Boundaries: The Edge of the game
Lately my interest in video games has sky rocketed. I’ve always loved them, but I’ve always struggled to play most games and so I was happier just to watch one of my brothers or sisters or friends play while I sat comfortably beside them taking in the world. As my increase in playing games rose, so too did my desire to work on them. I think I’ve always been somewhat interested in how to physically limit and contain a player, but it wasn’t until I did a full play through of Horizon: Zero Dawn, that I really considered how much this containment controls the game and how much boundaries can stifle a player when not polished and perfected. For many gamers, there are two types of games when it comes to world and level design, which are:
Linear: Games that have a beginning, middle and end at concrete points and have a path in between that players follow. These games are predominantly narrative based and the map and narrative influence and play off each other. My favourite example of this is, of course, BioShock. Where Jack must make his way through a series of levels in order to escape Rapture. Each level is a single map where Jack has a goal or objective that prevents him from moving forward. You could go backwards, I guess. But there really isn’t any reason to.
Open World: Games that have a beginning and end with a wide array of objectives and smaller goals in the middle that are spread out on an open concept map and can be done in the order that the player chooses. Horizon: Zero Dawn is an Open World game. You can go almost anywhere in the world just by walking there, even if the storyline hasn’t progressed that far yet. Many things will be locked and blocked off, but you can still explore a large portion of the map and complete quests in whatever order you’d like. These type of games play nicely with the Role Playing genre because you can stay in an area and fight machines in order to level up and get stronger. Massive Multiplayer Online is another genre that works well for this, like Elder Scrolls, where players can go at their own pace.
While others may just accept those two ways as THE two ways to limit and contain a player, that doesn’t quite work for me and I find myself thinking of all the games that are something kind of in between. And what I want to know, is how much should an Open World map look like an Open Concept home in order to fit into that category. Does being an Open World game define the way that the map looks?
Let’s look at Luigi’s Mansion. The beginning — Mario is trapped in a painting and Luigi sets off to save his brother. The end — Luigi saves his brother. The middle? There is a clear path of objectives that the player must follow and that limit the player, but there are also numerous side quests in the form of small secrets or mini games within the room. Players can spend a bunch of time trying to do all these or they can skip them if they want. Luigi accidentally releases 50 boos at the start of the game. Capturing each one is essentially a mini-game, but you don’t have to catch everyone if you don’t want to and don’t need the reward that comes from completing this side mission. So is Luigi’s Mansion Linear or Open World? If I had to guess based on first impression, I’d say linear, but once I think about it as I’ve done just now, I think it’s easily more of an open world game. But wait, the map isn’t open concept at all, it’s winding halls and levels just like in BioShock. Does that take away from it’s Open World-ness?
So then what about games like Dead by Daylight? Which has pockets of play and seemingly no unifying narrative.What type of limiting is that then? It definitely isn’t linear, but it’s not really open world either. It doesn’t really have a beginning and it doesn’t have an end. It’s just an infinite loop with a tutorial when you sign up. What about The Sims, where you create the story and the story ends when your character dies without a legacy? What about Beautiful Katamari, one of my all time favourite games? It’s almost the same except there is a narrative. It’s weak, but it’s there.
A more linear type of map and level design is a tried and true method. It limits the player by giving them sectioned off spaces to play in where each area has specific purposes and objectives. This allows artists and designers to make a lot of purposeful and perfectly curated decisions in order to maximize playability and artistic appeal, especially for a game limited by size. This is drastically different from an open world style game where the player is free to roam and find things that make roaming worthwhile. This method stacks these moments on top of each other, pulling them closer to each other and to the player.
But what does each type of map actually look like? How does it function? How do designers go about keeping players in the world. We’ll start with an easy one. Minecraft. No one would argue that this game is linear. It’s a big open world that stretches on as far as your computer or xbox can handle. Yes, there is The End, but let’s just focus on the regular world. How does it keep players in? Easy. Bedrock. Players can’t break bedrock. It makes logical sense because the minecraft world is based on our own Earth. Easy. But what if we weren’t on Earth? Could we use that same idea? In Oxygen Not Included, that’s exactly what they do. Once you hit, neutronium, you’re stuck. There is the edge of the map. Now, Oxygen Not Included is different from Minecraft in a lot of ways, but looking at the map, you’ll quickly discover that the map in Oxygen Not Included is actually very small. But it feels like it’s not. It feels like there is just no way for you to break through the neutronium and get to the rest of the asteroid. By just using an alien, other worldly-type atmosphere for this game it does something that Minecraft could never do, be small but feel expansive.
Let’s look back at BioShock for a moment and talk about why I think it’s so successful Let’s look at the way the edge of the map actually looks and functions. Rapture has walls and windows. Everywhere. These contain the player easily, because you’re trapped inside something wanting to get out, but also make the game environment feel never ending while limiting the work for the artists and level designers. This is the same as Oxygen Not Included. When I was playing, in fact, I didn’t even feel limited by the actual boundaries because the world felt so big, even small touches like having a big daddy and little sister walking in one of the tubes next to the player makes it feel like there is a vibrant world to explore and that you could explore if you weren’t being brainwashed. Even with the use of bathyospheres, which work like transit pods, it really feels like there are a bunch of other environments to go to, you just haven’t unlocked them yet. If this game were to have a multiplayer, no one would feel like the designers were stretching when they added new maps to the game, since almost anything you added would look and feel like it made logistical sense in the world they’ve created. Truly, I think this is one of the best examples I’ve seen of having a limited map feel larger than life. I want to make a backstreet boys joke here but I’ll refrain.
This is similar to the way that Subnautica treats their world, which has an Open World map. If you swim to the top of the water and look around, it is just water all the way until the horizon line. It truly looks endless. But the play area isn’t actually as big as it seems. You can quickly find the edge of the map by swimming down and out in any direction, looking out for leviathans who want to kill you. Then at some point, you’ll find a sudden drop off that just keeps going down. There’s no resources and tons of leviathans ready to kill you. I feel like this is actually a pretty unique way of limiting players. It’s fear that keeps you in the map. While this absolutely terrifies me, I also find myself wanting to explore this area and in this way it seems to fall short of doing its job to confine the player. Yes, there are giant creepy aliens hell-bent on killing me, but maybe… just maybe, there’s some mystery down there. Of course, I know that there isn’t, and heck- my ship can’t even dive that deep, nor can I maintain enough oxygen as a diver, but I’m still really tempted to go down there. While this might frighten some players, and scare them into the safer areas deemed part of the map, its also those same players who probably won’t finish the game since that relies heavily on players facing terrifying aliens while doing insanely deep dives. So I think that’s my schtick with it, especially because I was the player who wanted to explore the deep ocean but when I encountered a more tucked in crevice that involved bits of story, I was way too scared and it took a lot of effort just to convince myself to go down there. But theoretically, it’s a really cool way to define the edge of the open world map.
Slime Rancher uses a similar method, with the added notion of certain death. In Subnautica, you’ll probably die if you go off the edge, but in Slime Rancher, there’s no doubt about it. In some ways, this doesn’t physically limit the player as much as a game with walls would, because players with tenacity can get the max upgrade on the jet pack to try to fly as far into the distance as they can, but in other ways it does limit them due to the fact that dying causes the player to lose all the items in their inventory. And in areas like the wild, where you have to collect berries and return them without dying, this causes added tension, especially because you have to wait some time before you an try again and feral saber slimes will try to kill you and often push the player into the water. In most aspects of the map, the threat of dying doesn’t really bother me as a player, but in these additional worlds, I feel the threat of them and keep them in mind when using my boost to leap or fly over top of water. And for a casual player like me, I have no desire to reach faraway islands by testing my jetpack. I wonder then, if this could fall into the category of a platform game, and if that’s different from a linear or open world game, making a third option in that realm.
Horizon Zero Dawn also uses a type of boundary that has been widely used before in games like GTA and The Witcher, but in a way that I find very frustrating. The edges of the map typical result in a tall mountain, that is nearly impossible for the player to scale. I say nearly because I’ve reached the edge many a time with some amounts of effort and consistently felt sort of betrayed when I’d get the on-screen instruction to re-enter the playing zone, as I was now out of bounds. It just takes me out of the game world so quickly when I get a UI message that I’m out of the play area. It makes me wonder why they wouldn’t have just made an incline too steep for players to jump up. Sometimes, there are even banuk sculptures or metal flowers near these edges, which just makes me more inclined to get up there. And ontop of that, there was certain spaces where either I or my steed could not go, and instead of just making the action impossible through logical design, there were invisible walls for seeminlgy no reason that would trigger a UI prompt, which would explain that I or my steed could not enter the space. It’s those kind of things that make me grumpy as a player and make me wish that someone had spent even a moments more time considering why they felt the need to put the UI in. I know that it’s easier that adjusting the level, but it really takes me out of the experience and reminds me that I’m playing a fictional game with writers and designers and artists.
So there you have it, my thoughts on creating boundaries for the player. What do you think? Do you agree? Do you think I am very dumb? How do you think about the way a map looks and how that orients the player or progresses the story?
Thank you for reading and have a lovely day!
