I think so. Most, if not all the metroidvanias I’m familiar with are trees. I think it would be interesting to see a metroidvania mapped like a Petersen or grotzsch graph, I imagine it would be pretty frustrating to navigate though…
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this is exactly it - thank you for expressing it way more clearly than i could have!
Really cool line of thinking. “Linear” vs “open”, as we know, is a tired and unproductive distinction. Imagine instead doing a fine-grained categorization of game worlds using concepts from topology and graph theory.
I noticed Dark Souls 3 seems to often give you a choice between 2 paths, so I think drawing it out would look a bit like a binary tree. Dark Souls 1’s structure is more interesting: while essentially tree-like as well, it has a wide branch at Firelink and a weird optional graph cycle going through Drake Valley.
World topology basically determines players’ exploration choices at any point, so it has a huge impact on the experience. DkS or Metroid’s essentially tree-ish topology allows you to explore freely up to a point but sooner or later there is a boss in every available direction and you have to choose which to kill to explore further. In a true open-world structure like BotW where the overworld is one single giant node on the graph, you can explore every inch of the world for 100 hours before fighting a single boss.
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The aesthetic of Metroidvanias and Souls games is harsher than most open-world games. In an open-world game, you are an assassin or a Spider-man freely flying over the rooftops, a knight adventuring on their steed, etc. In a Metroidvania or Soulslike, you are in a clunky spacesuit exploring a nightmarish cave system, a human inching forward in a demonic castle, an undead exploring a ruined mountain kingdom which is basically a giant extension of a castle (every path has been fortified to draw any invaders through a narrow death zone).
In a Metroidvania/Souls, you must fight to explore. You do not get to explore by simply running past all threats you see. That’s why I think there is a fundamental distinction.
As for what is the 2d equivalent to an open-world game – what comes to mind is games like Star Control 2 and Sunless Sea.
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I agree with that. To u_u’s response, I have a half-dozen frameworks I commonly use but the Mechanics => Dynamics => Aesthetics framework is my favorite for this type of critical discussion, understanding how different game rules create similar-playing games.
In this case, while the underlying mechanics of Metroid-like games should create different dynamics and thus a different player aesthetic, the dynamics in soft Metroid-like games have been massaged until they generate aesthetics very similar to soft open-world games.
Really makes me realize we need to define our open-world definition tightly. I think the open-world framework has taken over the high-budget single-player space because it serves player agency in a way that linear games can’t: players can break pacing at most points to serve other goals (unguided exploration, side activities, secondary objectives), players can choose their game space/level much more broadly (level scaling in Elder Scrolls and Breath of the Wild accepts its failures to serve this), and they almost always support repeat-play in completed areas (i.e., getting into fights anywhere, grinding – standard RPG affordances).
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Troid-lites
Another thought: Ecco the Dolphin is one of the most uncanny games ever made because it has the surface-level aesthetic and metaphor of an open-world game, combined with the world structure and difficulty of a Souls game.
I totally agree with you BustedAstromech that dynamics do automatically generate aesthetics, but the game designer also needs to realize that and align their story/art/etc aesthetic concept with their gameplay-emergent aesthetic concept. Ecco is a very interesting example of the cognitive dissonance-filled experience that can created when that does not happen.
(And this might be a cool game design trick to do on purpose in a horror game that appears to be a non-horror game at first! I have no idea what Ecco’s game design doc looked like in the concept stage, but that is indeed essentially the game Ecco wound up being – the non-horror part being the game’s boxart, then the first 1 minute of joyful dolphin play before the aliens capture all of Ecco’s friends. Then the remaining 10 hours are “I’m running out of oxygen in this hellish undersea cave system”)
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in tabletop this is already a fruitful avenue of discussion. Most famously in this article about Jennell Jaquays’s map designs
vs
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And it’s an area where the extreme literalness videogames demand holds back formal experimentation. We use graph structures all the time in planning but we never show them to the player.
Strategy games like Total War: Three Kingdoms have experimented with more sophisticated player-facing data presentation; I saw them implement a dynamic node visualizer to show character relationships:
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Another game like Ecco: Frog Fractions. Another uncanny game, whose world structure and scope turns out to be different from the self-evident closure of the aesthetic that initially greets you, although in that one the uncanniness is wielded for humor instead of horror.
And also an example that illustrates how fragile “uncanniness” as a deliberate aesthetic can be – when player expectations come to align with the true underlying aesthetic, the magic is lost. Just like in the opposite direction, it’s possible to internalize Ecco’s true harshness and simply enjoy it at a challenging game, forgetting the prettiness of the art and one’s initial dreams of frolicking freely in the sea.
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I think Twine is probably the most amazing tool for map design because its an easy tool to design complex flowcharts
I’m just shoving my dnd notes into every thread today
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Please keep doing that
i love that Jaquaying article, ive been futzing around with designing an rpg maker game and ive kept it bookmarked as inspiratio
also been replaying the first deus ex more methodically than my first time and that game has some very Jaquayed levels imo. I haven’t played the sequels but i hear they dial it back. it’s always cool when games just let you skip or be completely unaware of content but im sure the expense doesn’t often permit that especially nowadays
like i totally missed the hidden MJ12 base in Hell’s Kitchen the first playthrough, i didn’t know it was there until i read about it (partly my fault for not pursuing leads about Smuggler but it’s still cool that there’s a whole secret level nested within a level)
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Visio is too expensive but it’s what I normally use and there are some good alternatives like draw.io
(the goofiest and least-NDA-d thing I ever made with it: FeaturesDescent.pdf (560.2 KB))
Machinations.io is a game design tool that lets you run loops and watch resource flow; I’ve solved a couple balance problems with it and it looks like this:
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yeah, realistic settings tend to naturally gravitate to these sorts of looping and branching graphs, so the original Deus Ex, in its aims towards ‘simulation’ tended to design levels around the idea that all the paths in a real environment might be somewhere the player wants to go.
Also relevant to this thread was when someone took inspo from that jaquays article and redrew all the doom levels diagrammatically
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It drives me crazy that realistic buildings serve so many modern goals of fidelity and plausible-functionality, while also being beautiful complex level spaces (with tons of embedded user-design from the architects and tradition that shaped them!), but they’re less popular than ever because pacing is the highest virtue followed closely by never ever letting anyone get lost
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this series of articles and tucker’s kobolds were the two things that convinced me as a baby tabletop player to take level design extremely seriously when i was a teenager and it was very pleasant to be reminded of that lol
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skyrim still sucks in case anyone was wondering
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reading about Himeji castle when I was 15 made me realize that level design can learn a lot from real life
I mean look at that layout! Any approach where you can see the big landmark of that keep will actually lead you into dead ends and blind traps and even back out of the entire structure. To actually reach the keep you either have to spot a barely visible switchback into a narrow alleyway that leads away from the castle, or follow a convoluted spiraling path that makes you an easy target for defenders.
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i’ve always thought samurai warriors has really good level design and it’s probably because every time you attack a castle it’s some extremely confusing himeji castle shit but those games still flow so well!!
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That’s really cool, I had no idea! I suppose it’s because the DM at least can see the graph formulation of the game on a piece of paper right in front of them. Except when the overworld representation is SMB3-style, it is rare that videogame players see a graph formulation of the game world (though I definitely believe BustedAstromech that game design plans are full of them), so our discourse about linearity vs open is simplified and impoverished.
Relatedly, I’m thinking again of the brilliant player-made Dragon Quest “map of meaning” from a blogpost I found linked on twitter (I linked it last week in the news thread). That is the map of the spatial associations of the experience in the vivid memory of a first-time player. I wonder how much it corresponds to the initial map illustrations over at Enix while it was being designed? I wonder how Enix’s game designer(s)'s experience with D&D (surely 80s RPG designers were very avid D&D players) informed how they thought about their map?
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