World's worth exploring

I'd rather go and journey...

The other day I found myself exploring around the parts of my neighbourhood that I had previously never witnessed. It was an attempt to shake some focus back into my mind, ( I've had a hard time thinking straight of late) but I found myself engrossed in the act of exploring. Seeing new places and accidentally getting lost on a hilltop cul de sac (That place really needed better signage) was quiet the fun adventure to go on, and it really got me thinking about the times when games managed to illicit similar feelings as you explore their worlds, as well as the factors that make those worlds worth exploring.

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about what it is that makes open worlds worthwhile, (I've already covered that before, anyway.) but the elements of any game world, be it open or otherwise, that tickle your spirit of adventure. For me, this means a game which makes you want to look in every house and dive into every cave, not just for the promise of treasure but simply just to see what's there. Or even worlds that have you delve voraciously into it's lore to explore that world in a manner more favourable to folk like Otto Von Bismark. (God, even by my standards that's a dumb reference.) Of course, that means that this blog will likely be highly subjective and my views may differ from your own, but as long as I get you thinking about the topic I'll consider this a success.

For me there are a few factors that go into making an interesting gameworld. One of which would be creating a world that rings with authenticity. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that world must be accurate, (Most games suffer in their attempts to be accurate) but it must feel like a world/society that obeys to it's own rules. This can come down to doing something as extensive as writing lore for that world, to something as simple as providing little continuity snippets that explain the mundane things in the world. Neglect these can make your world feel very surface level or too 'game-y' to make you want to dive in. I know it sounds silly, but part of the reason I couldn't enjoy the beautifully crafted gameworld of Assassin Creed 2 without an objective was due to these little annoyances. 'Why did guards put your wanted sign up ontop of buildings?' Questions like that kept nagging me and breaking my immersion before it had a chance to form.

On the otherhand, when games do put in that extra effort to ensure that the world is beholden to some rules, even if those rules are weird, it can really resonate with the players. 'Beyond Good and Evil' is a mostly average adventure game with a fairly interesting story that gets less intriguing the further you pursue. The game is a huge cult classic, however, such to the point that Ubisoft are hard at work making an incredibly ambitious looking sequel. (Which they then intend to ruin by turning it into a live service.) For my money, the wide spread fame of the game came down to the incredibly vivid and unique world that you find yourself inhabiting. Huge sentient Rastafarian shark mechanics stick in the mind of the player much more than an enthusiastic but unremarkable fighting system. (To clarify, I refer to sharks that happen to work on mechanical objects, rather than indepth coding for a race of Rastafarian sharks. Although I would be curious to see how that idea would play out for the long awaited 'Jaws 3: The game'. Wow, my reference game is whack today.)

Another aspect of game design that really elevates the product, in my opinion, would be the scope of that world. I'm not talking about how big the playable game world is, rather than how big the ingame world is. Oftentimes it's the parts of the world that we don't experience and only hear about that really bring the story to life. Just hearing tales about the lawlessness of the 'Terminus systems' in Mass Effect 1 was enough to spark the player's imagination. You didn't even see a Batarian in the entire game (at least not in vanilla) so all we had were stories about an entire race of bandit aliens who famously slaughtered and enslaved an entire colony. Mass Effect was full of universe building snippets like this that made the wider world feel alive and existing beyond the direct actions of the player. (Which is where, I believe, 'Mass Effect: Andromeda' went wrong.)

Of course, as I mentioned in my lore blog, all of this can only serve as a addendum to what you have built up in the main game. All these extra world details are useless if the world that the player gets to explore is empty and uninteresting. Just look at Bungie's Destiny. That game built itself around the themes of legendary heroes and mysterious unknowable acts of heroism. Unfortunately, that ended up meaning that the entire main game was full of meaningless self-important dialogue and nothing substantial for the player to get themselves involved in. The famous tagline for the game was 'Become Legend', but in truth all you spent your time doing was hearing about other people who became legends whilst doing boring back and forth fetch quests. Just as with all things, lore must always be implemented with a sense of balance.

Visual diversity is also something to keep in mind when designing a game world. There is nothing more soul crushing, for the viewer, than being running through the same looking environments for several hours on end. That's part of the reason why I hate sewer levels, or any themed level for that matter, they ask you to withstand the same visual palette until it makes you nauseous. (Which is something that 'Shadow Warrior' actually did for me with it's sewer level.) Now I know that this seems to be more of an issue that is related to the 'appealing' aspect of a game world, but you'll find that it's a rock to start a landslide. If the area you are experiencing is visually appealing then you'll be more inclined to stick around and want to explore it. Bioshock's Rapture is an entire city that is made up of bathysphere-like glass domes that all reside underwater, yet the area still manages to encourage curiosity due to many factors, one of which being the range of visual diversity. Apollo Square is realized as a lowlass tenancy, whilst Nature's Bounty is an old fashioned fishing port and Arcadia features a whole underwater forest. Despite boasting a consistent location and a general art-deco design convention, the place manages to be diverse in a way that inspires and encourages curiosity.

A lack of visual diversity can suck out the feeling of life in the playable world. Oftentimes most storydriven games seek to take their players on an adventure and if the beginning areas of the game look identical to the closing areas (And it's not part of a dramatic convention i.e. 'Claptrap's New Revolution') then it can be hard to reconcile that promise of adventure with the experience you just underwent. Take the base game of the original Borderlands, for example. Most of that game took place in an area know as 'The Badlands' which, much as it sounds, was Mesa-like environment with an abundance of rocks and sand. Now that's completely fine for the introductory few minutes, but by hour 15 your eyes will start to get bored of looking at faded out yellow and brown everywhere. Luckily Gearbox recognized this for DLC and future titles. (Although Gearbox Australia apparently didn't get the memo when they made 'The Pre-Sequel'. Oh look, it's more moon...)

Painting and theme-ing the world is only one part of the battle, however, things really get interesting when it comes to filling that world. Although this is primarily a struggle that open world's work to face, anygame must endeavour to fill it's dead air with clutter. There is no one way to go about this practise and it can take many different forms; sometimes you'll dabble in environmental story telling, whilst other times you'll be working on narrative cues or just simple flavour material. Bringing all of these things together help to create an immersive environment that keep players hooked long enough to wonder what is around that corner. Games like the upcoming Cyperpunk 2077 have pushed this even further by enlisting bands to fill the world with original music to fill the gameworld's airwaves. This encourages people to listen into music tracks they hear, not just because they may enjoy the song, but because it paints a picture of the wider game world. Bethesda did something similar in Fallout 4 with Lynda Carter's singer character; Magnolia, and 'Dragon's Age: Inquistion' boasted a whole bevy of bar shanties that I still find myself humming. (Sera was never an agreeable girl...)

Oftentimes it can be all too easy for the devs in charge of clutter to focus on being functional and forget about or ignore immersivenss. This is completely fine when we are talking about a game that is focused on guiding you through it's events like Battlefield and Call of Duty campaigns; but you likely won't find yourself coming back to those levels to take a look around. Walk into a room full of waist-high objects and red barrels and it can be hard to buy into the fiction of the world and want to explore. Again, it all comes down to the type of game you want to make.

The ability to explore the worlds in which we play is one of those aspects unique to the medium of gaming that makes it so transcendent, in my book. That is why I commend and celebrate any developer or genre that exemplifies these efforts and pushes their artform forward through them. Companies like CD Projekt Red, Rockstar and Bethesda create entire realities that feel as real as the one we face every day and I find that to be one the highest forms of art. Maybe you agree there or maybe you look for something entirely different in your games, either way, I'm sure we agree that those games we consider special are the ones that manage to get us to boot them back up again, after everything's said and done, just to see what we might have missed.