One of the best computer games that I’ve played resently was Subnautica. It’s reasonably well known (at least, well enough to get dragged into some of the miserable gamergate arguments, even if only peripherally and after the fact) and, as far as I know, it’s been pretty well received by gamers and critics alike.
In the game, you play the sole survivor of a crashed spaceship, trapped on an alien planet that is dominated by water (hence the name). Over the course of the game, you struggle to survive, and then you begin to investigate the different terrains and habitats that make up the planet. As you do, you uncover more details about why your ship crashed – and how you might escape.
It’s a great game for a variety of reasons (not least the absence of the ability to lay waste to the local denizens with ridiculous amounts of firepower), but the part that struck me was the relative lack of guidance that’s offered to the player. After an initial tutorial like phase, you are largely left to your own devices – there is no quest book or flashing arrow directing you what to do and where to go. And it’s that that sets it apart from a lot of games that I’ve played recently.
I’m a big fan of the open world genre – and I think I’ve written before about the challenges of presenting a fractured narrative while still maintaining the notion of player choice or role-playing – but too often even in these largely free form games, there is still a compelling drive or a prodding insistence reminding you what you need to do. Eventually, the weakest of these games boils down to a relentless task list – go there, talk to that person, go to another location, get that item or kill that person, return to the original person for your reward.
It’s probably a necessity – some of these games are so immeasurably vast that you’d rapidly forget what you were doing or who you were meant to kill without a handy task list and a few arrows and maps to guide you there and back, but in the end, you feel less like a struggling wasteland or crash-landing survivor, and more like some kind of medieval clerk with a to-do list.