Free-roaming games and reality

[edepot]

One of the trends happening in recent games is the ability to roam about freely in a fixed world, that is quite large in comparison to old school games. Of course, we are talking "fixed" world because currently most games are not advanced enough to be able to let gamers create their own world and upload to other gamers when needed, or placed on the server for other players. When that happens, we will have advanced to the next generation free-roaming games. But until that time has come, lets concentrate on fixed world free-roaming games.

In most free-roaming games, the player usually has a task list that needs to be completed to obtain a goal. These tasks can vary to collecting things, speaking to certain people, or visiting certain areas. It may also involve triggering an action script in certain order, and the result would be arriving at the goal. The goal can of course reveal other scripts or other areas or other items available to the player. One of the problems with these are that games get very boring after a while, after you have seen most of the possibilities offered by this task list oriented free-roaming game. Many games that do not provide free-roaming are actually highly scripted scenarios with lots of triggers and goals that are designed to make the game exciting and challenging. If you provide a very large area like in free-roaming games, it becomes very difficult to have control over all the variables than say a game where you can only walk down from corridor A to corridor B, and have monsters appear in certain areas to get your attention.

A free-roaming game can approach the excitment factor of tightly controlled areas (those without a lot of free-roaming territory), but would require many more resources and manpower with good designers of areas that can create good scenarios generically. You can think of it like a regular game with 10 levels, but then expand it into 100 levels and have all the levels joined into a big area for the gamer to roam through. You can see that it would cost way more to make a game of this caliber. However, one way to lessen this resource and design cost is to try to automate things as much as possible. Some games have special code created solely to generate a condition on a certain level related to an action of a certain character. If these codes can be generalized, it becomes easier for the level designer to create these scenarios themselves such that it does not require a lot of extra work. The secret to having a good free-roaming world that matches the excitement of regular first person shooters is how good the tools are available to the level designers.

But lets go into another area that is related to free-roaming worlds: that is realism, the topic of this post. If you take into consideration that if you are in a game world that you can roam about freely, there comes a problem where you may have an urgent task, but you decide not to do it and end up wandering about do something unrelated to the task. The task gets put into a waiting mode until you come back to it. This happens a lot in games like Oblivion, Fallout 3 and games of this nature. Because of this, these games provide a quest list and things you have done in case you forget and want to come back to it. Of course, this distracts from the reality when compared to regular action games that have areas that are highly controlled, with you unable to leave the boundary of a single "quest" per level. But lets say you WANT to merge free-roaming with its multiple quests and regular action games... How would you do it so that it has the best of both worlds? Excitement, and freedom to roam. If you have the resources, you can design the whole world such that it is one huge quest no matter which way you roam, but this is unrealistic because of limited time and budget. Another way is to have carrot and sticks approach to keep the user stay within certain parameters of a quest.

Lets say a person is supposed to go into battle and help out some comrades in a battle to take over a building or something. The people are waiting in front of the building and waiting for the user. This is usually what happens in free-roaming games. The next sequence of events are not triggered until the user is within the area in front of the building. In the mean time, the user can roam to a different part of the world, and those other soldiers will stay there waiting, for days, even years, and this is not realistic. In this scenario, to keep the realism real, you can actually have the battle time triggered so that the user can choose to go into battle, or skip the battle all together, but the battle will happen whether the user wants to enter into it or not. The carrot for entering the battle is that the user may get promoted, get better weapons, know certain things to continue different quests. The stick would be missing out those things, but you can actually have special punishments like the commander sends soldiers after you for leaving the battleline without permission, and you end up getting arrested and the story continues in these different scenarios. Of course, you can reuse these punishment scenarios and provide them to the level designer, so it doesn't have to be specially coded for EACH area of the free-roaming world.

One area of concern is that what if the user simply ignores all the quests that are timed (or simply was not there at the right time for them to happen), and then end up missing the majority of the "meaty" areas of the game? This gamer would come away thinking the game was stupid or boring. And this is how the carrot and sticks approach can keep the gamer involved. If there is something that is going to happen in the game that the gamer doesn't participate in (lets say the same example of the battle in front of the building), don't make it trigger a death scenario (you missed the battle, the enemy wins, game over) but trigger a punishment scenario where that building ends up being taken over by the enemy. The gamer would not be able to go past that area unless the battle HAPPENS AGAIN. To get the battle to happen again, the gamer would have to have to have task list to trigger a mobilization of another group of soldiers and the battle will happen again at a later time. Again the gamer can miss out and redo the tasks, but at least this way, the gamer's actions trigger the results and the scenario is realistic. If the gamer misses out on a lot of battles, then whole areas of the map are not available and the gamer has less and less areas to travel to until it gets to the point where the player MUST enter at least the battle to continue. In other words, quests are timed, but they are redoable in a different time period. You can script the game so that the gamer must complete certain quests, but missing a few of them will require the gamer to activate them again, and there are rewards (carrots) for activating them. I think games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 or games of these nature will be more fun if this realism is added.