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[filiph]

So what games do you think do a good job of capturing this risk/reward dynamic of wanting to explore a dangerous space?

All well-designed open world games do this, imho. Open world games with no really dangerous spaces are doomed to be boring after a while.

I remember that one of the first open world games I ever played — The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994) — did this well. (And remember, that's at a time when open world exploration was very limited because of the various technical reasons.) You could, for example, go to cemeteries and enter tombs, to lift some gold and equipment from the deceased. Most of the time the only opposition were some bats and rats.

But sometimes, you'd encounter the deceased himself.

And let me tell you, that was scary as f***, even in 640x400 and 256 colors. I remember the first time this happened to me, I was running away from the cemetery for some very long minutes before I dared to even look behind. I also remember talking about this experience with my friend who also played Arena at that time. These experiences are a major part of the fun I get from gaming.

On the most basic level, I think it's a combination of two things:

• The slot machine mechanic — it must be random, and it must have outliers in terms of both reward and risk. Put a small chance that the player either find something truly great, or stumbles upon something truly horrible.
• A good sense of danger — I believe these experiences must be crafted in the same way a horror scene would be. There must be some kind of precognition for things to be scary. That's why most horror books have some character who 'somehow' knows in advance that there's going to be trouble. That's why you hear the growling in Minecraft at night. The monsters could just as well be completely silent, and they'd be more dangerous if they were, but then the exploration would really feel like playing a slot machine and nothing more.

To answer your original question: all Elder Scrolls games, Fallout, Ultima, Planescape: Torment... I'd say even GTA and Saints Row series have this but they don't do so well at the second point (sense of danger) — because they focus on other kinds of player enjoyment than exploration.

[Alec S.]

• The slot machine mechanic — it must be random, and it must have outliers in terms of both reward and risk. Put a small chance that the player either find something truly great, or stumbles upon something truly horrible.

I disagree here.  I don't think it has to be random, it just have some element of being unknown.  In fact, most of the games that have elicited this feeling from me were very much hand-designed and not procedural.  Also, I think if often works well if there's a combination of known and unknown information.  Like, you know what reward you'll get if you go through this cave, but you don't know what danger you'll find inside the cave.[/list]

[Peace Soft]

My first thought was that roguelike/permadeth games are always gonna have an advantage here because if you die, the specific knowledge you gained of the world's layout doesn't apply anymore.

But you know what my favorite area to explore in any recent game was? Bloodborne's Forbidden Woods. It's sort of linear, like there's a beginning and an end with a boss fight and checkpoints in the sense of unlockable shortcuts near the end and the unavoidable bottleneck in the middle. But compared to any other level I've ever played, procgen or otherwise (and it is not procgen), it feels the most genuinely like getting lost in the woods. Here's what makes it work IMO:

-There are a lot of paths, and when the paths branch, there's rarely an obvious main one. You have to use your sense of direction and use landmarks for guidance, or you'll end up going in circles, but few of these paths lead to a dead end. You can get to the goal through any number of routes, so there's a lot of content you'll miss on any given attempt.

-There are ways to go off the marked path. If you hop off a short cliff or take a detour through an overgrown (but clearly not impassable) section of underbrush, you're likely to find a shortcut or a little bit of treasure or just a better understanding of how the whole level fits together.

-There are reasons to go off the marked path. One weed-strewn dry creekbed behind a creepy cabin leads to a crucially important optional area that in turn leads to one of the game's major sidequests. Exploring the mill leads you to a cool one-of-a-kind weapon and an encounter with a guy who politely asks for help while chowing down on a dead body. A wrong turn in the muddy river near the end leads you to something absolutely bizarre and shocking (even relative to all the other bizarre and shocking stuff in the game), presented entirely without comment, something you'll only understand much later and only if you scour the whole game world for clues. All of Bloodborne is really great about this btw.

[s0]

finally someone who shares my opinion that the forbidden woods are a freaking great level

anyway,

A wrong turn in the muddy river near the end leads you to something absolutely bizarre and shocking (even relative to all the other bizarre and shocking stuff in the game)

i finished bloodborne a lot of times and i'm not sure what you mean. do you mean the blue "aliens"?

[Peace Soft]

Yeah. I guess if you've found the back door to the clinic already you have some idea what they are, but I hadn't. What I meant about the whole game being "great about that" is that it throws bizarre stuff at you with no explanation and only later can you reconstruct what it might mean.

[s0]

uh tbh i just thought they were a nod to the mushroom people in dark souls when i first saw them. i didn't make the alien connection until later. also they look kinda goofy, so i can't say i was shocked lol.

i think the almost complete lack of exposition and very subtle dramatic "framing" for almost everything is what makes the souls games feel "exploratory". the games don't push interpretations and meanings on you, so it feels like you can really engage with the world and lore on your own terms.

[FK in the Coffee]

I think the distinguishing factor that separates exploration from sightseeing – at least for me – is the amount of work I have to put into discovering a new location or uncovering some kind of secret. Games like Bioshock Infinite offer pretty much no opportunities for exploration; they just spoonfeed you all of the points of interest, and it makes the whole thing feel more like an amusement park attraction than a real, living world.

Games like Fez and the Souls series really nail it, though. Their approaches are polar opposites (Fez takes away all of the barriers to exploration, while the Souls games make exploration risky but rewarding), but they still provide a genuine sense of discovery, and some kind of feeling of accomplishment as you uncover more of the lore.

[zombieonion]

• The slot machine mechanic — it must be random, and it must have outliers in terms of both reward and risk. Put a small chance that the player either find something truly great, or stumbles upon something truly horrible.

I disagree here.  I don't think it has to be random, it just have some element of being unknown.  In fact, most of the games that have elicited this feeling from me were very much hand-designed and not procedural.  Also, I think if often works well if there's a combination of known and unknown information.  Like, you know what reward you'll get if you go through this cave, but you don't know what danger you'll find inside the cave.[/list]

Have you played Stalker? I got similar vibes from Stalker and Souls games, regarding the exploration. Even so, Stalker is open-world, with interesting locations, and a world that seems to exist without the player having to watch. I remember being late to some mission, so my contacts went ahead without me and cleared out some raider camp or something.

[quantumpotato]

Games that give you inventory based heal+save - you have to figure out how to use these economically. FF1 had this but I don't think it saved a spot on the world map.

[JWK5]

As far as exploring the world and its relation to the story, I am back on a Dragon Quest 7 binge after trying to make a little more progress in Dragon Age: Inquisition and one thing I've notice is that while the towns people do not really say anything compelling I am overwhelmingly addicted to stalking them and talking to them anyways, where in games like Dragon Age Inquisition they had a lot of information to give and I wanted to avoid talking to anyone and everyone in that game.

I realized the main difference in the two types of RPG dialogue delivery used (in this case) is that in one (DQ7) I am more like a detective scouring the town looking for clues about what to do next and in the other (DA:I) basically the only reason I talk to towns people is for the possible side-quests they might trigger.

DA:I really shoots itself in the foot (like many other western RPGs do) by making use of compass beacons to always point out where to go next. There is no real reason to talk to anyone other than to get spoon fed exposition (or trip another side-quest) because the game pretty much does the detective work for you. Just follow the compass. It makes me dread talking to anyone because (A) I will quickly get overloaded with side-quests to the point where I forget why I am even doing them and (B) I really don't need to know all this information being thrown at me, it has nothing to do with me, it is just backstory exposition of characters that really will never play a role in the story beyond this point ever again.

DQ7's towns people keep it short and sweet. "Nope, I am not the guy you're for looking and you're on a mission so so let me throw you a morsel about what's going down here or maybe a playful joke and then send you quickly on your way." Talking to the towns people is fun because they play into the process of elimination mini in my hunt for clues.




On another note, I love how in early WRPGs and JRPGs they really pushed a sense of survival. Take FF1 and DQ1 for example (or just about any dungeon crawler, like Wizardry), in the early game you spend a lot of money on supplies to survive the dungeon and rather than just being a breezy "Press A" fest as in modern JRPG dungeons you really got tore up in there. You end up having to make several runs in and out of the dungeons buying and re-buying supplies and building up levels just to finally be able to weather the dungeon and make it to the boss. It felt a lot like Oregon Trail, where party members are dropping left and right as you try to inch your way through the twists and turns and make it to your destination.

I think once the "overkill" era set in, where instead of the characters being the nobodies who work their way up to being legendary somebodies the characters just start out wielding great power, the point of the random battles got lost. In early RPGs random battles were used to elicit survival, in modern RPGs they are a senseless nuisance. Anything you can mindlessly breeze through but are forced to wade through is really just there to stall you and pad out the game length.

I think that is why I love the Dragon Quest series so much, the games still stick to the idea of survival that they had in the beginning. The random battles still serve a purpose beyond length padding.