Hocking Explores Video Game Exploration
May 14, 2007 3:47 PM | Simon Carless
Our more or less final GDC-conducted interview is up on big sister site Gamasutra today, and it's an interestingly detailed chat with Ubisoft's Clint Hocking, quizzing the Splinter Cell supremo about "...his influences, what we can learn from Oblivion, and how to create great games through "different flavors" of player exploration."
Hocking is an provocative thinker, and in the chat, he talks in particular on the advantages of the sandbox: "Spacial exploration isn't mandatory. It's not required in any game. It's a certain play style and a certain type of player who's interested in playing in that way. There are ways to design to support that well and ways to do it badly. I think it's pretty clear which games do it well. Grand Theft Auto, Oblivion, they make players who might not even be that kind of player become interested in the act of self-motivated exploration."
So what makes it worth finding new places in the world? Hocking has an answer: "Well, I talked a lot about exploration games needing to provide ubiquitous, low-value rewards. Oblivion, like I said, does that really well with alchemical ingredients. But what I didn't talk about, and I intentionally left it off to the side, was this idea that one of the things I did in Oblivion was I went to places just to get beautiful panoramas. I went to the highest mountain I could find just to see how far I could see. I went all the way to the sea at the bottom of the world just to see the sunset."
"Literally, I left my controller there and drank a beer while the sun set. There is no reward for that. It was just wanting to see what the game did and how it worked. So there is this other kind of reward which is just the feeling of this openness and seeing how rich the simulation is, which is something you can’t usually do in games."
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2 Comments
Reminds me of Noctis, the space sim where all you do is explore a massive procedurally-generated universe for the sheer thrill of seeing what you can find.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/54/15
I wonder what would happen if someone spent the resources to achieve the rich graphical splendor of Oblivion or Shadow of the Colossus while still using algorithms like Noctis's to ensure a fresh and unplanned experience. Or has that been done?
Shih Tzu | May 14, 2007 4:43 PM
I never really understood, why people use Oblivion as a prime example for exploration gameplay. Oblivion's exploration sucked. All places look more or less the same, after a few hours of play you start identifying the same buildin blocks used everywhere and the vista from mountain tops sucks, thanks to the bad lod scaling and the ugly textures on faraway places.
If you gonna talk about exploration in fantasy games, try Gothic2. You allways found something, if you veered off the path and tried to go places.
Granted, the graphics are a bit old now. But standing atop a mountain and seeing right into a town, knowing that you could run to the building you saw from there (as opposed to Oblivion's system, where towns and cities are actually sperate levels) is an invaluable assett for the suspension of disbelief.
Also, in Gothic2 you'd find hand placed loot, as opposed to randomly generated flower petals.
The things you found actually told stories. An overturned cart, blood stains, corpses lying around, with rusted weapons and arrows sticking out of the wood and coins lying scattered on the earth (all of which you could pick up) rewarded your exploration in multiple ways.
First: Loot. Weapons to sell, arrows to shoot, gold to buy stuff with and maybe a few other usefull items scattered about.
Second: Storytelling. Without a single line of dialogue, the game told you a story about bandits or monsters ambushing a cart and killing it's escort.
Third: Consistency. You find just what you'd expect to find at such a place. the items you picked up there serve the dual purpose of beeing props to tell the story and game objects that had an effect on gameplay.
Of course, Gothic2 had one major city, a few hamlets, a ruined keep under siege and some wilderness as opposed to Oblivion's huge world.
When the Gothic team tried to create a huge world with the same attention to detail as in their first two games, they failed miserably.
little_dragon | May 15, 2007 3:50 AM