Rediscovering the Joy of Exploration

over the last decade video games have undergone a series of massive shifts there's been a whole new genre springing up out of nowhere entirely new ways to play like mobile games at VR as well as the rise of the indie studio but if I had to sum up the design ethos of the 2010s as succinctly as I could I'd do it with a single idea and it's probably one that anyone who's watched an e3 presentation before is familiar with all the way up to distant mountains and if you played our previous stuff you know that mountain is not just a backdrop you can walk all the way to the top of that mountain you can even reach those mountains in the distance if you walk far enough I'll just go to pick one of these at random and we can go there you see that you can go there it's a hell of a pitch and it's no wonder really the open-world games have become as popular as they have done over the last decade with the trend only really beginning to peer out very recently with games like minecraft GTA horizon zero dawn fallout and a bunch of other games making mega bucks and with more processing power than ever to work with the promise of a true living breathing virtual world for players to explore was for the first time becoming possible to realize however for all the more recent games that have tried to fulfill this goal of a massive immersive environment there's been surprisingly few that have been able to really deliver on the fun of exploration and discovery of the open-world format offers for example the procedurally generated infinite universe of no man's sky really strolled to hold my attention in spite of its fun mechanics as much as I love just zipping around in my ship or building a base the planets I'd be doing that stuff on blend it together very quickly there were ice world's deserts smoke planets this weird bone forest I found but without fail they all had some sort of hazard I need to stop on sodium to avoid the same sort of resources and the same endless expanse of bumpy Hills it's not that no man's sky wasn't fun but the sense of wonder and curiosity that drew me to the game in the first place didn't really end up a massive factor in my time with the game because chances are I'd already seen whatever was out there just in a different color the elderscrolls v skyrim also runs into a lot of similar issues the game has this vast beautiful world filled to the brim with Dungeons and Dragons and yet once the initial Sheen has worn off the world loses that magic and it begins to feel much emptier every tomb is filled with the same identical dragger and bandits trudging around in the snow is boring and takes ages forcing you to rely on the fast travel system which means to end up robbing yourself of opportunities to stumble onto cool stuff in the wilderness and the law while interesting and detailed barely has any real impact on the game itself even this beautiful ambient bird effect Moss the self a game that points the way to a court dungeon is totally scripted and never happens again as much as the game wants you to think that Skyrim is a deep and well realized fantasy world it's much more like a movie set very convincing from the right angle but it just doesn't hold up to scrutiny I've tried multiple times to pick up these two games but despite both making a really big point of giving players a massive space to explore filled with cool stuff I couldn't help but feel like the Express was weirdly hollow like I wasn't really being encouraged to seek out new and interesting places all being rewarded for finding them and that made it kind of hard to get immersed in the environments these games create and that's a shame because the joy of exploration is a foundational gaming experience it's what got players to advance past that first screen in the very first Zelda it's what got them to try running left for a change in Metroid and it's what tempted players interventioning beyond Durotar and into the wider world of warcraft but his video gaming worlds have gone bigger and more impressive with more stuff to do that exploratory experience has if anything become harder to find which is strange more well to explore rendered in greater detail should be a uniformly good thing well maybe not the industry's focus on the massive scale offered by hardware improvements procedural generation and good old-fashioned worker exploitation have caused us to forget what makes exploration fun in the first place and ask the ability not just to be a sightseer which will embrace that awesome feeling of discovery and iterative understanding that makes the desire to forge out into the unknown such a universal human story as for how to do that well I've got a few ideas and to make things a bit harder I'm gonna try and do the whole thing without mentioning Dark Souls because that game has good well design and you've heard that a million times before let's start as we mean to go on when looking at how the design of an open world can be used to challenge players and add some emotional way to exploring beyond just spectacle when designing an open world there's a certain America to let the player go wherever they want immediately they get to go and see all your cool content you work very hard on and inspiration is about freedom and self-expression right well kind of by putting up no barriers to the players exploration you end up relying exclusively on the novelty of new things to keep players engaged and that hits diminishing returns very quickly instead when making players work in order to explore new areas and rewarding them over the long term they can develop a much stronger emotional response to discovery than if you'd let them go there immediately this can take many forms in survival games you might have a spooky area that requires the player to invest in special gear to safely explore and that apprehension and curiosity can make finally getting there really satisfying or you could encourage players to backtrack and wreak sport areas they've already been to some of the best moments in outer wilds when you got to go back to planets you'd already been to armed with new information that let you access hidden zones that were previously locked off just giving players glimpses of high-level areas like during World of Warcraft's flight paths can be a great way to get players pumped up for one day setting foot in those themselves the trick is to give the player some sort of emotional connection make them want to venture into the outside world but don't let them until they're put in a bit of effe elsewhere that makes the payoff much more satisfying than just audio visual spectacle alone could create however you do have to make sure that the gating doesn't feel too arbitrary many Metroidvania run into the classic issue of abilities functioning less like a genuine skills and more like arbitrary keys for arbitrary doors blocking your way Metroid itself with its color-coded doors sometimes feels like this and the impression that your exploration is being blocked by the designer rather than the inherent hostility of the world causes the challenge to feel cheap and unrewarding it's also very important to trust the player enough to let them get lost or bump into dead ends a little bit as that small bit of frustration will pay dividends they are on finally getting to the crashed fritter Metroid Prime after hours of having it just out of reach is one of the best moments in the game because those hours of buildup remnant from the ashes takes a lot of world design cues from games like Demon Souls and a lot of its environments and set pieces are freaking cool unfortunately the world itself is essentially one gigantic multi-dimensional corridor it's impossible not to explore in the right direction so finding somewhere new when interesting simply feels inevitable rather than the result of your hard work guacamelee 2 also runs into the same saw problems whilst it clearly pays a lot of a marsh to metroid guacamoles world map is less of a labyrinth and more of a roller coaster each new tool you need is always a few corridors away and the vast majority of one's upgrades for inside rooms directly adjacent to the critical path that could be accessed almost immediately to make up for this though guacamelee does have a pretty fantastic movement system with you leaping uppercutting and fluttering your way through both the worlds of the living and the dead so even if your brain isn't really being challenged exploring the world never gets boring this brings me onto another key point and that is it a good world it's fun to move around in Batman Arkham City the best Arkham game is big on verticality with high gothic buildings dominating the skyline that section off tightly packed alleyways tunnels and small open areas great for an encounter with a pack of goons this focus on sharp changes in altitude plays into your primary methods of getting around as Batman the grapple and the glide from ground level you can quickly hook your way up to the tallest area like these watchtowers scout out where you need to go and then glide down like a spooky man that you are not only does this give you a great view of where to go next and any secrets you might've missed for this hook glide combo is much faster than running and can also be used to get the drop on some bodies Batman is a hero who takes an indirect approach and so making swooping through the shadows the best ad was the fun where to get around is a great decision optionally the game even lets you upgrade your hook so that you can directly chain it into a glide Lane you combo together these massive leaps where you never touch the ground using the grapnel boost is probably the most fun bear the entire game and Rocksteady knows it so they actually organized most of the rooftops around the best grapple points with the buildings often placed around them in order of descending height that means that if you fly down from say this street from the ace chemicals building you able to get a perfect landing right on top of whichever building you want a world that's fun to navigate and feeds into your characters movement system is a key component of a well-designed world as it helps to mitigate the inherent boredom of backtracking and means the developers don't need to be afraid of giving players a little downtime because they can easily entertain themselves this is particularly important in games with a larger open-world that takes longer to navigate getting around has to be both fun and relatively efficient to be worth using breadth of the wild does this excellently by letting you shield surf gallop and glide across the world maintaining that all-important sense of scale but not making it so if you have to hoof it all over Hyrule which would take absolutely forever GTA goes a different direction unless you listen to the radio while the characters banter while you're driving which goes some way towards alleviating the fact that this whole area in the middle of the map has about as much content as rock star of paid tax wells they're fun to move around in and offer a satisfying challenge to the player our great examples to imitate and help players who are already in that explorative mindset have more fun but I feel like they don't quite get to the heart of how you make a world that's fun to explore in the first place the real answer to this question didn't occur to me until I went back over my old hole and I footage to work out why exactly hollowness stands out over most others and why it was such a fun world simply to exist in mild spoilers for the mid game and an optional area the city of tears is a highlight moment for pretty much anyone who's managed to reach it and represents the culmination of maybe three to five hours of effort with you using an item you got from the very first boss to open this big door once you're inside you'll notice the fantastic music and this brilliant melancholy aesthetic this combined with the urban environment means that the city of tears feels completely different to every where you've been before the city is made up of dense claustrophobic towers packed to bursting with enemies and obstacles interspersed by incredibly wide open areas that lend the place unique sense of scale that makes it a real joy to run around it now this would be great enough as it is but there's a much more important and way more sole reason this place rules and I only managed to spot it because I'm a horrible misanthrope who's incapable of just sitting back and enjoying things see I still had one big question to answer about the city of tears even after more or less fully exploring it where's all the water coming from I'd actually have been completely willing to forgive the game for just including the rain because it look cool but if you journey up to an area of the map directly above the city of tears way off the critical path you'll find this place the Blue Lake a massive reservoir that slowly drips water down into the cave below team cherry knew I'd be curious about how the world works and so they made an area specifically to answer that question finding the Blue Lake and working out the implications of its position was like solving a puzzle the world suddenly fit together in a way it just didn't before and resolving that seemingly unimportant question from hours ago was a more memorable moment and felt better to achieve than beating most of the boss fights the key thing that I love most about this discovery is that it felt like I had a pioneer I asked questions and my curiosity was rewarded with cool new information that gave me a new appreciation for the things I've explored so far and hyped me up for all the other details I was gonna find as I carried on playing I think it's this sense of dynamism that all open watch and strive for to reward exploration with more things to explore and discover and there are a bunch of different ways to do this hollow light of course uses excellent well building to foster a sense of gradual understanding and mastery of the game's narrative and geography with only the most dedicated players able to really understand what's going on audio logs and character Diaries overdone though they maybe give players who are already interested in exploring the world even more details and law to work with by giving them a look at the world from a completely different characters perspective this ends up creating an awesome feedback loop where players are compelled to resolve their dangling questions created by the audio logs which gets them even more hyped up to find the rest Guild Wars 2 has a really neat spin on this idea as well the developers make a point of hiding stuff like cool panoramic cutscenes interesting world building and even sometimes entire little mini dungeons in areas the only diehard explorers would find stumbling onto this cool pirate cave in the main city complete with spooky ghosts puzzles was great fun and really fleshed out the law in a way that felt natural and like it was a reward rather than an obligatory bit of quest tanks that I in 99% of other people who didn't have infinite patience would have ignored and ultimately this is why a lot of high budget worlds feel so empty despite having a lot of stuff in the they lack ways for the player to make the experience of exploration personal humans are driven to explore new places and ideas because getting there will be an enjoyable challenge but also because the discovery will teach us something new about our relationship with the world the same is true for video games if a game can't make the journey to the Discovery interesting all the implications of it meaningful then players are gonna get bored very quickly journeying up Skyrim's tallest mountain and finding a cool dragon voice by mario it's true look it up is much less interesting when you're told to do it as par the main quest and having a nearly infinite procedural world is great but there should be a reason to go out and explore it if the open-world error can be summed up in a single lame and kind of misleading platitude that it would only be fair to do the same for the lesson we can learn from it now that the open world is falling out of favor and that would be that having more destinations isn't anywhere near as important as creating meaningful journeys so when you hear a developer or a marketing person or Todd Howard the master of lies telling you all about their cool new game when they break out that old line I actually think that means they've missed the point and could stand a little little something for an underappreciated diamond-in-the-rough called dark sauce oh wait [ __ ] [ __ ] god damn it hey hello and thanks for watching this episode was originally gonna be about something completely different but I've decided to split it in two so keep an eye out for the next video at some point in the near future hopefully if you'd like to help out with the production of future episodes then feel free to sign up on my patreon alongside these lovely mysterious benefactors Alex to launch a siren oh no 94 Baxter he'll Brian Atari Ani Calvin ham callin her man chill Daniel matches Dirk Jan Karen Belle's Evie feat salaat eyebath on Jessie Rhine Jonathan Kristensen Joshua Binswanger lieberman lucas slack lunar eagle 1996 mace window 54 Manucci max filippov patrick Romberg phil be the bill be phony homeless pro/5 p3r o or Prospero I think Sam Myers Ray's dad Samuel Vander Plaats strategy in Ultima yerin mirin and Chao I'd also like to take this time to recommend a cool YouTube channel you should subscribe to and this time it's black thorn prod a game designer or an artist who's got some really great guides focusing on the practical side of getting a game made as well as his own experiences publishing a game that you should probably buy it's quite good and he even drew a slightly less evil looking version of me go and check him out well without the way I've got to get to work on the aforementioned next video so I will leave you there see you around boy

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 296,603

Keywords: Games, Gaming, Video Games, PC Gaming, videogames, Adam, Adam Millard, Architect, Architect of Games, Review, Analysis, Critique, Retrospective, Video Essay, Skyrim, Elder Scrolls, No Man's Sky, Open World, Minecraft, Metroid Prime, Guacamelee, Hollow Knight, Metroidvania, Remnant From The Ashes, Subnautica, Batman, World Design

Id: 34S0EU73Q6Y

Length: 16min 12sec (972 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I wish he mentioned all the NPC dialogue because they're a great touch.

[u/SmirkinLIVE]

Definitely one of my favorite things about GW2. Gorgeous to explore and rewarded well for doing so!

[u/Sjaakdelul]

Oh he's absolutely right, some of these open world games absolutely feel like more of the same. The reasons he list are also the reasons why I cannot play Skyrim and No Man Sky longer than a few hours and then I completely burn out on them. That is something Gw2 did right from the get go and I would argue that they have become even better at it. The best current maps in Gw2 that really shine in that aspect are the Silverwastes and Dragonfall.

[u/FreedomPanic]

I ended up writing a massive counterpoint argument to his video in the youtube comments. I think he has good ideas, but I think he is a bit exclusive with what he considers to make a good open world. I disagree with the things he excludes from what makes for a good open world design, rather than what he includes. I think this is exemplified by the fact that he thinks skyrim makes a bad open world, whereas guild wars 2 makes a great open world. I think this is sort of blinded to the flaws of what makes guild wars 2 a less immersive world based on ignorance of the game. Conversely, it shows that he dismisses the relevance of roleplay freedom, quest design, and immersive elements that make skyrim an excellent open world. My point is that I think he diminishes qualities that make for an important element of world design, based on his subjective taste. Regardless of whether or not you liked skyrim, it had an impressive enough open world that it's open world was it's main hook that made it the literal juggernaut that it was. The values of fleshed out npc characters, with lives, and storylines that elder scrolls focuses on are important elements, which he dismisses via exclusion.