#like even zelda games where you have less options and linear progression feel less restrictive bc like. they don't fucking punish you.

[zelda-posting]

tears of the kingdom could have been so good if it were built around like, its story or its characters instead of being a clunky shell to show off the mechanic no one asked for that it forces you to use

[thepillareddark]

Nintendo’s Closed Open Worlds

I’ve always been sceptical about “Open Worlds” in games. When you heard ‘open world’ as a child and wanted to play an open world game it was usually because you’d been playing level-based games which felt hugely restrictive and linear, and an open world sounded like an actual place to be in, where actions aren’t linear, and where you can do whatever you want.

Two of those things follow, and the other doesn’t. Open worlds give you freedom of movement (for the most part, they still don’t open up bounded areas and have limits at their borders) and give you freedom of time (because you can do things in whatever order you want) but they don’t give you freedom of activity. The following point I will make is going to sound tautologous for a bit, but the reason it sounds like that is because I’m pointing out something that lies right at the foundation of video games and the limitations of the medium which people always FORGET about. They then try to describe videogames after having forgot those basic limitations and then make mistakes. I’m going to take Animal Crossing and Breath of the Wild as my examples in order to make the point that open world doesn’t really mean open, it just means that you can pick the order of certain things you do and don’t do.

In Animal Crossing, the great promise is of a life sim where there are no goals, and where you can take your time, and where there is no win condition, and where like in real life you can do more or less what you want. Any player of Animal Crossing, casual or not, will tell you that that is all patently false, because there obviously is a kind of win condition (max everything out and pay off your debts) even if it’s not explicit, and there are clearly many goals given to you, and there is a lot to progress with. It’s actually not at all unlike a normal video game, it just isn’t as pointed about the goals it gives you. To say you’re free because you don’t have to do those goals is the same as saying you can just put the game down and go do something else- the point is to play, and playing in Animal Crossing depends on jumping through hoops like appeasing villagers and selling fish. When you’re playing and your game-brain is activated, then that’s what you WANT to do because those are the goals in front of you. Sure, you never have to do anything, but anyone who plays the game does do all that stuff, so that freedom of not doing anything at all performs a strange, brilliant trick of vanishing entirely.

What is your freedom, then? You can pick what order to do stuff in, and you can pick what stuff you do and don’t do, and you can take your time, and you can do whatever you want. How many of these are we being honest about? Picking what order to do stuff in is definitely a type of freedom- we will put that to one side. Picking what stuff you do and don’t do is also a kind of freedom- you can never plant flowers and just be obsessed with catching fish, as eight year old me was.

Being able to take your time is a type of freedom which many games afford you, and which isn’t actually true in Animal Crossing. In Doom Eternal I can stop during a level and just stand there, and as long as it’s a bit with no enemies, I can literally stand there until judgement day. If my computer doesn’t crash I can spend three years playing the same level in one take. Curiously enough Animal Crossing is the same as this in general but also far less free. I actually can’t stand still because a huge number of things are either time pressured or time locked, because it’s locked into an active clock. There’s stuff I can only do in Winter which I’m scuppered for if it’s Summer, and if I stay in a shop for too long I get chucked out if it’s too late. It becomes night-time, weather changes, weeds grow, villagers forget my name. I can take my time only in so far as I can take as many years as I like to pay my debt without Tom Nook ever taking legal action.

So what about being able to do whatever you want to do?

This has always been the great promise of Open World games because the human brain always wants to put freedom of actions alongside freedom of space in a given world. ‘GTA is just like real life, because if there’s a world, there are cars, and if there are cars I can buy them, steal them from people on the street, crash them off ramps, blow stuff up etc.”. The mental formula goes that if a thing exists then you can go to it and do things to it. gWhenever we are given a ‘realistic’ version of the world it will necessarily be ‘open’, as the real world is, and we expect that to be paired with the other quality of reality, which is being able to do whatever I wanted to do if I really wanted to.

In video games this has always been patently false because of a really basic fact: you can only do what was programmed into the game. In Animal Crossing I can plant flowers or not plant flowers, I can pick them, run them over, water them, give them to people, buy them, sell them, put them into patterns, horde 10,000 flowers, as I choose. But I can’t burn them, pick one petal from them, examine them, throw them up in a weird way and catch them. Those aren’t options because they weren’t programmed in.

On a slightly more macro level than that Animal Crossing and other life sims and GTA and others only give you set activities and sections within the game which you can develop and explore into. As Open World games get bigger and more elaborate developers try to cover every little bit: You can own a house, take a shit, change your clothes, own property, get married, kill people, fly to distant stars. You can do everything, except you can’t. For Animal Crossing this is helpfully limited for the purpose of my argument because there are only really five or six things you can really DO, and they all tie into gameplay loops. Try actually counting up what you can DO in Animal Crossing, and the list is incredibly limited.

So what’s my point? My point is that Nintendo create extremely restricted open world and push them to people as ‘you can do anything’ simulators while actually only opening up sequence and not opening up ability. Nintendo open worlds give Freedom of Time, but not Freedom of Activity. Animal Crossing (and I think this is a sentiment that will feel familiar to anyone who plays it) stays just enough off of your back most of the time for you to think it’s the safe, free, happy world which the fanbase wants to think it is. It’s actually more or less the same as any other Nintendo game, because if you buy it then you buy it in order to do the activities and play it, and if you pause to look at the sunset then you’re only actually wasting your own time in-between doing the stuff the game ‘wants’ you to do. It gives you freedom to elongate the time as much as you want between objectives, and to pick the objectives (a bit of fishing here, a bit of gardening there) to the point of endless deferral, but it doesn’t ever lock off those objectives or remove them. People who pause to look at the sunset in Zelda or AC quantify that as freedom to stop and smell the flowers just because of that activity itself- pausing. Taking a moment to delay the gameplay loop and exercising their freedom of time to pause (they use the word themselves) the activity-progress of the game itself.

The obvious objection here is that all games do this, in that in my earlier example I could take three years on a Doom Eternal level without ever completing my objective and just be extending my freedom of time inbetween objectives. That would be an objection I heartily agree to, because it makes my point that by giving increased freedom of time and sequence Nintendo have created the impression of a free open world while not really being different to ‘normal’ level-based videogames.

What Nintendo did NOT spend time doing with Animal Crossing or with this Animal Crossing in particular, even eight years after New Leaf and endless power on the Switch, is actually open up freedom of activity. The activities haven’t really changed since Wild World, they’ve just been built upon marginally. They didn’t add minigames, or boat building, or marriage or anything. Once you notice that you notice how smart a game Nintendo are crafting, and notice their less is more understanding of gameplay loops, you start to realise what it is that makes them unsurpassed and why they can have everyone waiting eight years for a new Animal Crossing game which adds nothing but sucks in their attention while other endless life sims and wannabes come and go. You have to wait for a new building to go up, wait for flowers and trees, wait for turnip prices, hold on for eight years while they make the next one. Animal Crossing makes you wait for it.

Breath of the Wild is an easier way to make my point, because Zelda games have very obviously never ever been open world even though they have been open world since the first game on the NES (like Metroid, actually). What happens in a Zelda game before they ‘went Open World’ with BOTW was that you would progress linearly through dungeons in a thin hub world and earn abilities in a very strict sequence, while being tricked into thinking that your own experience was divergent and unique and different to anyone else’s adventure, and that it was an open world because you could go to a town inbetween dungeons to buy bombs and complete side-quests as you choose.

BOTW masterfully opens up sequence without opening up world. If Zelda used to be:

1-2-3-4-5-6

BOTW makes it:

1-3-5-2-6, then a while later 5

Or if you like, or are a speedruner, BOTW now allows:

1-6

Which is just running straight at Ganon once you get off the plateau. It has provided freedom of time because you can cut out main objectives as you like, and stretch time out as much as you like inbetween activities. One of the main jokes from people who play BOTW is that Zelda desperately wants help after you wake up but all the player is doing is running around collecting way too many Koroks and making her wait another three years. The game’s own narrative is locked into the idea of you being conscious of wasting time between a clear set objective. Nintendo actually made it so that you could see Hyrule castle from every main landmark in the game.

In fact, by making objectives, environmental set pieces and activities optional Nintendo has brilliantly flipped the openness. I don’t have the option to do extra stuff in this open world, I have the option to not do it. I used to HAVE to do the water temple to beat the game. In BOTW, I don’t have to do the water temple at all. But there isn’t a fifth optional temple, is there? There aren’t infinite extra dungeons in this world which is as rich as reality. I just have the option to not complete activities, activities which the game is obviously not fully complete without, like the four divine beasts. There is hardly anything you can do in BOTW which you can’t do in previous Zeldas- and most of it is just programming set pieces anyway, and not true freedom. I can cook fish now, but that’s just hitting A in front of a campfire. If that sounds reductionist and stupid, then it is, because that’s the point I’m making- think about what the freedom actually being afforded is, even if that depends turning back on yourself to realise how thin videogames usually are, and what sort of brilliant, unexpected answers are employed to make them feel free and fun. Nintendo, walled garden creators as they are, knew how little they had to open up the gameplay loops to create the impression of openness.