dudeguythethird-blog - Tumblr blog

[dudeguythethird-blog]

Is Anthem's biggest divergence from Destiny’s formula that important?

The similarities between Destiny and Anthem are obvious to anyone with any familiarity with the games. Anthem appears to be taking many of Destiny’s ideas and running with them: there is a ‘safe’ human settlement that is high up and has big walls around it to keep out dangerous wildlife, you play as a special dude of some variety who has abilities and goes out and kills said wildlife. For doing so, you get loot.

However, there are of course differences, some of them seemingly important. One difference is that Anthem is a third person action game that is first person in the social space. Destiny is third person in the social space and first in the actual game. Brilliant. That’s innovation baby. No, so I consider this one of the less presient differences. Obviously first person and third person games play differently. But in this case it looks like it won’t be that different. For example this seems to be the ‘run around and don't worry about cover’ style of third person shooter that was the norm 10 years ago, and was all but obliterated by Gears of War. Thanks to changes in the ways developers approach movement it has recently returned in more refined forms. Like in, unsurprisingly, Bioware’s Mass Effect Andromeda. I think there is a more clear and fundamental difference between third person shooters of the Gears of War variety and fps than between third person shooters of this variety and fps.

In all instances the basic thing you are doing is shooting enemies. But in the Gears style of third person shooters you have these predetermined ‘safe spots’ which are the cover. You end up spending a lot of time in these spots picking off the dudes. There is then a layer of strategy one has to employ when deciding whether to break cover, to risk leaving its relative safety for a potential big reward, chiefly an easy kill. You are also forced out of cover by flanks and grenades. In the ‘run around and don’t worry about cover’ style of third person shooter and, it is my contention, in FPS one does not have these predetermined safe spots in the same way. There is cover of course. But one does not snap into it in a binary fashion and generally will end up using it in a freeform way. Adaptively trying to put it between you and the bad guys mid firefight rather than just hunkering down behind it and taking potshots.

Obviously these rules are not hard and fast. But in the cases of the games being discussed it looks like it might well apply. So that’s why I’m not thinking of the perspective shift as a particularly important difference between these two games. One that really could be however, is the open world. Now Destiny is not really in possession of such a world, I think it is fair to say. It has large hubs that you can freely explore but you can’t move between all of the content in the game without going through a loading screen. In fact, all the main content, the essential and fun content, while often set on these maps, has to be accessed through a menu. So the action is consistently broken up by, admittedly flashy, loading screens. As a result any feeling of being in a “vast open world” is incidental to the way in which the game presents its content and has more to do with the cohesive aesthetic and tone of all the activities. Anthem appears to be trying to go full open world. This I am inferring from the giant vista that the trailer front loads. As well as the icons that litter it (seemingly to indicate activities scattered throughout the world) and the voiceover where the player mentions coming back to a harder challenge later. In short the trailer was quite clearly trying to say “look! We’ve got a real open world, not like destiny”.

So my question then is this: is this really a meaningful difference? I think the honest answer to that question is to say that it all depends on execution. Over the last 5 or so years open world games have seemingly asserted themselves as almost the de facto big triple a genre. It has become a hackneyed clique to hear some developer at E3 announce that their game is going open world and that yes, really, you can visit that hill over there. This has led to a growing cynicism among players about the essential merits of open world design. What was at first something one could get excited about in and of itself: open world design has become a bullet point many treat with trepidation. This is largely due to the trend itself. Developers and publishers saw that saying their game was open world caused an immediate positive response and thus, without thought made more open world games. There is, to my mind, no better example of this than Ubisoft, who made it their mission to release only open world games. The upshot being that the design of these open worlds makes them little more than destiny’s menus. The worlds are just space between the content. Space that it takes time to traverse which is tedious. It is also space, which once traversed, often doesn’t even yield any interesting content, merely the 10th iteration of a challenge.

My point is that unless Anthem can prove that its open world has been sensibly designed, as a cohesive space rather than glorified menu then it is of little advantage to the game. You might as well use a destiny style menu, it’s a hell of a lot quicker after all. I would bet that the developers of Destiny realised this at some point during development and added menu access for all major content. The presence of the largely empty open maps potentially indicate a shift in objective. So it is a strong move for Bioware to come out swinging and say “yes, we’re making a destiny-like game but we’ve actually done the open world properly”. I just hope they realize that “doing an open world properly” means more than having one big seamless environment, it’s about how that environment fits together.

Interesting open worlds can be logically constructed, to mimic a realistic environment. Exploring them is interesting because it is satisfying to observe the attention to detail. I would cite Fallout New Vegas as an example of one such world. Developers can also justify an open world by making it an unrealistic but fun sandbox (like Zelda: Breath of the Wild). These are but two ways of doing it. What really needs to be achieved is a world that is entertaining to move through through visuals and ideally gameplay too and one which incentivises exploration of it. There is definitely hope for them succeeding on the first score. It is clear from this trailer that much of the exploration will be done from the air in an Iron Man like fashion. Allegedly this flight will be, to some extent, skill based. That is important but what’s really important is as I have already said, the content in the world and how it is structured. Will the game compel me and my posse of Iron Men to fly over that next mountain in search of even danker loot? Let’s hope so.

I really do think this is the key to success with an open world. A vast world with no restrictions really only brings exploration to the table, so if a game includes one, there better be a reason to explore.