Creating Worlds

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 21, 2014

Back in its heyday, Origin’s motto was, “We create worlds.”

When I think about why I love games and why I love making games, that’s the key. As much as I do appreciate these “little” games with the single, focused game mechanic – as much as I used to love the arcade machines in the past – they aren’t the things I dream about.  Maybe it’s a hold-over from my childhood steeped in science fiction books about visiting other planets and cultures, but I want entire worlds to explore. Even back in the arcade days, I was the kid who always wanted to discover that there were entire, larger game-worlds hidden inside these simple shooters.

No, I never actually believed that you could drive your tank to the volcano and find a castle inside, as was rumored in Battlezone. Or that you could break out of the maze in the teleport tunnel to find a new maze in Pac-Man. Even then, I understood that while Easter Eggs might exist, nobody was gonna hide the bulk of their game away so that very few players would ever experience them.

But then, I soon had far bigger games. Ultima III, to me, was something of a revelation. I think it predated Origin’s “We create worlds” motto, but it was certainly the kind of thing they were thinking of when they coined it. It was the first game I ever played with that kind of scale, and it was incredibly satisfying. While not a “sandbox game” as we currently understand it, it was a big, open world, with tons to do and explore.

Fortunately, it was only the beginning. Games like Frontier (aka Elite II) were just as thrilling to me as a gamer.  Really big, procedural worlds – like Daggerfall – were awesome. The huge, heavily detailed, highly interactive world of Ultima 7? Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

But just being big and interactive isn’t enough. One of my all-time favorite games was Falcon 4.0. What really thrilled me about that game was that it was dynamic and interactive. There was a virtual wargame being played in the campaign mode. The AI had certain starting points and priorities, but after that, things (in theory at least) flowed organically. As the head of your squadron, your actions could be highly influential in the conflict – critical, by definition. But while you might be the queen of the chessboard, you were still just one of the pieces. But you could deviate from your “official” tasking to set your own missions. Were you suffering too many attacks from a nearby enemy airfield? Re-task a mission to level the airfield. You might not put it out of commission long, but you might get 24 hours of reduced airstrikes. In the most difficult campaign, the winning strategy was to ignore whatever tasking the AI gave you at first, and to set up strikes against bridges to slow the enemy advance until your reinforcements arrived.

One of the coolest things was returning from an engagement and just passing by a pitched ground battle taking place. You could see it happening, especially at night, because of the smoke and explosions flashing all over the landscape. It felt great if you had some left over ordnance to “swing by” and held out your guys by shooting a maverick or two at enemy tanks.

The cool thing was that the game responded to you. “Dynamic” didn’t mean random – it meant that you were interacting with the world, and the world would respond accordingly. You weren’t going to “cheat” by taking an approach the predefined scenario hadn’t considered (a trick I sometimes used in many other flight sims). If you lingered overlong (I learned to my detriment) in an area, you’d find yourself fighting a pitched battle against enemy planes which had been vectored into your area.

While it had its bugs (lots and lots of bugs), that helped define in my mind what a true, “dynamic world” should be. Not just interactive, not just detailed, but responsive to your actions on a fully integrated level – not just a few “decision points” in the plot. And yeah, “simulation-esque.” I think about how that would be in a role-playing game, like a roguelike. I haven’t played one that has come close, yet, but Soldak Entertainment’s titles have made some very impressive strides in that direction.

So if someone asks me what game I’d be making if I had unlimited budget and time… something like that. A kingdom simulator RPG where there are wonderful and terrible plots and subplots, and the player character(s) grow from being nobodies with almost no impact on the events of the world to being powerful, key players in everything they touch. It’d be cool.

Fortunately, as an indie, there’s no requirement for these kinds of things having huge budgets or being big productions. Nothing says I can’t start on something like that today, and let it grow organically, a la Dwarf Fortress or something like that.  Well, nothing but the colossal, nagging feeling of guilt because Frayed Knights 2 is already late. But hey, if you ever wonder what kind of direction I’d like to wander as an indie – if I didn’t have any kind of concern about ever being able to afford to finance my little hobby – that’s the gist of it.

I’d just like to create worlds. Is that too much to ask?

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 12 Comments to Read



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