Breath of the Wild has been scratching my exploration itch beautifully lately. I can’t remember getting this lost in a fictional world since FEZ.
Weirdly enough, a buddy and I explored pretty much every nook and cranny of Dying Light’s Harran before we even did any story missions. We slowly crept up the huge suspension bridge hours before it was even a notion that we’d have to do that to progress in the game (so many deaths and falls), looked through every house we could get into and looted like fiends. And when we actually decided to give the story missions a try, we often found we had an advantage because we already knew what the areas looked like.
In the realm of broad game concepts that are important to me, exploration is right up there with mobility. Breath of the Wild may have recently dethroned it, but I’ve always used FEZ as my go to example of a game centered around exploration. It borrows many of the same ideas used by foundational games about exploring (Zelda, Metroid), and puts them pretty center stage as the driving force behind the game. FEZ could be described as a puzzle-platformer, but the platforming is simply a way for the player to move through the world, and the puzzles are simply a way of punctuating and rewarding exploration.
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This is another important element, and one I’m encountering a lot of right now as I play Mankind Divided. Many times, my exploration will take me to a place that seems to be removed from the main plot, an empty space with some environmental storytelling aspects, both otherwise bereft of life. Then later, I’ll realize it’s a location for a key main story mission. Sometimes, that can diminish the excitement of discovery, having seen an area “before it’s ready” but I don’t know that’s necessarily my fault as a player, or always necessarily a bad thing. At its worst, it can undermine the verisimilitude of a world when absolutely every location exists in the world to serve as a setting for some mission or quest, leaving no space to exist on its own as just a lonely place. But at the same time, I can still appreciate the efforts of designers to ensure that every explorable area will eventually yield some reward to player curiosity. It’s a precarious balance.
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I think Avalanche focus so much on scale in the Just Cause games that inevitably the terrain is all computer generated and that means that it can look quite naturalistic at times but lacks any personality when you focus on any one place. The hand of an actual designer is spread incredibly thinly. It kinda works for them as generally you’re zooming over the ground at high speed and scale is their strength, but it’s a trade off.
I was a bit torn with HZD’s world. I think it might be the most consistently graphically impressive console game I’ve ever played. It manages near Uncharted 4’s level but in an open word and performance is silky smooth. It’s a remarkable achievement. But the world itself I found oddly constrained at times. Like they were still designing spaces on the scale of a linear game, which I guess was intentional. I’m not even saying I disapprove, just that I couldn’t quite nail down what their open world philosophy was. I think it suffered a bit unfairly for me having played it right after Zelda, with its radical scale and openness.
Finding the potential for exploration in Super Metroid is probably the reason that I still care about games so much today.
Every room felt like somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be; sounds my human ears weren’t supposed to hear, creatures I should not be interacting with. I was cautious towards them; I didn’t even kill a lot of the ones that just crawl around the first time I played, I worked around them as much as I could. Once I had the whole map open, I would go back and visit previous areas, considering them not as “levels”, but as places.
Super Metroid has nowhere near the world scale and exploration possibilities of the other games mentioned here, but consider its impact on a kid who had previously only known that you run to the right; that’s what you do.
Does anyone have an opinion on how No Man’s Sky is on the exploration front? I’m currently on the lookout for a game that lets you be alone (or mostly alone) in space, just wandering about.
It’s funny you mention No Man’s Sky because I had just come back to talk about it. I don’t know that the game really deserves or needs more criticism at this point, but prefacing aside, I found that NMS is sadly antithetical to the sense of exploration and discovery we’re talking about here.
Sure, it was fun to cruise around an infinite galaxy, finding planet after planet, each uniquely formed, containing different landscapes and scenery. But each subsequent jump brought with it diminishing returns as I eventually became acutely aware of the pitfalls of procedural generation. Sure, there were a ton of planets to explore and space battles to warp into, but after a while, they’re all just the same. They never actually feel “lived in” and they’re completely lacking in environmental storytelling.
I often contrast NMS with my experiences playing Subnautica, which, in a sense, is a smaller but more fleshed out take on NMS under the sea. The game is still in Early Access, but every incarnation keeps expanding an already massive world, offering more that you can literally dive into, and revealing little hints and relics of the world’s previous inhabitants, creating a sense of mystery and wonder as you try to figure out what came before you. Even if it’s through emergent gameplay, that’s critical to connecting with a game’s world. Worlds that are wholly procedurally generated without any sense of previous inhabitants or invitation to interaction can often feel hollow.
I think a key part of what makes for a powerful exploration experience is being able to connect with an environment when you can connect to it not just as a space, but as a place. Sometimes that’s achieved through environmental storytelling, finding traces of the place’s previous inhabitants and piecing together what happened here, or simply, who they were. Another way is through what @2Mello describes: the tension created through a sense of trespass, entering a place you’re not invited into, witnessing things that are intended to be private, but still full of beauty in their own secret ways.
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Thanks! Sounds like I need to look into Subnautica then.
I think they’re getting pretty close to a 1.0 release too, so now’s a good time to get onboard.
Subnautica is fantastic.
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I generally love exploring in video games, but the reason why tends to depend on the game. Either I’m exploring everywhere because I just want to find as much as I can, or I’m doing it because the simple act of exploring itself is very fun in the game.
Because I replayed it recently and was able to jog my memory of it a bit, Undertale is a good example of the former category. There isn’t anything inherently fun to me about the walking around and pressing a button to interact with objects or open the menu to use the phone, but I wanted to see as much as I possibly could because the writing in that game is so delightful. For the other type of game making me want to explore, Metroid games and Hyper Light Drifter were games I spent lots of time exploring in because the moving around in those spaces just felt really good and fun and rewarding.
They really did exploration well in that game. I think I spent like 5 hours just screwing around in Prague before even going to the subway station.
I agree with the OP about the importance of exploration, but to me, what makes exploration fun is also the fun of moving about in the world. I think games to me are a lot about mobility, which is also why I love playing Tracer and Pharah so much in Overwatch. To me, the original Doom did this really well: once you’re done with the monsters, you can just zoom around the level, looking at everything and trying to find secrets. On the other hand, while I enjoyed BotW, I think the way stuff like rain and stamina limited your ability to explore freely really kept me from loving the game.
On this subject, I came by this video on /r/SRSGaming yesterday. Haven’t watched the whole thing yet, but it looks interesting and relevant to the discussion.
I usually prefer a complete, straight forward experience, but I have some moments where I enjoy the vastness of a place. My favorite parts of the original Mass Effect were exploring planets, for example. It takes forever, but there’s just something relaxing about traversing all these alien spaces and taking them in.
My issue is that most game worlds don’t have that affect on me, or they’re so completely devoid of anything of substance to do that they come off as dead worlds (see NMH). I think what made Mass Effect different for me was how varied in look every map was, while exploration in most other games is a huge map, usually samey in everything you can see.
A great game for this (and one I’ve been playing lately) is The Witcher 3. The game will route you to some of the “points of interest” across the map, but you’ll also find some really interesting and cool stuff just by not fast traveling and running from place to place, things that aren’t really on the map or that the game isn’t necessarily actively pointing you at.
My favorite recent example of this is the Nilfgaardian camp in southeast Velen. The first time I played the game I didn’t even know it was there because none of the quests ever pointed me in its direction. I know at some point I probably saw the notice board on the map, but because it looked like a larger settlement I think I assumed it would eventually have a story quest pointed at it. As far as I know, it doesn’t; it just sits there waiting for you to go check it out (or not). It was especially rewarding to go exploring and stumble into it this time since it had one of the more interesting contracts I’ve done so far…one in which you can kill the monster and immediately walk back for your reward, or, if you’re paying attention, notice something that reveals the truth behind what led to the contract in the first place. Good stuff.
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re:subnautica
in case anyone was not aware
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What the fuck is wrong with people, I swear
God dang the replies to that tweet are a hot fire of garbage.
That whole saga is fucking weird and terrible. That sound designer is a real asshole.
As badly phrased as the main designer’s question is, it is an eternal question in videogame development - add new feature or polish what you got?
Subnautica is good, too :-\
edit to update: that person has been fired, apparently.
