For years I’ve thought about how games about exploration or immersion in a place work.
This is one of my five most important pillars:
“Player attention is on the game world”
The most beautiful, luscious worlds are squandered by games with systems and mechanics that draw attention away from them.
Have you ever played a game with a beautiful world but found that during actual play, you didn’t pay much attention to it?
You navigate with a minimap, or by following a waypoint or trail. You find objectives in a quest log or on the map. When you arrive, the terrain is unimportant.
You get all your information about the situation from the UI: you can see the objective, the target is highlighted, the enemy has a level displayed and a title that describes what it can do.
Maybe you’re raiding and you have DPS meter+aggro meter mods, and a mod to show your 39 allies’ HP bars.
Contrast these with something like Breath of the Wild, a game I would argue is ABOUT being present in a world and surveying the environment around you.
You can turn off every HUD in that game and still operate just fine because the world gives you all the information very, very clearly.
The core exploration loop is basically:
- Climb high
- Look around
- Spot an unusual shape or color in the distance
- Decide that is your goal
- Jump down and start gliding towards that goal
It’s all about hiking high and line of sight. All information comes from the world.
A sense of place and immersion can be a fragile thing. It’s a softer type of experience than hard numbers, loot, combat, and progression, and if those systems exist and can be engaged with beginning to end without surveying the world, players will tend to do that, especially over time.
But they CAN co-exist just fine if engaging with those systems requires that you pay attention to the game world, too. Monster Hunter World did that really well. If you look at a screenshot it can be quite busy, and it’s full of complex systems and detailed mechanics.
But during hunts you had to look at the world. You had to track the monster. The levels were dense and vertical, and you had to find your way around. Monsters would very actively move around, and you might purposefully try to make two monsters run into each other and fight. You watched escape routes.
In comparison, Monster Hunter Wilds took huge strides towards letting you ignore the world and pay attention purely to UI and combat.
There is no longer a tracking step. You have perfect information about every monster and resource on your map. The path to every objective is drawn on the ground.
And, the biggest offender: your mount will automatically ride straight to your highlighted objective. They managed to eliminate simple navigation and traversal from their game.
If I were being harsh I might say that they added a “make traversal into a loading screen” button.
That wouldn’t be fair; the beautiful world still establishes a sense of place IE in cutscenes, or when you’re splashing in the rainy waves during combat. There is a lot of rich sensory detail.
The world has value still, but it could have had MUCH more, and the game would have been stronger for it.
Earlier I said that the most lovingly crafted, luscious game worlds can be squandered when placed in games that don’t highlight them and draw attention to them in their gameplay.
I think Monster Hunter Wilds is maybe the BIGGEST example I can think of this.
feel bad for the environment artists, who did masterful, incredible work and it got paired with a set of mechanics and systems game that didn’t work WITH that world to elevate both.
The game is still really good! But oh boy does it contain some real dissonance here.