World Building, How to do it where the Player doesn’t have to see it

Do you like to play a game with a fully fleshed out world? Do you like to read far to many words to say far to little on a topic? Either do I. However here is a rant with far to many words talking about ways that games have been made to have fully fleshed out worlds examined through a focus on how the player experiences the world rather than how they were explicitly designed.

Disclaimer: Post contains words of a vulgar and disgraceful Malefactor who should know better. Read at your own discretion.

Alright it is time we changed things up a bit, it is time for an article that is Design related for a change, specifically world building. World building is something that is easily placed at the wayside while writing a plot for a game, designing encounters or putting together a new IP. It is something that you can easily make quite successful games without paying much attention to at all, however when it is done well with some real thought it creates a highly memorable experience for the player and far more importantly business wise, it is one of the key ways to start a series. Suffice to say games have been made and sold almost entirely on the premise of the world building.

There is plenty of examples here but I primarily want to examine three in particular and may give some examples of others that do similarly, we will be looking at Ar Tonelico, Mass Effect and Final Fantasy 13. With these three primary examples I want to examine two kinds of ways that I think of world development taking place in games from the viewpoint of the player, Actively and Passively. Exactly what I mean I will cover in relevant sections, but suffice to say that this is painting these concepts with a very broad brush. The final section is of course for everyone that knows me is going to be about how to do it wrong, it is important to learn from failures as well as it is from success or mediocrity and it also can easily highlight how little it matters to get the world building in perfectly for its presence to have a positive spin for fans.

Active world building

When I use the term Active world building I am talking of an experience of the world that the player has to seek out for themselves, this normally is a sign that there is a fleshed out setting that the story is taking place in, but for the core narrative it is not required. It may be the window dressing or only necessarily be required for the larger narrative arc that is to be addressed in future games. This is the example I want to use Mass Effect for, straight up front this is a game I greatly enjoyed and have partaken of a great deal of the larger lore of the world, not as much as I could have, but I am relatively well versed in the setting itself.

The specific style that Mass Effect uses is an encyclopedia of all the terms, species and most importantly the technology of the setting. For the player who has no real interest in the plot it sits are a large unapproachable mountain of text. For the enthusiast it is a veritable font of information that is seemingly unending which progressively gets larger and larger as you get through the game. This is a good way of separating what your players need to know and what you want to show them with this universe that you have created. It lets you trim some of the fat from your storytelling with establishing the world that your character lives in and can jump straight into establishing the character themselves or directly into the action if you are looking to jump directly into the second act of your three act plot (yes, there is other plot structures and when a game uses something else I will write about it). It is a useful tool, especially if you have an overactive writing department like Bioware seems to. This is far from a new idea in gaming of course, that is largely what your Civilopedia was for in Civilisation 1 back in the day or UFOPedia from the best game ever made. Another way that Bioware have expanded on that is with the breadth and scope of optional content in the game, from side-quests on main worlds to planet landings and searching planets for emblems and minerals. That kind of covers the nuts and bolts by what I mean by Active world building. You have this world out there and the player is taking part in it, but it is clearly a very small part of it. You aren’t going to show them the rest of it as that isn’t what your game is there to do, however you are going to give them the means to get out there and look at it on their own or to look it up for themselves if they so desire.

Now that is all well and good, but how something is done speaks nothing for how it is done well. Mass Effect itself handles the reference document component with mixed degrees of success, the menus for finding details leave a bit to be desired, but that may just be the student of the library or closet database designer in me speaking, it certainly is quite servicable for what it does. How it does it well though is helping to parcel out information in manageable bites, no article is excessively large, there is no treatise on how they solved the P=NP? or built a functional AI. There is however information on almost any given topic you could want to know the cliff notes of on the universe, from man kinds first contact with aliens to the workings of the Space Shotguns and why the hell anyone bothers with a short range weapon in space combat situations. Also is that there is a priority of importance in articles that is fairly prominently displayed to the player and is intuitive also. All the important info that will expand your knowledge of the universe with things that will directly effect the plot are voice acted. All the entries that are voice acted are stored in a different sub-menu to all the pieces about the different classes of Star Ship that the races have. Simple and Clean but effective, people that are here for the violence never need to open the menu, for those that enjoy the larger narrative have a way that they can actively seek out further information that is neatly presented to them in the format consistent with the rest of the game and for the grognards that need to know the nitty gritty of the universe have it all there laid out in front of them, they just have to get to reading it.

They can even read the planetary descriptions while exploring which will give them a rundown of the weather and environmental features of every world in every star system you can visit. That sums up to an absolutely amazing amount of text that is entirely optional and makes for a complete and fleshed out universe waiting to be explored. Which you can do, because Mass Effect has an absolutely ridiculous chunk of optional content that can easily skyrocket your characters into their mid 20s level wise (with a cap of 40 first way through the game) without touching the main plot outside of the introduction. You have 4 planets that you need to visit over the course of the main plot in Mass Effect, there is far more than just those four star systems available, you have 17 Star Clusters to visit, which have varying numbers of Star systems within them and under them a varying number of Planets. Each Star System has at least one planet that you can land on and explore on foot. This is where it falls through as most of the planets are desolate wastelands that you drive around for 10 minutes in your balloon mobile to find some dudes to shoot. Welcome to the galaxy, even though it is blooming with life, most of it is still a void of nothingness and gas giants. It entices the player with rewards of cashmoney for finding little doodads, but that is mostly just a reward mechanism (certainly a profitable one) in play to get people out there looking around. At the end of the day though it is entirely optional content so at its core, it only effects the game flow as much as the player wants it to. This gives greater freedom in plot writing, it is something of a having your cake and eating it too. It is fairly inelegant but effective. Probably most importantly though is the way the library is built up. This isn’t your text book that is handed to you Ultima style of it is all right there in the manual off you go or everything is available from the start ala Civilopedia from earlier example. Entries are unlocked fairly organically based on the conversations player has or the items they see or the parts of the world they interact with. This is something you see fairly prominently in other games that have a similar system, however one advantage here is that Mass Effect doesn’t have the amazingly gauche hotlinks with underlines leading from article to article. This is a game, not fucking Wikipedia.

As for other games that do this and do it well. X-Com: UFO Defense and its first two sequels do fairly admirable jobs (not RPGs, but the first one is aforementioned Best Game Ever Made tm), Dragon Age fits in its way (terrible menus though). Plenty of others that do this horribly come to mind, more on the obvious later.

Passive world building

For Passive world building, we are talking about the counter to the above. The players experience of the world is much more naturalistic, it happens with the natural flow of the gameplay rather than the player having to actively seek it out. Regardless of how the player gets through the game, unless they are not paying attention to anything around them then they are going to get something of a feeling for the world at large. The game I want to use here is not the best example of it that springs to mind, but is an RPG that was noted by some in the DL as being a good case for it or at least that was the main thing that they got from the game, Ar Tonelico. Now for yet another disclaimer, I did not enjoy this game and have not taken it on board nearly as strongly as the example above.

The world of Ar Tonelico is fairly fully realised as a world that is constructed with a musically powered internet that is full of loli robots who peddle in pornography. So it is close to the real world except all the fat pipe is run through one main tower. The game also runs you through the history of the world somewhat, how it came to be constructed, why there is lolibot pornographers and why the Internet Viruses want to kill everything. The way that the world parcels this information out to you is piece by piece as you make your way through the game, as you go to places it explains to you the significance of it and why it is all so important. This works for world building because the game takes you everywhere. You visit absolutely every area of the tower of Ar Tonelico, you start in the middle of the tower and are dumped down the bottom of it, the first story arc is pretty much making your way back up to the middle of the tower through the areas that are most densely populated, so you are shown how the society works in its dysfunctional way where pornographers are used as the primary weapons in the world. You observe most of the different cultures in the world while you are down there because you get dumped as far away from the tower as you can be, make it to the majour city, some drama happens and you go to the satellite of corporate mercenary sin and eventually on to the traditional native hold on to your cultural history types before making it back to the main characters home in the middle of the tower, where you really learn about the society there for the first time. It is a pretty long journey that shows you half the tower and by far the most important part from a world building perspective as it is where all the population is and the rest is mostly just the Internet backbone. The climax of the plot involves you needing to climb further up the tower to a point where you can teleport down to the bottom again, some more drama ensues with you covering the last unexplored areas down the base of the tower and you eventually end up building a rocket to get to the top part. That part is mostly boring because as anyone involved in actual infrastructure backbone will tell you, if you aren’t into it then looking at a DSLAM is pretty boring. By the start of the final act you have explored the majority from top to bottom and have met all the key players and had the whole plot layed out for you. Almost none of this is optional, it is all right there in the flow of the narrative. From there it is just tying up loose ends and off you go.

So what the hell does that even mean? Ar Tonelico is structured in such a way that just by the nature of playing the game and giving 2 shits about it the player will learn something about the world. They will passively take it in. It is just there. There is varying degrees to how you can do this, Ar Tonelico specifically spoon feeds you the whole thing, it is all there and you kind of have to take it on board, it isn’t really framed by the larger narrative in any way, it is presented in such a way that the world itself is something of the story (mileage varies here, I disagree with this personally and consider it a conceit of the storyteller that I give 2 fucks about this world and why Internet Virus wants to rape lolibots). This isn’t the only kind of world building that involves the player passively taking it on board however. You can present games in such a way that the natural flow of the gameplay itself empowers the players in discovering the nature of the world through regular play. This may seem very similar to Active above, both do involve the player finding the information, but in this case it is that through regular gameplay then the player will discover details about the world, rather than it being a secondary objective that they are succeeding in doing. The latter is far more elegant and is really something of an idealistic design goal, the likes of which Valve is commonly praised for example. Their games are notorious for not having the world spoon fed to you, but they also hide very little away. It is all there, you have but to look and since most of the games are largely on rails you don’t have to look far. The approach of interactive cutscenes further embraces this as the player is given the opportunity to observe the world freely while the game proceeds along fairly organically (depending on how well put together the scripts are of course). The biggest flaw to this is likely it relies on the player to play along with the designer which again can be something of a conceit, but the main thing to take away is that the game needs to be good as a game as well, the world building is just gravy. Whereas with the first method where you are forcing it on the player, the world building had better damned well be good, because I don’t think anyone really played Ar Tonelico strictly for the gameplay unless they are an even bigger fan of Press X to win than myself.

Again with the examples, let us proceed with me heaping praise and fanboying on things. I sadly can’t think of a world that force feeds the world building to someone that I can positively say it is well done, it is a common and effective way of world building in RPGs, but I can’t think of anything specific that is elegant and well handled. Halflife 2 is the quintessential posterchild for the show the player rather than tell kind of passive world building, but most of Valve’s other plot oriented games are noteworthy for it, both the original Halflife and Portal. Even Left 4 Dead has something of it in there as well with the writing on the walls in the safe houses. Other studios do it, but it really is something of a signature with Valve. This is also more along the lines of the world building in Mass Effect 2 with the people around you and the advertising commonly chatting quite freely about the state of the galaxy.

How to get totally wrong

By process of elmination you may have guess it that the one that got it totally wrong was Final Fantasy 13. Big surprise for everyone, Grefter is hating on Final Fantasy 13. Now before someone forms a lynch mob, remember that I am right and you are wrong like all the time. Now that we have got my vainglorious jokes out of the way, I am being absolutely serious here. All you have to do is examine the game with the two methods I described above and more importantly how to do them well. Suffice to say Final Fantasy tries fairly hard at the passive world building, you cover a lot of ground in that game. Even more obviously the game provides you with a vertiable whale of information, it is just a shame that much like a Japanese research vessel it ended up being released to market.

So how did Final Fantasy 13 get it so wrong? Well lets start with the Active experience because that one is very blatant. Final Fantasy 13 doesn’t just restrict itself to nice flavourful fluff to its encyclopedia, it stuff the plot in there as well. Your experience with the core plot is disjointed and jarring because there seems to be an expectation that you are reading all the entries. Terms, creatures, people and places are sort of bandied around and paraded through the game with next to no point of reference. The game even as it proudly proclaims starts you off right in the action, much like they did in Final Fantasy 7. A huge problem there is Final Fantasy 7 may have had a huge flashy showy intro, it was so much more than just for show.

Final Fantasy 7 shows you exactly where you are, you are in a freaking huge city and you are on a train, holy shit now you are fighting some dudes this game is intense. Final Fantasy goes okay you are a prisoner on a train now you are killing some dudes then the train crashed and now you are on a highway. There is no framework for it, but if you sat down for 20 minutes you know exactly where you are, what Cocoon is and have an idea who Lightning is. You know what that defeats? THE ENTIRE FUCKING POINT. Here is a good experiment, find someone who hasn’t played this thing yet and see how long it takes them to work out that Cocoon is the moon. If you haven’t read it and that was suprising, don’t worry, there is nothing that will actually clue you into that for a damn good long time in game. So spoilers I guess. Cocoon is the fucking moon. You cover a lot of ground in the game, but each of the areas is completely disconnected, this isn’t a fault of the design of everything being a path that you can’t revisit. You can do this kind of design without that shit. It is that the way you get from point A to point B tends to have no real sense of relationship. You fly everywhere and get the cutscenes being dialogue scenes from in the cockpit and can only see clouds or epic space battles on ice monster motor cycles or some other dumb shit. Towards the end of the game they just straight up go “Fuck it you got teleported into a magic training ground” then “Fuck it you got teleported out now fly away from the moon” and ultimately “Fuck it you got teleported back onto the moon” The only area that really shows your progress between two points is the second last dungeon sequence where you run through a residential area on Cocoon. But it is okay, you end up in an endless plain of moving platforms after that where you fight the final boss just so shit doesn’t make sense. What I am trying to say here is the game fails at world building because all it does is show you setpieces with no sense of context. I am glad there is all this stuff in the world, but what the hell does it mean? How does it work? Why do we care? Maybe someone does, but I don’t, because haters got to hate and the game did nothing to make me care. Even while I was playing it I couldn’t have told you where any two given points were in relation to each other. Sure there is more to world building than mapping it out, but it is a damned good place to start.

Now how does it get the Active world building so wrong? The encyclopedia is huge, it covers everything, even the plot! Well lets look at how I said Mass effect handles the sheer volume of its information well. An intuitive system of prioritising important information and an easy way to access and be engaged by that information that gells with the rest of the game. What does Final Fantasy 13 do? Throws you a book and goes “Here you go bro, work it out for yourself lol”. One thing it does get right is that it builds the entries organically as you go along. I hope you remembered what that term you never heard of before at the start of that 15 minute cutscene, because when it is over you can look it up if you remember what it was amongst the other ones. Now I honestly can’t tell you if the game highlights new entries, but that would have gone a long way (Another one Mass Effect does from memory). There is next to no point to documenting the entire world if you are going to do nothing at all to make it presentable. As bad as I found Final Fantasy 13 gameplay I can tell you that the last thing I wanted to do was reading instead. If I wanted to read I would have grabbed an unread Vonnegut book off my shelf rather than read about the way Vanille’s period has unsynched from the lunar cycle over the years or the flavour of condom Snow preferred to use when he was not knocking up Fang’s mother and giving birth to Lightning. So in their attempt to make Final Fantasy 13 as accessible as possible by dropping you right in the action all they succeeded in doing was failing to engage the player and providing them with an nigh unapproachable wall of text to catch up on just so they can try to make sense of a plot that doesn’t even have the decency to have a consistent internal logic from cutscene to cutscene.

World building isn’t an incredibly difficult prospect, most games have it to some degree even if just by accident. It is far from necessary to make a good game as well and obviously for some it doesn’t even detract from the game to do it poorly. There is however ways to do it poorly and if you are going to do it you need to make it accessible to the player. If it is optional you can certainly incentivise it, but that is not necessary because if it is actually good players will seek it out on their own. My own self inflated opinion of it is that Final Fantasy 13 failed to do any of the above. It is impenetrable and aloof, the game would have been better without it. They could have saved money entirely by not paying for any writers at all and just let the two 5 year olds that they had directing the main plot and designing the summons and related cutscenes have full creative control.

The song we sang on that fateful night it didn’t actually sound anything like this song. This is just a tribute.

To finish it all off I want to continue on with what is likely to become something of a theme in this topic, there is a game that does both of the above and mixes them together in its own way. Deus Ex is an absolutely stunning game. It achieves a seemless melding of both of the above methods. There is so much world building in Deus Ex that is tucked away in emails or data pads that are not required to beat the game at all that expand the world into complete details explaining how a megacorporation effectively bought out the UN’s emergency response service and turned it into its own army, who the Illuminati were and how the usurper took power down to tiny details about why there is a pair of corpses in the hotel room down the hall from your brother’s hotel/apartment. The scope of the information is both local to the area you are in (the game takes place in various places across America, France and Hong Kong) and on a more global scale. The real catch here is though that browsing and looking for these things is the natural way to progress through the game, you get key passwords or keycodes from these things. You are always given ways around locked doors or bypassing security systems, but there isn’t enough lockpicks or multitools to get around them all without heavy investment into these skills. This is coupled with casual conversations with NPCs, overheard NPC conversations and locations that tell a story by themselves such as the sunken ferry off the dock at Liberty Island or the Clinic in Hell’s Kitchen. So you have a game where you don’t have to read everything, but if you want you can search the areas completely to find everything but regardless of how invested in it you will get some of the story because that is just the way that the game is played. This is just one more facet of how great Deus Ex is, one more experiment that worked.