There was a point during the Hong Kong section of the original Deus Ex when I came across a rare moment of brilliance I hadn’t experienced before in a game. In the apartment where I was supposed to break-in and investigate without detection, I had been discovered. With nowhere to hide, I made a go for the window. Jumping through it, shattering the glass along the way, I expected to fall down to my death with the bone-crunching noise reminiscent of Half-Life.
Instead, I landed on a ledge. Well above the ground level and with no broken bones.
For me, this was one of the earliest examples I can recall from my gaming experience of level design so complex that even the player wasn’t able to comprehend the limits. Moments like these often take any gamers’ breath away. Finding out that the game world is bigger than you had previously perceived often ranks as a cherished and vital memory in many of our minds. Who wasn’t squealing with excitement when they found out that the end of Pokemon Gold wasn’t really the end and there was entire Kanto still waiting to be explored?
Why can’t we, as gamers have more of these moments? Why does everything need to be laid out on platter for us? Is it because the designers fear that the players’ will not fully experience their levels and indirectly undermine their hard work? Or is it for the sake of games as they continue figuring out new ways to achieve the holy grail of a “focused narrative”?
Reality and Perception
Reality and Perception happen to be two separate spheres existing within a common domain – the space between the player and the game. At any point, perception is what the player knows (or thinks he/she knows) about the game and reality is what the developer knows about the game, making it a factual point. Ideally, this perception is supposed to play a catch-up game with reality throughout the course of the game as the player discovers more and more about it and that excitement of discovery drives them forward. This is supposed to work across all fronts of the game – narrative, mechanics and design.
Unfortunately, there has been a distinct dearth lately of the cat-and-mouse game between players’ perception with the game’s reality. It has been quietly taking away the thrill of discovery and increasing the risk of fatigue settling into the players’ minds as a result of rote familiarity.
This can be seen when one observes just how persistent the feeling is among developers today that you are supposed to reveal everything about the game to the player. This exists both within mechanics as well as design. Within the field of game mechanics, this belief exists in the form that the players *need* to know about absolutely every minute detail of the game mechanics before they are let go into the world. This often results in intrusive and overly-long tutorials that perpetuate the feeling of “being guided” through the game world. Instead of being equipped with the bare minimum details about the mechanics and left alone to discover, we are instead showered with splash-screen tutorials whenever the game unlocks any new power for us.
That all-too familiar feeling of “being guided” exists especially when it comes to level design. We are well-aware of the “follow the marker from A to B” problem which tends to plague many AAA titles today. We are told everything from the beginning. For the sake of narrative focus, we are constantly supervised and told where to go and how to get to it.
This intrusive reminder meant to keep the game’s pacing “focused” on the task at hand often limits the expanse of level design as well. It can permeate either through a simple objective marker or friendly AI squad mates bugging you to head in the “right direction”.
It isn’t necessarily the only means to achieve the so-called “focused narrative” either. Half-Life 2 had an extremely focused and well-paced narrative without if ever falling into the aforementioned pitfalls that games tend to now.
One cannot be overly-critical of the level designers either. If we step into their shoes for a moment and imagine the situation, they are faced with choices where they can either:
- A) create variety in sections of the area that the player may/may not explore or
- B) create variety in the limited section where the player will definitely be led through.
It doesn’t seem like a difficult choice to make when we see it from that perspective. Where does the problem lie in that case?
Storytelling Killed Level Design
Is it because as a general norm, the story is written independently first and then the team of designers meet to discuss the various objectives of the mission and chart up a design for the area where the mission shall take place. Maybe this “Story first, everything next” approach might lead to a more focused narrative but it also decapitates the thrill of discovering something new. Focus on story makes developers risk-averse because they fear they might scare (or frustrate) gamers and then who will see the “shocking” story twist at the end they worked so hard to write?
It ruins the chance for a game to give its gamers Something that gives them an illusion of “I wasn’t supposed to discover this but I did and that’s awesome!”. It is merely an illusion but an illusion that has worked wonders time and again and frankly shouldn’t be something too difficult to implement.
Halfway through a mission in Dishonored, I was given the objective of backtracking to the starting point I had initially made my way from. Not keen on dodging every enemy patrol on the route once again, I instead jumped from top of the fort to the rocks near the sea, expecting death. Instead a minute later, I had safely reached my marker by circumnavigating around the entire fort. Something that wasn’t possible if I hadn’t jumped from that place. Almost a decade later, a very familiar smile flashed across my face.
