There is one thing that totally kills my immersion in a video game – it is the Monty Phythonesque realization that “it’s just a model”. In other words, if I see a piece of scenery – such as a house, or a door of some sort I should be able to go and investigate it. I hate entering a long corridor lined with doors on each side only to realize that the only one I can actually open is all the way on the other side. All the other ones are just textures on the wall and can’t even be interacted with. Or for example a village in which houses are used as walls, and obstacles rather than places you can visit and explore.
There are few games out there that do get this right. Morrowind and Oblivion and similar open ended RPG games usually get this particular feature right. In Morrowind for example there are no plot driven doors, or insurmountable waist height fences. If you see a door, you can unlock it. If you see a house, or a hut you can go inside to check whether anything valuable is inside. If there is a chest in the room, you can open it, take stuff out of it or put your stuff inside. If you spot a nice looking cup or a plate on the table somewhere you can pick it up and sell it in a pawn shop for few coins.
Of course Morrowind still contains many static scenery elements. Doors and containers are indestructible (but it’s ok since you can always pick their locks if you have enough skill) and most of furniture like tables, chairs, shelves and etc cannot be moved or damaged in any way. But the fact that each door leads somewhere, that each chest, wicker basket or a box you see is an actual functional container (even if empty) and that each room contains dozen items you can move or loot (even if worthless) more than makes up for this. It gives you such an astonishing degree of freedom that you forget that most NPC’s are painfully static in that game – spending their whole lives in the same room of the same building. I hear that Oblivion changes this by having roaming NPC’s who have regular schedules instead.
Someone will say it is hard and expensive to design game worlds the way Morrowind and Oblivion do it. I won’t argue with that. It is definitely harder to design few dozen of empty rooms that contain nothing specific to the plot of the game than to draw few dozen door textures and attach “this door is locked from the inside” trigger to them. But there is always a cheep alternative and it is called “good level design”.
Fable had this sort of level design too, despite the fact that the game world was smaller than in Morrowind by several orders of magnitude and much more linear. And yet you still could visit most the buildings you saw, loot them, kill their inhabitants and etc.
I wanted to propose something. This might be very radical approach but bear with me. How about – and I’m talking purely theoretically here – we do the following. Whenever you are tempted to add a dummy door that is permanently closed to a wall or a building – don’t. It is really that simple. Don’t line each corridor with row upon row of “decoration only” doors that cannot be open. Use actual wall decorations instead. If you are building a village or a town just design few dummy houses with 1-2 rooms each and throw in some worthless junk in there that the player could loot and perhaps even sell for 1 gold piece/credit each. It is really not that hard – you can have one or two room templates, and then just populate them with appropriate objects and textures based on the in-game location and local decor. If you do not want to put a visitable room somewhere simply do not expose any tempting door or entry way to him. If you will, someone playing the game will surely try to check it out and be disappointed. So no permanently cosed doors, no inaccessible stairwells that cannot be ascended, no fake archways, no man sized windows with impenetrable glass, no insurmountable waist high fences and etc.
And of course if you have to have a closed door, always offer the player more than one way to open it. They could either take an easy quest to get the key, or train for 6 levels to get their lock picking skill up to even attempt the door. Or allow them to bash it in, and let him deal with the fact it will alert the local guards.
It is really such a simple design rule and yet so many games get it completely wrong building impressive environments that cannot be interacted with in any way. Every door that cannot be open, and ever fence that cannot be jumped over abruptly jolts the player out of the game, and ruins the feeling of immersion.
[tags]games, gaming, video games, plot driven door, insurmountable waist height fence, it’s just a model[/tags]
I can only agree. By the way, I’d like to confirm that characters in Oblivion do seem to “have a life” of their own. That is they act a lot more like normal people than in Morrowind, and that includes going to the local pub to have a drink, going to buy stuff from random merchant houses and of course going home for dinner at night. You can follow them and interact with them a lot more than in Morrowind. However, I find the social interaction gadget horribly hard to use (just like the lock picking one), which is frustrating too and break the immersion just as much as a fake door.
I totally agree with you on having doors that cannot be opened. It sucks when they do not open new portals or opportunities for the player to explore new grounds. Like I feel that the designer fell short of ideas that could have made the game more exciting.
Started playing Half Life 2 recently (yeah, I’m a little behind on games… so what? :P) and there’s a fair few wall-doors around. Then again there’s also a lot of extra explorable areas with ammo and health to pick up if you need it.
It does suffer a bit from “the way you should go is the only way you can go” syndrome… there normally appears to be a couple of paths you can go down, but all of them except the one that leads to progressing forward turn out to be dead ends.
[quote post=”2475″]However, I find the social interaction gadget horribly hard to use (just like the lock picking one), which is frustrating too and break the immersion just as much as a fake door. [/quote]
Well, the conversation dialog in Morrowind was a bit awkward too but once you got used to it it was serviceable.
What did they do to lock picking in Oblivion? IMHO the Morrowind mechanic of “use lock pick on the door/container” and “use probe on a trapped door/container” made sense and was easy and intuitive. Did they make it more like the way lock picking worked in Thief (ie. a mini-game of sorts)? :(
[quote post=”2475″]It does suffer a bit from “the way you should go is the only way you can go” syndrome… there normally appears to be a couple of paths you can go down, but all of them except the one that leads to progressing forward turn out to be dead ends.[/quote]
I’d say that most FPS games suffer from this particular flaw. Especially ones so heavily scripted as HL2. There are scripted events in Morrowind but it is more of a sandbox type game. You make your own adventure by taking various quests. So you are free to roam around and the overall story unravels slowly (or not at all if you choose to ignore it).
HL2 on the other hand tries to give the player more of a movie like experience. Throughout the game there is a sense of urgency and purpose. Your goal is usually to go to a very specific place and do a very specific thing. That said, HL2 does a great job of creating rather spacious environments which do create an illusion of freedom.
Oh, and wait till Episode 2. The final battle essentially happens in a completely open area and your mission is to drive around in a car and take out striders as they approach from various points of the map. It is a totally free form battle, and there is no set path you are supposed to take. You can either drive ahead and try to defend the outposts, or camp out near an ammo dispenser somewhere and wait for the enemy to come to you. :)
I agree with you for the dialogs. But Oblivion ones are not better (and some of them are even very bugged). I was actually speaking about how to make people like you (bribe and flatter or taunt). It is now a mini game where you have to click in quadrants of a wheel while observing the reaction of the “target” (the whole thin in real and limited time, unfortunately). It is hard and frustrating. The lock picking one is in the same vein. It is a mini game like in Thief, except that it is much harder and the lock picks are breaking all the time. And it is not like in Morrowind where they have a certain number of uses: they just break like glass and there are not that many of them around, actually. So actually you think twice before lock picking anything, because most of the time it is not worth the trouble (and your precious and rare lock picks).
I was also annoyed by the fact that (unlike in Morrowind) many items have no value at all. Many it is a feature of the game, but I found that frustrating too. All in all, Oblivion is gorgeous and impressive and super realistic, but the immersion is killed from time to time by these defaults. Which means that I play it a lot less than Morrowind. Even these days.
Oh man… That actually kinda sucks. Let me guess – the Security skill (or whatever is the equivalent in Oblivion) measures how often you break lock picks rather than how good you actually are at opening locks, no? So to be able to semi-reliably use the picks you pretty much have to find a master trainer and raise your skill as high as you possibly can.
Really limits your options when you are playing a Thief and your primary means of earning money early in the game is actually stealing shit. :(
My current Morrowind character totally sucks in combat but I have really high Sneak and Security skills so I essentially walk into people’s houses and rob them blind when they turn around. :P
You said it, man, that’s exactly the problem. I love playing dodgy characters and that’s a lot more difficult with Oblivion. The game favors brute fighters and buying skills indeed. All in all, I find Oblivion generally harder to play.
This said, to be fair, the Security skill (yes, it is called the same) measures both how good you are and how often you break lock picks. The same with lock picks quality (it measures mainly how easily they break). I am not saying that it is completely unrealistic, but it is soooo frustrating that it soon becomes a serious annoyance.
Yep, even when I play as warrior or a wizard in Morrowind I usually loot houses that I visit if an opportunity is there. :P You just have to remember not to sell the stuff you stole, to the person you stole it from because they usually catch on.
Now that I started playing a Thief I started experimenting with pick-pocketing. It’s pretty useless though at lower skill levels. You have to have your Sneak well above 80 to even have remote chance of succeeding. And even at close to 90 you still fail 4 out of 5 times. :(
Arguably, the best source of income in initial stages of Morrowind (for any character) are the Dark Brotherhood assassins from the Tribunal expansion. That is if you can take them on. Their armor is insanely expensive and rather light. If you haul it all the way to the Mudcrab Merchant you get a clean 3k of gold for a full Dark Brotherhood armor suit.
I usually collect these armors, then drop everything sans my ring of recall and visit the crab for ~10k of clean profit. And yes, it is total exploit but if you want to gain few levels quickly to beef up your character just do this once or twice and then spend on the cash training your major and minor skills. :)
Above the level 20-30 they start ganging up on you so that is a good time to call them off and trigger the Tribunal quest.
Well, that’s a part I patched: I used the no-assassin patch to reduce the chance of the Dark Bortherhood attacking you more than once to 5 or 10%. It kind of unbreaks the game. They are way too easy to kill…
Also, a tip to pickpocket at lower level (around 45 to 55%): chameleon spell. It helps massively for pick pocketting (unlike invisibility). It’s not 100% fool proof by far, but it increases your changes enough to make it worth.
Ah, the Chamelion spell. I totally suck ass at magic right now, but I might as well sell couple of Assasin armors and train the shit out of whatever discipline requires that. ;)
Believe me, Chameleon is the only spell which is absolutely necessary for this game (though there are a couple of water spells like levitation, water breathing and water walking that are really useful too).
Oh, and I forgot to say that it is “illusion magic” (like invisibility).
By the way, completely off topic, but how do you manage to have these nice little avatars near your answer on this blog? I mean, not you, Luke (that’s obvious) but the others?
Oh, I’m simply supporting the Globally Unique Avatars (aka. Gravatars). To get one you have to visit gravatar.com, sign up for an account and upload a picture. It will become associated with your email address.
Whenever someone posts here, I have a plugin which polls gravatar.com for an avatar image with whatever they placed in the “email” field of the comment box. So if you have an account, your pic will show up.
Added bonus is that it will work on any site which supports them – and quite a few blogs out there do these days. In fact, I think the recent WordPress releases support them out of the box without a plugin. :)
This is “ubercool” (to paraphrase Cartman in South Park). Thanks for the tip.
You are right and wrong: (well since its an opinion/rant it cant really be wrong but since I agree with you on this… I have also seen the light to why we just cant have it our way)
I love having fully interactive environments and being able to go in any door in any house etc. I think the game that really pulls this off is oblivion and fable, but by doing this… you greatly expand the space needed in the game, and the game production time and everything else… it really detracts from the game. Look at fable… the graphics are not the greatest by any means… especially for an x-box game… they could have been better but I assume that since they had to use all that space and time for all those houses that don’t mean anything to me… I had to have a not so great looking game.
A game like oblivion is a huge game… its like what 3-4 gigs large? Larger? So yeah, while I love the idea of it… I would rather them just make a lot of the doors “Permi Locked” where it seems like your interacting with an actual room, but its just locked and you cannot get in.
What I really hate though.. is when you enter a room and it takes you to a static location.
Pirates of the Burning Sea does this:
You have to kill someone in this room, so you go in.. and its the same room as half the other rooms you enter. Its static. It feels cheap, and I hate having to load just entering a room, I think the room should be loaded with the rest of the current section of the building I am in.
I am in the process of writing a blog about how much I hate MMOs that do not allow you to take part in the economy… you should check out my blog by sunday it should be up.