5560 square miles. That is the size of the map in the 2009 video
game Fuel. 5560 square miles. That is roughly the size of Connecticut, and
much like Connecticut, the map of Fuel is basically nothing but empty space. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic world
similar to Mad Max, and this expansive, unnecessarily large map is really the only special part
of the game. The driving is mediocre, the races against
CPUs are completely rigged in your favor, and the graphics have that classic beige puke
color palette of the late 2000s. Just like the map, the entire game is a large,
bloated, barren wasteland. When it comes to game maps, there is almost
always a wasteland, the spaces in between the action. The roads and wilderness, stuff that has to
be there to look like a convincing world, but places where you don’t really have anything
to do. Hallways between the action. The issue with these is that they’re kinda
really really boring. While games are art, the majority are also
made for entertainment. So each and every game with a consistent world
has a big, large, gigantic wasteland problem. One of the simplest solutions has been around
for a very long time. Pokemon is a game that almost entirely consists
of connecting points, routes between the cities and towns populating whatever region you’re
in. These games are really two slightly different
games stitched together. The routes serve as obstacle courses, throwing
trainer battles and random encounters in your way to strengthen and build your pokemon team. Still, though, despite the life given into
these routes, the real content of the game is in the cities and towns.The most iconic
part of pokemon games are the events and gym battles. Each and every city is full of people and
quests and story, even beauty contests that serve as entirely standalone minigames. Each and every location is a hotspot not just
of life, but of game content. But to make all of this possible, to give
tension and challenge to the gyms and rival battles and story events, the routes are necessary. Not just to connect these places, but to serve
as the other transitionary part of an RPG game, grinding for levels. These two mechanics are almost always combined,
because it makes some intuitive sense.You don’t get stronger at the boss, you get
stronger for the boss, and both the journey and grinding make the payoff of beating a
strong enemy feel more worth it, like you had to put real effort towards your goal. However, not every RPG has levels. Shadow of the Colossus is a deeply empty game. The appeal of the game is, at first, the boss
fights against these hulking, monstrous creatures, but you don’t spend most of your time fighting. Most of the time is spent doing this. Riding through a desolate world.For a roleplaying
game, Shadow of the Colossus focuses heavily on the roleplay. The world is silent, as Wander and his horse
Agro hunt down the colossi to try and revive a girl named Mono. Between the battles, you need to ride to every
location with nothing but a guiding light, having you travel through long stretches of
silent meadows and meandering cliffsides. It’s painfully barren. Any tiny bit of content feels like an oasis,
with the rest of the journey being nothing but you and your own thoughts. The game itself feels self-reflective, asking
why you’re killing these massive creatures. At the start of the game they feel terrifying,
but as it goes on, it becomes almost tragic. They weren’t really harming anything, and
were the last signs of life left in this sweeping land, and you’re the one exterminating them. The empty space in the journey between these
monsters makes you think about all of this. There’s almost nothing to distract or entertain
you, using the world as a way to really put you in the position of Wander, the main character. You think the things he might be thinking,
understand his desperation, his questioning, and even his decision to keep going, all to
save this one girl. Most games, however, adopt the exact opposite
philosophy. As much as Shadow of the Colossus’s decision
was interesting, it’s hardly fun. In fact, for all games revolving around adventure,
there’s one whole leg of the journey that’s just as unfun: the trip back. For the first playthrough of a game, the biggest
appeal is that you don’t know what’s gonna happen, what you’ll see, what you’ll do,
but the trip back is a guarantee. You know these places now, that won’t change. So a lot of games focused squarely around
fun have gone to great lengths to minimize the lengths you need to travel. The most classic examples are vehicles. Whether its a car or a horse or a motorcycle
with blades on the side of it, vehicles are the most natural way to travel some boring
part of the map faster. It can even turn the landscape into a bit
of a minigame. With higher speed comes higher risk, so the
rocks and bumps and hills that would normally serve no danger become a new form of obstacle. My favorite example of this is Just Cause
3. Just Cause 2’s map was filled with tiny
villages between the larger areas, holding collectibles and secrets to hold the player
over on the way to the bigger events. Just Cause 3 made the decision to abandon
those tiny villages, instead having mid-size towns being the smallest areas available,
still giving a lot of things to do compared to the paltry villages of the last game, but
it meant that the distance between these places were longer. Just Cause 3 solved this issue with the introduction
of the wingsuit. While the previous game had the grappling
hook and a parachute, the combination of the two was pretty… slow. The normally high action gameplay was interrupted
by a fun but leisurely way to travel, making cars most often the best way to get around. The wingsuit changes the entire chemistry
of the Just Cause series. While the entire fun of the game before was
blowing up everything in sight, sometimes I found the wingsuit more fun than the destruction
itself. Suddenly, the landscape of Just Cause 3, this
beautiful island, becomes an obstacle course that you get to define. While you can soar peacefully in the open
air, I felt a draw towards getting as close to the ground as possible. Weaving between trees and cars and buildings,
risking everything for every little bit of adrenaline I could get. There were times where I’d just fly around
with a grappling hook and wingsuit, ignoring any objectives and taking in this new dimension
of travel laid out before me, it felt so freeing and dangerous and rewarding. I wanna play Just Cause 3 while writing this,
I like it way more than I should, anyways. Unfortunately, not every game can have a wingsuit,
and some are so vast or so focused on constant entertainment that not even vehicles cut the
time spent traveling well enough. So, eventually, game developers went: let’s
just have them teleport. Though to be honest, saying “eventually”
is a little misleading. The first game to have fast travel was Dragon
Quest, a game released in 1986. Being one of the earliest and most barebone
RPGs, it had the same issues of leveling and empty space that the Pokemon games would later
have. Understanding this even back then, Dragon
Quest gave the players a spell, return, which sent you directly back to the castle, no backtracking
required. Pokemon would also give you this ability in
the later parts of the games with the HM fly, letting you travel to any city or town you’ve
already visited. As time went on, though, games integrated
fast travel further and further into their very level design. The Borderlands 2 level, A Dam Fine Rescue,
has you chasing desperately after a robot that kidnapped the leader of the Crimson Raiders,
Roland. The design of Borderlands 2 is a lot like
a spider web, with almost every major area connected to at least 2 others, forming one
solid cohesive world to travel though. However, in the mission to save Roland, this
game design is thrown straight out the window. After fighting your way through a camp and
killing Blood Maw, you find your way into the Bloodshot Stronghold, diving headfirst
into the heart of the enemy. This mission might be the longest action sequence
in all of Borderlands 2, with waves of enemies meeting you in every single room and hallway
of the stronghold. You face turrets and nomads and psychos and
badasses, bruisers and marauders and mini-bosses, in close quarters and long quarters and both
at the same time. It’s kind of difficult to actually die in
the stronghold, because every single time you’re downed, there’s an enemy right
next to you to revive yourself with, it’s excessive in a fantastic way. After fighting through the hordes of enemies,
you finally meet up with Roland, locked in a prison cell. But before you can free him, he’s captured
by a robot named Warden out of nowhere. Being the enemy to a number of forces, Hyperion
decides to double kidnap him, and suddenly this already excessive mission becomes a full
out war between the bloodshots and hyperion robots, with you stuck in the middle of it. Fitting to the mission extending, you go out
even further to a brand new area, the Bloodshot Ramparts, an open warzone with Roland being
pulled to the very very back. The second entire half of this mission is
somehow even more chaotic and action packed than the first. The war seems brutal and equal at first, taking
some of the fire off you, but the further you plunge into the ramparts, the clearer
it is that Hyperion is winning the battle. By the end, it’s only you against the entire
army of robots, all culminating in the final boss of the mission, the Warden bot itself. Out of the normal bosses in the game, you
know, ones that don’t fly through the sky around you or something psychotic like that,
Warden is among the more fun ones. It has a classic video game big obvious weak
spot, but it’s not always possible to shoot. You’re forced to deal with waves of Hyperion
bots crashing into the ground around you, including badass loaders, as well as rockets
and other crazy shit happening to serve as a fun little cap to the already chaotic level. After managing to free Roland and kill Warden,
he actually uses the ability you had in the first game if you played as him, a turret
that can also heal you, and it’s one of the only times you get to actually fight with
an NPC in the game. All that’s left is to clear out a final
wave of robots, and the mission comes to a peaceful end. Now, Borderlands has always had fast travel,
and occasionally does make you or encourage you to use it, but the end of A Dam Fine Rescue
doesn’t even bother to offer you another option. To head back through both entire regions would
be psychotic. Even Roland just teleports. Unlike the rest of the areas in the game,
the Bloodshot Stronghold and Ramparts don’t really serve another purpose, not even as
connecting points. The only reason it was here was to throw enemies
at you from dawn to dusk, so now that the enemies are gone, outside of some side missions,
these areas are absolutely useless. Just teleport out, the game designers say. And honestly, I can’t really argue with
them. There are even games that don’t just remove
the trip back, but the trip there too. The Super Mario Galaxy games are a wonderful
mix of 3D, 2D, and gravity based platforming with some of the most atmospheric and interesting
level design that the Mario series has ever had to offer. That being said, I’ve never been able to
get the idea out of my head that most of the time, we’re not really playing one level. You play this mini-level then shoot to the
next and once you’re done with that, boom, next little level. Sometimes the only thing connecting these
worlds is a loose idea or mechanic, or just saying it’s the same level, deal with it. The level design in Super Mario Galaxy is
a series of small challenges one after another, with a fancy fast travel between every level. Truthfully, this isn’t an open world game
at all, not that the video was only about that, but its a regular, linear mario game
with launch stars instead of pipes and scattering around the position of the planets around
you. Empty space is taken rather literally, with
every level surrounded by the cold void of space, but even the spaces between planets
are nothing more than decorative. You don’t spend time traveling it, you’re
shot directly where you need to be, and catch a nice view in the process. In comparison to all of these varied approaches,
Fuel made an interesting decision. Let’s make all of it empty space. To describe Fuel as a video game is a little
challenging. The game makes the hilarious decision to add
a map in the bottom left corner, as if you’ll ever actually use the roads. Driving through the wilderness is just plain
easy, and is still the only sort of challenge the game can ever offer you. I watched the entire 2 hour long video “A
Nerd Cubed Road Trip”, and between responding to chatters or random tangents, the only thing
he could ever really mention about the game is, “wow, this game has a big map. This map is so big. This game map is massive.” The only other times he even mentioned the
game were talking about the very obvious, lazy glitches and re-used assets. Some areas put the exact same model right
next to each other, shuffling around the incredibly small asset pool a thousand times over so
we at least have things in the distance to look at. Nonsensical stone ruins and formations, broken
windmills and destroyed, half buried homes to use as ramps. The game can hardly render the vast landscape
that is literally the only reason the game is still known, with foliage disappearing
just in front of you, the distance being some vague blur of green or brown or black. As said before, the universe of Fuel is a
post-apocalypse, and it’s one of the most realistic ones I’ve ever seen. While Fallout calls its worlds wastelands,
they’re filled with quirky characters and technological remnants, laser beams and communities
and factions and life. The stories are huge in stakes and scale,
deeply political in its commentary and varied in every corner of the map. If the bombs didn’t drop in the fallout
universe, we wouldn’t have fallout games. For Fuel, though, it might have been a more
interesting and fun experience if society was still around. It’s the true definition of a wasteland,
it’s just nothing for miles and miles and miles. There is no special bits of content you get
to, no fanfare or rewards or anything to make the journey worth it. It is just nothing. And this isn’t some clever turnaround like,
“ooh, its secretly brilliant”, no, this game sucks. It’s so bad, but I still kinda love it,
because my brain is a pile of mush. It’s not a game I’d ever subject myself
to, but I’m happy that it at least exists, that the idea was thought of and tried and
executed as it was. And, while I don’t think Fuel was anything
close to a masterpiece, it isn’t the only game fascinated with empty worlds. The Long Drive released in 2019, to surprising
critical acclaim. The goal of the game is to drive, and I truly
mean just to drive. You’ve given a massive set of controls,
as well detailed access to nearly every part of your car, making you balance each of the
intricate details on your journey to… well… there isn’t actually a destination in The
Long Drive. The best words to describe the game are survival
and exploration, but it doesn’t really feel like that. Your goal is truly just to drive, with no
actual endpoint in mind. The landscape around you is procedurally generated. Most times when a game uses procedural generation,
it comes with the idea of having content around you at all times. Survival games love it, since the environment
isn’t just a set piece, it’s the materials that you use to succeed and build in the game. Minecraft is the most famous example, but
games like Astroneer and No Man’s Sky and Terraria all use it to turn their expansive
worlds into reality. The whole genre of roguelites depend entirely
on procedural generation to make every single run unique, promising that you will never
play the same game of Spelunky or Hades or Enter the Gungeon. All of these games use this tool to give the
player endless, infinite content, but The Long Drive uses it for another purpose. To give the player endless, infinite nothing. There are things to be found, structures that
have tools and gas and oil, but not always. You can find places with no use, nothing given
to you, even enemies waiting to ambush you. You can drive on a stretch of nothing for
a deeply uncomfortable amount of time, there’s no guarantee you’ll be provided with what
you need. The only guarantee is a near endless desert. There’s a youtube channel named “How Big
is the Map?”, a channel that both calculates and travels through as many video game maps
as they can. The time spent can vary anywhere from minutes
to hours, but the standout content are the ones that need to be split into parts. That’s to say, hours long parts. 5, 6, 7, 8 hours, traveling through one single
game world in real time. The series that I’m most fascinated with,
however, is about a game you might not expect: Kerbal Space Program. What Kerbal Space Program is known for is
its extremely difficult rocket building system, requiring a deep knowledge of the game’s
mechanics and y’know, rockets, otherwise all of your work falls apart the instant you
launch. However, for whatever reason, you can ignore
the entire point of the game and just kinda… walk around. This is the quest that “How Big is the Map?” started; to walk across just half of the game’s
starting planet. Part 1 of the series is entirely on a plane
of ice. Across the video, the only difference visible
at any point is what position the sun is in. In fact, part 2 is the exact same way, and
so is most of part 3. However, 22 and a half hours into the journey,
we finally get something new: a mountain peak in the distance. Now things are getting interesting. Over the last 4 hours in part 3, the mountain
grows from a couple pixels in the distance to… a few more pixels. After about 4 more hours, we finally see how
all of the peaks connect. And slowly, but surely, by part 7 of the series,
we finally reach the foot of the hills… 25 hours later. The total length of the series so far, from
the start to reaching this hill, is 57 and a half hours long. And the fun thing is, the series is unfinished. In fact, it’s not even close. With the speed of the Kerbal and the size
of the planet, the estimated time to travel just half of it is somewhere around 873 hours. A new part sadly hasn’t been uploaded for
10 months, and yet, one day, I’m sure someone will travel the entire thing. Because, for some reason, we feel a need to
explore even these empty worlds. People have gotten to the edge of The Long
Drive, the point where the roads just stop generating entirely. Multiple videos traverse the entire map of
Fuel, getting to the edge of Minecraft, of Daggerfall, these painfully long journeys,
knowing there’s nothing at the end to make it all worth it. It can’t just be curiosity, we know there’s
nothing waiting for us, yet we’re pulled along by something to see every inch of these
empty worlds. In most games, these roads are small. As short as they can be, letting the player
get to what they really want, where they need to go. But for some games, whether on accident or
on purpose, they become the roads. Things you travel for the sake of traveling. But, to me, the thing that draws people to
the size of Fuel’s map is the same one as every other game, every other connecting point
inside it. For some people, the only thing it takes is
the knowledge that somehow, somewhere, this is an end to find. And so, they will. No matter what it takes. Thank you, and have a nice day.
