I stumbled across a great article on GamaSutra the other day: Defining Boundaries: Creating Credible Obstacles In Games in which Gareth Griffiths discusses boundaries (where you can and cannot move) in games.

This is essentially a mapping problem (a split between what the player expects is possible and what is possible), and I hope to discuss this (as well as the follow up article in which I believe a few faulty conclusions are reached) a bit more thorough in a later post, but as a quick note, I’d like to discuss the topic in relation to RTS design.

From the article:

Gaming technology is incredible. With new hardware advancements, developers are bringing us bigger and more exciting worlds. We often have the opportunity to roam for miles or to actually walk through entire cities, exploring seemingly every nook and cranny.

But what happens when there are areas in the game that developers don’t want us to get to? Usually there is some kind of barrier that halts our progress or, alternately, an element of the story of the game which explains our inability to continue onward.

While this certainly is a problem (what gamer hasn’t been frustrated by the dreaded invisible wall?) something that struck me as I was reading it was that there is very little of this problem in a game like World in Conflict. Why is this? Obviously, there are boundaries at the edge of the map, and objects block the path of vehicles.

Three things spring into mind:

2D vs 3D movement: First, navigating a 3D world (which seems to be what Griffiths is focusing on) is a lot more complex than the fairly 2D vector that constitutes movement in World in Conflict – even if you’re controlling air units, you only move around a single plane, there’s no gameplay involved in height. This creates a very binary situation: an area is either passable or impassible. There are exceptions to this (infantry can move through forests), but for the tank and support role, it results in the notion that if it sticks up from the ground, you can’t move through it.

Speed and scope: Of course, in a game like World in Conflict (and I suppose most any “traditional” RTS) the scope is very different to a first or third person game. Units traverse a larger area, with less speed. This creates a gameplay where you’re rarely stressed, and you issue broader movement orders rather than specific control over a certain character.

Direction: This is also interesting. Of course, gameplay elements in strategy games will not be situated outside the allowed play area, and in most games, in an uninteresting area, away from enemies. The designers want you to go to that gold mine in the center of the map, much as they want your enemy to do to the same, provoking a conflict, and thus, gameplay. Add to that the fact that these games typically let the player know where he is located in relation to the world (left corner, right corner, etc), it creates a fairly simple case of going from starting point A, to interesting point B.

While first and third person games by no means direct the player away from gameplay and into boring areas, they rarely inform the player of his current location, and the specific location of his goal, and thus it becomes more of an exploration game. Couple this with the complexity of a 3D world and the increased speed and decreased scope, and you increase the chance of misinterpretation greatly.

What would the result be if we transfered this simplicity and sense of direction to other genres? What would such a game look like?