Aporeia
(?)Community Member
Shameless Mystic
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- Posted: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 21:53:31 +0000
Let me just start by saying this isn't just a problem with particular games, but a template in general that has been imposed on many newer games that appears to only be getting worse as time goes on. The games I will reference are games that I actually like, but have beef about. I feel that this discussion is too long winded for the Gaming Discussion forum, as all I'll get are TL;DR replies.
I'll start with three self-defined terms that will mean exactly what I say they mean in the context of this thread.
Now, as you can see, the primary examples for sandbox RPGs are Bethesda and Bioware, the only remaining companies that release big-name RPGs. They have dominated the market and set a standard that has more or less diminished the existence of Linear and Alinear RPGs. They used to be nauseatingly common, but now only exist in a pocketed handful of titles by companies who prefer to live in the past for better or worse.
Sandbox RPGs tend to contain a mechanic I despise, and is the subject of much contempt between players of polarize opinions: Unrestricted Fast Travel. I will do my best to explain why the existence of Unrestricted Fast Travel is a band-aid for piss poor game design in a relatively new sub-genre.
Games That Didn't Need It
Few people complain about fast travel in Ocarina of Time. The game starts with Link as a kid, and for the next 10-12ish hours of gameplay, you will be playing entirely on foot. You travel to 3 primary dungeon locations, along with satellite locations. By the time you've traveled MOST of the overland world, you are now moving on to the second phase of the game where you are shifted into adulthood, and are given two options for quicker travel- your horse and your ocarina. The first of which is a side quest in which obtaining Epona feels like an earned reward, and the songs that allow fast travel are only unlocked once you have cleared the preliminary quests to gain access to their associated dungeon. Up until you are about 25 hours into the game, you don't even get access to an area you didn't at least visit as a child, and yet the game is only halfway complete. Travel to these areas before this point were not only restricted, but they felt like a great unknown.
Wind Waker followed much of the same formula. It is not until about 12 hours into the game that you finally get access to the Wind Waker, and the ability to change the wind to allow you to travel freely. Even then, it's not for another 10 hours that you gain teleportation, by which point you've already explored 2/3 of the world.
Out of all of the Final Fantasy games, I feel VII was the best example of proper pacing in world travel. The game starts with you being dropped off in a tight-spaced city for 12ish hours (once again, that number shows up), and it isn't until then that you are locked out of the city and thrown into a broad open world with a still linear pathing. 8 hours later, you get a car that breaks down soon after, but gives you a taste of conflictless world travel. The world continues to send you on sprawling journeys with tons of distractions and roadblocks until about 3/4 of the way through the game when it finally tosses you an airship, now opening up access to every place you've ever been, along with new locations never before within reach.
I could go on, but I'll end it here. None of these games felt like they needed Unrestricted Fast Travel, yet they all gave the option of fast travel to the player once they progressed far into the game.
The Games That Needed It
KOTOR is the first game that I remember that required fast travel; that said, it wasn't entirely unlimited as it required you to return to your ship to travel between nodal locations. Quests generally kept you in the same area you got them in, but travel from one zone to another was dull and was, at best, a cutscene to something ominous.
Morrowind did about the opposite- the world was huge and fast travel was existent, but neither necessary nor easy to obtain. The size of the world made you wish for it after a few quests in, however, as you would frequently get lost. Scrolls/spells to teleport to the nearest city were wonky, but helpful, Silt Striders would take you to satellite towns in small networks that would require several stops before you got to your desired location, and the most reliable form of fast travel was extremely limited in its application, despite its customized nature - Mark/Recall. The game would frequently send you out on wild goose chases with nothing more than directions as if asking around a small town how to get to X, and all of the locals would tell you "oh, go where the old Y building used to be before it got relocated to Z back 30 years ago." A seed was being planted...
Oblivion took the worst inconveniences of KOTOR and MORROWIND and combined them with new issues! Quests would send you from one end of the continent to another on an almost 50% basis. Filler zones existed as they did in Morrowind and KOTOR, but lacked the uniqueness of either. In an attempt to make the world feel huge, Bethesda made a world of copypasta dungeons/caves that littered the overworld, offering very little reward for ever going to them without having been sent there by a quest. In order to avoid the uneventful grind, you were given two tools: a quest marker that removed all sense of exploration, and unrestricted fast travel that removed all sense of a journey. Its successor, Skyrim, did the exact same thing with no desire to undo its issues.
Dragon Age signifies the worst end of it. Unlike Bethesda's Oblivion or Skyrim, this game contains no exploration whatsoever. Resembling Bioware's previous series, KOTOR, the game sets you on a map with nodes you travel to with the only inkling of events between being randomly generated battle scenarios that only a handful of which have anything resembling a story. Unlike KOTOR, Dragon Age does something much worse, a symptom matching Oblivion's endless waves of fetch quests with no reward beyond gold...
What's The Issue?
The issue isn't Unrestricted Fast Travel; no, that's a symptom of a far more structural issue in game design. Unrestricted Fast Travel arose when games shifted from the Alinear RPG model to the Sandbox RPG model. Linear RPGs tended to bore people because you would always feel trapped in a box. Alinear RPGs tried to remedy that by sticking to a similar formula, but gave you the freedom to move about without a Chapter-bound system. Sandbox RPGs tried to take a step above Alinear RPGs; they have almost unilaterally failed in this regard (Morrowind and KOTOR being the exceptions). The reason for that is primarily these titles claim to be ambitiously building large interactive worlds with unlimited exploration, while lacking the drive to go through with any of it. The Bethesda Model showed us that game designers are more concerned with making their world large/pretty than captivating. The Bioware Model shows us that even Alinear storytellers lack the writing skills or imagination to bring us into a breathing world.
Both models contain a fundamental flaw that is intrinsically unique to Sandbox RPGs: a lack of scripted filler events. In both previous subgenres, the games were made longer by making you travel from one place to another with organically scripted events happening in between. These were generally somewhat memorable and nonrepetitive in-game. Sandbox RPGs lack this, and have to the best of my knowledge, never tried to introduce it. What they have done to lengthen the game is to bog down your time with grinding repetitive fetch x MacGuffin or kill x# of mooks to obtain enough gold to buy featureless diablo-style gear that is about as satisfying as it is fun to work for. They then hide this formula by sending you to dull locations with copypasta textures and meshes from previously explored areas so you can wade your way though waves of mooks and goons just to get to the generically named archmooks or goonlords that need killing or the MacGuffins that need snatching. By the end of it, you feel like you've done this 20 times beforehand... and you have. Nothing interesting was thrown into the equation because it's just grind-content.
Instead of being given a vibrant and memorable series of events, you're given an emotionless and surgically segmented series of story-nodes that make you feel less like you've taken a long journey (the reason I'm drawn to rpgs), and more like you've read a bullet-point summery of important events culled from a larger, potentially better written book. The sense of distance traveled is meaningless. The random hardship and intrigue of just trying to get to the place you need to go to do what needs to be done doesn't exist. It's like a story written by a 3rd grader who's primary inspiration was DBZ after it jumped the shark.
How Do We Fix It?
Stop making games too ******** big and ambitious for your ability to go through with them. If you make a game that has a huge world, don't fill it with hundreds of fetch quests. Stick to long and involved sidequests that have multiple phases to them, or present a challenge with exceptional levels of difficulty that don't equate themselves to gathering hundreds of rare-drop materials. Avoid simple payment quests because gold is a boring reward stemming from poor design in making it necessary to farm gold just to move on. Don't make the player travel from one area to another that's far off without entertaining them along the way. I don't care how many optional copypasta dungeons are between ******** Village and Shitwallow Cave, give us uniquely scripted filler events as we go there, or don't bother sending us to pick up the ancestral codpiece for some toothless farmer who just says "THANKS" before returning to molest livestock, never to be mentioned again. Give players a reason to explore all of that open content- not just quests, but unique battles, treasures, or secret knowledge you can't find anywhere else.
When you spend hours doing quests in hope of interesting results, and all you get is repetitive garbage, it's no big surprise I just put down your game because it somehow dawned on me I stopped having fun 100 hours ago.
Discuss:
Are games going down the toilet?
Am I complaining too much?
Why did the farmer need a codpiece?
I'll start with three self-defined terms that will mean exactly what I say they mean in the context of this thread.
- Linear RPG - Story is on rails, travel is on rails with some exploration, and is sectioned into "chapters," and backtracking is limited. Examples: Dishonored, The Walking Dead (TTG), Bioshock Infinite, Deus Ex (any).
Alinear RPG - Story is linear, but world is open. Chapters exist, but do not prevent you from backtracking. Examples: Final Fantasy (10 and below), Kingdom Hearts (series), Legend of Zelda (notably OoT, and WW), Bioshock 1 and 2, Fable.
Sandbox RPG - Main quest story is non-linear or optional, map is open. Chapters may open up new locations, but can often be done in any order. Examples: The Elder Scrolls (Series), Fallout (Series), Dragon Age (Series), KOTOR (Series).
Now, as you can see, the primary examples for sandbox RPGs are Bethesda and Bioware, the only remaining companies that release big-name RPGs. They have dominated the market and set a standard that has more or less diminished the existence of Linear and Alinear RPGs. They used to be nauseatingly common, but now only exist in a pocketed handful of titles by companies who prefer to live in the past for better or worse.
Sandbox RPGs tend to contain a mechanic I despise, and is the subject of much contempt between players of polarize opinions: Unrestricted Fast Travel. I will do my best to explain why the existence of Unrestricted Fast Travel is a band-aid for piss poor game design in a relatively new sub-genre.
Games That Didn't Need It
Few people complain about fast travel in Ocarina of Time. The game starts with Link as a kid, and for the next 10-12ish hours of gameplay, you will be playing entirely on foot. You travel to 3 primary dungeon locations, along with satellite locations. By the time you've traveled MOST of the overland world, you are now moving on to the second phase of the game where you are shifted into adulthood, and are given two options for quicker travel- your horse and your ocarina. The first of which is a side quest in which obtaining Epona feels like an earned reward, and the songs that allow fast travel are only unlocked once you have cleared the preliminary quests to gain access to their associated dungeon. Up until you are about 25 hours into the game, you don't even get access to an area you didn't at least visit as a child, and yet the game is only halfway complete. Travel to these areas before this point were not only restricted, but they felt like a great unknown.
Wind Waker followed much of the same formula. It is not until about 12 hours into the game that you finally get access to the Wind Waker, and the ability to change the wind to allow you to travel freely. Even then, it's not for another 10 hours that you gain teleportation, by which point you've already explored 2/3 of the world.
Out of all of the Final Fantasy games, I feel VII was the best example of proper pacing in world travel. The game starts with you being dropped off in a tight-spaced city for 12ish hours (once again, that number shows up), and it isn't until then that you are locked out of the city and thrown into a broad open world with a still linear pathing. 8 hours later, you get a car that breaks down soon after, but gives you a taste of conflictless world travel. The world continues to send you on sprawling journeys with tons of distractions and roadblocks until about 3/4 of the way through the game when it finally tosses you an airship, now opening up access to every place you've ever been, along with new locations never before within reach.
I could go on, but I'll end it here. None of these games felt like they needed Unrestricted Fast Travel, yet they all gave the option of fast travel to the player once they progressed far into the game.
The Games That Needed It
KOTOR is the first game that I remember that required fast travel; that said, it wasn't entirely unlimited as it required you to return to your ship to travel between nodal locations. Quests generally kept you in the same area you got them in, but travel from one zone to another was dull and was, at best, a cutscene to something ominous.
Morrowind did about the opposite- the world was huge and fast travel was existent, but neither necessary nor easy to obtain. The size of the world made you wish for it after a few quests in, however, as you would frequently get lost. Scrolls/spells to teleport to the nearest city were wonky, but helpful, Silt Striders would take you to satellite towns in small networks that would require several stops before you got to your desired location, and the most reliable form of fast travel was extremely limited in its application, despite its customized nature - Mark/Recall. The game would frequently send you out on wild goose chases with nothing more than directions as if asking around a small town how to get to X, and all of the locals would tell you "oh, go where the old Y building used to be before it got relocated to Z back 30 years ago." A seed was being planted...
Oblivion took the worst inconveniences of KOTOR and MORROWIND and combined them with new issues! Quests would send you from one end of the continent to another on an almost 50% basis. Filler zones existed as they did in Morrowind and KOTOR, but lacked the uniqueness of either. In an attempt to make the world feel huge, Bethesda made a world of copypasta dungeons/caves that littered the overworld, offering very little reward for ever going to them without having been sent there by a quest. In order to avoid the uneventful grind, you were given two tools: a quest marker that removed all sense of exploration, and unrestricted fast travel that removed all sense of a journey. Its successor, Skyrim, did the exact same thing with no desire to undo its issues.
Dragon Age signifies the worst end of it. Unlike Bethesda's Oblivion or Skyrim, this game contains no exploration whatsoever. Resembling Bioware's previous series, KOTOR, the game sets you on a map with nodes you travel to with the only inkling of events between being randomly generated battle scenarios that only a handful of which have anything resembling a story. Unlike KOTOR, Dragon Age does something much worse, a symptom matching Oblivion's endless waves of fetch quests with no reward beyond gold...
What's The Issue?
The issue isn't Unrestricted Fast Travel; no, that's a symptom of a far more structural issue in game design. Unrestricted Fast Travel arose when games shifted from the Alinear RPG model to the Sandbox RPG model. Linear RPGs tended to bore people because you would always feel trapped in a box. Alinear RPGs tried to remedy that by sticking to a similar formula, but gave you the freedom to move about without a Chapter-bound system. Sandbox RPGs tried to take a step above Alinear RPGs; they have almost unilaterally failed in this regard (Morrowind and KOTOR being the exceptions). The reason for that is primarily these titles claim to be ambitiously building large interactive worlds with unlimited exploration, while lacking the drive to go through with any of it. The Bethesda Model showed us that game designers are more concerned with making their world large/pretty than captivating. The Bioware Model shows us that even Alinear storytellers lack the writing skills or imagination to bring us into a breathing world.
Both models contain a fundamental flaw that is intrinsically unique to Sandbox RPGs: a lack of scripted filler events. In both previous subgenres, the games were made longer by making you travel from one place to another with organically scripted events happening in between. These were generally somewhat memorable and nonrepetitive in-game. Sandbox RPGs lack this, and have to the best of my knowledge, never tried to introduce it. What they have done to lengthen the game is to bog down your time with grinding repetitive fetch x MacGuffin or kill x# of mooks to obtain enough gold to buy featureless diablo-style gear that is about as satisfying as it is fun to work for. They then hide this formula by sending you to dull locations with copypasta textures and meshes from previously explored areas so you can wade your way though waves of mooks and goons just to get to the generically named archmooks or goonlords that need killing or the MacGuffins that need snatching. By the end of it, you feel like you've done this 20 times beforehand... and you have. Nothing interesting was thrown into the equation because it's just grind-content.
Instead of being given a vibrant and memorable series of events, you're given an emotionless and surgically segmented series of story-nodes that make you feel less like you've taken a long journey (the reason I'm drawn to rpgs), and more like you've read a bullet-point summery of important events culled from a larger, potentially better written book. The sense of distance traveled is meaningless. The random hardship and intrigue of just trying to get to the place you need to go to do what needs to be done doesn't exist. It's like a story written by a 3rd grader who's primary inspiration was DBZ after it jumped the shark.
How Do We Fix It?
Stop making games too ******** big and ambitious for your ability to go through with them. If you make a game that has a huge world, don't fill it with hundreds of fetch quests. Stick to long and involved sidequests that have multiple phases to them, or present a challenge with exceptional levels of difficulty that don't equate themselves to gathering hundreds of rare-drop materials. Avoid simple payment quests because gold is a boring reward stemming from poor design in making it necessary to farm gold just to move on. Don't make the player travel from one area to another that's far off without entertaining them along the way. I don't care how many optional copypasta dungeons are between ******** Village and Shitwallow Cave, give us uniquely scripted filler events as we go there, or don't bother sending us to pick up the ancestral codpiece for some toothless farmer who just says "THANKS" before returning to molest livestock, never to be mentioned again. Give players a reason to explore all of that open content- not just quests, but unique battles, treasures, or secret knowledge you can't find anywhere else.
When you spend hours doing quests in hope of interesting results, and all you get is repetitive garbage, it's no big surprise I just put down your game because it somehow dawned on me I stopped having fun 100 hours ago.
Discuss:
Are games going down the toilet?
Am I complaining too much?
Why did the farmer need a codpiece?
