I have started considering this after playing oblivion for the past week. I feel that in oblivion, I have no relationship with the evnironment. first of all, I can fast travel from any location to most other locations without ever having gone there or knowing anything about the place. secondly, let me say if i do travel somewhere on foot, it's generally just a passing through of most areas. if there is a lake on the way i just pass by it and pay no heed to it. i pass trees and all sorts of scenery and pay it no heed. i pass ruins and pay them no heed. why is this? is it my fault? could be. i have no interest in these places because i have a destination and i want to get there and i am going pretty quickly because it takes bloody ages. not to mention there are no paths or decent directions to most places so it is usually a beeline to that place. going over cliffs, etc. they pose no obstacle really and neither do rivers or anything. I may as well be flying most of the time. so the environment poses no real obstacle, and on top of that it holds no real treasure. i could collect teh plants but i could also buy them and it takes a lot longer to gather some herb than it does to purchase it. not that i would know where to look for any specific herb anyway. so thats pointless really. beides, even if i do collect a herb, it doesn't really have anything to do with the environment, it's just an odd colelctable here and there i pick it up and continue. so what is it that creates a relationship with hte environment? I think about world of warcraft firstly. what makes me consider a link to the environment with this game is fishing. also, eating and drinking potions. there are periods of waiting in this game. and during that period of waiting i look at my character, i use some emotes and i look at how i am positioned in the environment. when fishing, I like to look for a nice scenic spot to fish. i sit down and i am in the role. I am in the character and in the world. there are other games where similar interactions occur. even something so simple as a path makes a big difference. in soething like zelda, a huge cliff give the environment some shape and character. then there are palces where there are wild animals moving around. what i found with oblivion is that it is just one large terrain map. but it has very little actual life. there was one moment where i was walking along and i heard a noise. I do not know what t was, maybe just ambience, but i imagined how nice it would be if i could walk into hte woods upon hearing that noise and find a woodcutter in the middle of a job. it would give the enviromnent some personality. I found that i really miss that. a way for me to go around the world and find a place. perhaps a special place for me. a place that is not necessarily marked on a map but somehwere my character can sit and just enjoy. i could perhaps put a chair there and maybe eat something. or drink something. also, there are no characters that can lead you to a place. perhaps you are looking for a local ruin. you may talk to a character and they say, tha tteh way is tough so they lead you there. there may be a hidden path down a rocky face. but these ruins that are in the middle of nowhere have no indication that they are there. in real life there would be at least something. maybe a dip in the landscape where a road used to be. or maybe a broken wall that is overgrown. there would be some hints and maybe even markings on old maps. in oblivion there is nothing to link to the environemnt. it seems so separated. do you know what i mean? it seems like the world is dead and i think that this is a huge lack in relationship with hte environment. it has no character. i think that in order for a player to feel part of a world like this there needs to be some way of interaction with the environment to create that relationship. what do you think about this? [Edited by - tremault on September 28, 2009 12:02:57 AM]

Ok, first of all run a spell checker before you post please. :)

I personally loved exploring the world of Cyrodil and going dungeon crawling, but I needed to be in a 'roleplaying' mood. I remember occasionally when riding across the landscape I would spot a deer, jump off my mount and start to stalk it. And collecting the relics from ruins scattered across Cyrodil for the man in the Imperial City.

Oblivion did a good job in my opinion with the woodcutter scenario you gave, since every character had a daily schedule. Sure it had some problems in that the world was predictable because everything had a place to be at a particular time, but I don't think any game has done a better job then them in that aspect.

I'm looking forward to seeing how they improve on the system in Elder Scrolls V.

Quote:

Original post by Thoughtless Ok, first of all run a spell checker before you post please. :)

I don't have a spell checker, I don't know where you could get one and I am dyslexic.

p.s. you spelled cyrodiil wrong. :P

Besides that, we can all understand each other fine. If you want to continue that conversation, let's not have it in this thread, it would detract from a very good topic (although a recommendation to switch to Firefox is always welcome, and would solve the problem).

I think that one of my favorite game environments would actually be in Myst. In every Myst game the environment was almost completely void of animal life, but the richness of the mystery and the story definitely overcompensated for that small deficit. Even moreso in Riven, in which every little detail of the worlds was either a clue or had a history behind it (although half the time it's anyone's guess what that history was).

I've been playing Beyond Good & Evil recently (Off topic, the version I got from GOG.com was a bit glitchy, does anyone know if the Steam version was patched?) and I'm actually kind of impressed by how interested the game keeps me in the world. Seeing the same faces in the towns, even ones I can't necessarily interact with, and watching them react to my accomplishments in the games keeps me enthralled. And besides those nice little touches, the game has just such a generally cool world. A world with as much personality as BG&E will always me immersive.

I think the problem you're referring to cannot be really solved in a viable, economic, large scale way. The lack of immersion wrt the environment comes from a design focus. Some RPGs are more combat-oriented than others, some are more puzzle-oriented, but -for example - I cannot recall a single one being "travelling oriented" to a point that for example one needs to plan where to pass the night.

I am clearly limiting on part of the problem. But think about it - if you and your friends ever went to some trekking, some of you will have considered the path you had to take, to ensure you reached a correct spot for lunch more or less at 12-13, that you reached your destination for the night.
You don't have to go to the mountain for this. Even if you just go cycling around the whole day you'll have to plan in advance where and when to stop.
And we're speaking about relatively safe or even civilized areas{1}.

The lack of this "strategic" importance clearly flattens the landscape a lot. Unfortunatly, users don't like the experience of travelling much (it is "gameplay good" but "user bad") - this is excerberated by the fact that, as you say, the landscape contains alot of room but at a certain point, not so many "perceived valuable" content. You can't just ignore the environment in the real world - the fact you do is that you typically move in very familiar zones - I would be surprised if a game actually required you to do so.

Good luck telling users that on this new RPG there's more emphasis on strategically planning your jurneys. They want to act 24/7, and once you've buffed your stamina enough, you can run for days without even sleeping with relatively small penalty.

Even if the landscape would play a major role, this still doesn't solve the "content" problem. Populating a large landscape with content ("perceived-valuable" assets) requires bloody amounts of creative thinking, and it's always going to break sooner or later.

For the specific example, I think that Morrowind immersed me way better than Oblivion (to the point I just played the latter maybe a day after a friend borrowed me its copy).



Note 1: Always approach nearby mountains with care. The road is also not really safe, but it should be in line of concept.

Thanks for the tip, I have fire-fox but didn't realise I could get a dictionary.

Thanks for the great in depth thoughts on this.
I really enjoyed the new perspectives.

I have been thinking about oblivion and I am thinking that there are some areas that do have you spending some more time in and become a bit more 'know-able'.

one thing I really do not like though, is that there is no place that I could possibly find that I could then expect to return to for any specific reason.
if I found a spot by a river that I like the shape of, I would actually have no feasible reason to return. I like the spot? so what. I could come back, stand around and then go again.
I guess a major part of my problem is that your character has no actions to perform to 'be in the world', along the lines of emotes in world of war craft, or in dark chronicle, the fishing.

anyhow to come back from my tangent, I have found that some areas to be more familiar. my house is certainly familiar. I store collectables in there.
I have a horde in the corner, it's quite entertaining.
I guess if I could be confident that items would stay in the world environment, I would go and take random objects and place them at a place in the map of my own choosing. I may try that.. I'm afraid of it not storing the data though.
I'm not sure if I can carry chairs... or tables....

It's difficult to make a game where the nature is just a wonder to observe (in real life it's one thing, but video games are still video games and woefully less impressive), but you can give the world meaning if the player can make a difference. Say you need to collect wood, so you go into the woods and cut down a tree, if the stump remained to rot away, and you can plant a tree and watch it grow over time. It's perhaps even more relevant than furniture because nature changes (that's it's nature), and slowly grows over and stuff happens.

Oddly, I think Animal Crossing had a tremendously immersive environment for exactly that reason. I myself haven't played Animal crossing in a while but both my 21-year-old brother and my 13-year-old sister can easily occupy themselves for hours wandering around the town and hunting for bugs, fish, and random treasures. Perhaps that's kind of close to Jonathan Blow's idea of an "unethical" game, but it really has a lot of meaning.

I really love the idea of planting a tree.
that sounds so wonderful. it's so simple yet would add so much.

I think a large part of the issue for me is that I have a 'spacial' thought methodology.
whenever I play games like resident evil, or zelda, or any kind of adventure game, I build my own map in my mind. I can usually find my way around easily where my friends get lost. I can also use short-cuts easily because of this.
so I guess this could be my main problem with something like oblivion. there is not enough solidity in the landscape for me to build mental geometry.
maps matter to me, and my own mental map is most important because it is how I relate to the world.
does anyone else work in this way or experienced anybody else who works in this fashion?

Mental maps are a well established concept in HCI (navigating a menu, performing a task, navigating a virtual environment)... so in line of concept every at least lazily designed application/game should give you the elements to build your map. I'm not 100% sure I get what you meant to say.

It is worth noticing that mental maps does not have to be "geometrical" in line of concept, although a geometrical line of thinking certainly maps well with pathfinding.

there's 2 methods of mental mapping.
there's the geometrical method, and then there's the waypoint method.

I don't feel that oblivion borrows itself to either method.

for waypoint mapping, the game doesn't really lead you to a destination via any major waypoints. signposts are sparse and the paths are not marked fully on any map. at times I find it pointless to follow a path because there is no sensible direction to it and no indication it will go remotely near my destination.

for geometrical mapping, the game doesn't really offer any solid boundaries in the environment. I can walk along a cliff face if I really want to and take it slowly. the only boundary is the annoying invisible boundary around the edge of the map.