Un-designing Oblivion

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30 September 2006

by Mike Rozak

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It's time once again to talk about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. You might wish to read my previous article about Oblivion here.

This article discusses the "process" used to design Oblivion, or at least the process as near as I can guess. It relies heavily on Oblivion's "Official Game Guide", which I'd strongly recommend to anyone interested in designing avatar games. The book is intended as a walkthrough, but since it describes just about everything in Oblivion, it also doubles as a design document.

Sub-games

Oblivion contains a number of major sub-games:

• Choice of skills, attributes, and spells - This is a long-duration resource allocation game with no "undo" ability, so it involves many strong choices.
• Combat - With sub-activities of melee, archery, and magic (a form of resource allocation).
• Thieving and stealing - Watching NPCs watch you, and waiting for them to leave the room, contains a fair amount of pattern recognition and problem solving.
• Walking - This includes a minor jumping sub-game.

As well as quite a few minor sub-games:

• Backstory - While not technically a game, learning backstory is a significant component of Oblivion.
• Gathering reagents and creating potions
• Home ownership - Not terribly well done though.
• Influence NPCs - Oblivion didn't a good job at this sub-game either.
• Inventory management - Another resource allocation game.
• Lead NPCs - And the corollary: Keep the NPCs alive while leading them.
• Puzzles - Easy ones, but puzzles nonetheless.
• Trade

Oblivion's designers could have used different sub-games, or could have emphasised some sub-games above others. For example, Oblivion does NOT include the following sub-games:

• Castle sieges - While Oblivion does include a siege, it's no different than normal combat, unlike a castle siege in a RTS.
• Dancing - Players could buy a dance pad and use dancing to work their way up Oblivion's social ladder.
• Marriage
• Pet raising
• Puzzles, difficult - Such as adventures games.

Setting

Oblivion's setting has the following elements:

• Culture - Oblivion's world includes a few different cultures (often associated with races) that are in conflict. Culture clashes are used as the impetus for quests. Importantly, culture affects what the player can do; stealing and murder, for example, are taboo. Players can physically steal or murder, but they incur negative cultural consequences (aka: prison).
  
  Unfortunately, Oblivion doesn't use "culture" game-wise as well as it could have. For example: Players might have found businesses closed on holidays. Some forms of dress might have been inappropriate in certain towns, or inappropriate at certain times.
  
  
• Current events - "Stuff" is happening. The Oblivion gates have opened and some of the guilds are under threat. Most of the current events are merely catalysts for quests. Some current events are part of the "Backstory" sub-game. Importantly, current events affect gameplay; while the city guards are hanging out in a corner of the capital trying to catch some specific thieves, thieving in the rest of the city is made easier.
  
  
• History - A detailed past exists. The important parts are exposed immediately, but less-important details are included in the "Backstory" sub-game. History is not merely some text on a web page, but is an impetus for quests.
  
  
• Organizations - Several organizations exist in the world. For the most part, the organizations are used as quest/plot devices. Importantly, players can join some of the organizations, affecting gameplay. A member of the fighter's guild isn't allowed to have a criminal record, and can't act against other members of the guild. A member of the thieves' guild cannot kill to accomplish their quest.
  
  
• Races - Oblivion has a plethora of races that exist in the world. Players also select their characters from one of the races. Races come with special attributes and skills, which is nothing new. Less common though: One's race affects how other NPCs treat your character.
  
  Oblivion doesn't incorporate races as well as it could have: Most of the races are basically humans, and are visually similar. They all speak the same language and have basically the same culture. Race should have affected gameplay more.
  
  
• Religion - Religion plays its part as a quest/plot device. It doesn't affect the player directly though; As in the real world, different religions could have placed different restrictions on players, such as no pork, no meat on Friday, obligations to worship, tithes, etc. Benefits could also exist, such as charities or special abilities.
  
  
• Set of skills (or classes) - The skills and corresponding in-game actions that Oblivion offers are part of its setting. The game doesn't offer a "detective" or "trigonometry" skills, for example. Most of the skills are combat oriented, so most of the gameplay is combat-oriented, so the history, current events, and other setting elements must somehow lead to combat.

www.MudConnect.com lists nearly two thousand text MUDs and their web pages. If you browse through them you'll see that almost every MUD has a page devoted to each of the setting items that I listed. However, what most of those MUDs don't do is have the setting items significantly (or creatively) affect gameplay. Being an Elf is no different than being a Dwarf, except for the cliche attribute differences. The few games that eschew Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs still have Elf look-a-likes, and don't seem to realise that an Elf by any other name is still an Elf.

The procedural world

I discussed Oblivion's use of procedural content in my previous article.

To create Oblivion, the designers created the following "procedural" elements:

• Landscape
  
  
  • A heightfield with associated textures is created. Add a few lakes and waterfalls.
    
    Unfortunately, the heightfield doesn't affect gameplay beyond the obvious difficulties of climbing up steep hills. What about snow being slippery? Avalanches? Mud gumming up one's armour? "Aggro distances" are too short, so stealthily following creeks to avoid hilltop lookouts doesn't provide any advantage. Etc.
    
    
  • Trees and shrubbery are procedurally scattered.
    
    Trees and shrubbery are merely obstacles to movement and occasional combat barriers. They could be more. For example: Trees could be climbed and used as a lookout.
    
    
  • Plants for harvesting are added.
    
    Once the plants are harvested they disappear and come back a few game-months later. Why can't players plant seeds? Are any animals attracted to the plants?
    
    
  • Monsters and bandits are added.
    
    Why do the monsters/bandits live where they do? Do they breed and have young? Do they have dens?
    
    
• Dungeons
  
  
  • A maze of twisty passages is created.
    
    In Oblivion, the maze is basically linear. It twists around a lot to confuse players, but most dungeons have few or no branching corridors. Those that do branch are often blocked by locked doors to prevent branching; the doors are only unlocked when the player makes it to the end of the section. Also problematical: Why was that corridor built in that shape/direction?
    
    
  • Buttons are placed to open doors, creating very simple puzzles... and players are encouraged to press every button they find...
    
    
  • Traps are added.
    
    
  • Monsters and enemies are placed.
    
    Why is that monster there? What does it eat? How does it use its surroundings to its advantage, such as for ambushes?
    
    
  • Chests are placed near monsters and enemies.
    
    How did the monster get their loot? Why is the loot placed in a chest? Why isn't the chest hidden better? Do the original owners of the loot want it back?
    
    
• Towns and cities
  
  
  • Building are scattered around.
    
    Why is a building in any particular location? When were they built? What architectural style? Were they remodelled? Are the dilapidated? What about city engineering like aqueducts?
    
    
  • Buildings are filled with objects, mostly for purposes of looting and eye candy.
    
    
  • NPCs are created.
    
    
    • NPCs are given a job. Some jobs impact players, such as merchants and guards.
    • NPCs are given a home where the NPCs can be found at night. Homes can be looted.
    • NPCs are given a daily routine, which is primarily used by the thieving game, but also affects other sub-games.
      
      
  • Backstory is scattered around, placed in books and NPC conversations.

The reason this part of the world is "procedural" is because:

1. While a person enters the information by hand, they usually aren't too particular about it. It doesn't really matter if a character is named "Fred" or "George", or where a specific monster is, or if a particular home contains a book of cooking recipes or a book of history.
   
   
2. Once the data has been entered, the author just presses "go" and the world activates. From then on, it requires no intervention from the author or the scripts he writes. (Sounds like a certain religious debate from a few hundred years ago? Does God still play an active role in the world, or did he create it and leave it to its own devices?)

"The procedural world" is a standard component of FPSs, CRPGs, MUDs, and MMORPGs. Most players (and apparently most B-grade game designers) think that all a world needs is procedural content and then it's done. This is far from the case.

Adventure games do NOT have much of a procedural world. In most adventure-game worlds, every detail is carefully placed by the designer. Any details that do not need to be manually placed probably aren't critical to the game and simply aren't added.

"Grind" tasks

One important design element of procedural worlds is the ability to "grind" in them.

Whenever a player is allowed to make choices, they will make mistakes. Some of these mistakes will cause the player to lose/squander resources, like money, equipment, and experience points. Unfortunately, if a player makes too many mistakes, they find themselves without any money, equipment, and/or spare experience points. This lack of resources prevents them from completing the game.

To get around this problem, most worlds have a "backup" so that players can earn back resources that they have squandered. Oblivion, for example, provides an infinite supply of monsters to kill and herbs to collect. However, to ensure that players don't spend all their time playing the "backup" game instead of the real game, the "backup" game is designed so that it doesn't pay (in resources) very well, and is fairly dull. (Plus, there's no reason to make a "backup" fun, or it would be the primary game instead.)

A dull backup game is also known as "the grind".

MMORPGs, for reasons of their own, rely almost exclusively on "the grind". They need the grind because (a) they want to keep players around for as long as possible and can't afford a continual supply of quality (fun) content, and (b) they need a way to "rank" players since many players attracted to MMORPGs like being ranked (above other players, that is). Without liberal amounts of grind, a MMORPG's content would quickly be exhausted by players who routinely spend 20-40 hours per week playing, all the characters would quickly reach the maximum level, and ranking would be impossible.

Adventure games don't include a grind. They avoid the need for a "backup" by making it impossible for players to make decisions that prevent them from advancing in the game. However, adventure games do reduce cost by making many of their puzzles so obtuse that players spend hours wandering around looking for a solution.

Quests

Built on top of the procedural world are hundreds of quests. These are detailed and hand crafted. Each quest has:

• Plot and purpose - Quests add a "plot" to the procedural world, as well as a goal for the player.
  
  
• Setting exposure - Elements of setting, such as history, current events, race, and religion, are exposed through various quests. For example: A quest where, NPC A wants the character to do X to NPC B because NPC B is a member of a different religion, will expose a tension between religions.
  
  I'd go as far as saying that any quest that doesn't expose an element of setting and/or character personality should be rewritten/redesigned so that it does. Hollywood script design has similar "rules" about what should happen in a scene to make the scene worthwhile.
  
  
• Character - Quests are used to highlight NPC personalities, giving their personalities some dimension. However, NPCs that only appear in one quest are still left pretty flat. This is understandable since (a) it costs a lot to make a "three dimensional" character, and (b) it takes time on the player's part to realise that the character is three dimensional.
  
  
• Cut scenes - Many quests have "cut scenes" associated with them. While Oblivion doesn't show full-motion video cut-scenes, it does include carefully scripted events that wouldn't normally occur in the procedural world. These cut scenes make the world feel more real, and can be seen as a form of "eye candy", as well as an important device to portray character.
  
  
• Specially designed regions, NPCs, and objects - Almost every region, NPC, and object in Oblivion is somehow associated with one of the quests. Most of these content elements are accessible, even to players not on the quest, but many regions, NPCs, and objects can only be accessed by undertaking a quest.
  
  
• Starting a quest changes the game world - When a quest is activated, NPCs involved in the quest change their behaviour, calling upon quest-specific AI. In some cases, the AI of entire villages are affected by the quest's inception. Regions and objects are sometimes affected by starting a quest, with doors and loot suddenly appearing where none existed.
  
  
• Choices in approach - Players are often given several ways to accomplish the quest's objectives. In one quest, they need to (a) kill off some vampires living near a city and threaten its inhabitants, and (b) get some vampire hunters out of the city so they don't find out that the city's leader is really a vampire. If the player kills off all the vampires themselves, they can take the vampires' remains to one of the vampire hunters and the hunters will depart, or they can kill the vampire hunters too. Or, the player can tell the vampire hunters where the vampires are, and let them kill one another, mopping up whomever is left.
  
  
• Choices in outcome - The way a player completes a quest affects its outcome. Some quests have several different outcomes depending upon the choices/mistakes the player makes.
  
  
• Finishing a quest changes the game world - When a quest it finished, the world is changed. Again, NPC behaviour changes, regions are modified, and objects appear and disappear.

Many CRPGs and MMORPGs include quests, although they tend not to be as deep as Oblivion's quests. MMORPGs are especially guilty of having shallow quests, relying on quests that provide a flimsy purpose (aka: FedEx deliveries), no plot, no characterisation, no setting exposure, no cut scenes, no special quest-only regions, no changes to the game world (during or after the quest), no choices in approach, and no choices in outcome.

Conversely, adventure games are almost one hundred percent quests (or technically, quest-arcs). Adventure games don't usually allow for choices in approach or outcome though.

Quest arcs

Oblivion combines a series of quests to create a quest arc. Quest arcs allow the designers to do the following:

• Create emotional attachment through familiarity - Characters, organizations, and regions that appear in several quests become familiar to the player, who can become emotionally attached to them. Familiarity might be used to make the player (not just the character) like a specific town, or dislike a specific organization that is a thorn in their side.
  
  
• Create emotional attachment through characterisation - NPCs who occur in several quests have more "face time" with the player and can be fleshed out. Major NPCs can even go through their own character arcs, as Oblivion's reluctant emperor changes from someone avoiding the larger world to a character who sacrifices his own life to save it.
  
  
• Use the emotions - Once players have an emotional attachment, designers can use their emotions to effect. Some major NPCs sacrifice their lives for the greater good, or turn out to be traitors.
  
  
• Changing world - A quest arc can be used to make the world feel as though it is gradually changing. Every time an individual quest in the arc is completed, parts of the world alter slightly. Over time, these changes add up to something major. Such gradual changes have a different affect on the player than if they occurred all at once with the completion of just one quest.
  
  
• Epic - Quest arcs take a long time to complete and make the player feel like they have completed an epic task.
  
  
• Choices - Conceivably, a quest-arc could include choices that lead to branching in the quest arc.
  
  Unfortunately, Oblivion's quests don't have any significant branching written into them. (Branching costs money.) However, because the hand-written quests interact procedurally with the rest of the world, a form of pseudo-branching exists. For example: In a quest-arc's second quest, a player might have the option of befriending or antagonising a NPC. This choice affects the quest-arc's fifth quest when the NPC reappears, and either is friendly or hostile to the player depending upon the player's actions in the first quest.
  
  
• Obscuring underlying structures - In World of Warcraft, players quickly realise that the quests they complete have absolutely no impact on the world and are merely devices that provide additional experience points. If Oblivion merely had single quests, and no quest-arcs, then players would quickly realise that the world consists of hundreds of independent quests, none of which really interact realistically, spoiling some of the immersion. However, because Oblivion throws a handful of quest arcs into the mix, some of the quests that players do (those from the quest arcs) have effects on other quests (which happen to be from the same quest arc). This makes the world feel much more realistic.

Personal NPCs

Oblivion does not have personal NPCs. Adding them would have improved Oblivion. For more information, read this. Basically, you can think of a personal NPC as an extra-long quest-arc that travels with the PC, or at least frequently visits the PC.

Elements of "delight"

A few months back, Raph Koster mentioned adding elements to "delight" players, but not necessarily perform any actual game purpose. (By the way, the same idea was also brought up a few thousand years ago by Aristotle. He called it "spectacle".)

Oblivion contains a few elements of delight:

• Backstory - Some players enjoy reading or hearing backstory. The backstory in Oblivion is both about the world and individual characters that players can meet.
  
  
• Deer - Deer run around the forest, serving no real game purpose. I don't think that Oblivion has any butterflies, but I have seen them used in other games to similar effect.
  
  
• Eye candy - All of the pretty graphics are, of course, elements of delight.
  
  
• NPC conversations - NPCs meet in the street and just talk to one another about the weather and whatnot. Sometimes these conversations are part of the game, but most of the time they're just about delight.
  
  
• Rain - While rain doesn't (seem to) affect the game, it does provide a nice touch.

Interestingly, adventure games tend to emphasise delight more than CRPGs or MMORPGs. The Myst series is a perfect example of this. I'm not sure if it's an accident of history, or if it's because adventure games are targeted at a different player personality, one who appreciates delight more than FPS and CRPG players.

Using the formula to create unique worlds

One major problem that I have with most CRPGs, MUDs, and MMORPGs is that they're basically the same game. They all rely on hit-point based combat. They all have Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs, or races that are just like Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs. They are all based in quasi-medieval worlds with an evil overlord trying to defeat the forces of good. They are all populated by uninteresting quests that involve killing 10 orcs, collecting 10 orc heads, or delivering 10 orc sabres. And the few that have epic quests don't use them properly.

This problem is being further exacerbated by the plethora of MMORPG development toolkits coming onto the market. I'm not opposed to MMORPG (or CRPG) development toolkits; I'm writing my own. I am opposed to toolkits that only allow players to create more of the same. In order for an author to not create more of the same using a toolkit, the toolkit needs to encourage authors to rewrite large segments of the toolkit's code. (See below.) Coding is time consuming and requires skill. Since toolkits proudly boast the ability to create a world in under an hour without any programming skill, they can't require coding, which means they usually don't provide authors the tools and incentives to actually create something unique. What results are thousands of user-created worlds that are essentially all the same.

What is required to create a unique world?

1. Eye candy is only one of the ways to differentiate a world. Contemporary game developers like emphasising eye candy as a differentiator (to older generations of the genre) because it's a low-risk solution. Throwing out the combat sub-game and replacing it with ballroom dancing is just not done; it is a much riskier proposal that could result in the loss of one's job.
   
   
2. Look at all the bullet points in this article and figure out a unique solution to each bullet item. Not all solutions need to be completely original, but at least a handful of elements should be.
   
   Creating a world full of Elf look-alikes that are just renamed/retextured versions of the classics isn't good enough. Likewise, avoid cliche medieval villages and the same old evil-overlord story.
   
   The lack of creative solutions to sub-games, settings, quests, quest arcs, and personal NPCs is exacerbated by B-grade FPSs, CRPGs, and MMORPGs that fail to include decent quests, quest-arcs, and personal NPCs. (See below.) This only leaves the designers half the amount of "stuff" to play with, and thus, less opportunity for differentiation.
   
   
3. Creating unique sub-games or unique variations on existing sub-games is especially important because the world's setting, quests, quest arcs, and personal NPCs are constrained by the game's sub-games. Unique sub-games require heaps of programming, especially in an eye-candy rich 3D-world.
   
   The least amount of work required is to creatively modify an existing sub-game, such as combat. Making a fighting sub-game that renames "swords" to "katanas" is not going to cut it though. Combat actually needs to be different. How about hit locations instead of hit points? Or intricate strategies like those that are used by real fencers? Or melee combat in zero-G?
   
   A better solution is to demote fighting to a minor sub-game since it's so overused. Instead, place players in a quasi-medieval city (if you like) where the major sub-game is renting apartments to NPCs, or painting NPC portraits... Whatever! Just avoid the cliche of killing hoards of 20 hit-point orcs.
   
   For every major sub-game you add (such as renting apartments), you'll need to either demote or entirely remove another sub-game. Every sub-game you include must be learned by the player. If there are too many sub-games, players will find the learning processes to be too much work, especially casual players who only expect to play the game for ten to twenty hours. Games targeted at hard-core players can include more sub-games. A more casual 15-hour game, such as Beyond Good and Evil, has slightly fewer sub-games than Oblivion, and all of the sub-games are much easier to learn.
   
   
4. You may need new technology. Part of the reason why the same classic sub-games are continually reused is because that's all that currently technology allows. A game controller only has so many buttons and knobs, limiting what kind of inputs are possible. The same problem exists for outputs. The only reason Guitar Hero and Dance! Dance! Revolution have unique sub-games is because they each include new I/O devices shipped in the box!
   
   Text-to-speech and speech recognition are two technologies that enable new sub-games. I discussed these in The NPC-conversation wall.
   
   
5. Properly designed quest, quest arcs, and personal NPCs are required to create unique worlds. Most novels and television shows are set in the real world, but they still manage to differentiate themselves from one another. They do this by focusing on different combinations of plots and characters (aka: personalities); in avatar games, plots and characters are part of the quests and quest arcs, not the procedural world.