It feels like open world games have been having a bit of an extended, existential crisis these past few years. Like there’s a sense that something within the classic formula of big maps, question marks and to-be-coloured-in icons that’s served us so well, back through The Witcher 3 and Skyrim to at least The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, isn’t quite working. That a change or evolution – if not outright ripping-up revolution – of some kind is necessary for the genre to thrive. But also, a bit of a problem: that the games wrestling with these bold new frontiers of mapmaking don’t really know what that new, evolved form ought to be.
I’m choosing to place the blame for this squarely with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a game so momentously influential in its design that it’s really a cliché now to even mention it. But mention it I must! Because as we all remember, Breath of the Wild was the first big-budget, third-person, open world action game in the post-Skyrim landscape to come out and do something properly different with its structure – and succeed in doing so. It did this by shedding systems of incrementally ever-increasing gear numbers for tiers of self-destructing twigs, and dropping the mass of map icons so heavily relied on by most of its contemporaries for something less prescriptive, more topographical. A map that drew your eye with its contoured details and curious formations, rather than literal waypoints, for an approach that we all decided in joyous union was much more artful.
And from there it all got a bit messy. Open-worlders took different stabs at borrowing from Zelda, more often than not landing somewhat strangely on including a paraglider, of all things. No game summarised this more aptly than Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, the last full-sized Assassin’s Creed offering from Ubisoft and in some ways perhaps also the strangest. Valhalla’s approach to maps and discovery baffled and fascinated: beginning as a fogged-out wash of south-easterly English parchment, gradually this map unveiled its alternative to the Big Question Mark problem. We can’t just stick a load of mystery boxes on there anymore, I’m assuming the discussion went, because it’s all a bit too low-brow – so what do we do? Well, we keep them on there but replace them with glowing dots instead: silver for, erm, something, and gold for when there’s rare loot.
The result was a little murky, an actually quite fascinating idea, blending two almost diametrically opposed approaches to discovery into one – the icon-and-question-mark maximalism of prior Assassin’s Creeds such as Odyssey with the wistful minimalism of Zelda – into something that ultimately landed on neither the former’s convenience nor the latter’s romance. So many games in this loosely post-Skyrim period have got themselves into such a tizz over how they implement their open worlds, as they’ve found themselves in everything from Halo and Gears of War to God of War and Call of Duty. So many more have become even more puzzled by Breath of the Wild, and this endless struggle between a will to make things painless for a player and, I’ve always suspected, a nagging belief that actually, getting your players to think about things actively might be best. Ubisoft, so brutally maligned for its commitment to a very specific, aptly ubiquitous open-world structure of tower-climbing and icon-revealing, has arguably suffered the most, caught in this tangle of opposing ideas and lost identities as a result.
The issue was, and is, that the real problem is really only question mark-adjacent. The critique of this approach was really of the entire philosophy of Assassin’s Creed games, and beyond that, the many open worlds, Ubisoft and otherwise, that both preceded and followed it. Namely: passivity. You play these games on autopilot, as exemplified in recent Assassin’s Creeds so perfectly by the fact you could even set your horse to auto-run to your selected destination, a comfortable hands-free experience that let you blast yourself with a couple more dopamine hits from your phone in between crunching skulls, popping loot and cracking open chests.
Your mindset as a player here, in games that woo you into passive mode, isn’t to discover, investigate, experiment and enquire, as much as it is to be regularly presented with gameplay by the game in rhythmic, perfectly-timed intervals. For most, if not always all hints of friction to be lubricated into oblivion by all the soothing, massaging tools in the box. That means question marks for the nose-leading lures, yes, but also GTA-style sat-nav directions to get you there; pinned bullet-point objective reminders in the top-left; instant fast-travel; diegetic icons above all interactable characters’ heads; chests that make sounds; loot that teleports itself to your magic stores when you forget to collect it; and, naturally, good old yellow paint on the climbable ledges. Each a kind of silent homage to the big, invisible Bioshock arrow in the sky. In other words: feed me; do not make me hunt – unless the hunting feels like feeding as well.
Again, all of this is pretty well-worn discussion now. We had it with the great high-brow critics’ sigh of relief when Breath of the Wild came out and all the (somewhat misplaced) hope it inspired for more inventive triple-A action-adventure designs (guilty). And in the simmering discontent at said yellow paint splashes whenever they come splattering (also guilty). But also, even in comments from quite brilliant game directors themselves, too.
“Travel is boring? That’s not true. It’s only an issue because your game is boring. All you have to do is make travel fun,” Dragon’s Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno told IGN, when asked about fast travel early last year, damning an entire modern discipline in a sentence. “That’s why you place things in the right location for players to discover, or come up with enemy appearance methods that create different experiences each time, or force players into blind situations where they don’t know whether it’s safe or not 10 metres in front of them.” In time, the discussion has become distilled, as it always does, into a kind of analytical truism: hands-off, Breath of the Wild-style discovery good; Ubisoft-style hand-holding bad.
Well, I disagree. Or really I somewhat disagree, but that doesn’t sound as interesting. The hands-off approaches of modern Zelda games, of Dragon’s Dogma 2, and the smaller-scale efforts influenced in that direction – think: Sable – are wonderful, yes. Bordering on genius in fact. I think they are in most senses ‘better’, requiring more sophistication and nuance in design, or at least more wilful engagement from you as a player – this isn’t me going all relativism on you about how everything’s just like, your opinion, man. But, also: it would be wrong to say there isn’t some genius in there, somewhere, amongst the Ubisofts of this world.
It’s a tougher sell to describe, mind. Picture this: you’re galloping through the tree-dappled hills of outer Osaka towards a distant landmark – the masterly, swooping tenshu of Osaka Castle, perhaps – when you spot a troubled villager by an overturned cart next to the road. You hop off for a quick chat and, a bit of conversational guesswork later, you blag some intel out of them on rumours of a stray dog nearby in need of comforting. The dog’s in the other direction to the castle, you note on looking at the freshly-added marker on your increasingly thronging map, but it’s a bit closer; the castle can wait.
So off you go to find this dog, and a little quest ensues as you’d expect, and then you’re up a hill and close to an eagle tower (we still got ’em!) that could do with unlocking, so you scurry off to do that, and now more of your foggy map’s been cleared and more question marks appear, the last couple in the area, which bugs you. And so you think: better go clear off those question marks since I’m nearby! And those question marks lead to more quests, which are near more eagle towers…
This stuff is the opposite of intentionality, the opposite of control, arguably the opposite even of empowerment, or fulfilment. When games like modern Assassin’s Creeds and other Ubi fare get described as “junk food” there is more accuracy there than people realise – though arguably the better term for it is snack food. A good snack isn’t fulfilling, after all. Good snacks are moreish! And they’re moreish by design, engineered with ultra-processed precision to keep those orange-dusted fingers scrabbling back into the bowl.
I referenced a brilliant blog last week on the ways games have been designed towards addiction, not just in the obvious gambling-adjacent methods but in the many video game-specific ones, from the brain tickle of levelling-up to the creaking open of a chest, and the way these sister industries aim not to keep you spending, but playing, through the constant trickle of mini-rewards. You can chuck map icons and question marks in there too – the same fizzing urge to tear open the sidequest-shaped booster pack and see what task lies within – but this only leads to another question. Is all this, actually, a bad thing?
This is where it gets more interesting, and more complicated. The argument against is similar, but not identical, to the argument against those finger-staining snacks. It’s an argument based on immediate harms, one, but also of a kind of systemic control wielded over you. Going back to that analogy: by engineering food in such a way as to be perpetually moreish, purposefully unfulfilling, you are being manipulated into eating and buying more and more of it. Bad for your health, yes, but also bad in a deeper kind of way, bad because of the numbing effect of it all, the smoothing away of any real, conscious choice, the images of zombified grazing it conjures; bad for your spirit.
So it goes, this argument would say, for games like Assassin’s Creed and the rest. To be sucked into this zen loop of discovering, following, discovering, following again is to be stupified by it. And so, one, there’s that immediate harm – sitting for hours longer than intended is as lethal as anything in our diets, we’re told, but hey we’re all used to that now – and perhaps more pressingly the spiritual one. Here, in this temple of escapism, your senses are dulled, your awareness of and righteous outrage at the wider world and its endless injustices muted, your will to effect really meaningful change sapped away by the endless discovery loop. All the spare minutes you’d typically use with purpose instead tumbling into another hour spent climbing big, beautifully rendered digital trees and jumping off them again.
Is this actually bad, then? Well, it depends. We’ve been dulling our senses for centuries, after all. If I weren’t busy shanking nasty Samurai in Assassin’s Creed: Shadows this past week, I might instead have been soaking in a hot bath, taking a little walk, or cracking open my Fellowship of the Ring 4K Blu-ray steelcase for the 247th time. Or maybe eating some crisps. We have a duty not to escape ourselves out of existence, absolutely, and the need to push back against it is absolutely heightened by the sheer volume of acutely tuned devices, systems and programs sucking all the attention out of our free time.
But we also have a duty to rest between struggles, to treat ourselves, and to appreciate the artistry of a big, fat, dripping burger of a video game as well. This is all part of the cosmic mix. It’s good we’re asking questions about it, good we’re drawing lines in the sand, good we’re waking up to the ways we’re being conditioned or unplugged. And also good that developers such as Ubisoft are becoming more comfortable with their place amongst all this, as purveyors of slightly baser kinds of fun.
Where’s the genius in all this then? Well, there’s equal pleasure to be had in placing yourself at the top of a long and intricately crafted water slide, closing your eyes, letting its over-chlorinated waters wash over you, being whisked away down the spiralling tunnel of fun and giving yourself over to a cheap, simple, but thoroughly earned smile. As long as it’s your choice going into it. There’s a place for this kind of video game, and you don’t need permission to let yourself love it. We just need balance. Osaka Castle can wait, after all, until I choose to tackle it on my own terms.
