Classic RPG Design and the Art of Exploration
And now, I want to explore.

Writer Tyson McCann has an article at GameBanshee about design virtues of older computer RPGs, entitled What an Old RPG Can Teach Today's Designers. In it, he talks about how much fun he is having playing an old RPG (specifically, Might & Magic: World of Xeen) in DOSBox, and it's not for nostalgia's sake. He's enjoying the game fully, and finding a bunch of game design points that made these games the classics that they are - design elements that have been forgotten and neglected by modern RPG designers. As he went through the list, I felt I should staple this list to my forehead:

• Reward Players For Exploration
• Big Rewards for accomplishments
• Average fights were pretty easy. Big fights were fierce.
• No scaling of encounter difficulty to keep things exactly at your level.
• Specific to Might & Magic - but cut monster respawns to encourage further exploration.
• Make the game unique and quirky, so it stands out.
• Simplification of micromanagement as you progress

One point he repeats is how several of these elements encourage exploration of the game world. There are skills in the game (and in some other games, too, like Wizardry 7) that are there for no other reason than to allow exploration, like mountaineering and swimming. There are plenty of rewards for exploration. The lack of respawns encourage further exploration. The variability of encounter difficulty makes exploration more exciting. Scorpia has written about this before, as have many others.

This has made me ponder. Which helps me concentrate on something other than the pain of a staple in my forehead.

Exploration is a big deal - perhaps not a requirement of the genre but certainly a hallmark of the best games in its short history. But too often in modern RPGs it is extremely limited, or ... unsatisfying. What was the difference?

Worlds were somewhat easier to make back then, due to the predominantly tile-based approach to world construction. As a developer, the tiles - while boring and repetitive - really constrained the action so we didn't have to worry about physics bugs, getting stuck in the geometry, pathfinding problems (well, not as much), and so forth. The difficulty of getting all these things to work together in a freeform world is daunting - whether in 2D or 3D. 3D worlds are just exponentially more challenging.

A similar issue with exploration comes with the difficulty of creating content for modern RPGs. When a single dungeon takes so much time and effort to construct (as opposed to the tile-based days, where a designer could whip up a 10 x 10 grid with a handful of interesting encounters in a few hours), do you really want to spend so many man-months of effort and expense on optional content that only a handful of gamers will ever see? Theoretically, the old 2D RPG game designers could have built their worlds pixel by pixel. Come to think about it, I think Bioware actually did just that, with Baldur's Gate series. But it wasn't just a limitation of technology, I feel, that stopped the hand of most RPG designers from attempting this. It was also judicious application of available resources.

Both of these issues, in my opinion, could be resolved by adopting the idea of less granular building blocks for the 3D world. Yes, this means more repetitive pieces of content, arranged with tighter constraints, in a 3D world. However, the Elder Scrolls series, the Neverwinter Nights series, and I'm sure many other modern CRPGs - have had their own approaches to this very idea. But I think a lot more could be done here.

Another issue that comes up with modern game design is the worry about "game balance." If we give the player so many rewards for exploring the game, won't it make the end-game too easy? Won't it be harder to test and balance if some players finish the game at level 15 with only the standard magical gear, while other players finish the game at level 25 with assorted uber-weapons picked up through 20 hours of poking about the world?

McCann's answer would appear to be "so what?" I kinda like that answer. With all the talk about difficulty levels, and magical auto-scaling difficulty levels, and... well, wouldn't this - at least in part - put the difficulty level in the hands of the player where it belongs, and let him (or her) handle it organically? Boss monsters got you down? Try a little extra adventuring first!

And finally, there's the concern about players getting lost and frustrated in the face of too much open-ended gameplay. I have quite a few unfinished RPGs from that era that I lost interest in because I lost track of what I was doing, where I was going, or even what my next objective should be. But I don't think that is a problem with exploration-friendly worlds, exactly. Oblivion showed - perhaps too well - how an environment could be left open to exploration without letting the player get too lost or confused about his next step.

I think these are all legitimate concerns which face modern designers. And they go a long way to explain why so many games these days - RPGs and otherwise - are extremely linear in their construction. But I think they are not insurmountable challenges. I think there's plenty of room for inventive approaches to these problems that might help game developers combine modern design sensibilities with some of the classic - and successful - gameplay elements of classic CRPGs.

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:36 PM (Permalink)