Gaming website Rock Paper Shotgun has published an interesting new article taking a look at open world games, what works, and their flaws. The team interviewed former and current Elder Scrolls team members to get their opinions on modern open world games as Skyrim is considered a classic in the genre. They also look at what’s to blame for open world fatigue, which is occurs in numerous open world games. Here’s some of their thoughts on the divisive subject of open world games:
Nate Purkeypile former Fallout and Elder Scrolls designer:
“I think a lot of it has to do with the way some open-world games are designed, where it is very much that checklist. These games can be a lot of fun, and I’ve had fun with them, too, but I have that same fatigue…That feeling of not really knowing what’s over there and feeling surprised – you don’t really feel like you’re exploring the world, if you’re not actually surprised.”
“When you have literally thousands of people working on the game, sometimes you need to be able to have these bite-sized portions of ‘do this, go there’,” Purkeypile observes. “It’s very hard to run things at that scale without all those checks and balances and stuff.”
Nate Purkeypile on working on Skyrim:
“We were like 100 people back then, and there were lots of trust in the team, where you could just take something and make it your own. Like Blackreach – that was not on the schedule at all. We did it as a skunkworks project on the side, and people saw it and said, oh, that’s really awesome – I guess we should keep it. And I have people, to this day, say it’s one of their favourite things, because they go into that deep, dark dungeon to find something we never tell you about. It’s like, vaguely hinted at, but it’s a surprise.”
ZeniMax Online president and Elder Scrolls Online director Matt Firor on Morrowind and the future:
“If you play that right now – there is no compass, no map, literally the quests are like ‘go to the third tree on the right and walk 50 paces west’,” Firor says. “And if you did that now, no one would play it. Very few people would play it. So now you need to give them hints and clues, and because nobody wants to really devote that much time to problem solving. Like they want to go and be told the story, or enter or interact with another player, or interact with an NPC.
“Morrowind is a great game obviously,” he goes on. “It’s one of my favourite games. But the way it told its story with the open world is a little out of date for the type of gamers that we have now, where they’re not all hardcore, they’re not all PC or generation-one console diehards, right, who are going to go out and invest as much time in the game as possible. Now [that there are] so many other options for players, you really want to make sure that it’s engaging and fun, and wandering around a field trying to gauge 50 steps from a tree is not part of that anymore. Which is kind of sad, because I’m old school.”
“[We now] have to support both those kind of hardcore players – I’m saying hardcore, that term is loaded – but the people that really want to take the time and live everything and make it difficult, and then the wider audience that really just has 20 minutes to burn,”
“It’s make a space and then just populate it with things to do, and the players can do it in any order. And sometimes it’s a little chaotic. And sometimes you can’t figure out what the players are going to figure out, because they’re smarter than you. But that’s what the world is like too. And it’s so much fun, just to create space and let players into it, and then see what they do.”
skyrim is the reason I got my switch lol