Certain game experiences seem to suggest other, older games, and leave me longing for them. Age Of Conan, which I’ve been playing a great deal for the PC Gamer review, somehow left me longing for Oblivion. There was something about the way that Age Of Conan tantalises you with elements of single player gaming that left me quite hungry for a proper RPG romp, and so I reinstalled the last Elder Scrolls game and plunged in.
To tell the truth, I’d been meaning to go back and play Oblivion a some point this year after being reminded of it in PC Gamer UK’s Top 100 meeting. Tom Francis had talked about the moment he’d be most fond of in replaying the game: coming out of the underground tutorial into the bright, beautiful gameworld. “You get this incredible feeling of freedom,” he said. “It’s wide open and it feels like anything is possible.” It’s a feeling that, in some ways, is only possible in a game of Oblivion’s calibre. That kind of feeling could be an antidote to the pressures of real life, and definitely an antidote to too many hours in a traditional MMO. I wanted to recapture that, although I had wondered whether Francis’ was simply being hyperbolic. Was Oblivion better than I remembered?
A few weeks ago I wrote about Stalker which, in retrospect, would have been a far greater game if it could have been the “Oblivion With Guns” that some people we anticipating. I do hope Clear Sky can manage something closer to that. The other thing that Francis said at the Top 100 meeting, which left me a little dismayed, was that Stalker wouldn’t make it into his 100 games at all. That seemed odd to me, because I feel as if the Ukrainian shooter shares much with the open-ended games of exploration and personal achievement that Francis (and most of the rest of the PC Gamer team) are so fond of.
Anyway, my return to Oblivion, mixed both nostalgia for the excellent couple of weeks in which I’d originally played it (including an 3am, rather intoxicated, first plunge into the Oblivion realm which was remarkably intense), with a sense that I might not like the game all that much this time. I wasn’t expecting much – my recollections of Oblivion were faded and dulled. I expected it to have aged and recalled my eventual boredom with it the first time around. In some ways, it seems, my memory had been playing tricks on me. Discussion since Oblivion seemed to have dwelt on its failings: dodgy character development mechanisms, the lack of Morrowind’s weird-ass world design, and so on. It was as if this had overwritten what I actually felt about the game.
The truth, of course, was that I love Oblivion far more than I remembered. Even while just running across its wondrous open vistas, stopping to marvel at the sheer scale of its visual accomplishment (vegetation-drenched wooded valleys, walled cities visible from the horizon), it only took moments to spot something that I’ve lauded some other games for: something irrelevant going on in the world. A priestess of some kind was hunting and using magic to kill deer. I could ignore it, or go up to her and talk. The choice was mine. It didn’t matter, but it was still there. It was then that I got the same kind flash of freedom that Tom had done on coming out of the sewers. It’s a game that charms you with its breadth from those earliest minutes in its open world.
In some ways the same is true of having spent time with GTA4, but for some reason it lacked the same sense of exploration. Something about the attitude and environment of GTA4 meant that I didn’t get much joy from wandering off the mission-path. There are wonderful environmental elements, to be sure, and the train and cab rides really did convey the scale and bustle of the city beautifully, but I wonder whether my reduced exploration fun in GTA4 came from the fact that I mostly needed to drive around to get anywhere. Moreover, I wonder whether I simply didn’t want to explore another American city and whether my real-world inhibitions about being a thug in a city somehow dampened my enjoyment. I didn’t get such as kick out of the transgression this time around, even though GTA4’s city is the most impressive videogame world so far.
Even Oblivion’s expectant-looking NPC’s seem to facilitate my need for exploration. They might be awkwardly, bulbously naturalistic, but they’re also superb motors for your adventures with their quest-web of connections and suggestions for action.
At this point you’ll have to excuse me as I rework something I wrote on my personal blog around this time last year. It still stands
Far Cry 2 director Clint Hocking was interviewed by Gamasutra, and he talked about exploration as an activity-in-itself within games:
Spatial exploration isn’t mandatory. It’s not required in any game. It’s a certain play style and a certain type of player who’s interested in playing in that way. There are ways to design to support that well and ways to do it badly. I think it’s pretty clear which games do it well. Grand Theft Auto, Oblivion, they make players who might not even be that kind of player become interested in the act of self-motivated exploration.
I sometimes wish it was mandatory. Exploring has has long been one of the most important things for me in gaming. Elite, Midwinter, Armourgeddon, Outcast – there’s been a history of games I’ve wanted to play just to wander around in their landscapes. I often play games just to see the architecture. I was a tourist in Everquest 2, and couldn’t play Dark Age Of Camelot because the buildings were too dull. The main reason I log into Second Life is to fly around looking at peculiar structures and half-finished castles in the sky. I would quite happily have played World Of Warcraft if it had been an empty landscape with nothing to do but wander around exploring. In fact, I would probably have enjoyed that even more. (It would be interesting to take WoW’s landscape and create a ‘living world’ mod, where it is simply a place populated with AI and basic ecosystems, rather than being the backdrop for sets of linear quests. It could be an alternative MMO world based on the same space. Blizzard themselves could do that – WoW as a pure trade sim, complete with cartography, trade routes, travel plans, etc.)
I think the reason I like Oblivion was that I could just poke about in the woods and discover little shacks in the middle of nowhere. So few games offer that – Stalker does, to some extent, yet still I wish Stalker had been larger, emptier, and spookier. The number of baddies was still too high, and the ‘battle’ post-brain scorcher just didn’t interest me at all. I wanted to explore that enormous terrain at my leisure, not be hustled through under constant barrage.
One of the major disappointments of Eve Online, recently, was that “exploration” as an activity didn’t really love up to its name. There was much more genuine exploration when the early galaxy was littered with random asteroids and dust clouds – stuff that was removed in later iterations of the game. I’d like more detail like that to have been burned into the world, whereas exploration actually creates a semi-instanced dungeon that appears, lingers for a few days and then disappears again. If you do manage to find anything in Eve’s exploration sites, then it was never really there, and therefore never really explored. One of the original joys of Eve was finding interesting systems, or obscure things left over by the dev team – an unusual space station built into an asteroid, or two space stations around the same moon, for example. (Eve players will know what I’m blabbing about here, sorry…) That’s been largely lost.
Anyway, I think Hocking is right, that exploration of many different kinds is an important concept for understanding games. But purely spatial exploration, the idea of just exploring for the hell of it, doesn’t seem to be well catered for. Perhaps we explorers are in a minority. But I know we’re out there (so to speak), and I recall vividly flying out to a pointless remote island during the early beta of Planetside, only to find another person stood there on the rock. He’d gone out there because he could, because it was there. There was no gaming, “hi-score” reason to be out there, we had both just happened to want to see it, perhaps because we might have been the only people to do so.
Would anyone pay for a game that was created in the name of aimless wandering tourism? Could anything in a game world be interesting enough just to go and look at? I wonder what the minimum threshold of activity, the minimum amount of danger and challenge a virtual landscape has to offer to be considered a game?
Reports that Fallout 3 will be less about the exploration, less about the wide-open space that Oblivion provided me with does make me feel sad and annoyed. Where is my next installment of wide open virtual world going to come from? I’m kind of hoping that Hocking is going to be backing up his worlds with action. Far Cry 2, will you save the explorers?
Related Stories:
Mr President: I’ve seen my GF play endless hours of Endless Ocean. I think you can pull it off.
Frankly, were I an indie developer, doing something like it but a lot weirder would be one thing I’d consider giving a shot at.
KG
@ matte k: Where in this month’s PCG UK is the feature on Oblivion mods? I’m likely being a total dolt, and it’s probably because I’ve managed to not notice some pages are stuck together, but I really can’t find it. :(
@ Ian: It’s in the Downloads section, towards the back.
It’s a different variant of doofusosity than I’d expected. I have the previous issue of PC Gamer and have obviously picked it up on one of the last few days before it was taken off the shelves.
So the reason I can’t find it is because I don’t have that issue. :D
I’ve been playing through Oblivion recently too (must just be that time of the year) and I’ve enjoyed it enough to sink 100+ hours in so far, partly due to an obsessive desire to finish every quest this time. Not the best RPG, but a good game overall, once you use OOO and an interface mod.
As far as exploration is concerned, Almost Everything Viewable When Distant is great — you don’t need a magic compass to find things for the most part, you can see something in the distance (a doomstone, a ruin, a village) and say “I’m going there”.
@malkav11: I second the love for Whodunit. That was the one part of the game where I actually gave the smallest damn about a character. I actually felt bad about killing them. Aside from the characters being fairly well written and reacting to other characters and your actions in the quest, at least part of it is that the game encourages you to consider their feelings in your actions (ie, the two you can make fight each other), and once you have that empathy, they’re more like actual “people”.
Loving the new tag. RPS masterminds must be preparing their plan to conquer internet using all this feedback, something like calling the page: Fallout of Oblivion’s Pirates. Plenty of internet money granted!
I fear if RPS do an article on Oblivion Piracy, the internet would collapse into a black hole with RPS at it’s centre…
For a moment there I thought brown was the new black and review scores was the new piracy. But no, just a big thread.
Not nearly enough Freelancer love. It’s a genuinely great exploration game, somewhat in disguise I grant you, but it’s there. Maybe if I’d played more space games over the years I wouldn’t have been so, ultimately, impressed. But I enjoyed wandering a lot, and a lot of love went into that wandering too. If I could contrast Stalker; I’m not nuts about it’s story but it manages to be unintrusive for some reason. It doesn’t hurt the overall vibe. Freelancer’s story and plot elements genuinely get in the way. They try and create the usual sort of narrative drive and urgency and it just shouldn’t be there. In fact I found obeying the apparent conventions before made the game much more difficult; There’s usually a point in each ‘act’ where you are set loose to do your own thing, then after a certain amount of money you get a message to come back to the story by someone. If you actually did that every time the game would be short and rediculously hard. You wouldn’t have enough money and you’d be in dust ups all the time, which isn’t that much fun. And, worst of all you’d skim through some very large and interesting places. Sure space is flat, the simulation is best described as Lite, they’re pulling whacky forced perspective (travel around a solar system and, if the draw distance is long enough, see that the gas giants are several times larger than the stars. Which doesn’t really happen that often really) and the economics is some distance below Lemonade Stand in complexity.
But after I finished and got to free play I systematically made myself neutral with just about every faction (which is fun in itself) and could roam where I pleased. And all the little things you find off the beated track; abandonned jump gates, trade lanes under construction, join a formation with a long haul trucking convoy (after you ask them where they’re going and they say) and when you think you are finally at the end of it all in some otherwise empty system whose peculiar make-up makes it seem like you are surrounded by blue skies, there’s a Freeport or some lonely outpost where the bar tender doesn’t know your name. The place’s little history goes in your collection and off you go again. “Hmm maybe this time I’ll smuggle illegal drugs into the central planets”
It’s really cool. I wish they’d turned around on it quickly and brought out a big open sequel. I’m sure nobody wanted to after its protracted development, but there’s a really fun game hiding there and I believe it’s almost MMO-ishly played online to this day.
This page gives me almost as much headache as the TES mod jungle.
Can someone please recommend me some good Oblivion mods? I’m willing to give another chance. :P
This just in: Yahtzee reviews Oblivion this week on Zero Punctuation.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/75-Oblivion
Okami: you beat me to it!
(Any chance of us PC-gaming übermenschen persuading Yahtzee to review STALKER? Could be fun – he’ll either tear it to utter shreds, or find some aspect that he’ll love, cherish and whatnot…)
Cargo Cult: That’s because every wednesday starting at 18h (CET) I open up The Escapist in my browser and hit F5 every few seconds.
I admit it, I’m a Zero Punctuation fanboy.
My attention went out the window for the rest of the video after mention of “soapy tit-wank.”
My thoughts on oblivion exploration:
Having a mod that kills the compass is a MUST. The feeling you get when you turn around a corner and are suddenly standing face to face with a daedric shrine is way better than just having the shrine blinking on your compass 6 hours before you actually reach the place.
On a related note: the daedric shrines really rocked. I loved the “collecting by exploration” things that oblivion had: the nirnroot, the daedric shrines, the books with statbonuses (I actually read all of those that I found), the books that were part of a series (read most of them..), the 10 alyied (or whatever) ruins that contained rare artefacts that you could collect for a quest, getting the blessings from all the gods from the wayshrines, etc.
Just exploring the terrain was also nice (especially since that daedric shrine that you wanted to find might be hiding behind that mountain..), but I agree with others that the 600000 identical dungeons/caves/castles/ruins that basically contained a few levelled monsters and some random loot and nothing more were a bit.. meh. Having less of those locations, but in the same area size (so spread further apart) would’ve improved the game alot.
Oh, and I spend a few hundred hours on the game and still haven’t found all the daedric ruins. So I can imagine that someone who only spent 20 hours on the game may have found zero, or maybe 1 or 2, and thus that element of the game is completely lost on them.
I also loved tracking down one of every book I could get my hands on. I don’t necessarily read them all (though I intend to one day – it just kinda breaks the flow of play to do it mid-adventuring), but having that library waiting for me is cool. And the skill bonuses are just gravy.
I think I myself would get rid of *all* of the pointless random-monster-and-levelled-loot dungeons. There’s nothing exciting about them in the least. Instead I’d have a smaller, more artfully spaced number of dungeons of varying sizes with their own little stories and dramas and reasons for being. Nothing terribly fancy, but stuff like the Ayleid ruin just as you’re exiting the sewers for the first time, or the cave (Underpall) with a subterranean dock and fort tucked away in it, being used by a necromancer, his assistants, and the undead host they’re raising. That sort of thing.
For me Exploration is the most important thing in computer games. Discovering hidden valleys, standing on a high cliff at sunset in a game with high end graphics in open worlds is as satisfying exploration wise as entering a new level in linear games.
Morrowind I liked better than Oblivion. Stalker worked better for me than Half Life 2. I did finish Morrowind and Stalker, Oblivion and HL 2 I did not.
Oblivion did not entertain me for all the reasons mentioned by others above but the most annoying factor was the teleporting guards that appeared in empty cellars of empty houses out of thin air when I stole an apple.
In Stalker every new level/area offered something different while in HL2 I grew tired of being jumped at by headcrabs in corridors I have seen in every other FPS for more than ten years now.
Exploration in PC games means that I can see something new, new atmosphere, new enemies, new situations when I climb a mountain or enter a new level.
Fallout had great exploration mechanics, even though it was a fast travel map with chance encounters. Finding a new, lovely designed unique place in the wasteland was exciting.
Exploring the island of Operation Flashpoint after winning the war and discovering how huge it actually was, now that was exciting too…travelling by car, then helicopter and it just would not end nor load. In Oblivion every tiny shed is an instance for god’s sake.
For an old gamer like myself there is not much exploring left in the world of pc games. Been there, seen it all. Well almost all, Stalker meets Gothic meets Operation Flashpoint meets Vampire Bloodlines will come true – for me to be explored within the next 20 years, I am sure. And I will make myself King of Aquilonia. Crom!
Hope dies last.
I’ve noticed lately that I trend toward games where exploration is a key element: GTAs, Oblivion, Fallout 1 & 2, Endless Ocean, etc. If I could have an open-world exploration-fest modeled after Oblivion but without a map, I would be in love. The idea of using the environment to your advantage to get around (like getting to higher elevations to see points of interest) is incredibly interesting to me.
And I want a more realistic, true Scuba-simulator. Endless Ocean, but way with way more depth (pardon the terrible pun).
Oblivion, while criticized for its lackluster RPG-elements among other things, at least was said to be strong in one thing: Exploration and immersiveness
Yahtzee slaps it by saying it’s one of the least immersive RPGs he ever played. Ouch :D
Are wide open worlds necessary for the sense of exploration in a game? I’ve always felt that its the little details that do it for me. Half Life 2, for instance, is so full and convincing, just exploring its linear events is so enjoyable. Same with Max Payne 2 and Tomb Raider Legends.
Also, I would buy a game which is just exploration (if done well). Just walking around planting flags and making maps, thats all I need so long as the art direction and level design is superb.
@Bacon
Agreed. As Yahtzee says in his review, Oblivion’s world may be huge, but much of it is uninteresting. I love the little details in HL2, like the newspaper clippings showing the 7-Hour War (such details provide narrative background so the game can avoid forced recaps and history lectures from NPCs…)
The detail is what counts. But wide open worlds provide excellent photo op moments and that “Lewis and Clark” sense of charting vast, unexplored territory.
WoW has all sorts of little details that make the gameworld fun to explore. Ever notice how most MMORPGs feature dull expanses of rendered forests with little to explore in between?
That we don’t yet do this is in gaming is, I suggest, less about the lack of maturity of gaming, more about the lack of maturity of gamers.
You’re going to have to qualify that, because on the face of it it’s utterly flawed. You’re saying that gamers are not mature enough (in attitude?) for games to be made to appeal to them. This isn’t how it works. When a game gets made that appeals to a more mature audience, a small niche of more mature gamers will be brought into the fold. If this sort of game is successful and accepted, more games will follow directed at this audience. One way of looking at it is that there is already a group of more mature (in attitude) gamers out there, they just aren’t being catered for yet.
Aimless wandering is rarely an adequate substitute for a well-told story.
This clearly shows how close-minded you are that you think a game’s strongest possible point is its narrative. There are so many other elements made possible in games that aren’t possible in literature or film (social interaction on about a gazillion levels, open-world exploration, open-structure sandbox play, personal achievement via emergence and/or progression, personal and team strategy, player customisation, novel replayability, the list goes on…). Just because these aren’t what you classify as interesting, it certainly doesn’t make narrative the most valuable element in a game.
The most popular quotation in reference to games is Sid Meier’s “A [good] game is a series of interesting choices.” I would say that “aimless wandering” fails to be interesting if the player has no goal, just as a “well-told story” on its own fails to present the player with any choices. While either might make an entertaining experience to those that way inclined, neither on their own makes a good ‘game’.
Star f-ing Control 2.
Not on PC, but look into Afrika on the PS3. Looks stunning.
This is weird to admit, but I was really affected by the grand, beautiful waste of space in Just Cause. The ultra-mediocre action wasn’t worthy of the environment it took place in; it was truly a game where wandering became the only reason I’d play it. After finishing the storyline, I spent a lot of time flying around and noting small points of interest, impressed by the periodic architectural curiosities thrown around (most of which you’d never see unless wandering) and kind of hoping for some magical AI surprise to appear. You have lots of ‘random’ interactions between gangsters and police on the road offering tantalizing echoes of far-off gunfire, but it’s never worth checking out, no matter how unscripted. I’ve rarely seen as potential-filled a game world in an action game, honestly. I was really shocked at how mod-proof they made it; some added content would definitely have brought me back for more play. At one point I realized that that island world would take a REALLY long time navigate around if you never had access to vehicles and had fun stuff to keep you trekking from one spot to the next– the game affords some really beautiful clifftop vistas just asking for some wandering warrior to stop and gaze at before making it to the next town. Yet another “let’s hope the sequel offers more” case… In the meantime, where’s the modding genius who can hack that thing?
Incredible, incredible article. Of course Oblivion had its major valleys, but it was one of the best games to receive a large fan base of all time.
I am SO glad somebody mentioned Shadow of the Colossus. That has the most beautiful art and game world that I have seen to date.
Borderlands will be a must for you if you love open worlds.
There’s a game called Kyntt that focus on exploration and collection. There’s a few platformer type enemies and jumps, but very very few. I’ve heard it described as an ambient game, which exploration generally would be, and it’s really great. Secret passages are A1. Don’t get the sequel though.
Just Cause gave a beautiful and open world (about fifty times more interesting than the actual plot), but I’m not sure it qualifies as true exploration when you’re really just looking for a high place to drive a jeep off at sunset. Freelancer also left me exploro-cold. The game wasn’t dynamic enough in its freeform periods. The locations and activities were ultimately very similar. Driving a massive cargo of diamonds to a backwater planet didn’t change the price of diamonds there a jot.
Anyone remember Privateer 2: The Darkening? That game was essentially identical to freelancer. Except with Clive Owen instead of John Rhys-Davies.
I love Just Cause.
Driving a car off a bridge, jumping out, and then harpooning another car below so you can paraglide behind it will never get old.
I had high hopes for Oblivion (on 360, sorry) and got about 80 hours into the game. Then I ran into a bug that blocked me from finishing the Fighter’s Guild storyline. It reminded me of a similar bug in Morrowind, which ALSO kept me from finishing the Fighter’s Guild storyline (I think it was Chrysamere?). So 80 hours into Oblivion and 4 years after Morrowind, Bethesda still hasn’t learned their lessons.
Oh sure, I can download a patch, but I don’t pay good money to find the bugs in games for free, besides the fact that I’m well past the point in which I can use the patch from XBox Live. And scaled leveling? Are you kidding me? Why do these companies insist on punishing their customers? Good grief. Game save deleted, eBay here I come.
“Would anyone pay for a game that was created in the name of aimless wandering tourism?”
Oh yes they would – and pay for it too! People already travel further and seeking weirder adventures IRL. Online ones would be an acceptable and cheaper alternative. Online socialising also increases.
Definately a viable business opportunity
I believe there is a market for completely exploration-based games where the only goal is to satisfy your own curiosity. The intriguing element of exploration is the idea that you might find something no one else has ever seen before. Of course it’s hard to truly experience that feeling because deep down all gamers know that someone designed this game and someone already knows about anything significant you might find.