For years, gamers have laughed about video games that include a huge overarching plot of critical importance and then let players run around exploring rather than attending to the matter at hand. The realm is being attacked by demons from Oblivion and our hero spends days picking flowers. The Collectors are ravaging civilizations and the Normandy travels the universe scanning every last planet. A murder scene is growing cold, and the detective chases down a purse-snatcher on foot. Despite everything the game would have you believe, there is no urgency. As gamers, we’ve learned to accept this.
When a developer gives the player an entire world to explore, the player should be able to spend time exploring it. This leaves no room for plots involving any urgency. Many times in the past I’d thought to write about this phenomenon, but I never had anything truly interesting to say about it, and so I’d blown off the article. But last night on my commute home, I got to thinking – how would one solve this problem?
Water Chips and Servomotors
One of the best examples of an enforced time limit is the water chip quest in Fallout. You had a set number of days to return to valut 13 with a water chip, or else the vault’s population – everyone you’ve ever known – would all die. The game gave you plenty of time and plenty of warnings, but in the end if you took too long you stood a good chance of having to restart the game. This is a very old school approach, and Fallout was a fantastic game, but such an approach would never hold up in today’s video game culture.
The truth is that if there’s a single long-term goal that comprises such a large portion of the game, it’s difficult to predict how long it might take someone in an open world to accomplish that task. The game’s designers are effectively punishing the player for spending time exploring the world they’ve created.
This is similar to another problem that used to exist in old school games. In many games I’d played on my Commodore 64, I was able to save the game in a state where it was impossible to progress. Saving the game in a fail state should never be allowed. But what about a state in which success is incredibly unlikely? What if the player has only ten minutes to cross the northern wasteland, battling snarks and grumkins? It may be possible, but it’s prohibitively difficult. Any time your game includes time limits, these problems crop up. What if I was playing Fallout and saved the game with only 2 days remaining to return the water chip, but I was 5 days away from the vault?
Stages of Urgency
Any storyline worth its weight in bantha pudu has ebb and flow. There will be moments of intensity and there will be lulls. One solution is to allow for exploring during the lulls and enforce time limits during the more intense moments. This approach isn’t without flaws, but for example, let’s take a look at a theoretical open-world game – we’ll call it Neo Uber Tales. In Neo Uber Tales, there’s a huge open world and a player can explore it at his leisure. But partway through the game, the villainous Baron McMoustache captures the player’s uncle Kennist and ties him to some train tracks. Uncle Kennist is on the other side of the mountains, and the only way to get there in time is to travel through the Mines of Schmoria. The player has only an hour to get there before the train arrives, and as the game’s designers, we want to make sure that he doesn’t save the game because he could easily save it in a state where nothing but failure is possible. That’s an hour of gameplay during which no saving is possible, although we could allow a quicksave that would function much like an extended pause. The primary flaw to this method is that if the player dawdles in the Mines of Schmoria, he can potentially lose an hour of gameplay when his uncle is killed and we return him to the checkpoint at the beginning of the mines.
This approach only allows for a way to deal with shorter time limits. If we wanted to impart a sense of urgency in a longer term scenario, such as that with the water chip, we’d need a different approach. Barring time travel of the sort we saw in Majora’s Mask, I can think of only one way to deal with the problem: allow the failure. In Fallout, if too much time passed and you hadn’t retrieved the water chip, you’d see the people at Vault 13 dying and you’d receive a game over screen. But it needn’t be that way. I’m looking to Heavy Rain for inspiration here, since that game allowed the story to continue even when a main character died. Heavy Rain had no fail state, which is one reason I absolutely loved the game. In our Neo Uber Tales example, if you arrive at the railroad tracks and more than an hour has passed, you find Uncle Kennist splattered and have to deal with the repercussions.
The “hurry up and wait” issue has been an issue in many games over the past few years, and I’ll be interested to see how developers tackle the issue in the future.
