My name is I’m trying to be less controlled/obsessive about things I write here, as I think it’d be more useful as a loose notebook of ideas not yet fully-formed. And I’ll go less insane when updating it this way.
From Tom’s recent post about how to create a good open world:
The idea is to encourage the player to have a favourite place, and give him a way of making it significant. There aren’t many practical considerations: it doesn’t have to be near anything or easy to get to, since you can fast travel to it. So it gets you looking at the world aesthetically, something a world like Just Cause’s definitely warrants.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
There’s an area outside World of WarCraft’s Stormwind City called Elwynn Forest. I haven’t played the game in years, but I still remember the area. It’s beautiful, still and packed with tall trees. When I first visited it, I dearly wanted to stay there. To move in, build a hut, pitch a tent, make camp. A large part of my eventual dissastisfaction with World of WarCraft came from the inability to place meaningful roots anywhere in the game.
(Screenshot from the World of Warcraft wikia).
In any game that creates a convincing world, I want to nest. It’s rare that games let me do that, instead favouring progress and movement. There are obvious reasons: staying still is boring, no? Well, no. The Sims, Dungeon Keeper and Dwarf Fortress all prove otherwise, but also largely jettison the environmental exploration of a first or third-person action game. I want both. I just want my progress and exploration to be grounded and given meaning by a consistent and reflective central home.
There are great examples of this in other mediums. In comics, Batman ventures out into Gotham to fight crimes and then returns to Wayne Manor and the Batcave below. Each is a symbol filled with memorabilia commemorating his own life: a giant penny, a playing card, Jason Todd’s old Robin suit, Batman’s car.
Television does it, too, in part out of the financial necessity to build fixed sets. Buffy’s house, the library, the magic shop, all carry emotional significance. In fact, step back to the mythological underpinnings of vampires: they can’t enter your home unless you invite them. Homes have meaning.
Open world games in general demand a base of operations to make sense. I can suspend disbelief enough to accept a sleepless, foodless hero who fights with pause night and day, but I don’t like the disconnect of being a permanent tourist moving Jason Bourne-like through an emotionless landscape. I don’t want to always be gripped by a sense of otherness. I want to connect with my environment and imbue a part of it with meaning.
Frustratingly, this seems like such an obvious, natural desire. I spent endless hours as a kid using chairs, pillows and duvets to build forts, or finding clearings amongst trees and bushes into which to project personal, private hide-outs. Still, even those open world games that give you a base, like FarCry 2′s save houses or Grand Theft Auto’s apartments, don’t let you make them home.
This is why I connect so immediately with Wurm Online. It’s an MMO almost entirely about settling down. The world provides resources (trees, iron, fish) and obstacles (goblins, bears) and you have to survive and flourish amongst it all. The only way to do that is to set up camp: a place to store your items, a place to cook your food, a place in which you’re safe, and in the premium servers, a place to defend. A home!
After building my house in Wurm, fixing it up real nice, I eventually let it decay. I’d dug a cave underneath the house and decided to live in there instead.
(Screenshot from the Half-Life wikia.)
I remember Black Mesa East in Half-Life 2. Your first objective in the game is to get there, and after battling your way out of the hostile, dangerous City 17, you arrive to a haven of friends. You are welcomed with open arms by people who seem to know you and love you. It’s tragic when you an attack forces you to leave. It’s supposed to be tragic – that’s another reason why games could benefit from having more homes – but I can’t help but wishing I’d had more time there.
I want the Half-Life game where you’re not a constantly chased Christ-figure, but simply an ordinary member of the resistance. You perform your work within an oppressed city via a series of safe houses, lashing out at the Combine forces with strategic attacks, but always returning to a hide-out of friends.
(Screenshot from the Lord of the Rings wikia.)
Two final things: I was perhaps the only person who wasn’t annoyed by the long, 30-minute coda at the end of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, where Frodo and Sam return the Shire. I had just spent ten fucking hours over three years watching them venture across Middle Earth for the sake of their home. I was glad to spend time with them when they got back there, because it gave the journey further context and meaning.
Dwarf Fortress does almost everything I want wonderfully, except it’s an inaccessible jumble of letters. Still: you build a home, and that home changes to reflect the events that happen as you play. If your dwarves are attacked and gored by angry, rampaging elephants, then they will carve the walls of their home with giant, blood-smeared elephant effigies.
That’s all I really want.
I think this is the first thing I’ve ever read that captures my own feelings on this subject perfectly. When I find a beautiful, detailed, open world in a video game, I jolly well want to live there. I suppose it’s some kind of British instinct to till the soil or something, but I’m always longing to plant my own little flag in Azeroth or Middle Earth or wherever. Perhaps it makes sense from a narrative perspective – build affection for a place to make us feel it more deeply when we’re prevented from enjoying it, but it still bothers me. I wonder, does Fallout 3 do a decent job of it? I do feel quite attached to my townhouse, scattered with peculiar mementoes from my travels. However, the fact that it’s a) free and b) in the middle of hell on earth puts a dampener on it.
Your Half-Life idea is quite brilliant, by the way. A sort of… side-quel? It’ll never happen, of course, but I do sometimes get sick of ALWAYS having to be some kind of Messiah in games, and I do remember trying desperately to find every last nook of Black Mesa before I was driven out. The slightly obscure Robin Hood: Legend of Sherwood had a bit of that feel, as after every excursion you returned to Sherwood to rest and practice.
Fallout 3 does a decent job of it, at least giving you a shack to stick your crap. But there were limited ways to make it yours, other than expensive and pointless “themes” that could be bought for it. Ideally, I want my house to be in a location of my choosing. Choice is essential to feeling connected to it.
Have you played the Half-Life 1 expansions? They were essentially sidequels, casting you as either an army grunt or as the security guard Barney in a story parallel to that of the original game.
Hadn’t heard of Robin Hood: Legend of Sherwood, but it looks sort of awesome.
Yes, that’s a good point. Setting up a little homestead somewhere, naming it and such like would be rather nice. Someone should really make a mod. The only part of the Sims I could ever really like was building the home itself; my architectural quirks causing trouble later on, the extravagance of a grand piano that cost so much that I couldn’t afford a toilet. The mundanity of actually living my crappy life was what got me down.
Ah of course, I didn’t think of them! I haven’t played them myself – indeed I came shamefully late to the Half-Life series in general. It’s an interesting idea which perhaps isn’t played with enough; I like the idea of telling ‘small’ stories in a videogame, the sort of stories you might tell in a film. A game where you’re neither a messiah, nor a faceless squadie, but an real, ordinary human being in an awkward situation. I guess good old Chris Livingstone’s ‘Concerned’ looks at this from a comedic point of view.
Robin Hood IS sort of awesome. It’s very evocative, I think. It’s also like a version of ‘Commandos’ that actually lets you fight your way out if your ‘clever’ plan doesn’t work out. I would imagine it’s tricky to find though.