Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Permanance of the Open World!

The face of an open world game is a stony thing. Immutable and harsh. To look upon it is to look upon a landscape, and to see that landscape change would be unimaginable. Landscapes do not change dramatically over the course of a month or a year, the span at which we interact with these environs in our games, and in holding to that principle the landscapes of open world games are unique in their permanence, in their perceived liveliness which is truly no more than tableau. Rare is the open world game that allows you to meaningfully reshape the world around you. It’s something I’ve mentioned that I’ve written about before, something that Fallout: New Vegas made me think of once again.

There’s a reason these games are fairly immutable, a reason that the occasional manners in which they develop is highly structured, like the turf wars of San Andreas or the smoking crater you can turn Megaton into, should you desire it. These are big projects, tough projects to effectively generate in the first place. Making them something players can impact? A nightmarish, sysiphysian task. You can spawn new items in certain areas at certain points in the game, but if you’ve allowed other dynamic changes to occur you have to account for those. And if you allow trends to develop throughout the game, trends that emerge from the manner in which players play indirectly and dynamically, then the world itself can change in all sorts of weird, unexpected ways. What if a player generates enough super mutants in the world by opening a vault that merchant caravans can no longer travel? What if you hunt raiders to extinction and the same problem emerge from that root? What if those traders would grow weak or strong based on your presence, rather than scripted funding issues? What if you could effectively force patrols out of a given quadrant of the map, effectively rendering a territory uncontested, allowing one side to actually take ownership of an area? Would the game wig out, breaking quests and the like? Would the challenge vanish, or would it be replaced with a real sense of accomplishment?

New Vegas doesn’t really endeavor to answer these questions. As I mentioned last week, it loves its ambiguity. And it’s hard to tell, thanks partly to Obsidian’s masterful design and party to their ham-handed QA process, just what is really bug and what is really feature. It’s never easy to tell if something is intended of if it’s simply occurring because of things I’d done that Obsidian didn’t expect. I can’t tell if I talked Rose of Sharon Cassidy out of killing her assailants, for example, or if it just happened because of how buggy the game is.

This isn’t a huge problem for me. I enjoy games as developed experiences, collaborative efforts that occur after the developer has stepped away. It’s where games shine as a medium, where they can tell significant stories only possible in their medium, and games designed around this loose framework, around the expectation that things can and will go wrong, are usually the best games. But it does raise a lot of questions about design, about intent, and about how acceptable bugs are.

Bugs can be crippling, especially in a game with open world elements. Take, for instance, the lamentable Alone in the Dark follow-up from last year which demanded that players drive around an “open world” Central Park annihilating roots until they could enter a forbidden area. Bugs crippled the experience, forcing errors in the scripting language and leading to repeated, unexpected and unexplained fail states. The key to navigating areas was to figure out exactly how developers had intended it, how they’d tested it, and following that path. In a game with less of an open world vibe, less encouragement to improvise, it would’ve been fine. But in Alone in the Dark it was infuriating. It made a game that could’ve been incredible and dynamic miserable and unplayable. It was, in a way, unforgivable.

But a lack of bugs can, in a way, be just as bad. Red Faction Guerilla, for example, is an amazingly well crafted game, and an amazing game to play. But everything in it works exactly as intended, at least most of the time. This is going to sound silly, but hear me out.

Red Faction Guerilla operates on such a steady series of behaviors and respawns that the world’s growth is completely predictable. Not in a “I did this, so this happened,” way, but in a “I completed this scripted event to trigger this script” way. In a game so script heavy a little bit of mess would’ve been welcome. Instead players were left with a deeply predictable, incredibly fun and well crafted, world which didn’t have much to offer after the main question was completed. In Fallout I spend time wandering around without quests, simply seeing how I can change behaviors in the world. I’m still hoping to find a way to clear out that Cazador nest down by the Bitter Springs quay.

It’s a balance that people have been working to strike since the first Elder Scrolls game, since Arcanum introduced the term “open world’ into our diction as gamers. And it’s a balance which never seems to be discussed – the balance of unpredictable, perhaps unintentional elements against transparently generated and meticulously planned elements. It’s hard to really say that one camp has it right or wrong. To uphold Fallout: New Vegas as a paragon of practice would highlight just how foolish championing the side of bugs that can have dramatic impacts on game play can be. Just look at all those 360 players who can’t finish the game, all those people (myself included) who have lost ED-E to bugs. It’s kind of sad, but also wonderful if you’re willing to let go of expectations. But it’s not perfect, and it’s not for everyone. You shouldn’t have to worry about companions catching fire accidentally or being destroyed by a random series of events that developers didn’t expect. You shouldn’t have to wonder if your companion will figure out how to work that sweet Ranger Sequoia pistol you gave her, or calculate which item Veronica will choose to hit things with. You should be able to count on certain rules of the game to operate reliably, most of the time.

And that’s the catch. The sloppiness that permits this sort of invisible reforming of landscape, the sloppiness that let me hunt Legionaries on the banks of the Colorado until they no longer stood and entombed my still active robot companion in the depths of some shithole vault, cuts both ways. Because I’m kind of pissed that I don’t know what ED-E’s deal is. I’ve even used console commands to try and fix it from the back end, but to no avail. This is what the freedom of bugginess means, in a way.

But to be without it, in an immutable open world that functions, more or less, exactly as intended is to be in GTA IV’s unchanging urban hellscape. No game ever made me feel less like I was in a living world than GTA IV, where literally nothing is permanent, spare the death of the one character you might actually like. This is the alternative to Obsidian’s sloppy, ambitious design: over-funded, under-ambitious attempts at pandering to the biggest base possible. To me that’s far worse than Fallout: New Vegas’ bugs. Bugs can be patched out, ambitions grounded over time through the effort of hard working coders who legitimately want to make their game great. The sort of dross offered up by GTA IV, cowardly cash-ins on open world principles, are harder to fix, maybe even impossible.

The key is walking a fine middle ground, between invisible events governing a game world and transparent disclosure of just why things are actually occurring. And the best example of that isn’t even in an open world game – it’s in Left 4 Dead, with its incredible director. The director lets us know just enough about what it’s doing, and why, to let us anticipate events reasonably, but it never fully discloses just what’s going on and never tries to explain itself. Instead it just iterates us, gives us enough information to try to predict it and then subverts that data at a time and place of its choosing. It’s simple in its methods, elegant in its execution, and inscrutable without being infuriating.

But to see something like the Director applied to an open world game is all but unthinkable. As ambitious as Obsidian’s buggy efforts were, such an effort would have to take place on a scale so far above their own its hard to imagine. Indeed, it’s hard to even think of an AI as meticulous and monitoring-crazy as L4D’s being applied on such a large scale with even a moderation of success, given the overwhelming amount of resources and tech required to make such an effort work. So for now, celebrate the flawed open world games, the greats that don’t do it all right but do enough that we can enjoy them as they show us things we never expected to see in a video game. Even if they are, at times, a little bit too predictable