31:44 This is a great point I never considered. I think there are at least two good ways to alleviate this issue. Morrowind got around this by making your movement slow(at first) and forcing you to consider carriage routes, boat routes, proximity to mage guilds(who could teleport you for a fee). Even when you finally got your own teleportation magic, you could only mark one location to teleport back to at a time. To be effective at traversing the map, you organically develop knowledge of landmarks and shortcuts, a sense of distance, a sense of time passing, plan how much you'll need to spend, where you'll be resting, what quests you have on the way, etc. It also adds to the value of currency, at the start, you'll be tempted to simply travel by foot since your wallet is in dire straits. Towards the end game, you'll be fairly wealthy and feel a sense of privilege and freedom that you can go anywhere on a whim. You'll have formed friendly connections with all carriage/boat drivers, lowering costs even more. Almost as if you're treating the world as a "real place", all because of no fast travel. It's meaningful progression while staying logically/internally consistent and immersive. The first couple Assassin's Creed games gave you an obscene amount of choice as to HOW you physically move around the map. Every parkour move flowing into the next, allowing for certain preferences and styles to develop. Almost every action is cancel-able with incredible player agency, if you want to run up a wall and cancel out of that, you can. If you want to jump off the wall at any point in the wall run, you can. Combine that with climb leaps, swings, back ejects, side ejects, drops, vaults, hops, hangs, repositioning, lifts, cornering and catching ledges. With so much depth, the whole game could've been just this but expanded. There's so much choice at any given point that it allows movement itself to be expressive and meaningfully different from one person to another, not just "means to an end".
What you're forgetting about Death Stranding is the biggest flaw of the game - it actually IS about conquering and colonizing the landscape, by constructing buildings, roads, "gas stations", warehouses etc. The whole social part of the game (the most important part of the game according to Kojima) is about destroying the nature, littering it with awful constructions that are serving only humans. Death Stranding says that we have to choose between nature and humanity. In it's fiction the nature is so hostile towards humans that it is completly justified to destroy & subdue it. For the sake of the people, the beautiful land from the beginning of the game must not survive - this is the mission of both the main character and the player.
You are absolutely right on this: the less a game offers potential for rootedness in its world, the more it ends up promoting an imperialist fruition thereof. Whether it has combat or not, whether it contains explicit violence and pillaging or not, I think its exploration and level design is the fundamental mechanic at play here. In fact, where I may disagree with you is about FromSoftware's games: the first Dark Souls - i.e. their first open-world game - did manage to be non-imperialistic IMO, despite revolving around combat and felling, primarily thanks to its intraconnected world design. I feel free to share here part of a comment I wrote in response to Pixel a Day's last video, because I think we are dealing with the same concepts: "What was lost with the adoption of warping from the outset, to me, is a sense of home; the possibility of developing a sense of homefulness in the game world. Leaving Firelink Shrine without knowing when, and if, you'll see it again, and then unlocking a new path that innervates back into it, a new path from a location in the map that you perceived so far removed from the hub, a way back home from utter despair and uprootedness, really allowed you to take root in Lordran. The more connections you carved between Firelink Shrine and the surrounding areas, the more the former felt like home; and the less the latters felt like commodities, like colonies, to conquer, to pillage, to consume, and never return to. In a paper titled " _There's no place like home: dwelling and being at home in digital games_ ", Daniel Vella established a difference between _hestial_ and _hermetic_ videogames; _hestial_ stemming from Hestia, the goddess of the hearth in Greek mythology, and _hermetic_ stemming - quite literally in this acceptation - from Hermes, herald of the gods, the messenger able to traverse the world at otherworldly speed. The gameplay loop of hermetic open map games is, in fact, quite linear and incremental: you access new areas, conquer them, loot everything you can from them, then warp back to the hub where the materials you recently collected in your foray can be invested to upgrade weapons, unlock new items, new dialogues, new levelling up at the local maiden... rinse and repeat for the following, more challenging, areas. It's this kind of structure, of non-intraconnectedness, that prevents you from developing a sense of home for Roundtable Hold, or for the Firelink Shrine of Dark Souls 3, for instance, and that leads you to seeing the other areas with the same affection an imperialist has for new untapped territories to exploit. *The constant, unchallanged availability of their home makes the player into an uprooted consumer.* It is the hestial structure of the first Dark Souls that prevents you from developing a consumeristic fruition of the world around you. The moment you begin to understand how intraconnected Lordran is, is the moment you stop simply combing new levels for loot: you start searching for home in these foreign, god forsaken places. The game has conditioned you to these kinds of affordances in the environment: 1) since you don't know exactly when, and if, you'll be at home again, you try to make these places feel like home, to make them slightly less menacing and unbearable: you get to familiarise with their geogrpahy, the enemy placement, the shortest and easiest route from one safe zone to another; you search for NPCs or assets that can offer services similar to those you had at home - maybe there's a smith down here, or at least some DIY smithing site; maybe there's a vendor, etc; you may even try to make your bonfire similar to that you had at home, if you've already obtained the Rite of Kindling and are thus able to upgrade it. Granted, the bonfire in front of Queelag's Domain will never be like home, but it can at least get to feel like a camp; 2) and yet you are by now confident that there will be an unexpected way to go back home from here, so you research not only some kind of shortcut but also a mental representation of the world that will improve your guessing about where a shortcut might be. *Despite the fantasy setting, all of this makes for the exploration of a rooted, grounded individual, rather than an adventurer or a dragon-slayer.* And this exploration mechanically engenders geographical affections that are impossible to conjure up solely by aesthetic means. The sky of Blighttown, for instance. You left the diurnal sky of the Shrine and the Undead Burg a long time ago, first for the darkness of the lower burg, then for the descent into the Depths; as if the Depths weren't already underground and dank enough, you kept going down, into the scaffolds of upper Blighttown, which plummet into a swamp... you may be wondering if this game wants to drag you to hell, when you find a meander in the swamp, and a functioning waterwheel, and upon getting on it you are naturally nudged to look up, for the first time since a while: only to realise you are not underground, and the sky has been returned to you, and it's the same clouded sky of your home. This emotion, as many others Dark Souls players could recall from their first run, would've never existed with warping. No matter how starry, lyrical, unexpected, subterranean it might be: no sky in Elden Ring could ever equal the sky of Blighttown."
i get your argument, but frankly the warp mechanic or lack thereof is overblown to me, eitherway i think equating open worlds or any other similar game to imperial or colonialism is laughable pseudo intelligent drivel that a child could argue against. ER is just far more of an exploration game than ds1 is, its substantially more dense, intricate and thoughtful.
I will definitely be playing Sable after this. And possibly death stranding and gravity rush. Really enjoyed this. Also shout out to including Rise of Nations in the beginning, one of my favorite games when I was younger.
This is a great surprise. Environmental focus over a systems focus sounds like the Minecraft alpha development. It was like, ok, people love being in this place, now what can we add for them to do? Maybe that's a reason why it has lasted for so long. I'm sure there are other great examples.
That games which opt to go against this approach tend to struggle to find success makes me wonder what that says about us as an audience, or perhaps what we've been encouraged to believe about the world. I can't pretend that I don't get excited by the prospects of conquest many games offer either. Maybe that's something that will change. Excited to see you in this space Suriel, great video.
What's sad is that big, glorious open worlds like Elden Ring offer no alternative way of traversing the world. There are multiple character classes, but they are only there to fit your preferred style of *combat*... I would like such games to contain an additional class, for players who want to expore. It could even be as ghosts, unable to interact (much) with the world, but able to go places and help teams as spotters or path finders through hostile territories, taking pictures, make maps, and the like, of detecting game mechanisms and connections, trading in information, secret codes, whatever. Alternatively there could be the risk of being attacked, but with an option of pressing a stasis button or activating full cloaking, which would either root you to the spot, waiting for monsters to lose interest, or let you creep away agonizingly slowly, creating motivation for avoidance. The Elden Ring world looks good, but ... bosses and loot? No thanks. Big yawn.
After seeing intro: I find this an odd question. All games(or should I say 99.9%) have "win" or "complete" states. In order to reach this state, you categorically need to "beat" or "finish" something. That's kind of what makes it a game. There are the dubiously labelled "walking simulators" or "tech demos", a lot of people don't find the mechanical essence of those games engaging, stimulating or interesting enough to return to. There's often desired a source of "conflict", whether it's competing against time, nature, resources, enemies or even social interactions. Not sure if it's part of the human existence, but there is a unique kind of thirst quenched in after manipulating a virtual world to your benefit. It's an extreme level of control people normally don't experience in their own lives, so I think it's useful as safe outlet. Even cutesy, open-ended Animal Crossing had to add aspects of Capital and Stock Market to the game to make it more interesting, leading players to progression towards a point of "beating" the game
thats why i never understood the souls(type) games. they're overblown punishing pure-action games. i cannot be immersed in a world that is designed to murder you. there's barely any story, and reading / figuring out lore is honestly a cop out imo. might as well play DooM if i wanted that, or just go for an action game with a more enjoyable story.
There is a massive presupposition most of this is contingent on that I contend is incorrect. Exploration itself is a form of conquest (if you want the full argument as to why, I recommend The Angry DM's article, 'A Wandering and a Wondering'); not necessarily of peoples, but of the unknown. Exploration is wondering to satiate a curiosity, a desire to understand to know, to make the unknown known. This is not necessarily a conquest of violence or subjugation of other agents, but extends to familiarity with the environment, mastery over the physics of a world and how to successfully navigate it, mastery of the mechanics of the game, and so on. This pertains to every one of your examples, including Sable, where you are partaking partially in communal conquest (mastering and navigating lifestyles in their respective environments) and individual through problem-solving, traversing the environment, and making a place for yourself. Combat fits into DS better than you give it credit for. The obstacles of navigating the terrain are fundamentally no less a conflict or barrier than hostile entities are; they are a variation in the difficulties that one has to master to achieve the game's premise, mastery over traversal of the environment. Rather than looting resources off of someone's corpse, the treasure are the sights, safer and more efficient run times, and the like. While the game can work without the presence of _deliberately_ antagonistic or hostile agents, neither do they contradict it. If you want to frame the beings within that space as _part_ of that world rather than as colonialist masters of it, then so, too, must that inter-personal hostility and competition be framed as part of that world's difficulties to navigate and master (that, or avoid the matter, which goes against the game's themes and much of its appeal).
There is a basic and fundamental difference between the "conquest" of satiating a curiosity of the unknown (Sable), as well as the "conflict" of navigating a harsh environment (DS), versus marking your presence in an environment by destroying other bodies and plundering physical objects from it (ER, DS). Exploration is not inherently a form of conquest in any practical way because the mountain is not hurt or killed by you climbing it, nor do you own or control an environment simply by satiating your curiosity about it or its peoples.
@@aCleverCadaver Exploration of the world (which is presumably indifferent to the matter) is certainly a different category from dominating agents with their own autonomy and will (presumably against it their will), I concur. It is, however, still a form of dominance-imposing your will to travel onto the world-and expanding the range of the world that you control. Exerting mastery over one's body, the field of knowledge to successfully navigate the environment safely and successfully, is a practice in dominance over one's own body and the utilization of physics towards one's own ends. Conquest is not intrinsically negative. Colonialism is not negative by virtue of conquest but by virtue of violating something or someone. Throwing a rock is not an crime; throwing rocks at living thing is.
The colonists being discriminated against and suppressed by the English and tensions between the colonists and native peoples are not mutually exclusive. Natives _did_ attack European settlers, including torture and slaughter of entire settlements, both those who had not attacked first. Not each and every time, certainly; however, the indigenous peoples were absolutely aggressors in relation to other tribes and to the colonists. This is why incidents like the Trail of Tears stick out, as the peoples affected were the Five Civilized Tribes and in violation of established peace treaties, and contrasts with later paradigms like Manifest Destiny. Painting either party (insofar as either can be inappropriately reduced to a single, homogenous, or cohesive party) as entirely clean or innocent is flatly wrong.
I liked your RE4 video, but this got too political. Although I do agree with your point about how movement/travelling should be fun in and of itself, not just a means to an end.
Came here from Kyle Bosman -> MinnMax GoWR Deepest Dive -> you! I think this is really interesting, got me thinking about the Yakuza series relationship to its world
