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I love a good role-playing video game, and one of my favorites is Final Fantasy XII. There’s plenty of discussion about which game in the Final Fantasy game is the best, but the reason I love XII so much is that it gave off these moments of exploring a world. Your experience was not perfectly crafted and tailored for you, but instead things could effectively go “off-script.” It wasn’t often that it would happen, but it did.
After an opening sequence, the game puts you into a major city and sends you off on some little errands and quests. One of the first things you’re supposed to do is exit the city and kill a specific monster. That enemy is pretty weak and easily dispatched. The other enemies you encounter are similarly weak. But…
In that zone there’s also a gigantic dinosaur monster. It’s basically a T-Rex. And it is a good 25 levels or so stronger than the player character is. It also has the capacity to increase its strength by eating other nearby monsters, taking itself up to level 99 if you’re patient enough. If you try to take it on when you start the game, you’re dead. FFXII doesn’t exactly have a battle system that allows you to take down incredibly stronger enemies with superior gameplay. Thankfully, though, it’s not hostile. It will only attack you if you attack it first.
But this experience has stuck with me over the years since I first played the game. The sheer terror of running around this area and fighting wolves in the low single digits in terms of level, only to run into a dinosaur that is overpowered is hard to describe. And it gave me something to look forward to. Maybe I could come back and kill it later and see if it drops something cool.
Dragon Age Inquisition had you exploring a number of different areas in the game, and one of the first you had access to had a little pathway that could lead you into a clearing. Actually heading into that clearing would cause a dragon to fly down. The dragon was level 12, which may not sound like much, but given that getting up to level might require playing through anywhere between a third to half of the game, it was a big deal. And you could probably encounter it at level 2 or 3. Again, you were toast if you tried to take it on at that point, so you need to run away immediately. But it also gave a sense of anticipation: I can’t wait to come back and kill that thing.
When Final Fantasy XVI came out, I found myself thinking back to these moments, and the ways that games are and can be designed. We are often used to encounters in games being molded for us. Whether it’s automatic scaling to make sure enemies are at roughly the same level we are. Or making later enemies stronger in line with what the developers expect of the player at that point. Whatever the case, a lot of games can give this air of “sameyness” to enemies by making everything feel perfectly attuned. Nothing need ever be too hard.
And I want to make the argument that something is being missed through that setup. That while making sure the player is able to progress is important, so much more can be captured by occasionally just letting the player wander around and encounter something they genuinely can’t handle.
Exploration and Anticipation
Games that exist in open or semi-open worlds can run into a problem of flattening. Being unable to predict where a player might go, a developer may elect to make sure that all choices are equally viable. Who cares if you went north or south, because either way you know that the player will be able to succeed.
But the downside of this setup is that players are made complacent without necessarily experiencing excitement. It is not that players are unable to be challenged in these cases – difficult scenarios can still be crafted or generated for the player to overcome. But those challenges will be something that is explicitly always within the player’s arsenal, and thus the player knows that victory is always possible.
Many games will choose to gate content behind certain kinds of progression. You cannot enter this area until you’ve completed that quest. You cannot get into this room until you’ve acquired that ability. Thus players can be given a sense of anticipation through this signposting. By telling the player that there’s something to be explored or gained later, they have a reason to revisit that spot and look forward to it. At least, as long as they don’t forget…
But explicitly blocking the player can still diminish that feeling of tension in a battle. You will always know that you can win because you’re supposed to be here – if you couldn’t win the fight, you wouldn’t be here. The blocks can be useful as ways of encouraging exploration, but there is a cost. Rewards are generally going to be tailored to where the player is now, and so progression will feel like it is being slowly doled out – a gentle drip feed of growth.
A solution that is often ignored, though, is the idea of giving players the opportunity to fight something normally beyond their ability. Often the way that works best is having something not only intensely challenging that is meant to be tackled later, but locking a powerful reward behind that challenge. “Powerful” here can even be relative – it does not have to be the strongest weapon in the game, just something that a player would find incredibly if they came upon it early in the playthrough. That challenge is something that the player can attempt and perhaps win in any number of ways – through good strategy, dumb luck, or some cheap trick.
The upside to this is that you can still get the valuable outcomes of direction and anticipation. You provide content to the player, but point them clearly in a different direction. The player is simply given the option to ignore that direction. Meanwhile, if the player listens to the direction, they are given something to look forward to – if this challenge is here, surely it must be guarding something cool. So there’s a good reason to come back.
But the special value of the fight and the reward is that the player feels like they’ve done something unique. They not only overcame a challenge they clearly weren’t supposed to and thus feel strong, but the reward they get allows them to steamroll through a large chunk of the game. They get to feel powerful twice over.
Of course, this all demands a strange balancing act. A challenge must be both incredibly difficult – both to provide a strong sense of accomplishment and to provide good direction for players – and yet winnable in a set of extreme cases. Any tougher, and the challenge cannot be won until you come back later. Any easier, and players may well bash their head against the wall because they think they’re supposed to. Hitting that sweet spot is a fair reason to not try to actually build an encounter like this intentionally.
And yet, even by just placing something far too powerful out there, the core experience can still be preserved. Maybe players will find some way to overcome the challenge in a way that is not anticipated. Because the key to putting these kinds of challenge in the game is not for the player to win. It’s to give the player a sense of scale. To let them feel their power as it grows. You run into a dragon, you are scared away, and when you come back you didn’t just kill a dragon, you killed this dragon – this dragon which absolutely stomped your character earlier.
The purpose of this approach is to give the player a feeling that the world is, in fact, a world. A place inhabited by people or creatures that are powerful and scary and that pose a serious threat to the player. A place that demands exploration and time and effort. A place that is not exist around the player, but that the player discovers.
Concluding Remarks
This kind of development is certainly not viable for every game. This approach demands a sense of openness to the game’s exploration which allows the player to veer from the main path and return. It demands a set of systems which can clearly communicate to the player that they’ve come across a challenge that far outclasses them. Things like levels or clear damage numbers, and thus demanding role-playing elements that may not be desirable for a given game.
But where these underlying components align, there’s a value to be considered in how the player relates to the world as a whole. A world that progresses too linearly, too cleanly, is going to give off this feeling of curation. It feels constructed. And while that construction is true, a key element of many good games is the way they can create an illusion. It is a paradox that sometimes a more carefully constructed edifice can feel less constructed.
Abstracting Games 