out in new directions, exploring the strange new world set before me.

EXPLORATION VS. EXASPERATION

While exploration is a noble endeavor, in a game setting there is always the question of motivation.  For some, much like in real life, it is a question of pure curiosity – finding that hidden shrine on the mountain lake is enough on its own. For most others, though, there needs to be some sort of tangible in-game benefit.  In most cases, this comes down to a question of treasure, loot, what have you.  In Dark Savant, following the winding forest paths into the very depths of wilderness often meant that you’d find a solitary chest, just waiting to be disarmed and opened, filled to the brim with potentially valuable goods.  Most other games of the time followed suit, with treasure being your primary goal in going off the beaten path.

As the concept of “open world” games developed, however, what you could do outside of the primary game path grew in complexity and scale.  Treasure runs grew into entire dungeons, random NPCs grew into entire villages, and simple side quests grew into long (sometimes very long) quest chains.  In many recent games, such as Fallout 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV, the “extra” material far outweighs the offical “core” material of the game.  Hand-in-hand with that, the worlds themselves keep growing larger: Oblivion, the follow up to Morrowind, featured 16 sq. miles of gameworld – almost 2.5 times as much as its predecessor.

With all of this growth, there comes some serious design challenges.  First, regarding the growth of worlds, designers have to make sure they have material to fill them with.  Daggerfall, with its estimated 62,000 sq. miles of gameworld, was impressive as a technical feat, but the actual terrain and features were randomly generated, meaning most of it was incredibly bland or repetitive.  GTA: San Andreas was a sprawling five times as large as GTA III, but the quality of content was not quite up to the task of filling those suddenly expanded borders.

So, quantity and quality are two very important factors to consider, as you don’t want your players wandering endless hillsides or city blocks with nothing to do.  Yet, there is caveat to that as well:  Player exploration, on the whole, needs to be a player choice.  If the player feels compelled to go off the beaten path, there are potential rewards for doing so. The flip side of that is,  if you make the rewards provided by exploration either too valuable or to necessary, it ceases to be optional in the player’s mind and becomes a required part of play.

Lost Odyssey, for instance, while not having a huge scope of geography to deal with, does have very large city and town areas for the most part.  Early in the game, the player quickly discovers that a wide variety of objects in the environment can be searched and that they will always provide a reward of some sort.  These rewards can be usable items or, quite often, materials required for the Ring Making process that helps provide better equipment for your party.  These searchable objects tend to be everywhere in cities and dungeons, and the materials they provide are very useful, so the player quickly becomes ingrained with the idea that they must search every area they enter thoroughly to make sure they don’t miss anything.

For me, this quickly grew tiresome; no long was I standing at an intersection wondering which direction it would be interesting to go. Instead, I was trying to figure out what the quickest route would be to hit every square inch of the city to make sure I’d found every searchable spot.  This is tedious from a gameplay perspective, and extra tedious from an enjoyability perspective.

The difficulty in striking this balance is great, and it is compounded by the fact that, when you get right down to it, the designer is creating “extra” content; content that a majority of players may never see.  It is difficult to justify spending time, effort, and money on creating large swaths of content that are, in essence, completely optional.  To me, this makes it all the more impressive when designers do put forth the effort to fashion their worlds in full.  Although I may have taken issue with many choices made by the designers of Oblivion, I still respect the rich detail and loving craftsmanship they put into creating Tamriel, and recognize that it was no mean undertaking.

JUST BEYOND THE HORIZON

When I was a student in college, I spent a semester abroad studying in Japan.  Living in a small apartment in a town south of Yokohama, I found myself presented with a strange new unexplored world the likes of which I hadn’t encountered in many years.  I made a point to, at least once every weekend, to simply pick a new street and walk down it with no destination in mind, turning at random at every fork in the road.  These little adventures always took me someplace new, and the hidden little corners of my town I found while on them are still etched in my mind – the pear orchard tucked away behind the department store, the shrine hidden on a wooded hillside next to the twisting road to the neighborhoods below, even the archery range secreted away at the far edge of the school grounds, shrouded by undergrowth that gave no hint as to what lay beyond – all of these places were there, each ready to tell their own story, regardless of whether I ever found them or not.  The thrill of finding them,  even if I did nothing more than simply lay my eyes upon them and see that they were there, was truly the part that excited me the most.

As of yet, I have not encountered a game that has provided exactly that level of joy to my inner explorer, but over the years I have seen them grow more and more fufilling in that regard.  Creating a rich world, ripe for exploration, is a weighty design challenge by any measure, and doing so in a way that is still meaningful from a gameplay perspective as well makes it all the more so, but the experiences created for the player are unmatched in any other medium.  Videogames open a unique window to new worlds, and making sure designers seize upon this and offer players outlets to explore them is an important step in the continued maturation of gaming.