Post by Friendly Person :) on Jun 14, 2019 17:20:47 GMT -5
I was thinking more about my issue with environment design in JRPGs, and now that I think about it, it really comes down to the player-controlled camera: more specifically, how allowing the player to control the camera changes the way a sense of space is defined. Essentially I think the issue is that JRPG devs are taking 2D-era design philosophies and applying them to 3D environments. This wasn’t an issue during the PS1-era ‘golden age’ of JRPGs because technical limitations required fixed cameras, which intentionally or unintentionally helped cover up the shortcomings. However, with the switch to player-controlled cameras, the limitations become apparent.
When it comes to defining space, 2D has two major advantages. First, there are rarely areas on display that the player cannot interact with. In a side-scroller, anything not in the background is considered part of the playable space. In a top-down game, same rule applies: most of the time 80% or more of the screen is playable space. This is a pretty big deal, because it means that if you go through say, a forest, you get the sense that the forest is exactly as large as the number of screens required to navigate it. The end result is the sense that you travelled through a forest.
I already some-what touched on the second point: ‘number of screens’. Top-down only shows so much, which can help make areas feel larger than they actually are. Due to technical limitations of the day, areas were not singular entities, but a sequence of smaller areas tied together. Unfortunately, this method of constructing locations has been retained in JRPGs today, but more on that later.
So let’s look at these principles in the case of a town. A town can have 6 buildings and still feel like a town. The player can travel the entire town, and enter every building. Couple that with the limited screen space, and it feels just fine.
So let’s move to fixed camera 3D. No longer are you able to navigate the entire screen. Seriously, go look at Halure in Tales of Vesperia. Have you ever noticed that the entire town is actually completely in the background? Seriously, there’s a whole town back there! Relative to the size of the city, you can only run around maybe 5-10% of it. But it doesn’t really feel that small, does it?
This is where camera trickery has managed to keep budget JRPG production afloat in the transition to 3D. By using camera angles that emphasize scale and draw your focus a certain direction, developers are able to define your sense of space. There may be an entire city back there that you can’t visit, but that’s only a small portion of the screen space. Even when an area isn’t navigable, it can be used to add a sense of grandeur (think of the way the camera follows you up the stairs when you first enter the square in Vesperia’s main city).
So remember how I mentioned that a forest felt exactly as large as the number of screens it took to navigate? Well that’s clearly no longer true here. You’re still navigating a sequence of smaller, connected areas, but the background and scale now suggest that the forest itself extends well beyond the playable area. However, by keeping the camera focused on that playable area, your attention is also drawn to it. The background suggests, the foreground dominates.
Which is what gets entirely lost when you give the player camera control. Now suddenly the focus can be wherever the player wants it. You lose the ability to draw their attention away from what they can’t do. Couple this with the older philosophy of small, connected areas, and the sense is no longer that you’re travelling through a forest or a city, but rather that you’re on a Disneyland attraction ride.
You can no longer make a city feel large by putting a matte painting of a large city behind six buildings. When the player can see a vast city stretching out around them, but can only travel down two or three streets, it destroys the sense of exploration and discovery (two things that are basically the core of any adventure). Sharilton (Tales of Xillia) is a perfect example. There is an entire city that stretches out before the player, but they are limited to exploring literally three tiny streets of it. It sucks. I’m not exploring a city, I’m being shunted along on a rail like part of a tour.
And this is ultimately the problem. Be it city, forest, volcano, swamp, or even a field of ice, you are always on that rail. Each location is nothing more than a sequence of small locations designed to imitate larger ones: and illusion that quickly breaks down, leaving you with a game that makes travelling through a cave feel the exact same as travelling through an open field. You can play a 40 hour game and leave with the sense of having only gotten to explore 10% of the world. It does not evoke feelings of adventure or wonder, it evokes boredom and monotony.
Honestly, JRPG devs need to stop looking to older methods of design and need to look at contemporary open-world games. For all the dumb sh*t Xenoblade 2 does, at least its environments are able to create a sense of exploration. Locations are large and sprawling, yet the terrain naturally creates a sense of diversity without the need for a bunch of tiny locations. The cities feel sizable and interesting, and I can actually *go* anywhere I see (though you can’t enter every building, but eh, you can’t in most games anymore). Best of all, it does all of this while still feeling like a JRPG, not another Elder Scrolls game.
Alternatively, move to a more urban-style fantasy. It took a while, but I realise that the reason Persona 5’s dungeons feel like real places is because they’re all indoors. When you’re indoors it makes perfect sense to have a bunch of smaller, connected spaces because that’s how indoor structures work. You can’t make me go through 6 small screens and tell me I explored the entire swamp when I can clearly see 90% of the swamp I never got to freaking explore. You can make me go through 6 rooms and tell me I explored a bank, because... that’s about the size of a bank.
Obviously this approach would be more expensive, but if Monolith could pull it off with XB2 while half of their staff was busy with Breath of the Wild, surely other devs could do the same. If not, question why you even need a player-controlled camera to begin with. It feels like fixed cameras have become a dirty trend, when in fact you can do so much more on a budget with one. Seriously: Ys: Origin is a great looking game. Ys 8 looks empty and bland. Tales of Vesperia’s dungeons are interesting and I can still remember several of them. Tales of Xillia’s dungeons are a mesh of interchangeable blobs.
When it comes to defining space, 2D has two major advantages. First, there are rarely areas on display that the player cannot interact with. In a side-scroller, anything not in the background is considered part of the playable space. In a top-down game, same rule applies: most of the time 80% or more of the screen is playable space. This is a pretty big deal, because it means that if you go through say, a forest, you get the sense that the forest is exactly as large as the number of screens required to navigate it. The end result is the sense that you travelled through a forest.
I already some-what touched on the second point: ‘number of screens’. Top-down only shows so much, which can help make areas feel larger than they actually are. Due to technical limitations of the day, areas were not singular entities, but a sequence of smaller areas tied together. Unfortunately, this method of constructing locations has been retained in JRPGs today, but more on that later.
So let’s look at these principles in the case of a town. A town can have 6 buildings and still feel like a town. The player can travel the entire town, and enter every building. Couple that with the limited screen space, and it feels just fine.
So let’s move to fixed camera 3D. No longer are you able to navigate the entire screen. Seriously, go look at Halure in Tales of Vesperia. Have you ever noticed that the entire town is actually completely in the background? Seriously, there’s a whole town back there! Relative to the size of the city, you can only run around maybe 5-10% of it. But it doesn’t really feel that small, does it?
This is where camera trickery has managed to keep budget JRPG production afloat in the transition to 3D. By using camera angles that emphasize scale and draw your focus a certain direction, developers are able to define your sense of space. There may be an entire city back there that you can’t visit, but that’s only a small portion of the screen space. Even when an area isn’t navigable, it can be used to add a sense of grandeur (think of the way the camera follows you up the stairs when you first enter the square in Vesperia’s main city).
So remember how I mentioned that a forest felt exactly as large as the number of screens it took to navigate? Well that’s clearly no longer true here. You’re still navigating a sequence of smaller, connected areas, but the background and scale now suggest that the forest itself extends well beyond the playable area. However, by keeping the camera focused on that playable area, your attention is also drawn to it. The background suggests, the foreground dominates.
Which is what gets entirely lost when you give the player camera control. Now suddenly the focus can be wherever the player wants it. You lose the ability to draw their attention away from what they can’t do. Couple this with the older philosophy of small, connected areas, and the sense is no longer that you’re travelling through a forest or a city, but rather that you’re on a Disneyland attraction ride.
You can no longer make a city feel large by putting a matte painting of a large city behind six buildings. When the player can see a vast city stretching out around them, but can only travel down two or three streets, it destroys the sense of exploration and discovery (two things that are basically the core of any adventure). Sharilton (Tales of Xillia) is a perfect example. There is an entire city that stretches out before the player, but they are limited to exploring literally three tiny streets of it. It sucks. I’m not exploring a city, I’m being shunted along on a rail like part of a tour.
And this is ultimately the problem. Be it city, forest, volcano, swamp, or even a field of ice, you are always on that rail. Each location is nothing more than a sequence of small locations designed to imitate larger ones: and illusion that quickly breaks down, leaving you with a game that makes travelling through a cave feel the exact same as travelling through an open field. You can play a 40 hour game and leave with the sense of having only gotten to explore 10% of the world. It does not evoke feelings of adventure or wonder, it evokes boredom and monotony.
Honestly, JRPG devs need to stop looking to older methods of design and need to look at contemporary open-world games. For all the dumb sh*t Xenoblade 2 does, at least its environments are able to create a sense of exploration. Locations are large and sprawling, yet the terrain naturally creates a sense of diversity without the need for a bunch of tiny locations. The cities feel sizable and interesting, and I can actually *go* anywhere I see (though you can’t enter every building, but eh, you can’t in most games anymore). Best of all, it does all of this while still feeling like a JRPG, not another Elder Scrolls game.
Alternatively, move to a more urban-style fantasy. It took a while, but I realise that the reason Persona 5’s dungeons feel like real places is because they’re all indoors. When you’re indoors it makes perfect sense to have a bunch of smaller, connected spaces because that’s how indoor structures work. You can’t make me go through 6 small screens and tell me I explored the entire swamp when I can clearly see 90% of the swamp I never got to freaking explore. You can make me go through 6 rooms and tell me I explored a bank, because... that’s about the size of a bank.
Obviously this approach would be more expensive, but if Monolith could pull it off with XB2 while half of their staff was busy with Breath of the Wild, surely other devs could do the same. If not, question why you even need a player-controlled camera to begin with. It feels like fixed cameras have become a dirty trend, when in fact you can do so much more on a budget with one. Seriously: Ys: Origin is a great looking game. Ys 8 looks empty and bland. Tales of Vesperia’s dungeons are interesting and I can still remember several of them. Tales of Xillia’s dungeons are a mesh of interchangeable blobs.