infamous-gastropod

still dreams of orgonon

foremost expert on silly girls
all my high effort posts/short stories are in the #nice words tag
private acc @lavenderedBlithely

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I've honestly always kinda enjoyed twitter because I haven't been afraid of aggressively curating who and what I see. A big part of that is getting rid of anyone who's a shithead but an equally important, possibly more prominent thing is trying to limit how much secondary exposure I get to shitheads: dunks, subtweets, and even stuff trying to legitimately help in some way. It's not a whole lot better for my mental health for every tweet to be coolguy x talking about people saying transphobic shit and QRTing and posting screencaps than it is to just see people being transphobic.

I'm REALLY feeling the worse state of Twitter now that they've decided to just shove posts from people you don't follow in your face constantly. My twitter is like 30% posts about shitheads. I've only just today caught just how bad I've felt about, like, people in general recently. I wonder why that is!!!!



When discussing silly monster catching games, a common refrain tends to come up: that Pokémon has been making the "same game" for x amount of years. Celebrations are surely in order, then, when in February 2021, a new game was announced - Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Despite being described as a spinoff, it clearly resembled the core series more than any prior: with its turn-based battles, four moves, six base stats, team of six Pokémon and a human protagonist whose primary motive is to "Catch 'em All". To anybody who was paying attention, this was more than a spinoff: it was an experiment, in the same engine as Sword and Shield, with new modes of gameplay, new experiential focus, and a clear consolidated vision of what Pokémon is, and what it could be.

Hundreds of thousands of passively interested Millenials scream in unison: Finally, something is fucking changing.

No! Fuck you!

A person in a middle-finger costume.


The Monogenre

(From now on i'm not going to worry about capitalising things consistently or using the accented é. Strap in.)

A lot of game franchises have gone, or are going open world. In the last 12 months we've gotten Elden Ring, Sonic Frontiers and of course, Pokemon Legends: Arceus. Pokemon going open-world is a drooling classroom daydream so long-running that there are several Nintendo-hire-this-man styled fangames floating around, taking a swing at a concept. While I've deliberately detached myself from Pokemon discourse writ large, the Vibes seem to tell me that this is was a popular change! I find it extremely disappointing.

To get into why, I need to first be clear with what I see as an "open world" game, because it's one of those genre markers that, at face value, is so broad as to be nearly meaningless.

Open world games, in my opinion, are a methodology more than a genre, and I critique them from this angle.

What I mean by this is that, in my opinion, open world games are made using certain tools, techniques and conventions, and I believe that these production-side characteristics are the main reason why they keep being made - not because they're necessarily a logical evolution to the design of any series, and not even because they're trendy or popular. As an illustrative example, take a few unique characteristics of anime: plenty of limited animation or still frames, imparted with energy with techniques like digital panning, speed lines, etc. These are characteristics born and maintained because they make animation cheaper to produce, but they're also a unique, inseparable, and beloved textural element of the medium. In this way, genre and methodology, text and context, art and commerce aren't so separate, but I encourage you to bear with me as I look at open world games through that material lens.

In what I might reductively call "traditional" level design, every space is deliberately created, and explicitly connected to each other through entrances/exits, level starts/finishes and so on. Most open world games revolve around a different style of level design I'd describe as "node based". You start with a large space, the ground/terrain of the world, typically a heightmap. These maps are often partly procedurally generated, but aren't always (and in the case of Pokemon Legends, probably isn't). On top of this space is where the "nodes" are placed - meaning small, modular pieces of content that are usually experienced in no particular order. They are often strung together by theme, questline, level progression and so on, but they aren't connected in a way that would require you as a game designer to plan that much out in advance. It's extremely flexible. Moreover, it lends itself SUPER WELL to asset reuse, if you create them with modularity in mind! Whenever you find an interesting valley on your heightmap, you can slip a draugr crypt in there, and when you spot a bare yet enticing mountain peak, you can throw a shrine up there for Link to find. Almost any game that involves controlling a character in 3D space can be translated to this methodology, too! You can create REALLY. BIG. GAMES. thanks to the open world model, and in a timely enough manner to keep up with the 3-5 year release cycle that AAA studios are operating under.

Craig Perko's got a nice video on the workflow and design of open-world maps, if you're in the market.

This makes open world games incredibly economical, if your goal is to create something BIG.

Allow me to clarify - this is not an inherently bad thing! There are many cool games on every scale of production that use this to create worlds with a real sense of scale, or small worlds with shocking density and life. Vignette adventure games like Jazzpunk, An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs, Sludge Life and Paradise Killer are, imo, quite similar in methodology to what I'm talking about, and I think they do things that absolutely couldn't be done any other way. However, this gets weird when franchises come into the mix. Successive works in a franchise are, broadly, expected to be more elaborate and ambitious than the last - at least, when you're talking about big budget/block buster style entertainment. What happens when you're numerous games into a beloved franchise, and you're expected to be constantly outdoing yourself, and you're presented with essentially a three-step program to translate any kind of core character-controlled videogame to a format that makes it look at feel really, really big?

You get a lot. Of fucking. Open world games.

It's so sexy to stand on top of a mountain and look over a giant world that is entirely traversible. That Breath of the Wild framing is so iconic now, you can see it in the Elden Ring trailer too, and in the box art/promo material for Pokemon Legends. We love to be on top of a big fucking mountain, or look at a big fucking mountain from a slightly smaller fucking mountain.

Link standing on a mountain overlooking a vast world

Doesn't this make you so horny for adventure, bro???.

This, in my estimation, is why we are seeing this incredible AAA convergence on open world game design (at least, with the games that can't go live service. yet). It feels like an escalation, no matter what you apply it to, and it can be applied to nearly anything. It's great at looking like it has so much going on. But it tastes like

Filo Pastry

Filo dough is stretched so thin you can see through it. There, that's the metaphor. Look at this.

Unfortunately, this spanakopita is made with

POOP.

Spanakopita

Apologies to my Greek friends and loved ones.

The adage "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" snarkily points out that a big thing doesn't necessarily mean an interesting thing. Depth in gameplay can encompass a lot of different things, but imo it's generally a measure of how much the game is capable of rewarding you for putting more of yourself into it. A game that has 'depth' of gameplay continues to reveal entirely new facets of itself as you become more invested in the nuances of its systems.

A great example of this is Pokemon's battle system! As poor as the main series tends to be at actually displaying this depth, Pokemon has an incredibly deep battle system with numerous systems that reward you for learning and experimenting with them. The strategies that exist across different multiplayer modes of play, from community-organised Single battle rules to Nintendo's official VGC Double battle rules, are entirely unique from each other. ROM Hacks and Fangames can re-integrate a lot of this strategy back into the single player experience, and Nuzlockes expose an entire stratum of depth that don't exist in any other form of play.

Perhaps the most Gaming moment I've ever experienced in my life.

Open world games, by their nature, tend to stretch their mechanics to their absolute limits. I don't mean they actually utilise their mechanics to their fullest extents, they stretch them, like a drum skin, until you can see the little beads inside the barrel. They do not - can not, in all likelihood - build upon themselves, escalate, mature to match their bloated girth, partly due to their structure, and partly due to the material incentive for quantity above all else.

Most games of a certain length will contain a point, differing from person to person, when a world becomes a system. Assuming blind play, the beginning of any game is marked by essentially infinite possibilities: we don't know yet what we will be able to do, what we'll do it with, what we'll do it to, and as such, everything is deeply enchanting. In time, we come to understand what a game expects of us, what it can respond to, and in some instances, where the money and time was tight. We settle into the performance.

I'll acknowledge that there are people who are simply enchanted by the experience of just exploring a world, embodying the space. There are people for whom mechanics can get stale as a crusket in the sun and still feel propelled by the narrative inherent to an environment. I won't invalidate that. However, if I'm entirely honest, I think this sort of feeling comes pretty cheap! I recently played like half an hour of Evergrace for the PS2. I will never play more than half an hour of that game - frankly, it seems pretty shit - but I was enraptured by the way it looked, and felt, and sounded. I don't think that atmosphere was an accident, but I do think that any game can capture that kind of feeling, and I'm comfortable saying that highly extrinsically motivated open world action games are not the natural evolution of the goal to capture it.

Evergrace: the hero protagonist, sword in hand, standing in front of a fountain.

Honestly, maybe old bad games are the best at mood. I'm not ready to die on that hill though

Conclusion?

And that's the deal with them open world games. I've rambled in this section for nearly one full real-life year. I'm going to catch myself before I spend another year on it. This was initially planned to be a larger piece, where I write about my issues with the progression of Pokemon as a franchise, the themes and mechanics they've chosen to focus on, instead of just an open-world tirade. My thoughts are probably all over the place too, with how piecemeal I've put it together. I just want it out. One day, when I feel like being a hater again, we can talk about

Catching 'em All

and the legacy of a shitty catchphrase.