I Yearn For Faster Video Game Beginnings
I think that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion unwittingly established a terrible precedent for how to begin an open world video game. It starts with a thirty-ish minute dungeon crawl where you learn the game’s fight mechanics and create a character, and then you emerge through a sewer door into the bright, vast, open world for the rest of the adventure.
Every single game journalist, Elder Scrolls fan, and casual player at the time marveled at the design of this opening. It was so popular and beloved that it has now infected nearly every other big video game with a weird pacing problem. If you’re playing a large single player story-based game, you can almost count the Oblivion beats with a boilerplate checklist. You’ll be slowly introduced to the world in a small, cordoned off area, before suddenly being dumped into the larger scope of the story — often through a doorway that opens to a bright scene.
Is this good design? Sometimes, maybe. It certainly was twenty years ago. But I think its ongoing life might just be shameless copying of a “safe” trend. And it has gone on for so long that it has picked up yers and years of bloat.
The more of these openings I’ve experienced, the more I’ve realized their immense…
