I am baffled as to what this makes easier to think about, but I’m intrigued.
How is Assassin’s Creed is closer to The Witness than Ultima Underworld? If I ask this using the lenses I commonly use, I think:
- Player experience (from the Aesthetics of the MDA framework): In Assassin’s, the player is engaged in setting up interlinked goal chains and ticking them off, experiencing a long-term progression and impact on the world, advancing the narrative, while using combat to create pacing and test skill. The game is pitched as something to ‘lose yourself’ in, and immersive pitches are often viewed as self-abnegation, the desire to ‘kill time’. In The Witness, the player is piecing together rulesets in a very direct fashion, challenging their observational skills. They take breaks to explore the island but this is more exploring bounds of the challenging than exploration. Story is delivered as another puzzle. In Ultima Underworld, the player engages in combat tests and builds their long-term path through the world, revealing its edges in very discrete ways.
- Design work (the Mechanics of MDA): In Assassin’s, design work is organized between quests, building small bits of narrative and challenge, systems, building the repeatable actions the game hangs upon, such as combat and movement, and world, constructing an environment in which activities may take place. Unique to open world games, environment is disconnected from quest design as the game is envisaged to support play in all spaces. In The Witness, design is tightly focused on puzzle construction, with environment design tightly woven in to prevent it feeling divorced from the puzzle play. In Ultima Underworld, map and encounter design are tightly linked, while systems are constructed separately to inform the map and encounter design.
- Player needs (the psychological model currently in vogue at big studios, like the PENS framework): Assassin’s Creed players experience high autonomy in open-world games, with wide freedom of movement and semi-wide freedom of activity, while competence is moderately satisfied through combat and progression systems. As a single-player game, relatedness is served through NPCs (weak) and through out-of-game discussion with other people (in this framework, Bethesda games score high for single-player because everyone has unique encounters to share with each other). The Witness strongly satisfies player competency needs, and moderately hits autonomy, by supporting and giving context to the player trying other challenges. Relatedness is poor due to the single-player nature, lack of NPCs, and difficulty engaging in discussion without spoiling the game. Ultima Underworld pushes hard on competency through its combat, progression, and exploration, moderate on autonomy through its character building and exploration, and low-moderate on relatedness through NPC interaction.
So my tools don’t make that obvious so yeah, I’m game.
So that makes board games war games? Maybe old-school flight sims with dynamic campaigns (or maybe that’s just the frame around the ‘puzzle game’ core)?