Tea Leaves

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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