I came home today and, as per the norm, one of the first things I did was look at my instant messaging client that I never close. I had a few messages from various times throughout the day, and the last one was simply a link. Naturally, I clicked on it.That link can be followed right here.
It took me to the fairly simple flash game that you likely see before you because, knowing gamers, you're likely an impatient little bastard. As you move around in the odd-gravity platformer that it is, more of the level shows itself to you. As you do so, soothing, gentle music plays. There's no enemies, no butt-bouncing, no score, no real objective even, but it's nearly impossible to not play it.
While I'm certainly not going to cough up 60 bucks for a game like this, big-name developers should give it a definite play-through. It has a sense of exploration, wonder, and discovery that very, very few retail games actually manage to capture with all of their fancy graphics and animations.
Portal is perhaps the most recent game I can think of that managed to capture some of it, though even then, the environments felt so pre-made and designed that it took away from a large part of that.
The best example of a sense of wonder and exploration that I can remember in a retail game has to go to Morrowind. That massive world, littered with ruins, small villages, and seemingly random characters was one that you wanted to walk in for hours, and many people have.
There's other good examples of this too, of course. You could easily place worthy arguments for Oblivion, Fallout 3, BioShock, Mass Effect, Borderlands, and even Halo 1 if you mean the more open levels. I pulled big-name titles, but compared to how many I have on my shelves, it's a very small number, and most are built with exploration or wonder as one of the main goals.
More and more open-world games are coming out all the time, but GTA and its clones aren't making their worlds any more interesting. They still feel very flat, lifeless, and built entirely for the player. If worlds were built with more levels of character interaction and backstory, it's already a step in the right direction. If you then follow that up with interesting level design, you really have something other developers just aren't doing.
Referring back to my previous list, Morrowind and Oblivion both have fairly good character/race interaction, making the world seem more politically grounded and plausible. Morrowind's interesting physical world adds to this by giving the story an interesting and diverse setting. Oblivion dropped the ball on the physical world, giving players only a few unique areas and then repeating the rest until you knew exactly was over the next hill.
Fallout 3 has an interesting world with it's 50's themes and bulky technology. Considerable variety makes the player interested in exploring this world, and a fair amount of loot to be found rewards such explorers.
BioShock is perhaps the most odd inclusion of the games in that list, since the game is fairly linear. But its interesting characters, story, and unique visual style make it one game that sticks with you.
Perhaps what the industry really needs is better writers that work with the level designers. What's important to remember about most games is that it should really be one team of people working on it, not all of the different departments working on the same thing but separate from each other.
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