The '15 Second Rule' Behind Hogwarts Legacy's World...

so Hogwarts Legacy it's kind of awesome isn't it I'll be real I was expecting to be sort of disappointed by the open world aspects of this game because history has shown us that not many studios can pull off high quality and intriguing and captivating open world design it's not easy at all and especially not for Studios that don't have a ton of experience in this type of thing and remember the developers of Hogwarts Legacy their last game was Cars 3 driven to win and before that they worked on like Disney Infinity and stuff I had no idea that they were capable of something like this so Props everyone at Avalanche and Porky like seriously this is impressive but why is it impressive what is so interesting about this and why is the game so interesting and captivating to play have you ever wondered about that like what makes an open world in a game like The Witcher 3 or Hogwarts Legacy what makes that interesting and fun to explore while another game like forespoken or Assassin's Creed valaja I could just fall so terribly flat what makes it good and what makes it bad well I've done a lot of research and careful calculations on this uh in years past for some of the biggest open world games that have ever released such as The Witcher 3 Red Dead Redemption 2 breath of the wild Fallout New Vegas all of the open world games that you know and love I've done this experiment with and basically the experiment is pretty simple and it just serves as a test to verify something I saw in an article based on an interview with CD projekt Red developers years ago and you can see in this article from back in 2017 Derek Strickland interviewed some developers over at cdpr who worked on The Witcher 3 and learned from them what made the world of The Witcher 3 so engaging and captivating why did it feel fun to explore and why didn't it get boring like so many other games and what they said was quote we did some tests and we found that the player is focused on the stuff which we produce every 40 seconds they should see something and focus on it like a pack of deer or some opponents some NPCs wondering about so we have our rule of 40 seconds pretty interesting right all they're saying is that they aim for roughly 40 seconds between moments of interest and for whatever reason according to their testing games that are paced like that consistently tend to be more satisfying to play and less boring to play in the long run in case that's not clear basically what they'd be aiming for is between these two points they want roughly 30 to 40 seconds worth of travel in between them so as you leave this desert of gold you move on you're looking for something else to do and you'll hit this one after about 30 to 40 seconds or if you go in this way it's about 30 to 40 seconds and you'll start to realize all of this stuff is very similarly distanced from each other it's all very very close in terms of space between them and again it's because they basically created a circle with the radius of 30 to 40 seconds worth of travel distance and then they use that as a guide to design this open world and space things out in that satisfying way and I've tested this with a ton of other games like I said and every single one of them that has a high quality open world to explore has very consistent timings between moments of Interest as far as we've tested some games like Red Dead Redemption 2 are much longer other games are much shorter and denser packed but the games that have the highest quality and the most engaging open worlds are the most consistently paced ones so I wanted to test this with Hogwarts Legacy and see if that's why the world of Hogwarts Legacy is so fun to explore and so easy to get lost within and I had a couple of ideas as to how to do this I thought what if on stream I had my wife play a little bit and I didn't tell her exactly what we were doing I just said yeah go play explore do side quests whatever and I'll just record it and go from there and it actually worked pretty well she did just play and what I found was that the average time between moments of interest for her was very very low it was down at like 10 to 11 seconds when I went back through the footage after the fact so that was interesting that was cool but it wasn't empirical and we only had like 90 minutes to to two hours playing this to go off of and I mean she was playing in front of a whole stream of like five six hundred people so that might affect her Cadence the way she plays the game so I wanted to go with yet something else that was a little more removed from emotion and individual behaviors and so what I did is I went online and I found an interactive map through map Genie as you see here that actually has collected screenshots of the entire Games map and stitched them together furthermore they marked each moment of Interest or item that's worth collecting or encampment treasure layer everything they've marked it all on this map for us already which saves us a ton of time because again other than Dynamic enemy encounters that just spawn and occur randomly or semi-randomy I guess this is what's going to determine how interesting the world is to explore because these are the items that the developers have actually placed in their world for you to find and be captivated by but what you'll notice pretty much immediately is that while there are a lot of items to find and there's a set distance between a lot of them that seem similar you'll notice that there's a lot of clusters and basically what I mean by this is that you'll see there's groupings of say two items that are meant to Captivate your interest or over here in the Quidditch hitch Fields we've got two items there and then we have two right here really close two right here really close a whole cluster of buildings with a handful of things and so it wouldn't really do it justice to gauge the distance and time between each of those moments of interest because it would just throw off the average it would just throw everything off because there's so many little moments where you walk outside the door of one thing that you discovered and then you look to the left and there's the next thing and the the time between it was like half a second so we don't really want to count that otherwise it'll throw off the entire thing so I knew that I needed to have a little bit more flexibility with this and I pulled all of this stuff into Photoshop first by taking screen caps of this page and then stitching it together and making my own composite of the map in a 15 000 by 15 000 pixel Photoshop project which my computer didn't love and that gets us something like this we've got the whole map and now we can actually interact with it draw on it do whatever else we need first things first I needed to go in and Mark each individual cluster as best I could see them and this was pretty tedious but basically I went through the entire map and just marked what I gauged as clusters or individual items that were far enough apart from other items of interest that they would constitute their own cluster in and of themselves as you can see a little time consuming and I will it's very subjective I am not going to pretend otherwise some of these things you might Mark as individual instances others you might say are are clusters and I didn't consider them clusters this is subjective but at the end of the day this is just a stupid experiment for a YouTube video so sue me and you see we've got a ton of red X's all throughout the map of varying distances areas that are very blank and open depending it's just all over the place depending on where you are uh on the map which is interesting there's areas that are very very empty that you're meant to just kind of fly your broom through and not spend too much time in and then there's other areas that are just super dense where seemingly they would anticipate you spending a majority of your time in and personally I'll speak to this anecdotally I have spent a ton of time in these areas of the map so yeah no the the content in these areas definitely pulls you over there and once again this does not take into consideration Dynamic enemy placement or uh maybe side quests or main quests that take you into areas of this map that don't have markers or items there so it doesn't take that into consideration but we're mainly interested in just broad exploration when you're just getting lost in the game so it shouldn't really matter what I did then is I needed to gauge the distance between these items specific in terms of gameplay time if you're writing on your broom which most players are going to be doing in order to explore this world after five hours or so how much time does it take you to get from one cluster to the next cluster how much time does it take you between those moments of interest and once again and perhaps most importantly is it consistent through the game or at least in specific areas of the game and to do this it was pretty straightforward I basically went to a set fast travel point I timed how long it would take me to travel between two points that I was able to measure very precisely and clearly in terms of time and distance and then I was able to take those and copy those and extrapolate them to two or three or four times the size in order to get a legend basically of all the different times it would take you to navigate the world now I had basically a ruler to measure with and I could go through the entire Games map and gauge based on the radius of these circles how much time and distance was between each moment of interest and this took a while but I was able to end up with a pretty comp apprehensive collection of times that also have a very strong visual element to it as well this is basically what we end up with with the blue circles representing five seconds of distance from the center to the outside of the circle in other words the radius represents about five seconds of travel the red is twice the size and represents 10 seconds from the center outside again the radius represents 10 seconds and the green is 15 seconds what I found was that Hogwarts Legacy overwhelmingly leans into five seconds between moments of interest and items this world is extremely densely packed it's kind of ridiculous but what I actually found really interesting was not that a lot of this world is packed with five seconds between each moment of Interest or thing that developers have put in here to Captivate your time rather it's that they very strategically placed these things and in certain areas they spread items out and in other areas they pack them in such as this moment right here you see this is all really dense as you're exploring north of hogsmead and everything you would expect it yeah this is like the business for players like you're coming out here to get stuff done so it makes sense but as you travel a little further south you notice these fields just to the northeast of Hogwarts which are very open and where you get some of the best views of Hogwarts there's very little here most items are 15 seconds away from the next closest item of Interest or moment of Interest there's not much here and I think this was very intentional because in these areas as you can see there's really not much over here it's just a big open area but this is where you get the best view of Hogwarts so they didn't want you to be distracted by all sorts of uh you know treasure scattered around here and different things to to pull your attention away they want you to take in the sights to just take a moment and look at this thing that they created that you get to explore and then once you're done with that you can move on past down here you see the cave is an item of Interest oh that's interesting we see the train tracks off in the distance there's normally balloons here if you haven't popped the balloons yet so you pop the balloons and you see down here there's some animals you can collect with the the den over here there's all sorts of stuff to discover but when the game developers want you to take a moment and just take in the world and the view they remove items to distract you it's very very interesting how they've done it and again it's very intentional and as we go through the game map you can see that there are areas that are very open and then areas that are very dense and there's not a whole lot of room in between there's these areas right here which have a lot of the 10 second increments which it kind of to me represents a transition phase from open area to close and dense area which jives with what we see here I mean you can see items over here on the right represented by the green are very spread out taking 15 seconds 20 seconds between moments of interest but as you move further to the West you get to a very dense area especially down here in the southwest and as we move into some of the later game areas it starts to get very very dense not a lot of time between moments of interest at all and then it spreads out even more towards the end maybe this represents that they were running out of content maybe this means that they just don't expect players to spend a ton of time over here or perhaps more likely to me by the time players are exploring down here they probably already have the broom upgrades that make traversing these areas faster so this 10 second time increment drops a little bit lower because you can just travel faster with your various mounts and the upgraded broom so that to me would make more sense than that they just ran out of content and gave up on sprinkling stuff in here I think it's simply that they expect players to be able to move faster so they spread things out a little bit but what I found in doing these experiments is that sometimes the visual is more useful than the numbers I can tell you the average is just about 12 seconds for most of the map with certain areas like here bringing the average up closer to 20 seconds or 30 seconds in some areas like right here but I think the visual does a pretty good job of telling you just how densely these things are packed the blue are right on top of each other where you can literally see in the distance the next item of Interest the moment you finish the previous one and it takes you five seconds to get to it whereas in the other areas where there's a lot of red or green you might have to look and spend a little more effort and time finding the next moment of interest but above and beyond all of this there's not a lot of variability here I mean it's all pretty consistent between 5 and 10 seconds for the overwhelming majority of this map with a few major areas that are very open usually in spots where there's something very visually interesting to Captivate you and to give you a chance to take that in this is certainly very different from a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 when I did this test with red dead the average time between moments of interest in the mid to late game was around 80 Seconds not 12 to 20 or anything like that 80 Seconds and that's because they really took their time spreading out this massive world and they wanted you to be alone with your thoughts and they also were going for something a little bit more realistic and The Witcher 3 was a little bit more tame than that averaging between 30 and 40 seconds but it was very very consistent and also wanted you to really take your time and just take in the sights but when we look at Hogwarts Legacy I mean you can see that things are very densely packed all the way through the map and that's no mistake I mean they wanted this thing to be packed densely and for you to go and always have something that's going to pull your attention it's certainly very repetitive there's a lot of things in here that start to get a little old as time goes by the Merlin Mervin Morden puzzles are certainly one of them once you've seen 10 you've probably seen pretty much everything they have to offer but it's a dense world and it's consistently and competently done which is what's more interesting to me they really took a lesson from the devs of The Witcher 3 from breath of the wild devs and they applied it very very well here and I gotta hand it to him because it's not something that that is easy at all I mean we've seen games like Gotham Knights that try to have interesting open worlds or Assassin's Creed Valhalla or should we say Assassins Creed which was its own form of special we we can take all of these in and we can say like yeah they they I'm sure are very talented and gifted devs but it's not that easy to make a compelling and interesting open world it's just not that easy and the fact that They Came Out Swinging with very little experience and they did this good of a job it's not perfect but it's very very impressively well done that deserves a lot of Praise so really Avalanche portkey games you guys deserve all the the credit you're getting because this is pretty impressive now what you're going to do with this information now that you've watched this video I I do not know um it's probably going to be pretty useless info for you but you know what hopefully you found it moderately interesting and as you play through the rest of Hogwarts Legacy and other open World Games you learn to appreciate them ever so slightly more because the art form involved with putting these things together is pretty crazy and when it's done well you probably don't even think about it or realize it you just kind of enjoy the game and get lost within it but now hopefully you'll understand why you get lost in it and why it seems so interesting and compelling to explore and with that I'm I'm gonna go to bed because I'm I'm very tired this has taken a while so hopefully again you found this interesting if you want to see me give this treatment to other games make sure to subscribe and comment which game you'd like to see me tackle in the next video or a future video it's probably gonna be a while before I do this kind of experiment again and make sure to subscribe for more content like I said we stream constantly every Monday Wednesday Friday sometimes extra um over on Luke Stevens live just look up in the search bar Luke Stevens live and join me over there I'm live streaming right as this video goes up so I would love to see you come by and say hi also do you guys like the painting that my one-year-old Lachlan made for me I think it's great this one's called love and destruction um it represents the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse at least I'm pretty sure I think it's lovely though I think it's great so that's that's what this says in case you're wondering what the hell is sitting on his desk it's some artwork from my son but anyway much love thank you for watching and indulging me through this little experiment if you have any questions about the experiment and everything we did come over to the live stream and let me know I would love to talk to you and see you uh but until then much love thanks for chilling hugs and kisses bye

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 831,295

Keywords: luke stephens, hogwarts legacy, luke stephens hogwarts legacy, hogwarts legacy open world, hogwarts legacy spacing, hogwarts legacy experiment

Id: mgnl4xD49rs

Length: 18min 26sec (1106 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 15 2023