A while back, I realized that Ubisoft had pretty much killed open world games for me. Their open world model, pioneered by the Assassin’s Creed series and then copied to death by the majority of AAA open world games released in the years since, was initially appealing, but after playing dozens of games that used its template, its limitations became clear. Open world games were designed to liberate players from the aggressively linear corridor shooters of the mid-to-late 2000s. However, with the model that Grand Theft Auto 3 pioneered, and Ubisoft iterated on, it seems that designers traded one form of confinement for another. Traditionally linear games, such as Half-Life (1998), used a “content muncher” approach to design, that put the player on a narrow path from point A to point B. Good ones would give the player more options on their way there, as Half-Life itself did, but still stuck to a fixed order of content. This had its advantages, such as a tight control over pacing and variety, and it by no means was the only philosophy of game design alive at the time, but for a solid few years, it was the default model of AAA games. Ubisoft seems to have done to open worlds what Call of Duty’s single-player campaigns did to Half-Life: distil its foundations so greatly that much of the nuance that made it great in the first place was lost in the process. With Ubisoft, that distilled product took the form of checklists, giving the player a list of goals to accomplish, with every possible activity documented from the moment they begin a new game. This places every decision the player makes in the context of how much of those checklists they want to complete, and in what order they want to do so. The player is technically given freedom, they are not doing things in the order the developer wants them to, but the feeling of artificiality that comes from reducing the entirety of a digital space to a simple completion percentage can all but ruin 
any sense of freedom the player would have had. They are not exploring an organic world, they are picking which way they want to increase the completion percentage. That has lead to a fatigue with open world games, where, despite examples that I’ve found personally compelling for a time (such as Dying Light or Ubisoft’s own Far Cry 3), they eventually reduce to that completion percentage. Even the newest Grand Theft Auto, with all the artistry and skill put into its world construction, eventually reduced to instanced, scripted missions executed with the same aggressive linearity that its predecessors were created to avoid. Open worlds promised a digital landscape in which the designer did not always feel present, where the player could have experiences not explicitly designed, delivered, and focus tested by the game’s creators, but Ubisoft and its contemporaries seem to create worlds where the designer feels just as present, only giving the player more tasks to complete and evaluating them as they complete them.
But then there’s Skyrim. Of course, Skyrim isn’t alone in its design philosophies. It’s the product of fifteen years of iteration by a single studio, arguably brought to perfection by Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas. But despite believing that New Vegas is the better game, I have spent more time in Skyrim than any other open world game except perhaps World of WarCraft. And I’ll be the first to admit that Skyrim is not without its flaws: the writing is frequently terrible, the dialogue is delivered with barely any direction by the same six voice actors, the combat is shallow enough to be mindless, and far too many quests can be summed up with “kill everything in this dungeon and grab the McGuffin at the end”. But despite these qualities, Skyrim is, without a doubt, my favorite open world in the medium, and I believe that it works so well because it rejects the design philosophies of the Ubisoft open world so thoroughly. It doesn’t create a reactive fantasy world, in fact its narrative and characters barely respond to player input on a larger scale the way New Vegas does. Instead, its use of the open world itself, engaged with mechanically, and creates a play aesthetic that better captures the feelings of exploration and discovery than any other game I have played. The later Assassin’s Creed titles direct you towards every piece of treasure on the map and tell you exactly how to solve its various, instanced activities, but in Skyrim, the designer feels absent. The player directs their experience through the world independent of abstract game concerns like completion percentage, instead indulging their curiosity as they poke and prod at one of the most effective and (here comes the buzzword) immersive fantasy simulations in the entire medium.
At its highest level, Skyrim, at first, does not seem very different from a Ubisoft game. The player will begin their session in one of the game’s major cities, open their quest log, look at their huge list of objectives, and figure out which to do next. This seems fairly similar to a Ubisoft title, where the player does much the same thing: check list, pick objective, go to objective, complete objective, repeat. However, in addition to breaking the end of the loop later on, Skyrim also breaks the beginning. This might seem like a minor 
difference, but these quest objectives are not given to player from the beginning, they must be discovered by talking to NPCs or triggering scripted events. In, say, Far Cry 4, the player has barely left the tutorial when the game is slathering notifications all over their screen ordering them to collect twenty deer hides or complete all bomb disarm missions. This adds to the sense of discovery that the player feels before they’ve even left the city, as these objectives organically emerged from the setting, rather than being non-diegetic, game layer objectives. Additionally, when the player opens their map to look around the world, it begins as fairly empty, and is filled in gradually as the player either discovered them or is sent there directly. Contrast this with Ubisoft titles, which start the player with a map filled with objectives. This makes selecting the mission the player wants easier, but Skyrim’s approach makes the world feel more unexplored, and temps the player with large, empty spaces of the map. Skyrim does have a fast travel system that could allow the player to jump from point to point, just completing objectives, but a great deal of the time the player spends in Skyrim’s early game is hiking to their next objective. An NPC might give them a quest halfway across the map, and the player will have to spend half an hour hiking there. The frequency of these experiences decrease by the late game, when the player has explored most of the world, but this ups the pace for the game’s last few hours, so that by the time the player is tired of half-hour hikes between each objective, they can simply fast travel there. It’s worth noting that the game does offer an in-game travel system through its carriage system, a version of fast travel that only moves between major cities. I usually play with fast travel disabled, using only this system, and the simple inclusion of an internally consistent travel system helps the world maintain its sense of scale while still providing that convenience.
After picking an objective and setting out, the player gets into the real meat of the game: exploring the overworld. While its dungeons are not brilliantly designed and the combat is fairly sloppy, the process of moving between the various dungeons, caves, forts and buildings of the world is the game’s greatest achievement. The player begins walking in the direction of their objective, often with a great deal of land to cover if they are early in the game. They could just tape down the analog stick on their controller and go do something else, so to speak, but Skyrim nudges you away from that behavior in a way that many other open world games simply do not. Along the way to their objective, the player will encounter random wildlife, run across herbs and ore veins to harvest, and even occasionally encounter NPCs in the world who will offer them simple quests. This is engaging enough, and works for an experience that provides more variety than simply walking, but doesn’t take away from one of the core reasons Skyrim’s world traversal is so enjoyable: it’s a relaxing walk in the woods. I’m pretty sure that the single most 
important factor in if I am going to enjoy an open world game or not is if the game makes moving from place to place enjoyable. This is why I can enjoy the completely Ubisoft-inspired Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, because movement through the world is the core mechanic set of the game. Skyrim does not have any interesting movement mechanics, but instead puts a great deal of effort into making the player feel like they’re on a relaxing hike, not just moving their character from point A to point B. The overworld’s sound design is nothing short of masterful, with a brilliant combination of ambient music with rustling trees, softly blowing wind, and idle insects and animals. That soundscape blends perfectly with the often gorgeous fantasy landscape the player is moving to, regularly creating moments where the player can stop and gawk at the environment. Skyrim is a screenshot factory for this very reason: the developers wanted to create a world that the player was okay just walking through. In many ways, these sections remind me of playing Campo Santo’s Firewatch, which took these simple hiking mechanics and made an entire game out of it. That kind of idle relaxation is a perfect method of mediating the pacing of Skyrim’s long dungeon crawls. But those dungeon crawls still blend beautifully into the hiking part of Skyrim’s experience. I thoroughly respect Skyrim’s commitment to avoid instanced activities, and the dungeons just barely skirt the line in this regard, mostly for technical reasons. For example, in Burnout Paradise (a brilliantly designed open world in other capacities), you drive around the game world until you reach a stoplight, then get teleported to an instanced race starting at that location. That race plays out just like it would in a traditional racing game, then ends, and returns the player backed to the overworld. While this has its advantages (many of which Burnout Paradise uses), it creates a very modal game experience, where there is a clear distinction between two stages of play: racing and exploration. Most open worlds treat their content this way, most famously, Grand Theft Auto with its complex open world but simplistic, removed missions. The tradeoff, however, is that it makes the game world feel separate from its activities, and makes the activities themselves feel artificially gamey by comparison. Skyrim, on the other hand, doesn’t distinguish between these modes at all. There are a few load screens in the way, but the player can start in a city, walk outside into the world (even removing a loading screen if they have the right mods), wander until they find a dungeon or cave, enter that, complete it, and find their way back without changing the state of play. Skyrim doesn’t distinguish between game activities and open world exploration, in blends the two in a way that creates surprising moments. While walking to a quest objective, the player can stumble onto a bandit camp or find a dungeon, explore them, then get back on the path to their objective.
That core loop of moving towards an objective, getting distracted, then returning to the path to your objective is another of Skyrim’s greatest strengths. That direct path to the objective is interrupted by the player’s curiosity more often than not, and, surprisingly, this is done partially by the in-game compass. I usually believe that games should remove as many non-diegetic UI elements as possible, which is why I always play Skyrim with mods that disable or at least tone down the HUD as much as possible, or replace the in-game map with a parchment one. Skyrim’s exploration loop invites the player to immerse themselves deeper in a way that a standard “click an objective on your map and follow the dotted line to get there” loop really doesn’t. Skyrim’s designers put a lot of care into that stage of gameplay, and it really shows. I mentioned earlier that Skyrim doesn’t scatter objective markers across your map, but rather reveals them as you discover them. The compass slightly breaks this rule, but in a way that I think encourages exploration. While walking to your objective, the compass might show a grayed-out icon of a nearby cave, dungeon, house or outpost. It doesn’t show you its location on the map, just says that one of these locations is nearby and in a certain direction. This helps keep the player from becoming bored on some of the longer walks, as they might see a dungeon marker along the way and decide to take a break to explore it. This is incredibly helpful for exploration later in the game, but also breaks up the direct, point a to point b line into a zig-zaggy path between different locations. This reinforces one of the core design philosophies I believe the game’s designers were aiming for: one of exploration, but exploration with surprising discoveries. Telling the player where every location on the map is from the get-go removes that sense of discovery, but Skyrim’s travel loop bakes it right into one of the player’s most common activities. This lets the world feel mysterious, like there are hidden treasures to discover, but not so much that it takes away from the game’s state of flow. The game won’t tell you that you’ve collected 100% of the treasure in a dungeon, but it will tell you if you’ve completed its primary objective. The game won’t show you the exact position of every location on the map, but it will show you the general direction if you’re 
nearby. In this regard, Skyrim feels like much more of a console or ARPG than a CRPG, for lack of better genre terminology. It doesn’t want the player to be figuring out written directions and hand-drawn maps like in Morrowind (though it does occasionally offer those as side objectives), it wants the player to be in a state of flow that also incorporates discovery to keep it interesting. Walking across large distances in digital space can often kill any sense of flow that other parts of the game had built up, but with the balancing act of making the game flow but not flow so much that it’s mindless, the designers create an experience where you never feel completely lost. The end result is a system that enables and encourages hours of exploration, and doesn’t create moments of frustration where the player might quit the game. And this experience is topped off with the game’s approach to dungeon design.
Skyrim’s dungeons are certainly not the best designed in the business. They’re not complex labyrinths with interweaving paths, they don’t have complex puzzles or perfectly managed difficulty curves. They don’t brilliantly tell a story through environmental design, the way New Vegas’ vaults do. And they don’t offer a great degree of variety in enemy design like the Souls series. But Skyrim’s dungeons work incredibly well for what they are trying to be: slight variations on a dungeon diving experience that aren’t meant to last more than twenty minutes. Mystery is perhaps the dungeons’ greatest asset, as the game doesn’t tell the player what boss or treasure to expect at the end. Sometimes, with scattered journals and light environmental storytelling, the game will hint at an end boss or magical artifact, but that is the exception. Each dungeon provides just enough variety for a quick experience that doesn’t distract the player too much, with a guaranteed boss fight and boss chest at the end. In a similar loop to Diablo (a comparison that Fallout 4 would go on to strengthen), Skyrim gives the player a few distinct stages to each encounter, which it does break from time to time for variety. There’s the initial discovery, where the player is getting a sense of the environment and enemies of a dungeon. If the dungeon is going to provide a narrative hook or a side quest, they will usually do it here. Then, the player starts to explore the dungeon proper, fighting enemies, solving light puzzles, and getting their first taste of some treasure. The game will often split the dungeons into two sections here, with a loading screen in between. The second room usually has higher stakes, tougher enemies, and better treasure, building up to the door to the boss room. These will often be tougher draugr enemies, but will sometimes be dragon priests, powerful necromancers, or other varied NPCs. Then, the player finds their word wall and boss chest, and leaves with a new ability and some good loot through a hidden door back to the first area. This loop is quick, not distracting, and still satisfying for the amount of time it takes up, and the repetition actually works fairly well for letting the player know each stage so the designers can break it when they need to. And when it is broken, if often leaves the player with a sense of excitement that sticking to formula and revealing all the dungeon’s secrets from the beginning never could have.
One of my favorite experiences playing Skyrim since the remaster was released was discovering the Redwater Den, a quest area from the Dawnguard expansion. I wasn’t on the Dawnguard quest at the time, so my experience was entirely organic, a generated story that felt uniquely personal. While exploring near Riften, I stumbled across a broken down house, so I went to check it out, expecting to find a bit of loot and then move on. Instead, I found an NPC who directed me to a Skooma den in the basement. I had never been to a skooma den, so, curious, I found a nearby trapdoor and checked it out, and what do you know, it’s an underground skooma den! The area featured a vendor table with a protective cage, attendants selling skooma, and passed-out customers. I poked around the place, found a few bits of loot, and was about to leave…when I noticed a locked door. Now, I had no reason to expect that there was anything beyond that door, but the designers had left it there to pique my curiosity, to bait me into exploring. They didn’t do it with a quest marker, they did it with a simple locked door. So, I picked the lock, snuck into the back
area, and, what do you know, there’s an entire system of caverns, traps, and skooma manufacturing machines being run by a cabal of vampires using the skooma den to harvest their victims (Redwater. Get it?). I fought my way through the facility and got a ton of loot, ending in a dramatic showdown with the master vampire. Apparently the area is used for a quest later, but I didn’t care, because I had found these layers on my own, and I hadn’t expected a single one. It was a ruined house on top of a skooma den on top of a vampire den, and the discovery of each layer lead to more excitement. I was directed through these layers not by an artificial game system, but by my own curiosity and some subtle design tricks.
Bethesda’s approach to open world design has radically shifted since Morrowind, from an more organic, if clunky-feeling world with a heavy emphasis on narrative complexity, to, as Errant Signal’s Campster described it, their own blend of walking simulator and ARPG. Yet despite the studio’s contemporary lack of narrative ambition and setting reactivity, I find two things about their design ethos that keep me hopeful for the future of the format, even if Fallout 4 was largely a disappointing iteration. The first, is that New Vegas proved that their format could work beautifully if the right team with the right narrative focus takes a stab at it, as New Vegas is one of the most fascinating and reactive 3D open worlds in the entire medium. The second is that Bethesda has only continued to refine the core loop of their quest structure, finding a way to push it closer to the rhythmic flow of Diablo-inspired ARPGs, but keeping a feeling of player-driven, designer-absent play. Skyrim’s designers push their audience towards a specific playstyle just as much as the designers at Ubisoft and their contemporaries, but they do it with a subtlety and a respect for the diegesis of the simulation that it feels much more natural. This is a very careful balancing act, as the failures of Skyrim and Fallout 4’s radiant quest system proves. Despite the increasing emphasis on procedurally generated missions, Bethesda has still proven that they have the raw design talent to create open worlds that beg to be explored, with a mastery of their craft that seemingly almost no one else in the industry can pull off. For all my dislike of contemporary open world games, the fact that developers like Bethesda and Obsidian can create games that are so consistently engaging gives me hope that designers outside of these companies can shift away from creating abstract game spaces and into creating simulated worlds.
demand, keeping the player from crushing their controller and rage quitting is a persistent task for any developer, and Hitbox Team helped address this in a few clever ways, many of which overlap with this design aesthetic of flow. The game’s restarts are incredibly quick, absent of any load times, and don’t linger on your character’s death in the same way a game like Dark Souls does. You’re right back in the action in a few seconds. The music itself doesn’t even stop or react in any way, with an indifference to the player’s performance that stands in stark contrast to Runner2, or really most games out there. The game wants to keep the player calm so they are okay with trying over and over to perfect their runs of a level without turning into a rage-consumed troglodyte. This doesn’t mean the music takes a secondary role in the player’s experience, however, it means that the music creates a rhythm where a slip up and retry isn’t a jarring experience like it is in most games. You still fail – the game certainly isn’t pulling any punches – but the music keeps going even when you do. In addition to making restarts less frustrating, it also makes successful runs feel even better, as the player feels like they are matching the tone and mood of the music with an effortless-looking run. The jumps the player is making may, in actuality, be pixel-perfect, but the music, animation and game feel make it look natural. The combination of all of these elements, from visuals, to music, to game feel, to level design, create an experience that encourages to player to enter a focused, zen-like state of calm persistence as they slowly perfect their runs of a level and increase their mastery of the mechanics. The game wants to keep the player’s focus in the specific moment of the moves they are trying to pull off, and uses the music to narrow the player’s focus more effectively. For example, the game’s scoring system is designed to distract the player as little as possible, with the player being graded on two, easily and quickly identifiably variables: completion and combo. Completion is obvious to the player without requiring much additional mental effort, they just need to see if they have cleared the entire map. The combo meter is also straightforward, and simply requires the player to move quickly between objectives. With how easy both of these variables are to keep track of, the player can focus on the one variable that really matters: time. As a result, the player is always focused on their immediate concerns of moving as quickly as possible, because they do not need to spend time thinking about how to max out their combo meter or how to juggle other abstract systems. Without a focus on complex systems, the game can tell the player to focus on the immediate flow of the level, making the music match the tone perfectly.
support three tones at a time. However, the game builds on this with multiple musical layers, at first with only a background instrument or two on top of the melody, but eventually growing in complexity as the player picks up four power ups in the level. Each one plays a sound effect, displays a colorful notification on the screen, and adds another layer to the music, making the final few seconds of a level feel like a busting musical landscape. In addition to these power-ups, the level is also filled with thirty to fifty gold bars for the player to collect, all of which play a note or two when collected, also in sync with the music. Avoiding obstacles in the environment plays a different sound as well, each one placed at a point in the music that it feels natural. This is iterated on further in the boss fight for World 4, which uses a call and response structure as the foundation for the level’s music. The boss readies obstacles to throw at the player while playing a series of notes to let them know what obstacles to prepare for, then the player jumps over/ducks under/destroys these obstacles as the response is played. All of these aspects lead to a final audio track for each run of a level that is unique to that player, based on what collectibles and power-ups the player grabbed, and if they hit them at the correct time. This results in an aural experience that is much more reactive than even most rhythm games, where the player is expected to perform the audio the game wants rather than dynamically create their own. The end result is a more reactive take on flow, that feels just as elegant as Dustforce, but while Dustforce wants you to feel a detachment between the music and the gameplay, Runner2 wants you to feel like you are helping create it. Both takes are incredibly effective for each game’s specific design goals, but when compared, I think they provide interesting examples on how music can be used creatively with regards to game feel.
were obviously scripted and mostly cheesy. The more common mechanics of FEAR, however, created quite the opposite feeling. In addition to being a horror game, FEAR is also a first-person shooter, and it doesn’t seek to innovate too dramatically in that department, but it does execute on those mechanics wonderfully. From a design doc level overview of the game, it doesn’t have much to offer: samey enemies with guns, normal first person shooting, and a slow-motion mechanic to spice things up. But the game does so well with all three of these features that it elevates the game to an incredibly well-polished version of an oversaturated genre. First, the enemies use an incredibly clever AI system that sees them flanking, falling back, and responding to player actions, in a way that makes every gunfight feel delightfully dynamic. The first-person shooting feels punchy and kinetic in a way even games today still have trouble getting right. And the slow-motion, despite how overused it is in shooters, elevates the entire experience to a tactical, visceral experience. FEAR’s combat is not its only strength though, it’s environment and atmosphere do a much better job of evoking discomfort than its scripted sequences do to evoke horror. After a tough gunfight, the incredibly reactive environments will be covered in rubble and broken glass, leaving the previously sterile environments a mess. As the player walks from objective to objective, or explores an area for additional supplies, the tone is uncomfortably quiet, occasionally broken up by quiet, low-quality radio conversations that further the player’s sense of isolation. FEAR’s environments post-combat feel tense, and even though that tension is usually broken by a cheap jump scare, that tension is one of my favorite parts of the game.
frantic and confusing, but often it comes across as clunky and unpolished. This is a completely acceptable aesthetic to shoot for, but it diminishes the feeling that the game will respond to a player’s low-level skill instead of their higher-level skill. For example, aiming a gun in an FPS is a low level skill, it’s directly about using the controls to perform an action and the game reacts based on how well you do that. Deciding to flank an enemy and shoot him first instead of charging him head-on would be a higher-level skill, making tactical decisions that, while dependent on your low-level interaction with the controls, aren’t as immediately involved with them. This makes combat in Condemned more fun to think about than to actually play, as action games tend to rely more on low-level skill and the satisfaction gained from mastering them. In an opposition to FEAR, what it lacks in its low-level mechanics are made up for at a higher level. Condemned completely nails the atmosphere that FEAR only gets right some of the time. The discomfort of FEAR’s environment is ratcheted up for Condemned, making the player go from uncomfortable to always on the edge of their seat. Levels feel labyrinthine, requiring backtracking into rooms that will often be filled with new enemies performing unscripted actions. The game is fond of the same unmotivated cuts to confusing, horrific images and scenes that FEAR is, but it does them with more subtlety and effectiveness. While FEAR’s art style is largely forgettable, Condemned takes place in Metro City, but is obviously a grimey version of 1980s/90s New York, taking visual influence from films like 
Any botched hack or unscanned system could lead to a game over, which the game wonderfully contextualizes as the player’s in-game account being deleted, making retries a canonical part of the story. The player types commands into a DOS-like terminal, going through a process that, while not actually resembling real-world hacking, makes enough sense in-world that it limits necessary suspension of disbelief, even for players who do know a decent amount about cybersecurity. Most of the in-game programs have real-world analogs, like the brute force and dictionary password crackers, which are real world methods of breaking passwords. These programs are necessarily abstracted, represented visually by the inaccurate movie cliche of a program solving a password one letter at a time. Nonetheless, this closeness to actual hacking grounds Uplink in reality, not by actually simulating the real world, but by simulating something that feels just plausible enough. Like many of the good conspiracy stories the game’s narrative draws influence from, it gets just close enough to reality to pique the player’s curiosity, then lets their imagination fill in the gaps.
games work, which function just like Guitar Hero, but with the player plugging an actual guitar into their PC or console. So, Guitar Hero isn’t really asking the player to abstract their low-level actions, they’re asking them to abstract the context in which those actions are taking place. The music is the most obvious change in context the game wants you to imagine, and it does a decent job of emphasizing this through minor interactions such as the whammy bar and star power that give the player at least some degree of personal expression. The tracks also respond to player failure in an interesting way. Guitar Hero stores their songs in multiple different music tracks, including an instrumental track that only plays audio from the guitar, which will cut out whenever the player misses a note. Guitar Hero’s modding community will occasionally port custom songs over without this guitar track, removing the aural response to failure. Songs played without this feature feel substantially less responsive, and break the game’s careful balance of contextual abstractions. The expertly evoked game feel that Guitar Hero relies on suffers greatly from this lack of responsiveness, breaking the illusion that your actions are producing the audio coming from your speakers. Many of games are greatly elevated by their audio – would Bioshock’s Rapture have felt anywhere near as atmospheric without the game’s incredible ambient sound design? – but Guitar Hero is almost completely defined by it. If you remove all sound from Bioshock, you still have the game’s immersive sim-inspired systems, its competent combat mechanics, and its mostly stellar writing. It is an undeniably lesser product, but it is still Bioshock in some sense. If you remove the audio from Guitar Hero, the entire experience falls apart. It exists for the sake of its audio. 
Reapers, and, especially if you have chosen her romance option, she talks about Sheaprd so that another civilization might know about her, and her lines change based on your class and alignment, creating something that feels uncomfortably personal. It doesn’t make a big deal out of itself, it doesn’t have any explosions or giant battle sequences, it just tries to figure out why people like Liara so much. A bit later in the game, in an optional encounter with her on The Citadel, Liara talks about her mother, who you both killed together in the first game, and speaks of her as though she was a regular person, not some video game boss in a sci-fi epic. She tells a very relatable story about her mother taking her to a park so she could dig, a practice that sparked her interest in archeology, and with that as a starting point, she talks with Shepard about very normal things, like home and growing up, about sometime in the future settling down and starting a family. These should feel so out of place in a game about defeating crab gods from outer space, but they don’t. The game has built itself a cast of characters who feel like real, fully fleshed-out people. And, when it is at its peak, it can tell wonderful stories about them.
protagonist is going to come out on top, and if you’ve seen/read/played enough, it will start to get predictable. Citadel knows this, and it turns what could have been another self-serious save-the-galaxy plot into a self-aware comedy about Shepard and her friends going on a wacky adventure. And it isn’t without its technical accomplishments as well. For really the first time in the series, The Citadel feels massive. While fighting the clone and her mercenaries, Shepard gets to see parts of The Citadel that hint at an even grander scale, making the player really feel like they are on a massive, city-sized space station. This makes the shootouts that now are missing narrative tension more engaging because the player has never been in firefights in places that look just like this. You start to be reminded of the scale of the galaxy you have become so accustom to, and seeing a new side of a place that the player has seen in three separate games keeps the player from getting bored. But really, the writing is what carries these action sequences. The characters rag on Shepard for this and that and joke about how many people Shepard kills (because it’s a video game and Shepard murders hundreds of people). The game takes the time to be in love with its genre and its characters and just have fun with it. They make callbacks to throwaway lines from earlier in the game and use them as actual main drivers of the plot, like Traynor’s ridiculously expensive and complex tooth brush being the one tool they need to break into the Normandy after CloneShep steals it. They make jokes about how it’s really contrived that Shepard can never have more than two squadmates, but then break that rule when they have your entire team fighting beside you, something I really wish the main game’s final mission could have done. They even make a joke about Shepard saying, “I should go”, a line that reached meme status after the second game’s release. A great deal of Mass Effect 3 felt like it was made by committee, by people who didn’t quite understand how the game worked and why people loved it. Citadel feels like it was made by people who love the game as much as I do, and want to spend a few hours celebrating that. One of my notes that I took while playing through this DLC was, “This single-handed makes up for everything the main game did wrong”, and I genuinely think it does. While the main game had its share of powerful moments, Citadel feels defined by its greatness, having a purity of vision that the main game just lacked. And I felt that before the game’s crowning achievement began: Shepard throwing a party.
them. Events include walking on set of the Blasto movie, to watching a terrible romance movie that Tali is in love with, to spending a bit of time with your Shepard’s love interest. And they don’t limit themselves to squad members in the third game, they bring back *everyone*, which is really great if you romanced a character who wasn’t too present in the third game. They put a great deal of effort into making the dialog feel reactive to how you treat each one of your characters, like with James asks if his flirting might make Liara (or whoever your Shepard is getting it on with) uncomfortable, and it’s written so casually and naturally that it didn’t appear to be some token bit of interactivity, but the setting reacting to your decisions. Again, it shows the game understanding what players are about, and putting the effort into that. But once these individual character events end, the party begins, and I cannot think of a single section in any video game where I was smiling more.
species post-genophage. So, in order to produce his army of krogan, Saren found a cure for the disease. The only way to stop him is to destroy his lab, including all information about the cure. Wrex is, understandably, not thrilled with this idea, and pulls a gun on Shepard when she insists that they go through with the plan. If the player has the right amount of points in persuasion or intimidate, and says the right things, Wrex will stand down, but if they don’t, Shepard will shoot Wrex on the spot, killing him for the rest of the trilogy. I can’t really explain how mind-blowing this was at the time, that a major character could just die halfway through, despite having writing done for him to live far beyond this choice. Wrex can have a bright future ahead of him, but if Shepard isn’t smart enough, he bleeds out on the beaches of Virmire. Static media, like film or literature, can try to emphasize the loss of a character by exploring what could have been if they hadn’t died, but in Mass Effect, you can straight-up see the life this character would have lived if you hadn’t messed up. You can watch videos of it on YouTube and you can feel like shit because some twelve-year-old on the internet figured out how not to get Wrex killed and you didn’t, and they get to experience what Wrex’s future would have been like, and you didn’t.
enlisted in the Alliance military. Ash is hypercompetant and hyperfocused, and at first appears like she will be a clichéd, no-nonsense soldier. But, if the player talks to her more, you start to find a bit more depth. Ash is the oldest of four sisters, and helped raise them while her father was deployed. She’s got strong, healthy relationships with them, and we even see bits and pieces of them from overheard conversations. In a universe dominated by robot gods and strange aliens, seeing a normal relationship between a group of sisters is refreshingly human, and a touch I wish the series had more of. It grounds Ash, makes her feel like someone who could be alive today, and that only goes further the more you learn about her. Ash is religious, in an undefined deist sense, but doesn’t talk about it unless the player asks. Her faith is important to her character, and while she believes in it strongly, she avoids falling into the religious fanatic template that pretty much every video game seems to cast anyone religious as. She’s a regular person who is also religious. Imagine that. She quotes Alfred Tennyson poems, is a bit racist towards aliens, and is a bit of a romantic. Most players don’t see this depth to her though, because she’s written off regularly as “Racist Human Lady.” Still, I’m glad that it’s there.
of the first asari that Shepard runs into, and while other alien characters in the first game serve as ambassadors for the species, Liara is actually fairly different from most other asari. The asari are a race of all-female humanoids who are the longest-lived and perhaps the most powerful race in the galaxy. Liara is a recluse who prefers to spend her time studying long-dead civilizations. She grows a lot over the course of the series, but that’s a story for the later games.
The original Mirror’s Edge game came out some eight years ago, and has been one of my all-time favorites ever since I first played the demo at a friend’s house. In the time since then, there has never quite been anything like it. Sure, Brink had some parkour, Titanfall took the basic stylings and made it crazy fast (and added jetpacks, which is always nice), and Dying Light applied it to a Ubisoft-styled open world on their own, but while I love all of those games (except Brink, c’mon, Bethesda, what were you thinking?), none of them even come close to Mirror’s Edge. Because as fun as their movement systems are, at the end of the day, the feel just a bit too floaty, too removed, and, most importantly, too easy. Movement is never the core gameplay of those games. In Mirror’s Edge, it was basically all you had (I’m not going to talk about the shooting mechanics, and no one else should either). While Ubisoft games had me hating going from Point A to Point B, Mirror’s Edge is basically nothing but that. So, they figured, if our game is entirely about getting from one place to another, why not make that really freaking fun? And they did! The movement in Mirror’s Edge is filled with this flow, heft and weight. Faith can get up to some serious speed, but she lands with a thud, will get hurt if you don’t time your roll right, and fall to the ground with a sickening crunch if you miss a ledge grab. The game asked you to be constantly aware, not just to stay alive, but to move as fast as you can and look as cool as you can while doing it. The aesthetics of parkour, of traversing a complicated space in a unique way and making it look effortless, translated so well into gameplay that I am amazed that, eight years later, NO ONE ELSE HAS GOTTEN IT RIGHT. But the first Mirror’s Edge was a linear, level-to-level game, and while I really admire and enjoy its purity, this year, when we *finally* got a sequel, they changed that.
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is a straight-up, Ubisoft-inspired, checkbox-ridden, collectible-filled open world. It has an overall completion rate, barfs icons for random tasks onto your map, and doesn’t provide and mechanical incentive to do any of those things. And I freaking love it. Most open world games get very tedious, very fast, because a decent chunk of your game time is just walking from objective to objective, but in Mirror’s Edge, running everywhere is the core gameplay, so they focus on making it as engaging as possible. I had a blast finding out different routes from the various points of interest in the game, felt amazing whenever I found a new shortcut to shave off some travel time, and got genuinely, shout-an-exclamation-of-joy-at-two-in-the-morning-and-piss-off-my-parents excited when I unlocked a new upgrade that let me double wall jump. I didn’t care if I was parkouring to a fixed objective on the map that added to my overall completion, I was doing parkour! I wish I had more to say about it than that, but all it took to make this style of open world enjoyable was to just make going from place to place exciting. The walking wasn’t a chore anymore. I learned every detail of the environments because they were useful to me. And a type of game that I had *hated* for years suddenly was something I was raving to friends about again. Except this time, the honeymoon phase didn’t wear off.
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