Freedom in our Open Worlds | The UBISOFT Formula

Games, like any art, give the consumer a choice: the liberty of “playing the game however you like” within the confined limits that the developers have created. But the freedom to do busywork however you want isn’t the same as the sensation of agency gained from truly immersing oneself in the game-play and themes of a game.

Screenshots from Watch Dogs Legion's and Cyberpunk 2077's Interactive Maps 

with only Side Content turned on.

 

 This is how modern open-world games have come to look like. A “checkpoint open-world”, often blamed on Ubisoft’s increasingly formulaic game design. The tasks are simple, repeatable (see collectibles) and involve little freedom in how they are achieved. Given this design choice, players, moving like water, have sought the easiest ways to complete these objectives in order to “finish” the game. Go collect that, upgrade this, find that weapon, complete this side mission (most often repeatable content like "kill X" or "steal Y”).

„Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.” This echoes loudly when we consider the rise of websites hosting interactive maps, made oftentimes for players looking to get through the slog of finding every collectible. Just give me a visual list from which I can check off everything like I’m going for groceries. Optimization drains the “fun” out of a game and removes the player from their immersion. When the player is no longer immersed, they start behaving outside of the intended agency of their character. This is when ludo-narrative dissonance rears its ugly head in.

 

But what makes it not fun? 

Games, to borrow from game studies (Bernard Suits, C. Thi Nguyen), are the art of agency. Video games in particular allow us to embody characters (agents) and make choices (have agency). Sometimes, these characters are an ensemble (Watch Dogs: Legion) or even concepts/spirits (When playing Victoria 3, I’d argue I’m playing as the “national spirit”). The choices we make as agents then give us agency because they have consequences in the fictional world that the game develops. 

 Let’s come back to the quote, made famous by Civilization IV's lead designer Soren Johnson. It’s easy to hail these words as an axiomatic holy grail of video game theory - oh, players don’t like to have fun, they like to optimize. Nevertheless, let's highlight a less talked-about part of this quote. “Given the opportunity” is the key to understanding why game design choices like the checkpoint open-world disappoint so many players. 

Take Red Dead Redemption 2, for example. For all of its faults (namely, being more of a cinematic experience than a game – see NakeyJakey’s iconic essay), RDR2 always keeps the player engrossed in the fading life of Arthur Morgan and the Van der Linde gang by never allowing the player to stray away from the story. Side quests always relate back to a larger narrative – they, at a minimum, share a common background & theme with the setting as a whole. When you squint your eyes at the legendary hunts, they may appear as a checklist – but are they really? The hunt itself is not repeatable – in fact, each hunt is particular in all of its content and consequences (the pelts, the outfits). By constructing a linear sequence, Rockstar restricts the freedom of the player in favor of enlarging their agency. This extends to many more aspects of the game, especially the temporal and spatial limits of side content. By confining missions to certain chapters, the player doesn’t experience choice paralysis and the classic feeling of “well, since I’m here, might as well do this outpost” – instead, crafty players and completionists go to great lengths to actually experience side content before reaching the main story.

 

Is Ubisoft's formula done for?

In this section, I’d like to throw a last hurrah for some of Ubisoft’s decade-old titles, namely Ghost Recon: Wildlands. A few months ago I got this game on sale with a friend, long after its heyday. On first glance, it’s a neat shooter with a barebones “we’re good, they’re evil” setup – you play as an elite team of American soldiers dropped in Bolivia to deconstruct the Santa Blanca cartel. You have a sprawling open world (20+ provinces with unique geography) littered with seemingly the same collectibles. You have repetitive side content (defending a radio while waves of enemies try to attack you, hitting convoys etc.) and an oppressive HUD (so much so that there’s an option to turn it off completely or customize it however you want). The AI itself is hit or miss, with it sometimes employing very well-thought-out tactics to snuff you out and other times shooting you through foliage from a 200m distance with dual SMGs held sideways. Couple this with a drone that helps you mark all enemies and know their location at all times and you have a good way to spend your time…

…but there’s more. The Santa Blanca cartel isn’t just some lifeless husk of an enemy. They’re modelled after real-life criminal organizations and you can see the love that’s been put into their creation. Just driving on the highway you’ll encounter executions of rebels, civilians hung from telephone poles and many more. It’s the little things that really create an immersive atmosphere. But it is easy to overlook all of this if you’re focused on the checklist you need to complete.

And this is the kicker: games like Wildlands give you the freedom to enjoy them. This is the absolute freedom touted in the game’s intro – no strings attached, but no linearity or guiding hands. When provided with this freedom, we have a choice between consciously having fun or mindlessly scrolling through. This is a sign of our times: from quite early on compared to other media, games have been suffering from the “second screen” problem. They’ve been made to be passively consumed instead of actively enjoyed. Unfortunately, our brain is wired to keep optimizing, so to have fun with such games is a struggle, but not because they’re bad.

I’m having a blast with Ghost Recon: Wildlands, even 100 hours in (although the game is estimated to take the average player 54h), because we’ve chosen to constrict our freedom out of our own volition. We play with a limited HUD and we’ve been reading through the Prima Official Guide. This makes us feel like actual agents in Bolivia – not to mention the developer commentary that provides the thought process behind the way guns are constructed. This is amazing, because we read through the dossiers and we let the world run its course – instead of rushing through it, we take our time.

 

Ending thoughts

It is difficult to make a game - a triple A title no less. The complexity of the task at hand evolves as more and more people get thrown in the mix, each with different values, goals and opinions. Just by looking at the Prima Official Guide, it's obvious that the game designers had specific intentions for the provinces and the weapons you find in each - there was supposed to be a sense of progression that arose organically from you looting different weapons. This is even more obvious as many of the collectible weapons, skill points and upgrades are found in locations you explore throughout the main missions.

But things like these often get muddled when deadlines and executives pop their heads. Suddenly, a game has to also sell software-as-a-service, so why not throw an in-game store that you can spend real currency on to buy overpowered guns? Oh, and let's throw the SR-25, a sniper rifle with virtually no damage falloff and an obligatory equip in the grinding of Tier 1 (the game's hardest difficulty), into a DLC pack.

Ghost Recon: Wildlands is not perfect and nor do I want it to be. If I wanted to play a game that perfectly suited my imagination, my ideas and tactics and offered me full liberty, I'd go play a tabletop RPG ran by a friend. Instead, Wildlands is proof of a systematic erasure of the ideas of game developers in favor of money - money that sometimes doesn't even end up in the company pockets when the game fails. But Wildlands also proves that there is a choice in the player's hands: the choice of how you play. So go out there and play some games! But play them ingeniously, creatively and outside of the rules.