Some Thoughts About Large And Black Box Large Games

22 6月 2024

I've been playing Mass Effect 2 on the side, and unlike my negative experience with the previous game, I've come to appreciate the game more as a kind of Final Fantasy 7 for XBOX 360 players.

I'm not saying it's as good as FF7, but what I mean is that it was able to create experiences that felt bigger than they actually were. You don't revisit places with memorable set pieces that often, and the galaxy actually felt big. This was my experience with FF7 where I saw bit by bit how big the world was after leaving important locations.

The key word is "felt". It's not about whether this is real (of course the game is bigger than ME1), but rather my feeling that Mass Effect 2 feels big and worth exploring.

And it made me think about Large Games, how daunting and unplayable they are to me, and yet I have played long games like La Mulana 1 without a problem.

I believe there are at least two kinds of Large Games that have been conflated in recent years.

1) The Physically Large Game

This is the typical AAA game caricature. The file size is large. The maps are big. The assets are big. Everything is big and takes up most of your PC's hard drive. You know to some extent how big the game is because of the file size and what the game press has said. You open up the map screen and it tells you how many objectives there are. I see that mountain and I can climb it.

This is Large and Big as people tend to know. People are going to have very different feelings about this -- some might see it as ambition, some might see it as bloat -- but I personally see it as dread.

I look at the objective list and cower. There's so much I have to do because the game tells me it's big this and big that. When people started describing Tears of the Kingdom as having too much to do, I lost interest. I can only think of it as a game full of chores, and I know that is an unfair characterization. It's just the way my brain worked.

At first I thought it was because I was not interested in Large Games. Maybe what I wanted was small and compact games. But that didn't make sense to me because I played so many long JRPGs.

2) "Large", or Black Box Large

It took me a while to realize it, but I like it when Large Games don't reveal how large they are. I put this "Large" in quotes to indicate that it's quite imaginary or obscure. A better way to think about it is to describe how a black box works.

God bless Wikipedia because it can describe things better than I ever will:

In science, computing, and engineering, a black box is a system which can be viewed in terms of its inputs and outputs (or transfer characteristics), without any knowledge of its internal workings. Its implementation is "opaque" (black). The term can be used to refer to many inner workings, such as those of a transistor, an engine, an algorithm, the human brain, or an institution or government.

The TL;DR would be "we don't know what's in here, but it's doing something" and I want to use that to describe the size of games.

A classic example of what I consider a "Black Box Large" would be something like the Etrian Odyssey games. That's a dungeon crawling RPG where you know you're delving into something, but you don't know how deep it goes. You have to map it out for yourself, and then realize through your own efforts how labyrinthine the dungeons really are.

This hits different from knowing that a game has ten floors with three thousand rooms. You discover the size of the rooms for yourself. It feels more accessible to me, and there's a sense of mystery about figuring out how big the game is.

But there are other ways to make something feel big without giving everything away. Something I found interesting while listening to an interview with 1000xRESIST's creative director was his description of Final Fantasy 7 as a game where you leave places. For him, there's something sentimental about leaving places you've been forever and then exploring a wide new world. It transforms the sense of loss of not being able to access places into something great and wonderful. Like it's saying, "You may have to leave your hometown, but there's a bigger world out there."

If you play 1000xRESIST, you'll find that each chapter is full of unique setpieces that don't appear in other chapters. The same goes for Final Fantasy 7, Mass Effect 2, and other games where you lose access to places you're familiar with. You are forced to go to different places, a new world. I think this negative sense of loss and the strange need to "immigrate", for lack of a better word, make the world feel bigger and harsher than it actually is.

Because if you think about it, there is no way a game would just throw you into a softlock. It's clearly meant to advance the story and make you see things. But I think for a player like me, it makes the journey after the status quo is dead feel more hectic and alive.

It just makes me wonder, "Is there a world even bigger than my fictional game home?"

Why the Distinction?

Let's imagine two versions of the same game that follow these outlined philosophies. The first game is a title that advertises its size. The second game hides it and takes players on precarious adventures in unfamiliar terrain. These two versions are the same game, and yet I think their different priorities have led to unique results.

This is all a matter of preference, but what I find exciting about the black box variety of big games is that I get to discover how big they really are. La-Mulana 1 felt magical to me because I didn't know when the game would end. I kept unlocking newer items and harder areas, and I didn't know how to understand what I was looking at. Compared to games where I knew how much text and gameplay there was going to be, I found this enthralling and mysterious.

It felt like I was on an adventure figuring out how deep something went. The anxiety and awe I felt created a larger game than it really was. It's all imaginary when you step back and think about it, but I would argue that imagination is a productive space that makes games feel like fun and not a chore.

This is why I really love old text adventures. I couldn't tell how long a game was because it was all text and the puzzles could range from trivial to absurdly difficult. Getting stuck on a puzzle prolongs the game and stimulates my imagination.

But when I encounter a standard Metroidvania, I get what is advertised on the Steam Store page. It did actually take me 20 hours to complete, and I did actually encounter all 500 unique rooms with 20 special weapons. Nothing surprising, nothing different.

And I think that's tragic to see genres that are all about exploration be something like a routine. I know what I'd be getting into and I don't like that.

I think that's why people loved Final Fantasy 7 and Mass Effect 2 back in the day, because you didn't know what was going to happen. Now it feels trite to play another video game.

We Can Make Games Like This

I don't think this is a post written by a boomer who thinks games used to be good and magical. Instead, I know of several recent titles that bucked the trend. If you need an AAA example, think Elden Ring, where you find new areas because the map you had was incomplete. There are also many indie and doujin examples: Sylvie RPG is a game full of secrets, and NonStories is a game that feels impossible to describe other than "big".

Nor do I want game developers to read this and go "aha, I'm just gonna obfuscate my mechanics." You could be the next Kawazu to make the next SaGa games, but I don't think every game needs that. I'm playing Thistlemine, and it's a game that tells you everything you need to know, but you still have to fight some challenging puzzle bosses.

What I want is a sense of mystery back. A sense of not knowing everything. You can do that by adding new mechanics, by creating friction, by adding a challenge, or just by adding some dank plot twists. I don't want to be able to predict what I'm going to do in the next hour. That sucks, and it makes me feel like I should be doing my real chores.

I think Physically Large Games and the companies that make them today are forgetting that games can be towering in size, but it doesn't matter if the "size" isn't felt by the player. Just because a game takes up so much of my free space doesn't mean it feels like a place I want to explore.

All in all, I think physically small games can feel big. My partner enjoyed Void Stranger, a 300MB game. After encountering a certain mechanic, they joked that they now treat the game as an SCP. They're playing with it and learning how the game works. It started to dawn on them that the game was much bigger than they thought, and it's exciting.

I think we should want more games like this.