One of the big selling points of Dragon Age: Inquisition was its huge world. Heck, the Hinterlands, the starting location of the game, was bigger than all of Dragon Age: Origins . This made people drool with anticipation, thinking about how immensely massive the game world could be.
But now the game is out, and people have played it, and yes, it was a pretty good game – but you know what I don’t hear people saying? “Oh man, the Hinterlands was such a great place! You know what I wanted more of in the game? More of the Hinterlands.”
In fact, most people said the exact opposite. People couldn’t wait to get out of the Hinterlands and put its many low level fetch quests aside. Most of the Hinterlands was just wandering around from point A to point B, with nothing but uninspiring forest around you.
This, actually, is a problem that we encountered several times throughout the game. For example, there is a game-spanning quest in which you have to find crystal runes in every zone. To find those runes, you have to first go to what is essentially a viewfinder to point them out on a map. Then you have to run to each individual one, pick it up, lather, rinse, repeat.
This quest took me ages to complete, and I didn’t enjoy any of it. Why? Because there was nothing compelling in it! There was almost nothing to fight as I ran around looking for skulls, and anything that I COULD fight wasn’t a challenge, but was rather just busywork. There was almost no story being expressed, just a tomb full of statistic boosts to unock. It was largely a matter of running from point A to point B over and over again to get an arbitrary reward.
Usually when I complain about this sort of game design, people tell me, “then just don’t do the quest!” Really? That’s the solution? Don’t play the game? That seems like a cop out, at best. I’m not sure I agree with the shotgun style of game design where you include everything in a game in the hopes that people will play the parts they like and ignore the parts they don’t.
My question is, what do these humongous landscapes actually add to the game? They may add time, increasing the travel distance between each quest and giving you more room to explore, but they don’t add substance. Frankly, unless you fill this space with stuff to do – meaningful stuff to do, not just fetch quests – all these huge areas are doing is padding out the game length. More importantly they are increasing game length without increasing content.
Walking from point A to point B isn’t actually a skill. You aren’t DOING anything other than holding a joystick in a direction. Frankly, unless there is some awesome boss to beat or enemy to encounter along the way, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to fast travel from one location to another. The quest would be functionally the same, except it would take minutes instead of hours.
We don’t need games to be as big as Dragon Age: Inquisition . Right now “open world” is a buzzword, and I understand why. The appeal of being able to explore a huge living world is strong. But frankly, there is a reason why the real world is not as interesting as video games. There’s just so much of it that is inconsequential to your life. We live in a vibrant world, but you can’t enter most of the doors on your street and most of the people you talk to won’t tell you anything important. So while increasing game size may increase realism, it doesn’t make the game more compelling.
Instead, games should be just as big as they need to be. Look at games like Final Fantasy VI . The towns in these games had three or four buildings in them, just enough to offer you what you needed for whatever quest you were on, and the world still felt alive and interesting. That’s more of what we need, games that are sized appropriately for their plot, not games that are big for the sake of being big.