Building a Successful "Open" Game World 104
M3rk sends an excerpt from an opinion piece on Gametopius discussing what it takes for an open game world to be successful. Interesting stories and characters are important, but they must be balanced by varied and entertaining gameplay. The lack of either will be a limiting factor in how many people return to play once the primary plot is completed. Quoting:
"A game like GTA IV takes itself and its fiction very seriously. It spends a lot of time, effort, and gameplay resources convincing you that the world you are traveling through is the same world that the story and cutscenes take place in. It may not be a game that allows you to own or control property to the degree seen in Burnout Paradise or Saints Row II, but it wants its world to be cohesive, not divided. ... While GTA IV's game systems almost serve its plot, Saints Row II and Burnout Paradise live for their game mechanics. Sure, these worlds are fun to look at and explore, but any exploration and discovery that the player enjoys merely drives them to these games' raison d'être: fun systems to play with."
Idea: (Score:2, Interesting)
Idee fixe of first person (Score:3, Interesting)
Many games, open world games in particular, put you in the place of the protagonist. Or, at the very least, you play the persona of an observer in the game world.
This type of storytelling seems to me to be an unnecessary restriction on story telling in this type of game format. When watching a movie, or reading a book, the same limitations can occur, but there are many variations.
Having a story in a movie be about many characters never bothers me, at least not in the sense that I'm wondering who is holding the camera that allows me to see the story. As a disembodied observer, the story unfolds itself just as convincingly as it would from the point of view of some of the characters. The game can focus on manipulating the game world, changing the rules or even just tracking several characters in an interesting way, effectively playing 'director' of an interactive movie.
Re:eat my shorts slashdot !! (Score:5, Interesting)
Open worlds are still limited by plots though... (Score:5, Interesting)
I loved the plots of Grand Theft Auto IV and Final Fantasy X, and that you could do a myriad of side activities within the game world before completing the story mode (and in the case of GTAIV continue playing the game free roam) but ultimately as a narrative experience you are bound to the plot.
In Grand Theft Auto IV if you want to unlock the other islands etc. you must progress through the story, so the world is only open (from the start) so much. In Final Fantasy X you are limited very much where you can travel until you have progressed up to a significant point in the story where you are finally given the option of roaming the world at your own leisure.
Fallout III actually had a more correct approach to giving the player a true open world choice in that the entire landscape was available to be explored the moment you exile yourself from the vault. And every sidequest and other task is available to be completed as the player's own judgment and they can go in any direction and order. You can even choose your character's name, gender, race, and some facial features.
But what all three of these games have in common is that no matter how open the worlds are at any point, in order to complete the game, at least as the developers designed, is to conform to the character's pre-written closed world and isolated story.
In GTAIV, you cannot become a cop or a taxi driver, or a motorcycle racer, you must find the military men who betrayed you back home to find closure for your character. But the game, once you have beaten it, gives you the brilliant option of playing the conquered world completely freely including finishing the side tasks. Though to unlock this complete sandbox you've had to assume the scripted and not open-ended role of the main character. The story is GTAIV is excellent, but the focus and enticement of having a large sandbox to explore and fiddle with, is usually the driving force for people to complete the game.
In Final Fantasy X, once you beat the game, that's it, it goes to the final cut scenes and wraps up the story. The only way to replay it is to either start a new game, or to load an older save file. Of course this is the way the developers planned the game, you are meant to finish the game, there is a story and it is the main focus of the game despite you being in a sandbox world at one point the developers are pushing you to finish the story, the game. FFX had such a tragic ending and fans screamed so loudly and furiously for more story, and therefore more gameplay, that Square (who makes the FF games) created FFX-2, or the first true sequel to any FF game in history. So even though at some point the game was open-ended, once you are done doing every side-task, all that is left is the story. But completing the game 100% is no small task.
Fallout III, you get the entire world open from the beginning, you can lead a good karma life, a neutral karma life, or a bad karma life. But no matter how good, indifferent, or neutral you are, your world is always the same, the quest is always the same, The Waters Of Life. In Fallout III they give the character the choice of being whoever they want. In GTAIV you are Niko the insane immigrant seeking vengeance and retribution at all costs. In FFX you are Tidus and company ridding the world of the giant monster Sin. In Fallout III you can be whoever you want in terms of looks, and even karma, but no matter who you think you may be...you are forced into the Waters Of Life Quest.
Even if the Waters Of Life Quest can be ended in different ways, the developers force you to help your father in a task that has little emotional connection to you the main character. You have to join project purity. You could blow up Megaton, enslave children, kill the ghouls, enslave the replicant, and become the devil of the wasteland...but when daddy says he needs help with the water filter and fuse box running the generator guess who has to become a handy man taking time off from savagely raping and brutalizing the world. I could understand if
Re:Meh (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting stories and characters are important, but they must be balanced by varied and entertaining gameplay. The lack of either will be a limiting factor in how many people return to play once the primary plot is completed.
Neither of the factor is a must for a game to be a success. World of Warcraft for example. It has no story, weak characters and gameplay which been obsolete for about 10 years. Halo is another example.
All it takes is to target the right market at the right time and have a huge marketing budget. Everything else is optional
Warcraft actually has a very in depth backstory, moreso than any of the games listed above (with the exception of Final Fantasy, perhaps). There are novels surrounding the universe, a very very detailed history, and so on. The stories, however, play out in quests and raids. Most players don't read quests, just enough to figure out how to get XP, and most raids aren't even touched by the average player.
So I see your point there - there is no story, but that's because it's not a story driven game and therefore the players are not forced to sit through the lore. It's a community driven game - not a good one to compare to the others.
Halo, agreed. (Don't say 'it's just a FPS' - try the Half Life series)
procedurally generated history (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Idee fixe of first person (Score:4, Interesting)
Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy does that, the story is told from the viewpoint of three characters and you switch between them every now and then on predefined points. It works pretty well. Dreamfall also does that, even featuring a dialog between the two of the characters where you switch characters in the mid of discussion, which was pretty cool moment. The interesting part is that this is really nothing new, Maniac Mansion had that back in 1987, along with cutscenes that show you what other non-player characters in the house where doing.
I think a big problem with video games these days is that they try to follow Half Life model of 'cinematic storytelling', which means a single view point that is always attached to the main character, it never ever gives you a clear idea of the bigger picture and limits the story to things the main character experiences, which makes things both implausible and very limiting.
Re:procedurally generated history (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that this is the ultimate goal of procedurally generated content - a whole world built upon a set of "simple" well-defined rules, some starting parameters and a little room for God to play dice.
Not only would this make the world unpredictable, un-walkthru-able, endlessly inventive and open, it would lend itself to more and more elaborate worlds as developers learned to optimise procedural generation and spawn more and more depth and detail without games becoming unwieldy to install. Forget Spore: see kkrieger [theprodukkt.com] for a real-world example of just how efficient and powerful this concept can be. (I'm also excited about Introversion's latest project, Subversion [wikipedia.org]).
However, there are problems with this. The first and most obvious is that designing procedural algorithms to generate good quality content is an enormously complex and challenging task when compared to conventional content development. It's like the difference between building a creature by adding and changing organs (again, see Spore), and building a creature by coding some DNA from scratch and chucking it in a cell nucleus. It's much more elegant, but so very much more difficult.
Add some randomness into the mix to make the world not only procedural but also unique, and you have a hell of a tricky project on your hands. Setting the range of starting parameters, such that the resultant world will always be interesting and varied enough to be playable, would be very difficult, even with a very simple system - see the Game Of Life if you don't understand why.
Secondly, there is the subtler problem of how to make good game content. Talented developers spend years learning their art and the pitfalls of the trade, and even then can screw it up too easily. Making good scenarios and content is an impressive skill, and the result can only be judged in human terms - how can a computer judge what makes a good mission, quest, set-piece or whatever? Even with a simple thing like Sudoku, hand-made puzzles are almost always more satisfying, more taxing in particular ways, more elegant... Procedurally generating a really good puzzle or quest on a consistent basis is, I suspect, impossible.
I really hope that what you suggest comes to pass - it's the holy grail of PG games - but for the foreseeable future it's exactly that. Quixotically difficult, and quite probably an impossible fantasy.
Re:Idee fixe of first person (Score:4, Interesting)
Space Quest, Maniac Mansion, King's Quest, etc were quite "open" games in the sense that players were encouraged to try anything they could think of to solve puzzles.
Just my personal opinion here, but any game in which, when you try the "wrong" thing, kills you off and presents "Gee, I sure hope you have an earlier save" message box, doesn't really encourage you to try anything you can think of.
"Companions of Xanth" was a bit better in this regard in that they made custom responses to even the most absurd actions (e.g. "Talk to table" yields "Sorry, the table has taken a vow of silence.") and while a lot of things did kill you in Xanth, instead of the normal dialog with only "Quit", "New Game", "Load", there was also an "undo last action" button, so dying by experimentation became a lot less painful and a lot more fun.
The "Monkey Islands" series was even better (in this particular metric of "encourage players to try everything"), because there was no way to die from trying things. I believe the series had 4 games, and there was only 1 game you could die in, and even then it was only via inaction (don't do anything for 10 real-life minutes), rather than from experimentation.
Open game worlds are overrated (Score:3, Interesting)
Open game worlds are overrated. There has been an ongoing trend towards every game moving from closed areas and scripted events toward wide-open spaces. "Open environment" is a feature added to any game in order to make it more modern and easy to sell. But adding that feature doesn't necessarily lead to a better game.
Open worlds were fascinating at first because they were new and full of possibilities. The game levels became vast playgrounds to explore. There was an undeniable appeal to running around in GTA III for the first time and just firing rockets in various directions to see what would happen.
However, the novelty of this is wearing off. There's only so much of interest to do in these open spaces. My real life town is a big open space, but that doesn't mean I wander around the various streets with my mouth agape. I'm finding that I spend too much time in these open world games getting to the interesting bits, rather than moving directly from one interesting challenge to the next.
I want scripted events. I want a game to be well written and entertaining, and for all the time I spend with it to feel satisfying. I'm hoping the pendulum will swing back towards careful design, even at the expense of openness.