The perceived purpose of an open world and gameplay

It sometimes impresses me how far we have come in video games in regards to world building, I always assumed it was a pain and a hassle to build everything from the ground up (I remember seeing some documentary about how Doom was made and was shocked at the amount of paper they had on their desks and how everything looked like back in the day, but I always wanted to know more about it).

As games continue to grow in quality and size so does the tools that help this purpose, some worlds are huge and beautiful, filled with so many things you must spend a considerable number of hours to explore all of it, but is this the right thing to do, do we really need a world so big it takes us forever to look and some random thing in the middle of nowhere?

To mind comes Elite Dangerous, a game where the space in which the player can move is absolutely huge, some new features were added with time but the game (cost rather) never hooked me enough and I tried it with the official stick and thruster which made for an even more realistic experience, I was not hooked because I felt there was nothing to do in the world aside from going around all over the place fulfilling some demand in order to get money and upgrade your ship, sure, the space battles were very good but that was it for me.

Same thing for other games that seem to be trying to share this idea of a procedural generated world that can give the player an immersive experience, No Mans' Sky was a huge example of this and so was Sea of Thieves, sure you have these massive worlds or lands to explore but for what purpose if what you find in them is one of the following scenarios:

• Generic mob or scenario which becomes repetitive way too fast, there is a pattern to find here and it soon shows that there is little inspiration behind it
• Empty scenario with some “great landscape”, sure it’s cool to see some cool eye candy from time to time but if you are paying 50/60+ USD for the game you better get more than some nice background, some commentary by the characters, a random event (I keep thinking about those very odd events you would get in Fallout and Fallout 2), something to fill up that void you suddenly feel when reaching that point
• Unfinished idea/area which was to be worked before/during/after release and never got pushed past an idea, sure, sometimes you can make something out of whatever was lacking and build a nice placeholder (which may never go away) but at least it’s not so obvious to the eye
• It so happens that time or resources run out to finish all these great ideas that could have been an awesome game, therefore keeping the scope of development into a realistic arena is the best way to finish the product and then keep building over it (just like Paradox Interactive does with Europa Universalis 4 or Crusaders Kings II, just look at all the DLCs available for each game!).
• On the above, a DLC can be a great way to bring something that was too far on the original development cycle to the player at a “reasonable” cost, but a DLC is in no way compensating for whatever is lacking from what was originally planned, if the game was sold as having a specific feature and then it’s being sold to the player because of X/Y reason this is just bad, plain and simple, there are hundreds of examples available nowadays regarding this situation.

Also to add another very valid point here, you don’t need to have the best graphics or eye candy for your game to work, just look at Mount and Blade, it still supported DirectX 7 when it came out and was nothing too impressive graphically but the gameplay was incredible, same thing for Hotline Miami, it was not the greatest thing to look at but once you got hooked you were set and done, I have dropped countless hours on Hotline Miami 1 and 2 to get better times, Banished was a game that while not very fascinating graphics wise had a very challenging gameplay with some interesting procedural generation, not always the map was the fairest but if you knew how to squeeze every inch you could make it work (specially in the smallest mountain scenario that could earn you an achievement if you survived more than 20 years), Depraved, a city building game during the Old West, is a game I would have never expected to see and I really want to play the game even in its crude alpha state because it's something I never thought would look so interesting, Factorio is another game that is very weird, I discovered it by accident while watching Arumba in one of his playthroughs and became fascinated by the game, soon after I got friends hooked up and we were doing LAN parties (yes, we still do these in 2018) in which four or five of us will work our way through some very hard scenarios, but both of my personal favorites and challenges (which one of my friends was so shocked to see that he called me an absolute nerd when he is already one of the biggest nerds I know) Dwarf Fortress (no mods, no nothing, just the pure raw game as it is) and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

Figure this out, the last two games I mentioned have no real graphics but letters which symbolize something (that something you may need to “examine” to figure out what it is) while in other instances it is a bit obvious what it is, there’s a lot of reading, some very hard learning curves that will see you die almost immediately for the first twenty times and then, then you will figure something out, then you will get to understand the mad world surrounding you, when you can make those very first steps without reading a guide you know you’re done for, you have gone too far down the rabbit hole.

Learning something from older videogames

The older I become the more interesting older video games become to me, the newer ones have something enticing too but as I have come to focus on a specific type of games or maybe I am just part of a demographic who want something either more detailed that has way too many ramifications to be humanly possible to follow through with any of them.

A recent example of something that got my attention again was Railroad Tycoon and this by mere chance when going back through some games I’m selling on eBay, Railroad Tycoon was one of those games that I bought somewhere in the mid to late 90’s back when I was in elementary, I bought that purple players choice box from Microprose at KB Toy Liquidators (rest in peace, such a great place and so many fond memories and games!) that I would have not obtained through any other means and going to the store was also another mere chance, finding the game on a discount bin for about a dollar together with Dragonsphere and Return of the Phantom of the Opera, X-COM: Terror from the Deep and some other Microprose good games from back in the day.

I tried the game and found it to be a little too complicated because English is not my first language and back then I was still learning, I did get to enjoy it quite a bit but never got through with the game as I have in recent times.

My latest playthrough with this game taught me that mechanics found in Railroad Tycoon 3 and Sid Meier’s Railroads! were already present in the original Railroad Tycoon and RRT 3 polished to what could have possibly been the best it could get too (or maybe I’m wrong here, I think Railway Empire could be a true successor to the Railroad games).

From replaying RRT I noticed that not only my grasp of English is better (after some 20 years it should be as I have been working mostly for American companies) but my understanding of the mechanics was derived purely from experience from figuring out other games that followed other mechanics so it was easier to go from more complex games to simpler ones (not that this is always the case but this is how I see it from this point in time).

Reading the manual obviously gave me much more insight that experience alone could have thought me and in a much shorter time span, playing the game in investor mode, dispatcher mode and complex economy surely made for a more interesting game, but I have yet to play with cutthroat AI but so far, I have learned the following things from my experience playing the game:

1. Micro management can be a total pain in the ass when you start expanding too much way early in the game, while I had more than 2.5 million in the bank by 1866 in the East Coast (where is the Civil War, eh?) I did not have an effortless way to handle the 20+ locomotives that I had at the time and station wise I had around 15 or 16 at the time with more on their way but the madness that was becoming of this was not making for an easy game.

2. My administration of the lines (express and local) was not working as I had intended, passenger/mail trains were getting stuck waiting for freight trains to move through the signals and I was losing valuable money (not that I really needed it, but if you are selling such a service you should deliver, maybe I’m just roleplaying here).

3. I had to build a sort of logistical map to figure out what was going out anymore, the complexity of said map (in paper, because I could for the life of me not figure how to put this in a computer at the time because I wanted something simple) was such that I truly understand why such precision was needed in real life when moving trains around, one bad move and a collision could happen or trains could get out of their time tables and money is lost, you get the gist out of it.

4. My logistical nightmare eventually taught me that dropping certain materials at certain stations (just like in later versions of RRT) that were being used as a central to haul resources to other stations was the best way to go, mixed trains could potentially solve the issue at the time and later with faster trains I could continue to push for better centralization.

5. I had always improved stations to get more profit, but I had never truly understood the purpose of the other buildings such as the switchyard, the pen, goods storage, etc. Now with that in mind I could push to centralize even more things and then move them elsewhere and keep the system rolling, shorter hauls were better in my mind at this point and in a way, it worked better as it would clog the system less than with the 20+ trains running around although this would be done at a slower pace.

6. I had invested way too much brain power into the whole thing and I was freaking out for not being able to have a better logistical system and then I figured out that I’m just a guy in his 30s who’s investing too much time in a videogame that is meant for people to relax while playing with trains.