I’ve been playing a lot of Ghost of Tsushima lately. (Who hasn’t, right?) It is loaded with instances of smart design. While so many open world games seem to overwhelm the player, this one gets it just right.
Most open world games in the vein of Assassin’s Creed are, at their core, a checklist of activities, objectives and collectibles. The intent of this design is twofold. First, it’s meant to encourage exploration. The studio has created a big world and they want to encourage players to see as much of it as possible. Second, it’s meant to give players a break from the main objectives. Narratives need to give the player downtime so that they can digest what has just happened and to prepare for what comes next.
The wild card is the player. If you lay out multiple options, you have no way of knowing which the player will pick. Not all choices are equal, players will distinguish between the main quests and everything else. A significant number of people like to complete things, and they’ll want to do as many side objectives as possible before progressing the main plot. This approach turns what should be fun side objectives into a slog of task, and nobody wants a game to turn into a slog. So how does Ghost of Tsushima, a mission-based, open-world game filled with side quests and other distractions, avoid this? The answer is simple: It doesn’t overwhelm the player with the entirety of its side content. It’s a small change that has a huge impact on the pacing of the game. It means that the majority of the side content will be done while the player is traveling from one mission to another. The result is that the player completes it organically rather than going out of their way to do so. By limiting the locations on the map, for example, Sucker Punch was able to make traversing the island feel like a journey rather than a checklist waiting to be completed. Let me put it another way. Imagine if, at the beginning of the game, your map displayed every point of interest on the southern island. Every fort, every fox den and every shrine are displayed to the player. Would you have played the game in the same way? I’d argue that most players would end up prioritizing the hunt for every collectible, slashing every bamboo and chasing every fox before progressing the plot. What kind of effect would that have on your enjoyment? After a while you’d probably get sick of it. You’d get tired of stealth killing chiefs, tired of climbing to those shrines and, as much as you don’t want to admit, it you’d probably get tired of the foxes. That would be an absolute travesty.
Now, Ghost of Tsushima isn’t perfect in this regard (a bit involving farms comes to mind). Most of the side quests are revealed to the player through rumors (nice touch, by the way). Those multi-part character stories are always visible. But it’s fine because all of those side stories provide world building, character arc and allow Jin to act on his identity as a samurai protector. This prevents the side quests from feeling like distractions from the main story. If anything, they enhance it.
So, what can we learn? I think that Ghost of Tsushima succeeds because it remembers why we have side content to begin with; to break up the main narrative and to reward exploration. A lot of open world games fill their maps with side objectives simply because it’s expected. Empty space only works if the game is built around it. (Shadow of the Colossus, Breath of the Wild, etc.) It’s important to understand how players will interact with side content and what, if anything, it will contribute to the overall flow of the game.
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