• they/them

back alley noise dealer, aspiring cyborg ninja, games understander


applecinnabun
@applecinnabun

so i recently played Chorus! it's an open-world-ish spaceship fighty game, and there's a lot that could be said about it, but i've got one in particular i want to write a post on.

when people talk about ubisoft style open world design, they usually don't mean anything positive by it. but if you ask for specifics, people (including me) have a hard time expressing exactly what's so wrong with a ubisoft open world, but chorus taught me something i think is important about why open world maps succeed or fail... by failing in a way i don't think anyone would have said if asked, "what's wrong with ubisoft maps?"


(disclaimer: this is not a hate post. i think chorus has some serious problems but also some incredible strengths. like, from now on, if you're making a zero-g combat game that doesn't use chorus' control scheme, i think you need to justify why not. it's that good)

the first things people are likely to say about why ubisoft maps are bad, are "cliche go to the tall tower and collect a map piece" and "big empty world with nothing to find in it," but i don't think either of those are really the heart of the issue, personally. i've had plenty of fun exploring worlds that do the map tower thing! is it actually so wrong for the developer to flagpole a point of interest, to introduce you to a section of the environment as a first taste, before giving you the map and therefore the tools to chart your own path from there? i don't think so.

and while people accuse ubisoft style open worlds of having nothing to find, i don't think that's actually true either. they have tons of things to "find." you're inundated with map markers and side-"content" that doesn't really feel worth doing. so what gives? what's the actual problem?

well chorus helped me find my answer to this by giving me the unmistakeable "oh god AAA open world map design" feeling without even doing the map tower thing. you just get the map for free. and there's certainly stuff to find, you pick any direction and you'll find things. many of those things are better written and more fun to play than the main story thread is, even!

i realized that my actual problem with it has to do with pacing. chorus is positively desperate to make sure you never get bored. you can feel the level designers having an anxiety attack about it through the screen.

the game encourages the use of a radar ping button which auto-populates a huge area around you with every possible map marker it can find, because they're afraid you'd get bored if you had to actually fly around and look for things. the map is so dense with "content" (a word literally used in game, in choice little immersion breakers like "Now Loading Content...") that completely disparate sidequests will be literally a stone's throw away from one another.

here's two kids who want to race, and you'll lecture them on being too keen to fight in a war, here's a ruins where you listen to audiologs about a failed science lab, here's a crash landed ship that needs your help to recover. these three things are all on screen at the same time, like they occupy the same strip mall. maybe those kids should have helped you with your crash landing?

it's just an absolute firehose blast of key-jingling to make completely sure you never have a moment alone with your thoughts. it feels desperate, condescending, and a little predatory in terms of what the designers' opinions on my agency/attention span must be! and that's what gives it the AAA feeling without some of the hallmarks of the modern ubisoft formula that we'd be tempted to point to as an explanation for why they feel bad to play, i think.


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in reply to @applecinnabun's post:

yeah, it's exactly that. people often describe the symptom of this approach - the towers and all - but those are just there to make absolutely, positively sure that players won't miss out on the Hundreds of Hours of Content that the devs put in because, as you and that funny guy on the internet said, boredom is a crime

(hell, Far Cry 5 introduced random enemy encounters spawns so even if you stand completely still at some point you'll have something jangling all up in your face)

to me the issue is the checklist-y approach of it all. i play games to have fun and see some great design at work, but those games tend to treat themselves as a list of things to check off to give you a sense of accomplishment. and i can't deal with that