Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Closed Open Ends!

I’m prompted to press B to bring up my “tactical overlay.” My gun vanishes and is replaced with a series of calm triangles and hexes, geometry codifying the already highly symbolized language of the game world around me. As I pass my reticule over each triangle I get a little note on it. Some of them represent Cell Operatives, who are apparently very angry people who like shooting at me. Some of them represent piles of ammunition, some of them guns which, despite having a series of little bars next to them, remain mysteries to me more or less.

The most interesting part of this secondary visual language comes in the form of a set of golden hexagons with numbers on them. These hexagons offer suggestions to go to a certain place and use a certain tactic. Resupply, one of them tells me. Snipe, another invites. Stealth kill, number three recommends. Number four tells me “infiltrate,” which I guess means “walk here while invisible.” I can highlight any of these options, in case the level design doesn’t imply enough about what they want me to do, for future reference.

I examine each of them, considering the value of resupplying over there, instead of just using the piles of ammunition at my current position. I consider sniping in that building across the way, again instead of simply remaining in my current position. I stealth kill the person they suggest stealth killing and pick up his rifle and begin sniping from there, a position removed from the recommended course of sniping. I die, I reload, I try a new tactic, something bold and revolutionary: I ignore the suggestions the game throws my way.

The end result is something I’m used to: a brief, improvised firefight where the AI moves down a corridor at me and I beat them back, knocking out enough of them that I can move up the corridor and mop of the handful of AIs who realized that running away from me might be a good idea. When all is said and done I’ve moved from the beginning point of the level to the end point of the level successfully. I go back to investigate the various recommended routes, trying to discern some sort of rhyme or reason to their layout that would justify the advice the game had offered me when it asked me to traverse the level in a specific fashion, but I really can’t All I can see is a set of corridors which emerge into an arena which in turn becomes another set of corridors.

It’s an issue that has beset two of the ostensibly open world games I’ve been playing, and enjoying, of late: open-world isn’t what it used to be. Giving players a handful of options and asking them to move between two points rarely presents an open world so much as it presents a somewhat open ended question. No game better personifies this than Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which spends far less of its time expounding to be an open world.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is open ended, sure. But it admits that it’s a heavily structured game right in its introduction. It tells you about its city hubs and their function within the game. It rewards you for exploring and guides you, step by step, through the various means of accomplishing objectives available to you. It gives them all equal weight, letting you decide if you want to avoid enemies, confront them, hack your way through computer systems or knock them out and stack their bodies into a cozy log cabin, ninja style.

All of this gives you the impression that you’re in a world filled with possibilities. But as you move through levels you begin to see that there is less possibility at work in Deus Ex and more pathing. The design guides you towards certain solutions, subtly recommending that you take a certain route if you like a certain style of play. And regardless of what path you choose the ending is more or less the same. As I moved from place to place in the world of Deus Ex I was amused by how little the environment reflected my movements. I could kill an entire factory full of people, murder all of the bangers in D-Row, and no one in the city noticed that the DRBs were no longer with us. Purity First doesn’t seem at all perturbed by the loss of one of their cells. And the world itself remains a set of corridors guiding me from cutscene to cutscene.

But this is to be expected from Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The Deus Ex series has always been all about multiple choices guiding you to linear outcomes with minor tweaks to them depending on your in-game actions. The first Deus Ex did it so well it revolutionized shooters, made them all want to give players options that didn’t really mean much for years to come. And when that finally started to fade and the Call of Duties and Battlefield: Bad Companies started to rise to prominence, it was a bit bittersweet to see such a rewarding kind of gameplay fade, even if it was satisfying to see their claims of any kind of open-ended problem solving finally laid to rest.

Crysis 2 is a far greater offender, if only for the games it shares its proximity with. The first Crysis had an impressive open world system that was completely subverted by its level design. You could avoid enemy positions completely if you chose to wander off the beaten path, but the game guided you along roads and through structured environments, encouraging you to move through its set pieces instead of around them. It was brilliant, in a way: you could cut through enemies, playing the “game” portion of the game, or you could run around them completely using the map to guide yourself across open territory, pausing when you find a patrol, measuring their movements and deciding whether or not it’s worth your time to fight them.

And Far Cry 2 must be compared to Crysis 2. These games are really all the misbegotten children of the first Far Cry, and Crysis 2 directly represents the creative direction of the team which produced that game. Far Cry 2, on the other hand, represents perhaps the most ambitious and creative effort in crafting an open world environment for a first person shooter. It presents no barriers, its sense of consistency is fluid and encourages characters to move carefully, to plan their actions and scout gingerly. It has moments of unexpected, unscripted beauty and the story missions can often constitute the least interesting portion of the game. Even those story missions truly are open ended: there’s no limit on the tools available to you. Far Cry 2 focuses mostly on the items you bring with you. The environment provides you with little tricks that you can engage, but it never attempts to guide you to them for anything more than shits and giggles: you’ll spend more time following level design cues to find hidden items than you will to achieve objects in Far Cry 2.

But Crysis 2, a game that does everything short of calling itself an open world game, is slavishly linear. Each firefight plays out the same way: a passage through an arena of some sort into a corridor. Occasionally the arena is a corridor, as is the case in one of the earliest and one of my favorite moments in the game where your first earnest battle with the Ceph occurs. But you’re always moving through a map with a set destination, with a set of recommended tools that the designs want you to use.

You can ignore them, sure. But lifting up that machine gun, stealth killing those guards, or sniping from that elevated position will make the game easier. But it won’t make the end experience any different: you’ll almost always slip a little and find yourself fighting your way out of a situation you fell into by accident. You’ll move to the end of the level under a hail of bullets, whether you wanted to or not.

And there’s not actually anything wrong with this. It’s totally valid. Plenty of games make it their central modus operandi, and it remains impressively profitable and interesting to see. Rage, for example, is the end result of id making such games for over a decade. But Crysis 2 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution imply in their advertising and the discourse surrounding them that they are open world games, places where you have choices. But when push comes to shove these choices dissolve – players will always encounter the same examples time and time again. They’ll always ask you to reach the same destination, and the manner in which you can do will rely on a set group of tools the developers want you to play with. They won’t offer up a series of possibly endings to each individual scenario the way Far Cry 2 does, or present you with an option that essentially involves completely ignoring the mission for your own fun the way that the first Crysis did (in its early levels, before it completely jumped the rails).

What we’re left with is a culture where linearity with options imbedded in its design is becoming an alternative to open world play, which is bad. Not in cases like Deus Ex, where meticulous level and game design makes the puzzles and options available to players (boss fights aside) interchangeably useful and in most cases mutually exclusive. But in cases like Crysis 2, where players are given the impression that they have options which are then stripped from them through haphazard level or game design or made meaningless by the surroundings the player is imbedded there is actual harm being done.

Because open world games are valuable experiences. They represent the true potential of games as narrative devices: machines of self insertion where we can imbed ourselves in a story and make it our own, write our own story on the pages of the world before us. Games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution provide a similar canvas, a sort of paint by numbers which allows players to express themselves through available options and create a meaningful experience from those options by making the decisions you make important enough to change the way the game plays as it goes on. But games like Crysis 2, games with pretentions of being placed in real, breathing worlds, undermine the conversation surrounding these games. While it’s not sexy to market a game like Crysis 2 as a corridor shooter, that’s what it is. You can doll those corridors up to look like overpasses or subway terminals or shattered city streets, but they’ll remain corridors where you run and gun. And when you refuse to embrace these facts about your game you undermine the experience as a whole. And what’s worse, you draw attention away from other games with new ideas, open-world ideas, when you invite a discourse on your game which casts it as a game where options are important and the player is king. There’s nothing wrong with being a corridor shooter, nothing at all. But there’s something wrong with claiming to be a game about choice where the only decision players are asked to make is which weapon to use.