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

Congratulations Little Brown Boy!

Yesterday you were just another little brown child in a little village in the middle of nowhere in some nameless, godless island in the South Pacific, but today you’re going to be king. After freeing all those prisoners from yesterday, most of whom were actually just tourists visiting your country for its gorgeous beaches and lax laws regarding the consumption of weed and opium, there’s going to be a need for a new infrastructure to govern your diverse island paradise.

Previously the Japanese remnants that still thought they were fighting World War II kept order, or rather terror, in your little village through a combination of violence and general shameful looks. But without their constant teasing and general douchiness you’ll all need to find a new way to maintain order.

Since the majority of the tourists are Americans they’ll just vote for themselves when asked who should be leader if you use a wide open ballot, and while none of them would be nearly as bad as the Japanese no island has ever really been put on the map by the leadership of drug addicts and people who use “extreme” while referring to activities that involve massive amounts of safety gear. That leaves native inhabitants of the island.

Most of the natives will have had their spirits broken long ago by the Japanese and the horrible ravages of your island paradise (so much banana diaharhea) that their reigns would be dismal, hopeless things. It’ll be up to you, little brown boy, to take all of their native energy and turn it into something positive, instead of sulking and shooting at things with antique firearms all day.

And so, in an almost completely uncontested election that Disney will later immortalize in a terrible movie, you will run for the office of President of the Island. You’ll be elected almost unanimously, largely because you saved all those white people earlier and they’ll do most of the talk and the voting during the election, and when all is said and done you’ll be in charge. Which will be great news for the island, because the very idea of a child leading an island will spark so much tourism that within a month your income will have multiplied tenfold.

Congratulations Little Brown Boy!

Congratulations Prisoners of War!

Being a prisoner of war sucks. You’re often abused, you rarely get to speak with people from home and when you even try through messages in bottles of various forms of decorate glassware cast out to sea they just bring the glass back and make you eat it. Every day is just suck, suck, suck.

That is, except when one of the prisoners has a birthday. Then they bring out the cake and eat it right in front of you. It’s the best day because it makes you feel like you’re eating cake. And also because the guards, pussies they are, think that eating cake in front of you is actually a sort of punishment instead of a reprieve from the constant beatings. Also they abandon their guns, briefly, during the cake-eating ritual.

Which doesn’t seem that cool, until you realize how friendly that native boy from nearby is, and how much he hates Japanese people who still think it’s World War II and think white water rafters are secret American commandos too. Factor in how little attention the guards pay to him and you’ll have those guns in your hands in minutes, and those guards pumped full of bullets in seconds. Now if only you knew where the key was!

Congratulations Prisoners of War!

Congratulations on Passing on the Right!

You won’t want to do it, but she’ll just be biking so slow and so far out. The only option will be to come up inside her and roll on by.

You won’t think much of it. You’re an experienced road biker, after all. You’ve ridden cross country, you attend those pretentious little bike and build seminars and while you’ll know it’s an eggrigious violation of the rules of the road, you won’t care. You’ll be in a hurry to get to whatever the fuck vegan juice bar fag fest you’re headed to.

Which is why we’ll all be so incredibly pleased when you burst into flames as you try to pass the fat chick on her right.

“WHYYYYYY!” you’ll cry to anyone who’s listening, dropping to the ground and rolling about in vain.

“BECAUSE YOU TRIED PASSING ON THE RIGHT!” a passing motorist will scream at you from their window, and you’ll know in that moment that it is true.

Congratulations on Passing on the Right!

Congratulations on Restoring Your Border Collie's Trust!

It won’t be easy. First you’ll need to buy him some flowers. Preferably his favorite kind although, honestly, this is a fucking dog, so really, does it care?

Second you’ll have to write a very nice, very thorough note apologizing for what you did. Again, it’s to a dog, so make most of it pictures. Hire a professional if you can’t draw.

Finally, figure out how to say “I’m sorry I removed your balls with a pair of scissors under the supervision of a physician” in collie. It’s the only way to make shit cool between the two of you again.

Congratulations on Restoring Your Border Collie’s Trust!

Congratulations on Fucking the Devil!

When you wake up this morning your head will be splitting, your mattress spinning. The world will seem a blur, a horrible place you’d rather avoid if you could but it’ll be right there, pouring into your skull through every freshly opened crack and crater. Sunlight will ooze under your skin and burn you cold, an oil slick cross your consciousness.

Your lids will flutter open unbidden, letting in the horrid vision of your bedroom. Sheets will be wrapped around you, strangely moist with some indistinct bodily fluid. You’ll pause for a moment, breathing in tentatively before you realize, with relief, that it’s sweat they’re soaked in. Your relief will last until you look to your left and see who’s laying with you.

It’ll be the devil. Not like an overly suave, handsome dude who talked you into bed, but the literal fucking devil. He’ll have horns, dark red skin, a goatee and a shitty hair cut. The whole deal. You’ll feel his tail flicking you under the covers as he smiles at you, hungrily.

“Last night was wonderful,” he’ll say. He’ll clearly have been watching you for a while as you slept restlessly. You’d like to think that he was watching to see if you’d throw up on yourself, watching you to keep you safe, but you’ll immediately realize, upon looking into his eyes, that he’d most likely wait for you to choke to death on your own vomit and then fuck your corpse if that had happened.

“Oh God,” you’ll say under your breath, tasting a little bit of throw up with the words. He’ll let loose a laugh, a terrible sharp thing over his smile.

“Not quite,” he’ll say, wincing out a new smile, somehow crueler, as he brings himself up to mount you.

“Whoa,” you’ll say, putting your hand on his chest. “Whoa.”

The devil will frown and lick his lips. “Where was this fight last night?” he’ll say, grabbing your tit over the sheets. You’ll pull away from him, exposing his penis. It will be a narrow, needle like thing, its color implying disease which may or may not be there.

“You need to leave,” you’ll say, looking him straight in the eye.

He’ll sigh as he gets up, collecting his cloak and boot cut jeans from your floor. “Everyone on your Facebook friends list is going to know about this, FYI,” he’ll say as he slips out of the door, his tail nearly catching in the jamb on his way out.

Once he’s gone you’ll wrap yourself in sheets and pray that you have the day off. You’ll stare at your cell phone, waiting for Marv to call and tell you you’re late. You’ll stare for a seeming eternity before a new, greater dread takes hold of you and you realize that the devil might have your phone number. You’ll weigh the trouble of rejecting him against the bother of navigating Verizon’s customer service to change your phone number.

It will not be an enviable choice.

Congratulations on Fucking the Devil!

Congratulations Cake Monster!

Cakes have been oppressed for thousands of generations (since a generation of cakes is like, a month, this isn’t as long as it sounds). They’ve dreamed their whole lives of something better (again, a cake’s life is like, a month at best), an existence where they can do more than simply be devoured, an existence where they can find love, settle down and live out their (month long) lives in peace raising families with more options than just being devoured.

But cakes haven’t had a lot of say in the matter. They are, after all, fucking cakes. So really, who’s going to listen to them?

Everyone after tomorrow, when you, a horrible monster disguised as a cake, reveal yourself by devouring the entire population in attendance of the Steinberg-Katowitz wedding. The day will be flawless, the ceremony will go off without a hitch, right up until you sprout arms and begin devouring guests left and right, starting with the bride and groom. There will be no survivors.

This will usher in a period of cooperation with cakes the world over, as we endeavor to cooperate with cakes so as to avoid future encounters with Cake Monsters such as yourself as a species. This plan will last for roughly a month and a half, until you turn stale and die and all the cakes who had all these dreams also die and their memory is buried like so many crumbs under an infinite field of picnic tables.

Congratulations Cake Monster!