Open World and Player Rewards
Tuesday, December 1, 2009Lately a lot of open world style games has been released, even though I like them I feel like many of them tend to disappoint when it comes to rewarding the player.
Open World games are games where the players freely can roam the game world, more often than not the player also can choose the order of mission the player wants to play. There is one game that comes to mind that doesn’t follow this formula though even though it is an open world game. This game is Shadow of The Colossus, the world is open even though the mission experience is very linear. A game where it feels like there is mystery around every corner, even though there wasn’t much (which is disappointing) but the feeling is there.
I really like the open-world experience, lots of possibilites for mystery, exploration and rewards. There is a constant threat and a goal that is being presented to the player, but even then the player can explore the world at his own pace, the only thing that is missing is the reward for exploring which most current games actually neglects.
If we take Assassins Creed II as an example, in this game you will during the experience get a lot of money, just by playing the game like it’s meant to be played without exploring or doing all the sidequests. The money you earn will be more than you can spend in the game, so the money will just keep piling up without purpose.
The developers also decided that the reward for finding treasures and exploring would be money, why the hell would you want more money when you can’t spend it on anything?
Let’s jump to another game, let’s talk a bit about an older game. Let’s talk about The Elder Scrolls Oblivion, in Oblivion you get a lot of interesting side-quests, however when exploring caves and dungeons me and my friends always felt like you didn’t get rewarded enough to keep it interesting. When you’ve cleared a cave from all the monsters and gone down to the lowest level you still felt like you wasn’t rewarded for your effort. No awesome armor, no awesome weapons and no awesome boss-like creature, just a bunch of goblins with mediocre equipment.
If you loved to run around swinging that two-handed sword you know what I’m talking about, even though you killed of a bunch of monsters with your full-leveled two-handed sword , you wouldn’t gain anything from it, and by anything I mean experience for the weapon skill since it’s been fully leveled. Sometimes the reward could be the satisfaction of killing an enemy, but even that feeling doesn’t last, Assassins Creed is a shining example of this.
“The reward of the player should always be equal and sometimes greater to the amount of effort the player invested”
I think this applies to every game out there, but mostly I think open-world games tend to lack keeping this formula. Always rewards without substance, should I run around all of the game world looking for 1000 markers to collect for a simple achievement? I think not.
What do you guys think? How many games actually manages the reward = invested effort? and what kind of rewards do you like?
Well for the most part I like achievements on the Xbox 360. Though if I was to play a game like Elder Scrolls Oblivion I would have probably wanted better featured weapons or scrolls that teaches you something new. Money is a good thing also if there’s something you can spend it on.
Well, in Oblivion there is many things you can spend your money on like weapons, armor and more expensive stuff like the houses. But in that case it’s not the houses that is the actual reward it’s the houses functionality.
If the house is only a house with no secrets or nothing that compells the player to use it’s a bad reward for the money you’ve gathered. You can also buy houses in most of the cities but the houses are all of different class, so why use a house of a lower-class when you’ve got a mansion?
Why not have different class houses in every city then? You might like one of the smaller cities so you want a mansion in that one instead of one of the bigger?