This write-up is about the current status of many ‘open world’ games, and how Bioware’s latest game
Dragon Age: Inquisition tries to avoid the flaws of contemporary open world games through the means of narrative and character development.
A Far Cry Syndrome
The term ‘open world’ is the zeitgeist of modern AAA games. Once a term used to describe
Grant Theft Auto and
The Elder Scrolls series of games, nowadays everybody promises a big, open-ended, never-ending world for players to explore and interact with. The trend started in the last generation, with several developers and series rising to prominence through the charm of the vast world inside the game.
One developer, in particular, was successful in this trend: Ubisoft Montreal was already a successful game developer known for Splinter Cell games, but it was a big world of
Assassin’s Creed games that made Ubisoft a household name for casual gamers as well. After a commercially successful yet somewhat critically mixed debut, the sequel
Assassin’s Creed 2 and its spin-off
Brotherhood well-established a formula of open-world AAA games. Many other games that previously had a closed game design were to follow this formula.
However, few developers enhanced or modified this formula enough, even (and especially) the original developer itself. This culminates in what I call a “
Far Cry syndrome”. It is a term I made myself for games that applied
Assassin’s Creed formula without thinking about it enough. It ends up with one very consistent flaw in game design: An open world game is initially entertaining and big, but you get bored of it way before the endgame. The game that best describes this problem is, of course,
Far Cry 3.
So, what is wrong with the critically and commercially successful
Far Cry 3?
- A checklist-based game design that never come together
There are a lot – and I admit, A LOT – of things to do in a contemporary open-world games. In
FC3, you can drive cars and bikes, hunt animals, collect items, occupy enemy fortresses and radio towers, and there are no shortage of these activities. However, you never get a good reason to do these activities, other than that you do this for fun. Why would local militia with armed forces ask a completely inexperienced American protagonist to hunt some animals for them? Exactly what are you delivering in your ATV, and why are there checkpoints and time limits for them? And above all, what is the connection between disabling radio towers and clearing out the map? Is the radio tower equipped with EMP or something?
These are gameplay elements that made sense in other open world games like
Red Dead Redemption and
Assassin’s Creed 2.
RDR made it absolutely sure that you are in a Wild West and you are never safe outside of a civilized world, so all the hunting and salvaging made sense. The whole
Assassin’s Creed series forms its saga around this memory scanning device called Animus, so tower occupation has the concept of memory synchronization attached to it.
FC3 borrows these designs, which in itself is nothing wrong. Problem is, the game does not give enough reason for these systems to exist in the world. They are there just because it has to be there.
These elements are loosely tied together with RPG-like skill tree system, but this only gets you so far. At first, all these unrelated elements give you new skills and unlock new gameplay elements, and this is enough of an incentive for players to go on with the game. The more you do, the more empowered you are. Around halfway through the game, however, you already have all the skills you need, and then you end up with questions: Why am I doing these things? How does this make sense in the game world?
Of all these characters, how many do you still remember?
- Generic world that does not motivate players
Which leads us to the next problem. I briefly checked how animal hunting made sense in
RDR and tower sync in
AC2. Likewise, the best way to give gameplay elements a proper reason and context is a narrative. But the narrative of
FC3 never succeed in that, and it just does not grab player’s attention. Frankly, it is so boring and generic that players remember almost nothing about it, other than there was some neurotic crazy guy at the center of it. You are a typical American trying to save your friend, and while doing so you get corrupted by the taste of violence and the power it gives you.
Even worse, this storyline is not connected to the game world at all. People criticize
The Elder Scrolls series for having a boring storyline, but at least Bethesda makes sure that the story explains something about the game world. None of the plot points of
FC3 has anything to do with resistance forces that have been fighting the bad guys even before you arrived at the island, or why you should help these locals hunting animals and delivering stuffs. As much as the narrative is boring, the whole game world has no characteristics.
Even worse, the main quest in an inferior version of what you do outside of it. The best moments of
FC3 are in killing enemies in your own style and developing your own gameplay moments, but the main quest ignores all of that and makes you go through rail shooting sequence, full-on assaults, or a highly scripted stealth sequence. Also, because characters are one-dimensional and forgettable, all of the activities in the main quest serve no purpose for the player. There is no reason for you to complete these main quests, other than for the sake of completing the game.
In the end, it becomes so evident that the world in the game is “just a game world” made to satisfy your needs for fun. You do not care about it because it is just an arbitrary world comprised of unrelated activities, supported by the fact that there are no real humans inside it. There is no reason for you to care about the world in the game, and once the fun is all gone, there is no reason to go back to it. And the fun will last only for a moment.
Wow, another area of the same size! - And of the same old thing.
The side activities that keep you busy eventually lose steam by the time you are halfway through. This is the reason I insisted on “
Far Cry” syndrome instead of
Assassin’s Creed: the transition to the second island in
FC3 is a breaking point to a lot of players. The first island alone is pretty big, but then you reach an even bigger and more challenging second island halfway through … which is filled with exactly the same kind of activities. Even when you get a new area which is supposed to give you new experiences and opportunities, it is exactly the same thing. This moment can come at any time, but with
FC3 the transition to the second island painfully signifies this.
At this point, the whole game starts to feel repetitive. You are doing all kinds of unrelated activities for reasons you do not know, and while RPG elements keep you awake for a while, at one point you become strong enough that you do not care about it anymore. You might want to turn to the main quest, but gameplay-wise they are even more boring than the tired side activities, and narrative-wise you do not know who is who and why you should care even when you are more than halfway through.
In the
Far Cry syndrome, the world inside the game is nothing more than a playground or a theme park. You do countless unrelated activities for fun, and once the fun wears out, you get out of it.
That is the end of the game, not the end of the main quest, and the end usually comes earlier than the game expected.
Open World Games: Consuming a Playground
This “
Far Cry syndrome” perfectly sums up every single Ubisoft open world game since 2012. You keep finding and conquering posts or towers that somehow open up the map, earn currency to spend it for a lot of useless things, collect collectibles for reasons you do not know, etc. And you repeat, and repeat. Whether you play a cyberthriller whose protagonist is a hacker, or a racing game where FBI agent goes undercover inside a racing gang, you do almost exactly the same thing for no good reason, with a main quest that is boring and forgettable in both gameplay and narrative. When you get tired of all the activities, or when you consume all of these contents, you just throw it away. While I made it sound like all of this is solely Ubisoft’s fault, open world games of the past have shared similar problems.
The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion was comprised of repetitive warp gate closing and various fetch quests, for example. It is just that Ubisoft Montreal in particular never really bothered to solve the problem because their games sold so well.
Still, many Ubisoft open world games are successful, so many games benchmark them, suffering from the
Far Cry syndrome to a varying degree. One game that employed open world design yet was a far cry from
Far Cry syndrome (pun intended) was
Grand Theft Auto V, but Rockstar’s almost on-rail approach to the main quest and storytelling makes it (maybe also
Red Dead Redemption) an exception when we talk about open world videogames. A similar case would be
Batman: Arkham City, which maintained the tight environment of
Arkham Asylum and kept everything as story-based as possible. When the game got bigger in a different hand, however,
Batman: Arkham Origins severely suffered from the
Far Cry syndrome. Riddler Challenges felt like a chore, the side quests got repetitive, and the main quest written by the creative team of
Assassin’s Creed 2 and
Far Cry 3 was incredibly tepid and clichéd when compared to Paul Dini’s tightly paced script of the first two games.
Last year’s acclaimed
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor is also a victim of
Far Cry syndrome to some degree. Admittedly, the main storyline of
Shadow of Mordor is far better than other victims of the syndrome, with all of the main characters being more likeable than I ever expected. The much-praised Nemesis system also gives enough context to everything you do. But
Shadow of Mordor stumbles on world building does not overcome its repetitive nature. By the time you reach the second area, you realize that new Uruks will fill the shoe of those you beheaded, and they will be the same sickening creatures that you killed already, though with different names. It is just another world full of scumbags, albeit with higher difficulty. In the world filled with sickening respawning enemies and not much more than that, it is easy to get tired when you start again from the flat in the second area, just like
FC3. (That said, if the game gave the outcasts a more human angle, it might have been a truly living and thriving world.)
This, while acknowledging
Far Cry syndrome, is not a solution to it.
Others like
Saints Row 4 or
Sunset Overdrive directly make fun of the syndrome, by unabashedly admitting that the game world is made just for the player’s fun. At one point of the main narrative, characters of both games revel in the fact that the whole game world turns out to be theirs to play with. This breaking of the fourth wall not only makes fun of the generally self-serious tone of aforementioned games, but also unearths the core of the
Far Cry syndrome by telling us that “it is just a game”. While this approach is hailed as an antidote to all the generic open world games in the market, they are not the answer to the playground approach that is at the center of the
Far Cry syndrome. Far from being an antithesis, these games even admit that what they they offer to players is merely a playground to enjoy and consume. I like these comedic open world games, but they are rather a
Far Cry syndrome stretched to the extreme to give it a fitting tone.
(continued in next post)
