Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Elder Scrolls.
Not Oblivion, mind you: I’m far, far too cheap to have purchased an Xbox 360 yet. Instead, I’ve been playing the previous game in the series, Morrowind. My initial thought was that this would be an effective way of curbing my urge to buy an Oblivion-capable PC, or an Xbox 360. You know. Kind of like how smoking lots of opium makes you not want heroin so much.
Well, OK. That part of the plan isn’t working so very well. But it has been entertaining and instructive, nonetheless. It’s given me some perspective on what in Morrowind — as a game — worked, and what did not.
I have played Morrowind on both the PC and Xbox quite a lot. Previous to this recent spate of playing, I had never managed to get very far in the game. I had logged many, many hours, mind you, but always found some excuse to throw away what I had done and start over from the beginning. I must have played the beginning parts of the game 20 or 25 times.
I initially started playing on the Xbox, and then switched to my PC because I wanted to use B. E. Griffith’s beautiful facial textures, and because I liked the idea of the “quest log.” Then, when I suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure on the PC, I switched back to the “Game of the Year” edition on Xbox. Having spent the last two weeks immersed in it, I’ve reached the conclusion that the Xbox version is superior, and I assert without proof that this superiority extends to Oblivion also. The console game may be inferior in every way from a technical perspective, and you won’t be able to install any of the free mods available on the internet. But all of that pales in the face of this one, simple truth: playing on my couch is better than playing at my desk.
At my desk, I have enough stamina to play for an hour. Maybe two, if I’m engrossed. On the couch, I start playing at 10, and then I glance up at the clock, and it’s 2 in the morning.
I am now further into Morrowind than I’ve ever been before. The reason it took me so long is, I think, because of a mismatch between the game’s design and the way I want to play. I don’t want to wait around for three years before I can tour the island. I want to go to potentialy dangerous places right away. But if you play the game the way it’s “meant” to be played, this is nearly hopeless. This time, rather than simply “role playing” and getting sand kicked in my face like a 98 pound weakling at the beach, I have Developed A Plan. My plan involves abusing the game’s levelling mechanism such that instead of my character getting just a little bit better at each task each level, he gets insanely better. Through techniques just on the ragged edge of cheating, I have become like unto a God. This means that R has increased just enough that I can wander around randomly and not get killed by the first wild animal I meet.
I will go so far as to say that this isn’t just a mismatch between me and the game, but something of a fundamental flaw. The thrill of the Elder Scrolls games is that they provide a very large “sandbox” to play in. But at least in Morrowind, when you start out it is a very large sandbox staffed with bullies who can kill you by breathing on you. R increases so slowly that most of the sandbox is deadly to you. In the Japanese-style RPG, this problem would be solved by simply not letting you wander in to the dangerous areas. Here, you’re free to wander up to Ghostgate and get killed any time. Exhilarating, yes, but also very frustrating.
My Morrowind solution, as I said, is to powerlevel. And now I can wander around, face moderate challenges, and not feel like I should be riding the Tamriel Short Bus. The Oblivion solution, apparently, has been to scale all enemies in the game to not be too difficult or too easy. This has caused some uproar among the “hardcore RPG fan.” “Hardcore,” in this context, is defined as “that segment of the market which, if every one of them bought your game twice, you’d still go bankrupt.” While I understand their feelings, it seems to me to be a reasonable compromise to make their painstakingly constructed world accessible to all.
It’s a truism among a certain sort of RPG player that the platonic ideal of a game is so large that most of it will never be experienced. As a software developer, I can’t share this sentiment. Every bit of text you write that isn’t read, every line of dialogue you record that isn’t heard, every tree you place that isn’t seen translates directly into man-hours and money wasted. What you actually want is a game that feels so large that it feels like most of it will never be experienced. Every player in fact plays through 99% of the game, but still believes there is an unexplored world just over the next hill.
Morrowind sustained the illusion of a huge, mostly unexplored world by creating a world that was huge and, for a large number of players, not really explorable without cheating. I suspect the level scaling of enemies in Oblivion was largely a response to this. It’s not that they were trying to make the game easier simply for the players. It’s that few designers like creating a large, detailed world that hardly anyone ever gets to see.
After all the hours I’ve put into it, I still enjoy Morrowind not for the game elements, but as a sort of extended travelogue. Even though I’ve been playing it for so long, I’m still finding entire towns I have never seen before, with completely different architectures. I visited a daedric shrine, and survived. I finally saw the Ghostgate. And yet I know I’ve only scratched the surface of the virtual landscape.
Morrowind’s greatest weakness, of course, is still apparent: the utterly flat characterization of just about every NPC in the game. It is something of an achievement that the characters in the game manage to be less interesting than the books. I don’t expect Oblivion to be substantially different in this regard.
But I still want to play it.
In summary: if I manage to not buy an Xbox 360 after dinner tonight, I will deserve a medal. Thank you, and goodnight.
I think the complaint people have with level scaling in Oblivion (I still haven’t gotten far enough to really judge, or rather, here at level 6 things are still pretty fun) is not so much that the beginning of the game is too easy but that it makes the end of the game too hard. People enjoy achieving godlike powers as a reward for spending a gazillion hours playing the game, even though in some objective sense that makes the game boring.
If the entire game advances precisely in lockstep with you, there’s little sense of achievement for improving your “R”, indeed there’s little sense that anything is improving at all — it’s all just static. And it is of course this improvement that is the crack driving RPGs. Normally the sense of achievement and improvement comes from (a) being able to access new areas, and (b) becoming the godlike master of the areas you could already access.
“Every bit of text you write that isn’t read, every line of dialogue you record that isn’t heard, every tree you place that isn’t seen translates directly into man-hours and money wasted.”
I strongly disagree. While optional content needs to be keep to a minimum, saying that *any* optional content is a waste is going too far. Optional content increases the interactivity, helps the immersion factor, and benefits the dedicated player.
“What you actually want is a game that feels so large that it feels like most of it will never be experienced. Every player in fact plays through 99% of the game, but still believes there is an unexplored world just over the next hill.”
This is what would really happen in your ideal game: half of the players wouldn’t care if there is an unexplored world or not. Maybe they would feel the sentiment, maybe they won’t, but since they really don’t care, it won’t change their game experience. The other half, the players who care about the world, would try to explore it, but they will become frustrated as early as they discover the fake window dressing. So you’ve alienated a part of the audience while doing nothing to the other part. I would hardly call this an ideal course of events, even if you think the second part is a minority of hardcore players.
You’re still thinking from the perspective of the player. I’m thinking from the perspective of the developer. I agree, of course, that the “99% visited yet still maintaining the illusion” case is not realistically doable. But that’s why I called it a _platonic ideal_.
As to whether the hardcore players would be disappointed when they discover there are limits to the world, I have three points that I’m trying to communicate:
(1) The hardcore players constitute far, far less than “half” of the players of a wildly succesful RPG. I would suggest that the number is more like 5%.
(2) That 5% will reach the limits of your world (and possibly be disappointed by it) no matter how much time and effort you put into it.
(3) In the meantime, the other 95% of your players will be dealing with the fact that your game is (a) buggy, (b) late, or (c) both, because you screwed the pooch during development so that you could add a bunch of content that most players will never experience.
This, incidentally, is one reason why Bethesda charging for additional content is a good idea.
“This is what would really happen in your ideal game: half of the
players wouldn’t care if there is an unexplored world or not. Maybe
they would feel the sentiment, maybe they won’t, but since they really
don’t care, it won’t change their game experience. The other half, the
players who care about the world, would try to explore it, but they
will become frustrated as early as they discover the fake window
dressing.”
Not necessarily. It is possible (difficult, but we’re talking about
ideals) to make those two halves of the player world *wind up seeing
the same stuff*, despite their different proclivities.
This approach would involve making exploration interesting and
rewarding, but also constructing the plot so that it eventually leads
all players to explore all (or, more realistically, most) of the
available world.
You’d also have to set up the *barriers* to exploration in a
satisfying way. So that when a thorough player reaches the end of the
interesting content in an area, he doesn’t say “Aargh aargh glass
walls hate” but rather “That was really fun. Where next?”
These ideas are coming out of the adventure-game genre, of course –
that’s where the *whole* value of the game is exploration and new
discoveries, and the designers can’t patch the cracks with
rat-clubbing time. But it’s equally applicable to the exploration
elements of other kinds of games.
(None of this is to say that I *dislike* bonus stuff in games; only
that I understand a designer’s reluctance to spend time making it. I
think the _Shadow of the Colossus_ team may well have been insane to
create an enormous, highly-detailed landscape for the sole purpose of
letting people ride around it on the way to different parts of the
game. I’m glad they did, though.)
I think it’s hard to make the case for optional content being a waste in this series, because — essentially — that’s this series’ reason for existence. People buy it because they’ve been promised ludicrous amounts of verisimilitude, and astonishingly, they mostly get it. So it’s not really optional at all — it’s just part of the baseline experience, which happens to be a very broad baseline experience.
Now… is this kind of game cost effective to make? It seems unlikely, and yet the company has done it four times now, and by all accounts, is making money hand over fist at it. Which means the real question is, how do they make all of this breadth cost-effective to create?
Re-reading, I see you’re arguing that Bethesda is attempting to approximate this ideal. And yeah, I take your points, but I also think they’ve done a pretty good job at approximation — enough so that we start to run into your arguments about why it can’t be done.
Also, MMORPGs take an interesting whack at this — “hell is other people.”
One other point is I think it’s likely that most average players (including me) don’t see 50-80% of the content in most traditional games (shooters etc), because they are linearly structured and people get bored and give up at some point. I don’t see why this content, then, isn’t similarly wasted under your definition as all the extra content in a big open RPG. Why must nonlinear games be balanced so as to allow you to see all the content out the starting gate, when linear games, the vast majority, obviously aren’t? And what is the flaw in the Morrowind version of this (ie, a sort of soft linear structure in which you have the notional illusion of being able to visit the whole world initially, but in fact need to advance before you actually can)? It seems like your complaint is really just that Morrowind doesn’t do a good job of staging and timing this advancement, and has nothing really to do with whether there is ‘extra’ content that most players will never see.
The problem in Morrowind is not just one of timing and advancement, but also in layout. What happens is that you, as a player, are actually punished for exploring in a subtle way, because if you explore effectively, you will end up completing various quests before they are actually assigned. This leads to unsatisfying situations like showing up someplace and some guy says: “Please find so and so’s murderer. Oh, you already killed him. Good job! Here’s 1,000 septims.” As a player, the game has just let me cheat myself out of potentially a lot of narrative fun.
This leads directly into me, the player, being paralyzed with fear. I _want_ to explore, but what if I screw up and ruin some future quest?
It is the most unbearable attribute of the game, for me.
(Why, yes, I _was_ exploring the Hlormaren Dunmer stronghold without any assigned mission last night)
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