To believe or not

It is said that one of the most imperative tools of any storytelling is the suspension of disbelief. The ability for the Storyteller to present an idea or situation and the listener to sit back, nod along and go with the flow. And it all comes down to the very tepid and ill-shaped thing known as 'believability'. "Can I buy this", "Does the story do enough to suspend by perception of what is real and what isn't." Without that there is always a distance between us and the story, a film behind which we observe ourselves more than we observe the story- and when you're in that state it's near impossible to be driven emotionally, feel the adventure, react to the stakes. It is the death of immersion.

But how does the act of 'believability' translate into gaming? That's actually something more of a nuanced question, because the very nature of a game does not engender itself to 'true to life depictions'. You create a game where the character needs to eat and sleep and go to the toilet in order to function in their day to day and 9 times out of ten you've made a boring gameplay loop that people don't want to engage with. One bullet deaths? An unfun overly brutal game. But there is still a balance to be struck, as evidenced by the philistine spread of that mostly misunderstood concept coined as 'Ludonarrative Dissonance' that bevies of half-educated luddites cite as though proof reading their own dissertations. People can sense when something doesn't feel right, even if they can't quite verbalise why that is. 

The very nature of how most modern games play out means that we can never really create a one-to-one parity. When a gameplay loop is built around shooting bad guys- it makes sense to throw dozens of enemies at the player even though a sensible mind will tell you that one guy in a fight against several bigger dudes is never going to work out for them. At moments like that what is 'believable' shifts in perspective to how we are presented with these scenarios- what little branches are offered to the audience that they can sell themselves into this world. A world were one men armies exist and bullets sting like a wasp poke.

Given that I've been playing through them recently, the Mafia games come to mind when I consider this. Games with their fare share of ridiculous explosive set pieces- but set against fairly comprehensives crime narratives about the nature of organised crime and how the desire to always get more eats away at yourself, those around you and very nature to enjoy the life you thought you wanted. Mafia tempers it's more explosive moments with a relatively sedate pacing for a video game, where the evolving and devolving life of these mafiosos are placed in contrast to the bursts of violence and death. It's a great sobering device to keep us in the frame of mind to 'believe' in this world and the consequence of our brutality. Then Mafia 3 kind of spat on all that, but we're focusing on the positives today.

Tomb Raider, the remakes, are one such game that gets brought up often- largely because of half-heads who can't comprehend what stakes in a narrative are. I always found that new Lara to be very well attuned to realism in the manner of 'consequence'. They went as hard as they could into the explosive set-pieces and insane magical insanity- as long as they could back everything up with grounding consequence on the otherend- and it really worked out! Lara had to kill so many to survive that original island, and watch all her friends die or drift away after the fact- landing her in therapy. She saw supernatural happenings before her very eyes, making her an intellectual outcast after the fact. She learned of a great secret society praying on the hidden world, making her a paranoid recluse. Living in a world where A equals B is a great tool for having that world feel like it matters.

And on the more extreme example side we have the likes of Borderlands. Yes, I know- "Borderlands? How is that a game that can sell a believability to it?" And to that I would like to reiterate- we're talking about the player's ability to buy into this world of belief. It's all about being believable within the space you've created. If there's a wacky world in the ass-end of the universe were bullets are more common than water- then I want to believe in everything that comes with that sort of setting. A dusty and rustic world were civilisation are all but tiny rare pockets against a land gone mad- that sense of prevailing isolation amidst the crazed wackiness of the local power players. When you start softening the edges of a world like that- you lose that carefully crafted image. Suddenly Borderlands no longer feels like Borderlands anymore now that it's just a bad-joke factory. 

Of course this works best with a game like Grand Theft Auto. One that bills itself around capturing, and then mocking, the state of modern life. Rockstar do this immensely well, bringing entire cities to life and extracting just the right slices of culture for mockery- but if we take this to the other degree and talk about immersion than it would probably be the Red Dead Games that take the cake from the catalogue. Lean slices of the mid-to-south west brought to a interactive playspace that feels weighty. Where you track and hunt, pick up bounties, get drunk and start bar fights: Red Dead delights in spicing up the mundane to be just exciting enough- striking this careful balance between the realistic and the playable. A masterclass, some might say.

At the end of the day all this talk about what is and isn't believable amounts to little more than a studying of tools- tools with which artists create entertainment that grabs and moves us. Breaking through the tough skin of the fictional becomes harder as we move into an age of more all consuming entertainment but as artists it will forever be our duty to stay ahead of all of that and sink our teeth into the real next level ways our work can snake into the hearts of the public. Immersion is just another one of those tools that can cut through so much of the doubt and dissention when used right, to the right audience and create the truly unforgettable.  

Taking it slow

 

Recently I found myself gravitating to a game that I hadn't played for a very long time. Four years in fact, and I pretty sure that at that time I wasn't playing the best part of the game, but rather it's bastardised Online mode a few months before it was retired to a perpetual maintenance mode. I speak, of course, of Red Dead Redemption 2, the last Rockstar classic, for which I decided to dedicate another run from the getgo to get a feel for what the game was like- as well as see the game in 4K because I realised I'd never quite experienced that yet. Of course, then I had to start the game four or five times because I kept accidentally jostling one of the plugs in the back of my Xbox which is tied to my HD storage which, of course, would instantly exit out of Red Dead 2. Which is a bit silly, considering that my Red Dead 2 is installed on my SSD- because of course it is- I only keep the HD for Xbox One backward compat titles! Long story short, that was how I learned repeatedly that Red Dead Redemption 2 features no autosaves during it's entire prologue mission. Saw that opening about four times.

What I came back to the game for was that feeling of being of grounded-ness that beguiles so many other games out there. Where all the AAA games are desperate to seek the biggest spectacle and the fastest pace- few titles are happy to let you saunter about and admire the wind while you track an Elk through the brush. And I've come to find that the games which do give you that room tend to feel so much better when the guns finally do come out and that calm explodes into violence- because you know the range of activity that the world can inhabit- you've felt the still and can appreciate the motion. It seems almost overly simple to say it- but the more disparate the experience, the greater each extreme comes to compliment one another. (To a limit, of course. There's no point throwing a Helldivers 2 style game on the back of a tax-filling simulator... although now I desperately want to play a game like that, good lord!)

I think harnessing that calm before the storm is such a powerful tool for game designers, which draws me so deeply to the stealth genre which is conceived all around that concept. Metal Gear Solid, Splinter Cell, Hitman- all these games revel in putting the player in control of the pace of the game, with the amount of action being entirely dependent on how well the player does in their stealth endeavours. MGS 5 in particular actually features decently solid 3rd person action, but that excels to feeling robust and thrilling when your exposure to that side of the game is limited only the tense moments of adrenaline when everything is going wrong. Hitman, on the otherhand, features pretty mediocre combat- therefore avoiding having to deal with that side of the game by setting up a flawless execution without ever being spotted contains that excitement of the spontaneous into the art of the strategy.

Stardew Valley, on the otherhand, is a game built around the pursuit of the 'simple life' and, at least in the way I play it, the simplification of your daily required activities as mush as possible. Stardew Valley for me is all about living in the town, building a routine of brewing Pale Ale and handing it out at the tavern on Fridays. Fishing in the evenings and then pawning those fish off at the farm bin because I don't trust the local fisherman not to resell my catches as his own. Planning out my crop buy and sell path over the next four seasons so I maximize my 'request fulfilment' potential. Stardew is a game about routines, which is the fartherest thing from the high-octane draw of action- and in that relative peace a serene state of focus can be touched upon. (Which might be why I find live service titles, which try to turn action into a routine, so roundly boring.)

Colony Management games are also big on my list for title of the slow vs fast nature. Sticking around here for a while will tell you that my favourite is of course Rimworld- for it's long from RPG stat building and base construction day-to-day intercut with flashes of activity when a raid happens or a disaster occurs or seven pawns get an infection at the same moment that there's a radiation storm and then an insect colony erupts in the dining hall. A comedy of errors. But what makes Rimworld work so well is the time investment put in during those inactive hours. You fight for what you have because it cost you blood sweat and several months to create, you try to keep your pawns safe because you've carefully raised and built their skills for the past two years. And you throw away all you plans when the AI refuses to go through the kill-door you built and all your plans get scuppered!

But of course, the game that really exemplifies the heart of 'taking it slow' has to be the Persona-style RPGs that balance living a normal life with traipsing through the evil dens of some overworld in pursuit of some form of wider societal justice. You are heroes living ordinary lives, and it's the depth of those ordinary lives, the connections you make through the other-time hobbies you adopt, that fuels the purpose of the monster slaying. That is, of course, to laud all the side stories, the tea brewing of 5, the bug catching of 4, taking Elizabeth on real world tours in 3- and the clever way that all these off-time actions contribute to improving the toolset you'll have access to in the main game. Reinforcing the message in the doing so!

And, of course, Red Dead Redemption 2 veers it's way much more towards the deliberate and rigid. You loot procedurally from corpses, skin every animal live (pretty much), pick through draws and cabinets one-by-one. You go through the immersive rigors of rough living in a manner that I believe is meant to bring you closer to the decidedly more worldly and introspective world view of Arthur Morgan. Whereas John is revenge driven, trying to earn back his family, and thus the faster paced action might fit his story better- Arthur is trying his best to find some connection to tie him back to the world. Outside his love for the gang, which is constantly wavering, Arthur has no one and nothing but the world around him, which he studies and draws about in his trusty journal. Taking your time to admire it all is what makes RDR2 such a unique big budget adventure.

If that is up your street in games, there is actually another big budget recommendation I have. The peerless Death Stranding with it's curious approach for gameplay definitely not designed for the easily bored. You probably know how the gimmick goes- vast journeys over large treks of land to deliver packages back and forth in a world deprived of physical interaction wherein you are the only connecting tissue bringing the world together. The isolation and loneliness is a key forming factor of the narrative and some people have really trouble getting to grips with that and connecting in a world without physical beings in front of them. Death Stranding highlights the importance of the unseen roles, those that work tireless for those they can never meet. These are the experiences that touch me the most- in a world that feels afraid to slow down- those that squeeze out that precious time are the sole few who get to experience how special it all can be.

Most confused awards of 2023

 

What would you define as 'innovation' in game design? Maybe a game that transcends the very boundaries of what you would consider a game? A game that excites and reminds you of the possibilities of interactive media in a way you haven't felt since you first started discovering video games? A game that challenges you to think in ways you simply haven't before? It's a game that is fundamentally different, distinct to a fault, and pretty much every single thing that the Industry is not mired in currently with our endless remakes, sequels and remasters. You want a product that thinks out of the box. Astounds. Redefines. Amazes. You want a game that isn't Starfield. So why, in the name of all the gods in the sky, does it have the Steam award for 'Most Innovative game'? And what exactly can we learn from this little foray into backwards land?

So Steam has decided that it wants to get into the 'award giving' circuit just like the Game Awards before it- actually this was a crusade they embarked on quite a while ago, we're simply catching up to them now. Because you see, I've never really given two craps what Steam tells me a good game is- Steam is flooded with absolutely unbearable trite every other day, if those wastes of Software are considered good enough for a platform, that platform simply hasn't enough integrity to be an authority on 'quality'. That being said, Steam is the biggest storefront for games that exists, so if anybody was going to do it- it makes sense that it would be Steam. Although I bet Stadia would have tried to slide in on it if they knew that was a possibility back in their days.

Steam's aspirations at respectability are scuppered by one small detail, however; their belief in the video gaming public to be trusted with sole voting authority over the award's gifted. In Geoff Keighley's awards, that duty is gifted first to reviewers who couldn't give less of a toss to pick out the nominees, and then the final decision is made in a joint vote betwixt the public and those journalists, with a heavy skewer to make the journalists vote count for more. Steam, fools that they are, left both the nominations and the award gifting totally up to the whims of the gaming public- which of course led the way for eye-popping results that make more headlines than the actual legitimate winners. (Afterall what else is there to say? Baldur's Gate 3 earnt two more awards? Big whoop, it's already Game of the Year- what else was going to win?)

Starfield being crowned 2023's winner for Most Innovative Gameplay, however, is such a sarcastic plaudit I can't help but giggle about the cruel sardony behind it all. Made all the more potent by the fact that Bethesda's long suffering community team took to Twitter to celebrate the win, not noticing the thorns of the joke twisted inside of the rose of the 'victory'. Of course, this only brought out the attention of how ludicrous the win was to their followers, who let Bethesda's Twitter team know well how they were the butt of a joke. And now we have one of the most head scratching screenshots of the year- with Starfield wearing a badge it has no business existing in the same room as. Oh innovation, how far your concept has fallen!

But Starfield was perhaps the most obvious joke. It was actually such a headline stealer that I didn't notice the even deeper cut that the gaming community had made on another game awarded a similarly as perplexing award. See, when you look at the multiple award winning game 'Red Dead Redemption 2' and see it as a winner of an award, that makes sense at first glance. Perhaps a glimmer of confusion might strike you upon remembering- this is the 2023 game awards and RDR2 released in 2018, but who knows why mad award shows give out the awards they do? What was this one for? Labor of Love? Well that sounds like a fine enough award I guess... until you actually read the description of that particular award.

You see 'Labor of Love' is described as an award gifted to a game that had already launched a while ago, but who's developers 'like good parents' have stuck around to nurture the game's community and growth in the following years. It's an award designed to be given to all those indie darling games that get substantial updates over the years like Terraria or Stardew Valley, and the Live Service games that make perpetual support part of their business model. (Which in my mind would inherent disqualify live service games from being considered 'Labor's of Love', as they are more 'Labors of our wallet', but higher ethics are besides the point here.) Only upon acknowledging all of this does the sarcasm of Red Dead Redemption 2's award really hit home.

Red Dead Redemption 2's after-game support was it's online mode, the same as Grand Theft Auto Online, but Rockstar soon realised that the art of adding content to a western themed game presented more creative challenges than the half-hearted new cars every few months, that GTA Online required. They experimented for a year with job roles, Moonshining, some special bounties and then the team decided it was too hard and gave up. After just over a year. Yes, Grand Theft Auto Online is still supported to this year, yet Rockstar couldn't even keep Red Dead Online alive to see the 2020's. Talk about pathetic attempts at providing post game support and a hilarious poster child for everything you'd avoid in the search for a 'Labor of Love' product.

Some have highlighted the missed opportunities for serious contenders to get recognised thanks to these joke nominations and votes, and cry out for the establishment of proper curation standards. To be fair, Steam is the biggest store front and being recognised there could be more important to an up and coming game than by any other respected award show. But to be honest, the Steam awards have never been taken seriously- and I think one last chance in the year to stick the knife in to the big corporations and twist it a little isn't going to collapse the industry in on itself. Afterall, what's the point if we never take the chance to take a laugh at ourselves. Or at others. Who disappointed us. Greatly.

Realism versus Entertainment

The debate of a generation.

Entertainment mediums are designed to be, go figure, entertaining for the fellow experiencing them on the otherend of the screen. Or comic book. Or stage. Whatever, there are a lot of vectors to experience entertainment from. At the end of the day, no matter how twisted that quest becomes, it really is the deep-most desire of all creatives to entertain someone, somewhere, even if that person is ultimately just themselves. Which is why one might often find themselves asking what place of purpose truly difficult or overly challenging games have in an environment where entertaining the player is the main goal. Surely it would be time efficient to just shorten the time between input and satisfaction. Well, of course it isn't as easy as that- delayed gratification is often a more effective feeling and there's a difference between earned rewards and given rewards. I'm not getting into the weeds about all that, we've had that discussion before. Instead I want to focus in on the 'realistic' games.

As a general rule, games are typically designed in a way that isn't exactly realistic in the worlds and scenarios that they're depicting. Whether you're a incredibly agile shinobi who stabs people through the heart but they keep coming until an arbitrary life bar is drained, or you're an 'army of one' Nazi killing machine rampaging through an ancient German castle withstanding the various bullet wounds you receive by munching down on wayward bowls of dogfood. There's an inherent suspension of disbelief that one must commit to whenever they dive into any video game in order to be inducted into a immersive environment where they play the center of the storm around which all the action and excitement is funnelled. In order to narrow down the vast experience of entering the shoes of another human, simplification is inherent and unquestionable, unless you want to be playing as the one ass kicking super-hero who has to take time of his day for toilet breaks. 

But then there are the games who accept the inherit aura of disbelief requisite to form a game playing experience, but then attempt to make up the deficit in the design of systems that simulate realistic systems for the express purpose of being as realistic as possible. Often times, games which go this direction will actually prioritise the pursuit of some simulation of 'realism' over raw entertainment and enjoyment, and not necessarily always with the understanding of the power of delayed gratification. Sometimes developers just want to chuck a hunger, thirst and sleep bar at you because they think it'll be a challenge. For a long time in the middle 2010's, so many games that didn't need to be survival titles, and didn't particularly wear the coat gracefully, found themselves bogged down with overly excessive resource management bars that ended up being so strict they tipped the bar the otherway and became unrealistic again. "I starved fully to death in half a day without eating? Poppycock!"

There are a couple of decent budget games that would fit into the mould of being 'AAA' which I've selected that both have their own ideas of bowing down to the ideals of realism over quick gratification entertainment. And both are constructed to some level of gameplay coherence, unlike the vast majority of that survival game deluge I alluded to. One such game is the sweeping cowboy adventure epic sequel, Red Dead Redemption 2; which altered many systems of the first game to be more of a 'realistic' simulation of Wild West life. The other being the maiden game of Warhorse studios, 'Kingdom Come: Deliverance'; a game for which the concept of 'crushing and unforgiving medieval realism' was an actual selling point within the marketing cycle. How do both games manage their pursuit of the 'realistic' and how does that come off to the audience?

Red Dead Redemption 2 actually caught a lot of slack for it's intentionally slower pace from a crop of more casual gamers who preferred the more easily accessible way that Red Dead Redemption 1 played. Rockstar went for a much slower pace for RDR2's moment to moment gameplay, with greater emphasis being put on the effort of exploring in-door environments as you manually loot each draw and cupboard, or manually hauling the carcass of an animal onto your horse in order to ride it into town and sell the thing before it expires. There's even a system of eating regularly to increase your health regeneration, and wearing warm clothes in the cold and thinner clothes in the heat. This bleeds into the presentation of the story too, where many missions take their time to just move from one area to another, rushing neither you or Arthur's narrative as you immerse yourself in the gang.

I think 'immersion' is the key word for Red Dead Redemption 2, because beside what some dissenters might like to think, Rockstar never ties the weight of consequence too much over you. Management bars being ignored can never kill you, nor really inconvenience you so horribly that you feel obligated to maintain them. And the pace of the slower missions are intentional in order to juxtapose the game to the moments of wild explosive action when the bullets start flying, heightening their impact. Whether you're willing to endure the play at realism and give into the immersion ploy is really up to you as a player; but I think most who are willing to give that over agree that the result is a more visceral and intense experience where you truly fill the shoes of Arthur, living the life of a cowpoke of the century as well as of the anti-hero gunslinger.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is similarly married to realism, although for that game it is taken in a more hard-line way. Your management bars are deadly, for example, and not being rested and fed before a battle can actually make a bit of the difference. But then, that marries well with the setting of Kingdom Come being a seemingly authentic medieval experience through old Bohemia where you start as a literal know-nothing peasant and have to build yourself up into a being of prominence. I'm not alluding to some sort of montage sequence, either. Kingdom Come fully expects you to train for real-life hours in a combat ring in order to rank up your various combat stats before you're ready to face enemies in combat. Knowing the intricacies of combos and deflection isn't enough, without those stats you will die often.

I find much of the immersive 'realistic' elements of the game are justified as attempts to stay authentic to the age. Finding written words to be gibberish until you force yourself to learn how to read is in fitting with the level of literacy of the age; being unable to hold a bow whilst flailing wildly is the baseline of most any amateur archer. The process of starting from the bottom and struggling to become someone of any sort of skill is certainly appealing, especially smothered in a package called 'realism' which makes ever struggled-for achievements feel that much sweeter for the hardship endured to get there. Warhorse does go a bit overboard in some specifics, though. The training for hours is quite mind-numbing to be honest, and the restriction on saving, in a game as unstable as that, was a bold and ultimately unwise design decision.

Realism doesn't inherently need to be the enemy of entertainment, even though it might seem that way at a simple glance. Escapism and fantasy gains it's initial spark of interest from the promise of not resembling the dour real world we live through every day; and inheriting any aspect of that tedium just feels counter intuitive. But in the same way that the bow string which pulls ever tighter suffers tension before it snaps back to send an arrow flying further, some level of realistic tension can counteract with the entertainment to heighten the effect and propel excitement further. Of course, by that same merit; those who marry themselves to the ideals of 'realism' too staunchly can find themselves using that badge as an excuse to 'forgive' tedium and boring gameplay, finding the balance there is the art of intuitive design practises.

Should action games have quiet sections?

Does the boom boom go well with the shush shush?

Games are all about action, right? Swinging in to save the day, blasting through rooms of waist-high objects, murdering hundreds yet still calling yourself the goodguy and maybe even looking a little bit over your shoulder for the front cover. (But not too much over your shoulder, you have to maintain the plausible deniability that you don't care about the attention) But of course, not all games are about constant action and, in fact, even the one's that are sometimes might not show action all the time, sometimes there are careful balances to be struck between when a game goes full violence and when it lets the tempo rest up a bit. And when we're talking about games, with their length, we leave enough room for these experiences to be more flexible with their pacing than one might expect an all-out shooter to typically be at first glance. But should a game that is dedicated to action allow for moments of quiet and calm, or does doing so detract from the package of the game in general? And whilst acknowledging that every game is obviously going to be it's own case-by-case scenario: what effect does action and it's proliferation have on the experience of the player?

To provide an example of such an 'effect' as well as demonstrate the difference in approach I'm talking about; I want to touch on two great open world games. Sleeping Dogs and... well, any Rockstar game can go here, although I should probably stick to just the open world ones, as they all share the trait I'm about to discuss. Rockstar allows their open world games to have times of action and times of characterisation, either for the city or the starring characters, whereas Sleeping Dogs sets a mandate of at least one action scenario in every single mission. I find this keeps things moving for the easily bored, but conversely makes things incredibly predictable. In GTA you can genuinely have a mission where you are introduced to an area and important people you'll need to get to know, such that you could spend a whole mission talking or listening to exposition. In Sleeping Dogs, you cannot have a mission without either a car chase (or race), a gun fight or a fist fight. (Usually more than one of those, but it's always got to be at least one.) What this means is that it becomes really hard for the story to surprise you at any point with any development, because as soon as someone says "Can you take me shopping?" or "Would you like to attend my wedding?", you know straight away that something is going to happen that will turn everything on it's head. Predictability robs all power from spontaneity, which I think hurts the lingering appeal of a story. 

I pulled back on saying 'all Rockstar Games' because of the follow-up example of a game that is even more full throttle than Sleeping Dogs. Because you see, as an Open World game, Sleeping Dogs needs to not be throwing death and suffering at you at some points, there has to be open world no-action driving sections for the sake of simply going places. But an action shooter like Max Payne, nah that can be as action packed as you want. (Just as most action shooters are.) Barring cutscenes, you're pretty much always spraying lead at someone whilst diving slow-motion through the air and it captures a very action movie-esque sort of atmosphere. I personally always looked upon Max Payne 3 as the Die Hard video game we never got (that top-down abomination does not count.) The toss up is that it can make you desensitised to the explosion that is action, requiring the game to use other methods to keep players interested. Something which most games achieve by changing up the challenge (new enemy types, harder sections, increased stakes), and others fail at.

Then, to shift gears once again, we have a sort of game which is built around action but could contain plenty of other content in it as well. I've picked Fallout for this example, but pretty much any RPG title could fill this space. We're talking games wherein it's just as likely that you'll spend a play session chatting or walking to places, as you might spend it gunning down bandits in the wasteland. These games can, when handled right, still maintain that adrenaline which action brings even to the last stages of the game, just from how segmented the action moments are. A title I'm playing right now which is wonderful for managing this balance would be Death Stranding, which normalises it's robust delivery framework so much that when you go awry and bump into a Beached Thing, it's never a comfortable encounter that you're familiar with. And in entertainment being uncomfortable is preferable to being bored. 

But what about games where action is the very last thing you manage, and not in the way that Death Stranding does it (where action is a surprise which could be lurking around every misstep) but in such a manner that approach the conflict gameplay willingly but sparingly? Of course, I'm talking about the Persona games here, wherein most of the game is spent living the life of the protagonist and choosing where they develop their skills and whom they kindle friendships with. The latter half of the game is the RPG fighting, and though much of what you do on the outside does improve those duelling skills, the draw of the audience is more towards living these lives and getting closer to these fictional people. The drawback of games like these is that the core spine of the gameplay, the actual RPG fighting, can start to feel like a mere obstacle between you and progression, because that's just not what you signed up for. Balancing this with making combat fun and varied becomes even more of an issue than it is for the full action games.

When it comes to the genre called 'action', I feel it's always important to maintain and develop the core of the action gameplay, but that doesn't mean it can't be just as important to have other dalliances too. The sorts of games that aren't focused on creating rounded experiences like that need to really nail their action premise in order to not feel vapid and empty, something which the Far Crys of the world can fall short of. I think that might be why we can have a game as beautiful and pulsing as Cyberpunk 2077, and still feel like we're walking around an unfinished Alpha. Life is more than just constant conflict, and though games are an embellishment of the life experience, avoiding the calm before and after the storm is an easy way to disconnect the audience from the world you've built. Again, unless the game is specifically designed to meld around that design, such as with your average FPS game. 

That being said, I do understand people who don't like any deviation from the straight action of the game as they feel it's just a waste of time. Red Dead Redemption 2 has it's detractors for that very reason, where time spent not shooting things and rocketing through the storyline can be aggrieving when the game is asking you to soak in atmosphere and enjoy the arcade-simulation of cowboy life. As such it largely comes down to taste, and that can be different for everyone. Some people like to spend as much time in these fictional worlds as humanely possible, whilst others want to power through at a break-neck pace so that they can onto the next one in no time flat. The only question is which kind of gamer you want to be.

I think there's always a place for quiet in action games, as the very concept of disparity is inducive to competent pacing. Even all out action first person shooter games, with all their chaos and explosions, can sometimes be best served with their moments of peace, or even just quieter variations of that action. (Such as how in 'Halo: Reach' one of the best missions is the stealth one) For me, the ability to take your audience on a journey is the prerequisite to all great entertainment and pacing is the key instrument through which you can work this magic, which is why no matter where I am in life, how busy everything else is, how little free time I personally have, I'll always make space for the Death Strandings and Red Dead Redemptions on my play docket.

How open worlds vary

 One hill too far.

The Open World game is one of the most complicated beasts in all of gaming if you ask me. At it's heart, the very concept is indicative of the modern prototypical assumption of what a game even is, as informed by the supremacy of 3D era Grand Theft Auto games and the deluge of copycats that streamed after it. We're long past the days when gaming was chiefly represented by the Goomba stomping platforming antics of Mario, and maybe rubbing onto an age where online deathmatch games will take the predominant spotlight. (or at least, more online centric style games) But for the time being there's a special sort of intrinsic familiarity we all feel when a Open World game is laid before us, even when we've no idea what it's about or the roads it will travel, because these sorts of games have been ironed into our very souls. They'll have an almost smothering amount of freedom, usually plenty of ways to kill time beyond just playing the main quest, typically follow a traditional narrative set-up and take anywhere upwards of 20 hours to beat. So if this image is so well ingrained, why aren't these games created equal?

Indeed, one may look upon an open game world and consider it's sprawling golden fields a bounty of exploration and untapped dynamic adventure, whilst that same person could look upon another and shudder at the magnitude before him and the chore of tasks that await behind just those mossy hills. The observer hasn't changed, the game has, but in ways that aren't exactly obvious to first impression. Heck, it might not even be clear to most developers either, given the way in which a sizeable number of these guys make their bread and butter churning out the latter type of open world whilst each time promising it's the former. So whereas we may sing our praises of Rockstar's Open Worlds, from GTA to Red Dead Redemption, we roll our eyes as the, sometimes bigger, play spaces of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed and Watch_Dogs, and I wanted to see if I could pinpoint the many reasons why.

I think a lot this starts with design intent, and the purpose of the world that is in the process of being made. Ubisoft and Rockstar have very different approaches when it comes to this most basic of step, and it lays the foundations for very different styles of games, despite their rather comparative visual quality to one another. With Ubisoft the purpose of the world being made is very functional, in that it's always created into chunks and regions that are separated by the rising tide of difficulty and the game's overall challenge, rather than the natural heart of what this virtual world would look or feel like. Rockstar are more into the idea of creating a believable play space, and so you'll usually notice that their worlds are specifically designed to feel lived in and genuine above all else. Of course some concessions are made to be more pleasing for the player to either navigate or look at, but verisimilitude never leaves the thought process for any significant amount of development time.

Another big component is the art of actually filling that world, known not-so-affectionally as 'side content' in gaming vernacular. Again, this links back to design intent, but is perhaps the most clear way that we can see what sort of open world we're dealing with. Rockstar, in recent years, has tended towards side content that is formed in minigames or meta tasks, or just something that is going to give the player reason to return to parts of the map repeatedly, perhaps even beyond the life of the core narrative. Even further points, in Rockstar's book, if it feels like a natural addendum to that part of the world and creates the sorts of activities that people within this world might enjoy in these locations. (Tennis minigame at the courts down by Venice Beach, for example) Ubisoft have an approach that has invited comparison to 'checklists', for the way that their 'side content' is almost always different types of collectibles. Chests, fathers, flags, pages, stuff shoved around the world with no care about why they might be there in-universe or even for enriching that area of the map for repeat visitors. They're just blips on the map that lure you over just to pick them up and then you'll likely never return for the rest of the game; contributing to the feeling that a lot of Ubisoft open world's feel supremely under-utilised and wasted.

 

The biggest use of the world in a game is, of course, to be a vehicle for the main narrative, which means right now I'm assessing its primary purpose. You'll hear different terms be thrown around which are mostly synonymous but have their own quirkish oddities to them. Sand Box, Open World, Hub space; that generally relate to how the game world exists for it's narrative. Games like Destroy All Humans and Red Faction Guerrilla (as well as Far Cry) have a sandbox world that exists for the player to mess around with and have fun in. The main narrative merely exists to direct people across this space in a linear fashion, directing them to steadily more dangerous areas as we discussed earlier. More open world games like GTA, Red Dead and Fallout either lack these 'linear scale of difficulty related to location' or hide it more subtly. They try to engage with actual world building and instilling purpose and justification to the various lands you visit. Those storylines might have you spending all of your time around one area of the map simply because this is where it feels natural for events to be happening, the skill comes in justifying way players should branch out to the more dour and less central corners of the play world as well.

And then there's the question of the non-essential addendums to our worlds. The things that aren't related to exploration or side activity, the visuals and mechanics that are merely in place to make the world feel alive. How can I believe that this world is breathing if I don't believe people actually live in it, and the way that developers handle this question is one of the most interesting to me. Having people wonder the streets and towns seems a given, but the way in which different games handle this simple factor varies wildly. In Ubisoft games they pride themselves on the diversity of the crowds and the cultural accuracy of their looks. (Or for Far Cry games, the accuracy of the dynamic wildlife) Rockstar games have gone to making the crowds act with unique animations or react in fun ways to the situations around them, and Elder Scrolls gives every single character a unique routine and a backstory. There's no recipe for success here, and that's why it's so fun to compare and contrast.

I have a special relationship with open world games, in that I have a tendency to love as many as possible whenever I can, even despite the weaknesses here and there. Rockstar worlds can sometimes forget to prioritise certain corners of their maps through their need to provide purpose to every waypoint. Far Cry games often don't spend enough time anywhere, or does such a poor job in being believe that nothing feels real to me and I end up caring little for it. Assassin's Creed games pile on worlds that are too big with ludicrously expansive collectibles or side quests chains so that it feels like a total chore to slog through. No one type of open world is perfect and for all of their flaws they all have their benefits too. Rockstar worlds are endlessly replayable, Ubisoft worlds are unerringly gorgeous, Bethesda worlds always feel brimming with living lore. They're all special in my book.

The study of open worlds is fascinating to me, and I could see myself coming back to this topic time after time in my life and finding a new shade to fawn over every single time. I just feel that of all the archetypes of games out there, of interactive art pieces, these are the one's that feel the least defined and yet the most explored. Nothing in art is ever straight forward and simple, of course, but that doesn't make the humble open world game anyless mysterious and wild to a simpleton like me. And maybe at some point there could be room on this blog for analysis of all those hundreds of games out there with open worlds that don't work on any level, and from there I might start to deduce that special recipe for invariable open world success. (It might be fun)