Game Design Theory: Working with the Environment

I came back reading yet another massive complaint regarding Diablo 3 from someone who is a fan of Path of Exile. While I have become disillusioned with Blizzard these past few years, the thing I started to think about was how to improve the ideas in a game like Diablo 3. The truth is outside of the just re-inventing Diablo 2 with better graphics, you cannot easily progress a game series without touching off the legions of fans. Still you can innovate on different levels and today I came up with one such idea: increased interaction with the environment.

Diablo 3 made the environment destructable. It was a pretty cool feature that ended up not having as much impact (pun not intended) as the game designers probably intended towards the end. But the idea of doing things to parts of the environment is a great idea for any RPG style game. Part of the problem in RPG games is that there’s a lot of focus on abilities, which end up becoming +/- damage modifiers. The actual descriptions of these abilities may seem cool are merely reflections against other modifiers in the game like armor, resistances, etc. In the end, this aspect of the game becomes a complex version of rock-paper-scissors, which is why it grows old after a while.

However, what we don’t see enough of in games, especially environmentally aware games, is how these abilities affect the world around us. Most game engines that have some environmental sentience deal more with physics than actual consequences to an environment. For instance, let’s take the fireball spell. If you were to cast this spell in an enclosed area, the blast would set afire anything it touches, including yourself. While paper and pencil games can easily account for these affects via the imagination and the mercy of a DM’s discretion, most game engines do not.

This is a huge area of exploration for actually making abilities more meaningful. What if you cast a frost bolt at a beer mug? Shouldn’t the beer instantly freeze? When you create a flame wall inside a building, shouldn’t the entire building burn down? What if you’re inside a town and this is done? Shouldn’t the residents get pissed, take up arms and ban you from the town? What about taking a huge hammer and repeatedly smashing it against a wall? Wouldn’t that eventually break the hammer or the wall with enough persistence? Couldn’t a person doing this build up strength and constitution?

The other aspect is the way one can interact with the environment. Right clicking or hitting the space bar once your character is adjacent to an object has become more or less the de facto manner in which you manipulate your surroundings. The best we get is some visual cue from the result of that. I can see from a developer’s point of view how this eventually became the most efficient way of conveying how one interacts with objects. Yet it feels so limited and there rarely are cases in which the game provides additional methods to work with the environment. A good example of where this works is in how Skyrim handles lock picking. Most games that have locks pretty much rely on a character’s skill or inventory item (such as lock picks, keys or spells) to get passed this. Skyrim did a great job in simulating a lock pick exercise while combining the other factors in determining the ease of bypassing the lock.

Obviously, you can go overboard with this design. I believe herbalism in early World of Warcraft days had some chance for failure of PICKING A FUCKING FLOWER. Now, this wouldn’t be an issue if picking something off the ground involved more than a simple right click. But doing multiple right clicks because someone lacks the skill is not an environmental enhancement.

There’s also making the environment interactive beyond quests. Perhaps, I’ve just been playing World of Warcraft and Diablo too much lately. But it feels that items are either quest based, combat based or useless. But take a bucket in Ultima 6 where you can milk a cow, then churn it and convert it into butter. If you go through the whole process, you can make cheese and sell it, creating your own sustainable economy. It could still be a grind but there was a logical harmony in that environment.

Another thing is self-created quests. Imagine that you are grinding in an area and manage to kill off a population of spiders. Perhaps, another creature depending on those spiders for feeding ends up dying off slowly so you must do something to correct that. You can artificially create a specific area, spider and creature to do this quest within the game, but I’m talking about far more complex ecological mechanics.

Or what if you’re a wizard who drained all the water from an oasis in order to cast a spell? Perhaps other denizens of that oasis require it. So players might have to figure out how to restore the oasis.

Part of the problem with games these days with regards to RPGs is that they’re almost exclusively combat oriented. As a result, the world gets largely ignored in favor of killing things and increasing the efficiency of killing those things.  The world itself isn’t dynamic enough and relies on illogical mechanisms like respawning to keep the game active for traditional deficiencies (e.g. killing a boss over and over for loot, progress and boredom). I want to see more reactive environments with logical and dire potential consequences arise in games. Not just shoehorned plots that allow someone to work an environment just once, but a constant evolution of a world based on what someone does to it.

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