This week we’ll be covering a general issue, and next week I’ll be reviewing an old game (thought it’s a benchmark of gaming). I apologize for any expectations this might disappoint, but I feel that it’s important for me to review current AAA titles, and my day-job lifestyle does not furnish me with an income that makes purchasing and reviewing those AAA titles something which requires careful financial calculation on my part. Thus, I give you what follows and promise a review of Saint’s Row IV two weeks from now.
I mean mountains. Just normal mountains. In video games. Open world video games.
This may seem a tangential, unimportant issue at first, but I assure you that it’s anything but.
I recently did a full play through of Shadow of the Colossus for the first time. Similarly, the Elder Scrolls series is probably my favorite series in gaming. One of my favorite games of the last year is Far Cry 3, and my first favorite game was Ocarina of Time. All of this serves to say, I know open-world games, and I know what makes them fun.
On the face, every open world game from Vice City to Skyrim offers freedom as a fundamental part of the experience. Everyone is always just waiting on you to show up for things to really get down, and generally a side-quest system is incorporated to make the open world seem, well, open. There are things happening that you, the player, can facilitate like the good enzyme you are.
The other side to the fun every open world game is supposed to offer is movement in an open world. Games like Spiderman 2 on the PS2 and the more recent Infamous 2 and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations did a good job of implementing this concept by making the world fun to move around in. In these games, movement in the world is one of the most intriguing, engaging and entertaining aspects of the game. In contrast, other games like Oblivion, Skyrim, Far Cry 3, Shadow of the Colossus and the first Infamous have an open world, and in all of those cases it’s a beautiful world, well-fit to making gorgeous screenshots. But in all of those cases, there is a common lack of fun in engaging the environment itself. In layman’s terms, moving around is boring.
Why it is that movement through the open world is boring in games that are otherwise engaging is, I think, an important question, and I think I have an answer.
If we look at the aforementioned games, Spiderman 2 and the like, in which movement is one of the most entertaining aspects of the experience, I think we can see a common denominator. At their base level, these are games which do not restrict the player’s movement on the one hand, and which provide an experience of speed on the other hand.
In Spiderman 2, the player can access essentially every surface in the game, and the engine is designed in such a way that either by swinging, slinging, or jumping, the player can do that in a way that feels fast. In Infamous 2, there are a number of vertical jump poles, and these combine with the player’s glide ability, proclivity for parkour and a number of mid to late game unlockable movement abilities to provide an experience that makes the player feel like the master over not only the enemies of the game, but over the environment itself. Similarly then, in Assassin's Creed: Revelations, movement is entertaining both because it is essentially unrestricted and because it feels fast even when it isn’t really too quick. The player-character moves and reacts to everything in the game, ducking around pedestrians, climbing up essentially every surface in the game and moving quickly from one visual range to another, which creates the illusion of speed. In this vein, the iOS release Badlands and the PS2 classic Burnout 3 are successful in almost the same way: by presenting a new visual vista and new obstacles in almost every individual second of some segments, they create a feeling of speed. When the player is able to successfully react to these new stimuli piece after piece as they come forward with a seemingly blinding speed, the mastery of those phenomenon creates either a desire to master the environment on the one hand, or a feeling of satisfaction with having mastered the environment on the other hand.
Fundamentally then, I think what makes an open world specifically fun to move through is a feeling of mastery over the environment itself, most frequently and most effectively communicated through the 1-2 punch of unrestricted movement and a feeling of speed.
This is where games like Skyrim, Far Cry 3, and Shadow of the Colossus make their critical error and make movement in the open world a tedious experience instead of an entertaining one. The chief example of this is the mountain.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever been wandering around an open world game and come across a mountain which lay more or less directly in your path.
Keep it up if you tried taking a more or less direct route over that mountain.
Keep it up a bit longer if you failed.
Grow tired of holding up your arm if you were frustrated, and the experience of the mountain, rather than presenting you with a challenge, which seems to be the goal of the developers, just made you frustrated because you didn’t know where the hell you were supposed to go to get to the mission you were trying to complete in the first place.
Anyone who’s climbed The Throat of the World to reach the monastery of the Greybeards in Skyrim is more than familiar with the tedium, confusion and frustration that come from wandering around an open world, feeling subject to the impassable peaks, cliffs, and rivers presented to you. Who among us has not, in such a moment, wanted to throw their controller out the window and scream, “Just get me to the fucking mission start point!”
My general point here is that impassable barriers to open-world movement, which most frequently take the form of mountains, cliffs, and steep inclines, are a fundamental detriment to the experience of an open world game. If you’re going to make me approach a kick-ass building from a certain angle so I can appreciate your careful in-game architecture, just make it a linear game to start with.
Whatever else it may be (hard to make, difficult to program, etc.) free, unrestricted, fast movement through a large, open game world is one of the best things that gaming has to offer. If it wasn’t, why would people still remember Spiderman 2, an otherwise lackluster movie-adaptation whose sole redeeming feature was awesome movement, amid a tangle of bad graphics, elementary writing, atrocious combat and a frustrating upgrade system?
If you’re going to give me mountains, don’t give me a way around them, give me a way over them, and the gaming community will thank you.
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