Immersion and Linear Progression

by kapowaz, Thursday, July 25, 2013, 02:59 (4142 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I keep trying to summarise a non-dismissive response to what you've outlined, but in taking it apart piece by piece I keep coming back to the same basic problem I have with what you appear to want (and what you find so unappealing in some games): that linear progression is an important part of an immersive game world, and that accomplishment and reward are vital ingredients to support that.

Fundamentally, any game set in an immersive universe like Destiny with no save system would fall down because it would be impossible to maintain a linear progression through the game world, and without that the game's immersion would crumble and be exposed for what it truly is: a simple, house of cards. This is a problem World of Warcraft suffered from pre-Wrath of the Lich King expansion (although there was still a linear narrative throughout; we'll come back to that) — your actions as a player had no visible lasting effects. Sure, you slayed the dragon or freed the prisoners or killed 100 kobolds or whatever, but a few minutes later the dragon would respawn, the prisoners would be back in their cage and, whaddya know, there are still kobolds roaming free. The effect was one that broke the sense of immersion in an otherwise captivating, world, and revealed the simplified gameplay for what it was.

In spite of this, they were still able to keep a linear narrative going because throughout this whole process your character was levelling up and exploring new parts of the world which your level afforded you access to. Without such a level system it would be impossible to prevent players ‘skipping ahead’ in terms of the linear narrative; you explicitly suggest that players might exchange information with each other, which would lead to exactly this kind of behaviour, completely derailing the linear narrative in the process (as an aside, any game design system which relies upon players sharing information outside of the game is inherently broken).

I'm not saying that a game with an epic universe that you are free to explore would be unenjoyable without a linear narrative, but it certainly reduces the scope for enjoyable activities. In every game, the player has a motive, a purpose to their actions. In a strategy game that objective might be to defeat the enemy; in a (non-multiplayer) FPS game it might be to play the role of hero and save humanity (or suchlike), but when you break it down the game will always be comprised of other smaller games, and these games all need to be fun (up until you get to the lowest level, anyway).

A game of chess is fun because whilst you're trying to beat the other guy, you're also thinking about strategic gambits comprised of a number of moves, as well as individual moves within that gambit based on your opponent's moves, until you get down to the meat of it and you have the base mechanics of how pieces can behave and the rules of the game they inhabit. The same is true in a game like Halo: you are experiencing the wider story arc of the Master Chief and his fight for Humanity's survival, but then below that there is both the war against the Covenant and the story of the Forerunner-Flood war, both of which have narratives which unfold through the story, impacting on gameplay in terms of the kind of environment you visit, the enemies you face and the weapons you get to use. On a lower level, the gameplay of an individual encounter might be comprised of deciding how you're going to defeat a pack of Brutes, or how you're going to destroy a couple of Wraith tanks on the horizon, and then even lower than that you have the basic mechanics of gunplay, the rules of the game as it were.

What I question is just whether the game you describe provides enough layers of these games to make for an interesting and enjoyable experience. With a Bungie game I think we can take it as a given that they're going to get the gunplay right, and presumably the encounters that you experience too. What happens in the game layers above this is something that hasn't really been explained in detail yet, but you can be sure it exists. But what would these layers be in the saveless game world? There can't be a linear narrative (as we discussed), so just what is there to motivate the player and give them purpose?

Ultimately what I think you described isn't something that would be an enjoyable experience for a lot of players. It's easy to be dismissive of big publishers because they play it safe with the games they choose to finance, but being risk-averse doesn't just mean playing it safe, it also means steering clear of projects which are likely to be commercial flops. This gives room for indie developers to experiment, sure, but they're never going to do it on the grand scale that Bungie are attempting, and they may find once they've build the game they imagined it's just not that fun, but without scope to fix the fundamental problems.