Building in games

Building buildings here!

In the right hands, the power to create can be a limitless gift. In video games, player-shaped creation is a big step in allowing players to personalize the game which they are playing. There are countless ways in which this can achieved from something as grand as creation tools to something as tiny as the ability to name your weapons. It narrows the vast abyss between the developers and the players in a way that endears them to the product. Allow people the chance to create a little ounce of rapport with their game world you'll find their response to be all the greater for it.

The philosophy behind this particular topic is rather hefty so I intend to condense it down into little bite-sized installments. First, as the title suggests, I want to talk about the ability to build in games. Whether as a token gesture or a full blown, realized, game mechanic; I believe that when the player is tasked with staking a claim in the gameworld it establishes a tight bond with the player. They say that the task of creating something can be like tearing out a piece of your own heart to serve as the dough, transpose that ideal into the world of games and it can be easy to see why players go nuts for these sorts of mechanics. They are so popular, in fact, that some games have built their entire premise around the concept of building.

Kinda like Minecraft has. Everyone and their mother has heard about the infinite replayability of Mojang's Minecraft and it's limitless appeal. Adults and children find fulfillment in the game in such a way that few other entertainment products capture. This is due to many factors; the low minimum requirements allowing lower-end systems to run some form of the game, blocky timeless pixel graphics that kids and adults can enjoy, and the key focus on the concept of creativity (A virtue that I maintain everyone harbours in themselves to some degree.)

When playing Minecraft, players are presented with an expansive, never ending, world which is entirely at the mercy of their creative wit. Tree's can be cut down, land can be upturned, stone can be dug up and water can be displaced. Nothing in the world is permanent and everything can be reshaped into whatever form you so please. Players can build houses, mansions, castles, towns, cities, Death Stars, Full scale replicas of the Enterprise-D and giant floating islands in the sky. You have no limit to your work beyond that which you can imagine. Even after 10 years of constant updates, Mojang still recognize how this freedom is the heart of their game and seek to improve upon world generation or exploration whenever possible. Minecraft is the purest possible example of game-ified building mechanics.

Minecraft met with such fame and success when it first released that some games pivoted their entire design to ape the juggernaut. Just look at Fortnite. Back during their first gameplay presentation, Epic relied heavily on the building mechanics to demonstrate to people how their experience was distinct from any other tower defence game. Some even went so far as to invoke the name of Minecraft whilst describing the rudimentary building tools, despite their apparent crippling rigidness. The issue with the base game was not that players were disappointed with the fact that the game couldn't live up to Minecraft's promise of freedom, just that they felt belittled by the company attempting to equate the two. You could even see this as a contributing factor to Fortnite's initial lack in sales.

When 'Fortnite: Battle Royale' hit, everything changed. Now people were comparing this game to the other big battle royale of the time: Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. Suddenly the building aspect of Fortnite was a significant gameplay differentiator that transformed the product as a whole. Players who had got used the slow, methodical, crawl of PUBG matches were now met with an entirely new meta-game experience, one of charging the enemy and building as they go. I think history proves which game's approach ultimately won that ideological clash. Fortnite's building may not have been as robust as what Minecraft offered but it wasn't until Fortnite found it legs that people realized, it really didn't need to be. For a fast paced Battle Royale a simpled, streamlined building mechanic is necessary and appreciated, and that is what Fortnite specialized in. No one will spend their time building something semi-permanent with those tools, (Outside of the dedicated 'build mode') but the quick-build structures were enough to endear people to the game. It allowed players to make the battlefield their own in a way no other competitive shooter had managed before.

For a structurally linear experience it can be hard to imagine how a game like Assassin Creed could have building mechanics, but they do, just in a completely different way to those other two games. With both Minecraft and Fortnite, their building was founded on the ground of free-placement items. No such luck in Ubisoft's story-centric, historical stab-athon franchise. But that doesn't mean the games couldn't fit some sort of building in there, or rather 'renovation'. Ever since Assassin's Creed 2 there has been some sort of building metagame that varies in narrative relevance; but it is always there so that Ubisoft's open-world department managers can tick off that box on their clipboard list sheet. In Assassin Creed 2, Ezio was tasked with renovating Monteriggioni, Brotherhood and Revelations had him fixing up large portions of Rome and Constantinople respectively, Connor worked on an entire town project in 3 and Kenway built up the entire Caribbean in Black Flag.

The effect this has on the player differs from entry to entry but it is always noteworthy. In Assassin Creed 2, 4, and Unity, the player is working on their own hub space as they go through renovations. Having somewhere to call home goes a long way to grounding that player in their world and helps the audience to immerse themselves . (Even if no Assassins Creed has managed to come up with a worthwhile reason why the player ever needs to consistent go back home.) In Brotherhood and Revelations, the player is playing landlord with an entire city, so the mechanic is less there for grounding purposes and more just to institute one of those 'hands-off' gameplay loops that Ubisoft loved doing for a time. I never was a huge fan of these systems, they always seem built to reward you for not playing the game, which just appears a tad shortsighted. Then there is Assassins Creed 3's homestead which ties in significant character driven narrative progression into an optional build-a-town-questline. And yes, you heard me right. I said 'Optional'. People who complain that AC3's Conner Kenway is entirely unlikeable often never took the time to trough through this questline (Which spans the full length of the entire game.) in order to see Connor's character growth up close with the community he built. I'm not saying that it saves the character or anything, but it helps you see one more side to the stoney-faced snooze-inducer that he is for the rest of the game.


Even Bethesda got in on the 'linear house building' craze with Skyrim's second DLC Hearthfire. Those who partook are offered the ability to build their own homestead on Skyrim's icy tundras. (An alternative to the perfectly functional, if small, vanilla player homes.) The only catch, you have to build it all yourself. And it is no simple task. Hearthfire was a DLC built for the sole purpose of bolstering role playing potential in Skyrim and helping root immersion. Players went through the struggle of acquiring copious amounts of building material and then were given a small range of design choices as they crafted a prefab house. After it was all said and done, players could sit and back and bask in the glory of the hard day's work. (Or, as is more likely, a hard months work.) A lot of The Elder Scrolls' systems are created for roleplaying potential and build-able player houses were no exception.

Therefore it should come as no surprise that something similar should pop up in another game that champions immersion and roleplay potential. (Although not, perhaps, with as much of an all-encompassing approach as Bethesda does.) 'The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild' features one linear 'Build-a-house' system that is so optional that I, along with many other gamers, didn't even know it existed in our initial playthrough. In Hateno Village the player can come across a small run down shack which they can then convert into their cool little home. The house itself is limited in actual beneficial function, offering you little more than a place to sleep and a display case for some of your items; but the mere novelty of having a home to return to helps lend to that 'world grounding' I was talking about earlier. Although I will say, BoTW's Link looks more at home sleeping rough than any other video game character ever.

If Skyrim was the point that Bethesda were experimenting with 'house building' mechanics, then Fallout 4 would certainly be the beta stage. Borrowing the core concept from Elderwind's popular Fallout: New Vegas mod, 'Wasteland Defence', Bethesda sought to implement a settlement crafting system into Fallout 4. But this wasn't with the linear pick-an-option approach that they tried with Skyrim, but a rudimentary manual placement system more akin to Fortnite. Players had to build up the living space for an entire town of mostly interaction-less NPC's and then defend them from endless waves of bullet fodder. Fallout 4's building didn't exact lean to the calm and serene role playing potential that Hearthfire did, but more the quick action-oriented approach that the rest of the game adopted. This was slightly marred by the building tools themselves. Just restrictive enough not inspire the imagination like Minecraft did and just liberating enough to require real effort in order to make something remotely presentable.

Fallout 76 was when Bethesda's building mechanics were really ready for market. Instead of building settlements, players were given the ability to build a home, only this time they had no restrictions on foundations and could build anywhere. The actual building tools themselves were improved to make the act of building much more intuitive and forgiving. With a map as huge as Fallout 76's, being told to go out and make a house almost feels like staking your claim in the old west. That old junkyard house you eventually put together is representative of the blood sweat and tears you put into gathering the material to assemble it. (And your patience for persisting through all the server issues.)

The prevalence of 'building mechanics' in modern games is indicative of the appeal of creative outlets in games. There will always be an audience for mindless action experiences and tactical real-time strategy games, but sometimes people just want to settle down and let their creativity flow. I have always been a huge fan of these kind of features, even if I've never been much an architect myself'; I find the drive to create something that I am proud of often trumps the desire to push forward to the end. Sometimes I find myself becoming hopeless dedicated to games that don't completely deserve it in order to perfect something that doesn't really have any concrete criteria for perfection. I become my own taskmaster and I'm not the only player to fall into the similar habits. I guess it just goes to show; tell the player to build a house and they'll try to make a home.