Cohost archives: Being in the open world

September 20, 2024

The posts absorbed into this one all orbited the release of Starfield in one way or another. Dread Delusion would've come into this too, but I never did get to write properly about it on Cohost ... maybe some other time.

Morrowind is a game designed for people who like PC RPGs and will therefore have an amount of patience for certain kinds of jank if it makes a game more interesting. I wouldn't say Morrowind is good because it's janky, but it's janky because it's specific and also good because it's specific.

Oblivion is a game designed for people who own an Xbox.

I like Oblivion, and Skyrim, and I think people overstate the degree to which New Vegas is better than Fallout 3. FO4 is a mixed bag, but I still put a lot of time into it because if you let me build a house, I'll play your game for 500 hours.

So I figured I could coast for a while in Starfield just finding space stuff to put in my space house. But sometimes a space house resists all your efforts to make it into a space home.

Here's the thing I want to say about Starfield

I think the main character of Fallout 4 should've been Preston Garvey. He almost immediately became a joke because there's always already another settlement that needs your help, but he couldn't have bothered you about it if you were him. He has an actual history and stake in the world and, more specifically, reasons to care about establishing communities and networks in the wasteland--it's his job as much as it's anyone's. That he almost singlehandedly saves his organization from total destruction and then hands the reins over to a clueless time-traveler is one of the more extreme examples of the Bethesda defiance of all reason for the sake of making you feel important.

This also would've required the settlement stuff to be anything more than an afterthought. Maybe fewer potential settlements, each with its own character, populated by NPCs with literally anything going on. Settlements with their own faction story arcs.

So my hope was that, since outposts were clearly on the Starfield roadmap earlier on, building outposts would in some way feel more like building communities. In fact the opposite is true. It feels like buying upgrades in an idle game, and the people there are buffs to raw material production numbers. That they're people at all is mostly incidental.

As far as I'm concerned, almost nobody makes an open world like Bethesda. In contrast to the Ubisoft collectathon model, there are spaces and landmarks in these games that feel like they weren't made for you to conquer, maybe due in part to BGS's fondness for human-curated procgen. As hard as Skyrim leans into being a dungeon crawler theme park, there are still all those abandoned shacks in the wilderness, still the big empty stretches of landscape west of Whiterun. I guess some people don't like the empty planets in Starfield, but why would you even play it if not for that?

The illusion of place never quite extends to the NPCs, though, and this is the ball these games have been dropping since at least Oblivion. They could, in a much more substantial way, be games about people, populated by characters who exist for reasons other than to make you feel strong.

There's usually enough going on that you can imagine how this would work. Town-building that anyone in the world cared about, for example. Often there are some nice sidequests involving NPCs of no real importance, who don't have much to offer you other than insight into how people in this world get by, and to be fair Starfield has some of my favorite examples of these thus far. But it misses as many opportunities as its predecessors. It devotes a lot of words to religion but has very little to say about it, owing in large part to its Christian-centric myopia. The major faction questlines all making you different kinds of cop is too big of an issue to get into here, but suffice to say that's the breadth of imagination the game is working with as far as how people organize themselves. We were also supposed to care about the political situation in Skyrim, but it hardly affects anyone in ways you can engage with. The civil war stuff is underbaked at best, and a city changing hands never results in anything remotely approaching the world states of Kenshi; two to three government officials are replaced by different people and that's basically it. I mean I get that nobody will ever make the RPG I really want, in which the NPC faction leaders are playing a 4X game against each other while you dick around in dungeons or whatever, but still. Give me anything.

Most of my ideas about why these games keep getting bigger but not really any more interesting are pure speculation. But one thing we can be reasonably sure is a problem for Bethesda is the Xbox, and this predates the Microsoft acquisition by about two decades. They'd probably object to the idea that this resulted in a compromised creative vision, but they've said outright that Oblivion was an attempt to appeal to a broader audience on console after Morrowind unexpectedly proved that such a thing was possible. Making [thing] for people who don't like [thing] is maybe sometimes a winning strategy if your main concern is sales numbers, but I'm struggling to think of an example of this resulting in work that feels particularly thoughtful, and I wonder whether Bethesda games' weird focus on slaying thousands of indistinguishable bandits is a result of some imagined idea that Halo or CoD players need a steady supply of heads to explode. The way Starfield populates planets with landmarks is fun, but that so many of these landmarks feature another thirteen guys to shoot becomes very old very fast, and it usually feels like an interruption to or distraction from exploring rather than a reward for doing so.

Much more interesting to me is finding a little village on an otherwise barren planet, a ship landing pad surrounded by two or three shelters sealed against an environment that isn't actively hostile so much as it has nothing much to do with human beings, and listening to the villagers talk about how they like it there or don't. This isn't something that happens very often.

Vampire country

Like many sandbox games, Kenshi pulls in people who spend a lot of time thinking about how the world should work. Half are decent; the other half are fascists. So if you look into it, maybe avoid any comments sections you come across.

This video by Rosencreutz (a very good video essayist if you're a compulsive map-painter) made me think about Kenshi. It isn't hard to make me think about Kenshi. Steam says I've spent 388 (and a half) of my finite life hours on Kenshi. Contrary to the topic of the video, Kenshi doesn't have vampires in it (unless...), but thinking about vampires in games also means dealing with the fantasy adventurer as a game conceit:

[Re: VTM: Bloodlines] You are told ghosts are real, and it's something you blow off. Okay sure, there are ghosts in Skyrim too, and you can stab them through the chest. And then you experience the ghosts, and it's a threat you can't just badass your way through.

A big part of VTM is that there are things bigger than you. And those things aren't even monsters or individuals, they're organizations, complex webs.

Speaking of Skyrim ghosts etc.: as much as I think some of the criticism of Fallout 3 results from it being a popular target, I have to admit that it and every other Bethesda RPG that's not pre-modern high fantasy get weird in their refusal to deviate from the Elder Scrolls template. You're driving a sword and sorcery adventurer through the post-apocalypse or through space, and the demands of that structure impose limits on these stories that their settings otherwise don't seem to imply. Ranged Touch talked about this too.

Kenshi is one of those games made by enthusiasts of an, if not simpler, certainly earlier milieu partly as a reaction against this tendency. As the Steam page says,

You are not the chosen one. You're not great and powerful. You don't have more 'hitpoints' than everyone else. You are not the center of the universe, and you are not special. Unless you work for it.

You may be tempted to dismiss this as edgy posturing. I'd also be tempted to do that. Referring to HP with scare quotes is certainly a choice considering that Kenshi gives every character eight discrete HP bars, several of which you can improve in various ways until you have more than almost everyone else. It's fine given that a computer game is fundamentally a bunch of math and I don't care about suspension of disbelief anyway, but the naked artifice of "'hitpoints'" has not been overcome here.

Kenshi does succeed at positioning the player character as something other than the lone hero, it's just that it doesn't do this through sheer difficulty. The early difficulty gate of Kenshi, like that of Dwarf Fortress, is easily kicked open once you know the game. The way Kenshi overcomes the hero problem is by making your characters live in a society, and it achieves this in a few ways:

1. You don't play a character; you play a crew. It's true that "you are not the chosen one" in that you are not, strictly speaking, one. Even D&D-indebted party-based RPGs often designate a main character, and losing this character is a hard failure state. Kenshi asks you to create one or more characters, but unless you fully run out of party members, the game continues in their absence. The difficulty, such as it is, isn't about puzzle-solving or manual dexterity, it's a set of incentives pushing you to build a community--superior numbers help in a fight beyond what any individual's stats might suggest, and a bigger party makes it much easier to both prepare for and escape from bad situations. You can eventually get a lot done with a solo character, but you benefit more per unit of time invested from assembling and training a squad. And while some of this could apply to any given hard RPG, your unforgiving dungeon crawlers and so on, a "party" in Kenshi is potentially two dozen or more characters filling a variety of combat and non-combat roles. You're the badass adventurers and the village they come home to.

2. The world is populated by other crews. The most enduring threats aren't planet-eating godmonsters, they're the empire of libertarian samurai cosplayers and the genocidal white guy theocracy. These two factions police enormous territories and can basically always overwhelm you with superior resources when fights don't happen on your terms. The few major, world-altering strategic decisions in any Kenshi run include whether and when to go to war with these groups. They're strong allies if you can power-RP your way into stomaching their ideologies, but they're positioned as nuisances if not outright enemies for most newly-generated characters (they'll attack you for arbitrary reasons and are the two big factions that do slavery), and it's generally more fun to treat taking out their cities as a progress goal. Either way, though, your interactions with them usually aren't interactions between your one character and a boss-level NPC waiting in an empty room, they're interactions between organizations.

3. Your crew benefits from being part of the world. Basebuilding in Kenshi is very flexible, and you may be tempted to rush out into the desert and set up your weird little compound as soon as you can afford the materials for it. In most parts of the map, this is a mistake--at best you'll be chased away every few days by bandits or various and diverse ninjas. Until the mid to late game, you're better served by setting up in or near a town and making use of its economy and its guards. You'll have an easier time in the wilderness once you've made some friends who can send squads to defend you.

The point being, I guess, that this is one way an RPG can decenter the hero mechanically without letting the horror convention of a disempowered player controlling a vulnerable protagonist dictate the whole experience. Kenshi has limitations--absent much in the way of gamified conversation, your main mode of interacting with its world is violence. But I also think there's something to take away here re: how to convey ideas through systems rather than by overburdening NPC dialogue with exposition and/or forcing the player to build a charisma-based character.

This doesn't require a physically big world, either. One thing that's instructive about Morrowind is that the world is relatively small, but it doesn't feel small. It's all smoke and mirrors anyway. You can make a meaningful open world on a budget if you make every location feel important to someone and connect it to broader networks. Maybe, instead of NPCs talking about supply lines with complete strangers apropos of nothing, supply lines are simply present in the world, and interacting with a trade caravan impacts the material wealth of the people along its route.