This. All you need is an element of gambling and actual interesting stuff to discover.
I think the question is misleading - a sense of exploration isn't something you can magic in with style or slick user interface. You either are discovering stuff that was unknown and made you curious or you don't.
Wavinator: I can't say I've played rogue specifically much either, I was using it as a fill-in for the roguelike of your choice: Angband,Nethack,Powder... If you're interested in PCG, I'd consider the genre much 'required reading'.
Poker is really an excellent example, as it meets the basic requirements of exploration, but doesn't 'feel' like it fits. There's excitement as you wait for the last card to be flipped, but it doesn't fill me with a sense of exploration. A few reasons why: the competitive feeling overwhelms the exploratory feeling, you're exploring a well established fixed set, and it comes down to discrete, high impact moments.
If exploring the alien ruins always comes down to (they die | nothing there | $5,000 artifact found) I think you'd lose the exploratory feeling pretty fast as the player learns the rules behind this and it becomes more of a slot machine. I'm reminded of various strategy games where your units get upgraded as they survive battles: You choose if your scout becomes a horse archer or a knight. The first time through that's a very exciting moment: what can he become? How will it help me? But a second playthrough and you know the unit progressions, so it's just a strategic choice instead of something new. Roguelikes use randomized items as way of always giving you something new.
Consider the last card flipped in Texas Hold'Em: This happens at a known moment in the game, and defines whether you've got a J high or a straight. So you've got the reward, but you know precisely when you'll learn it. Contrast again with Civ: you'll explore thousands of tiles in the course of game, any set of which might turn out to be a great city location. Same with roguelikes, where any monster could be holding that powerful new artifact. While not a requirement for the exploratory mood, it definitely contributes.
Applying this to your alien temple example: the player should stumble across it instead of knowing its location all along. You want lots of different events that could arise: different traps left behind, different treasures. Ideally the exploration should take an unknown timespan, so you get updates, any one of which might be the big one. If the temple ends up tying into some pre-existing back story (This must be where the cyborgs were built!), so much the better. The more variation in what you can get, the better: different alien artifacts are ok, but if you can also find a fountain of youth or a robot army to lead or release a star-devouring worm, the exploration would be that much cooler.
By what you said in response to the Small Worlds game, this is about a single screen showing the results of exploration, not a single screen to explore, right? I think it could feel like I was exploring the world that contained that site, but not the site itself. I think it comes down to player interaction, not danger or world building or whatever.
It's sort of like the poker example. There's no sense of exploration as cards are revealed because that's something that happens without player input, almost something that happens to the player. The sense of exploration comes in poking and prodding your opponents' cards through the betting, the player acting on something else. Like the X-com example, too. The research feels like exploration not because it feels like I did the research when it says, "Hey, research happened!" but because I directed the research to occur. The sense of exploration isn't in the static screen but in the action that lead it to appear.
Myst is maybe a good example, too. It's mostly static screens (a few puzzles included some limited animation). The sense of exploration came from navigating these static screens. Room escape games also give a sense of exploration and often only show static screens.
I don't think that a sense of danger or the nature of the reward has much to do with the sense of exploration. I think those aspects have more to do with providing a motivation to do the exploration than the sense of exploration itself. If all I'm going to get from exploration in an RPG is a little pocket change, I might not do it because it's easier, faster, and more interesting to fight a few monsters. Myst had little danger, but created a sense of wonder to reward exploration.
I think it's all in the unknown. Fundamental information theory - if you always get exactly what you expect that you learn nothing, discover nothing. You have to mind SNR (signal-to-noise ratio). If everything is "awesome" then really everything is mediocre.
I'll reference Master of Orion. It's essentially a single screen of stars and what makes it 'discovery' is you have to 1) initiate exploration, 2) wait, 3) discovery an unknown, typically mediocre, sometimes bad, sometimes good, rarely very bad, rarely very good. All the better if some amount of skill is involved in order to make the discovery or affect the outcome.
The key thing is there is a clear /differentiation/ in what you discover and you can tell what is better and what is crap. When it's too complicated to tell it all becomes crap again and the sense is lost - you're not finding something /better/ just different (and mediocre)
In MoO even when you find something mediocre, it helps you work towards getting to something better (quality planets) so you usually /gain something/ even if it's not great.
The same thing with phat lewt in WoW or EverQuest.
- The trade-off between price and quality does not exist in Japan. Rather, the idea that high quality brings on cost reduction is widely accepted.-- Tajima & Matsubara
"Poker is really an excellent example, as it meets the basic requirements of exploration, but doesn't 'feel' like it fits. There's excitement as you wait for the last card to be flipped, but it doesn't fill me with a sense of exploration. A few reasons why: the competitive feeling overwhelms the exploratory feeling, you're exploring a well established fixed set, and it comes down to discrete, high impact moments."
You're not "exploring" what cards are coming on the board - you're exploring how out of his %#$%ing mind villain is. It's a complicated game and you get lots of not very significant clues about how he plays and thinks and you have to assemble that into something coherent and make decisions based on that. It's detective work, no question about it.
I do agree about it not "feeling" explorily like, strange new worlds, curious alien life forms and mysterious redheads, so perhaps I am wrong and there is a component of style here.
I think menu-based exploration really only works when you're involved with many different tasks at the same time. Take a look at those online browser MMORPG games where you select from menus what to build and when. These games are exciting because there is so much going on at the same time. You have a real sense of urgency to build & explore because if you don't, you're going to get wiped out. Let's say you send out an exploration party to an enemy base to see what their tech level is or what they're building -- well, there's a real sense of danger in that because they know that they're being scouted and that they might retaliate. At the same time as the scouting party is deployed, you're also scouting other people, queuing up units, planning a course of attack with your team mates, etc. However, if the only thing you can do in your game is control the actions of one scouting party via menus.. well that's not exciting. You're just playing windows explorer there's no real impact as to what you're doing.
Does Poker lack an 'exploratory' feel because of its rules, or because it fails to follow 'exploratory' conventions about space ships or archeologists with whips? It's interesting to imagine poker wrapped up in another game: does it meet this somewhat intangible 'sense' of exploration? I'll use Texas Hold'em as an example, it could be any variant.
Imagine a game where you've got a cache of points, which translate into your ship, crew and weapons. You gain 50 points, and maybe that's a new navigator and laser cannon.
You pay your blinds as 'wages' to go on an expedition. You get your two cards. Then you and opponents representing fate/other explorers make your bets. Again, points translate into something game specific, in this case challenges. Maybe the first round of betting concerns getting to the site. 50 points becomes a pirate. 200 points becomes a blackhole. You can see a bet to rise to the challenge: The pirate ship kills your navigator and damages your laser cannon, but you carry on. Or you flee, accepting any damage you've sustained so far.
Each round of betting would bring you closer to the treasure: Challenges on the planet, challenges in the ancient ruins, etc. At any point you can flee. Once the round reaches a conclusion, the winner of the hand gets the points in the pot, represented by some sort of alien artifact, or fame that translates to more crew members or political influence. It's just poker, but instead of raising you $10, I raise you 10 points, which semi-randomly turns out to be a tribe of spear wielding aliens guarding a golden statue.
I'm inclined to still view it as having less of a sense of exploration then other rule sets, but what do other people think? Would that be sufficient?
Original post by Way Walker I don't think that a sense of danger or the nature of the reward has much to do with the sense of exploration. I think those aspects have more to do with providing a motivation to do the exploration than the sense of exploration itself. If all I'm going to get from exploration in an RPG is a little pocket change, I might not do it because it's easier, faster, and more interesting to fight a few monsters. Myst had little danger, but created a sense of wonder to reward exploration.
Your Myst example and point on interactivity got me thinking: In terms of the aesthetic / "feeling" of exploring, what would Myst be if you took out the puzzles but left in all the discovery of the history as well as the individual locations? Aside from whether or not it would be a game or fun, would that capture the essence of exploration?
I think it would if only because you don't know what's beyond the next screen. Even presenting the player with a single photo-realistic vista wouldn't be enough because all the information can be apprehended at once. So I think the idea raised here that there needs to be some sense of anticipation, some forced delay is very important.
--------------------Just waiting for the mothership...
Original post by Shannon Barber The key thing is there is a clear /differentiation/ in what you discover and you can tell what is better and what is crap. When it's too complicated to tell it all becomes crap again and the sense is lost - you're not finding something /better/ just different (and mediocre)
Hmmmm... this is a very good point, and I think it's directly proportional to the depth of the actual exploration node. You can't reasonably have 100 different planet types in something like MoO in part because the gameplay depends on spreading out across the map. Too much information to process, too much noise. Nor could there be dozens of planets in every solar system for the same reason.
Obviously this changes depending on the focus of the game. An adventure-oriented game might have more tolerance for more "noise" than a strategic one due to time pressure. But even still your point about clear differentiation is very important and would apply just as much when exploration of a given node (say levels of an alien temple) is detailed, as each room or area would contribute to the overall noise.
--------------------Just waiting for the mothership...
