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[PsychoBlonde]

Fair warning:  this is yet another of my tedious, jargon-filled, pseudo-intellectual ramblings.  If you are not a tedious, jargon-loving, pseudo-intellectual individual, you will probably become sadly baffled in the first paragraph.  Go read one of the joke or rant threads instead.  Your eyeballs will thank you.

Something that I was thinking about today: a difficulty of game design, particularly in RPG's, is that the mechanical workings, the bones, as it were, always show the most in the fringe aspects of the game, whereas in the core they're usually well-enough hidden that a few flaws can disappear under the padding.  The mechanical bits underlying the fringe areas need to be nigh-perfect.  Otherwise you'll be poking yourself in the eye with them. 

Maybe so.  But I think there may be benefit in making an effort to *more clearly define what areas are fringe and what are core*.  This is where it gets sticky, because there's a degree of subjectivity to this based on the goals of the player and of the dev team.  Degree of subjectivity does not mean that analysis is useless, though.  Just because *everything* isn't and can't be universal doesn't mean that universals cannot be discerned.  The fact that you can't give a hard number about how many hairs make a beard doesn't mean you can't tell whether a given individual has a beard or does not.

So, it's time for my favorite activity:  NUMBERED LIST!!!!!

I'm going to define by exception a bit, here, and only talk about fringe stuff.  Without further ado:

Game Fringes

1.  The beginning(s).  No matter how much effort you throw at the first 10 minutes of the game (and, in a game like DA2, the stuff immediately following the act transitions), it will NEVER be a core area.  It is ALWAYS a fringe.  I'd be tempted to say that you just flat-out can't hope for any padding in this area--the only thing to be done is to minimize them as much as possible.  The bones are going to show no matter what you do.  So, in my mind, the thing to do with the beginnings is to revel in the bones.  Show them off with loving attention.  Some of this is covered by the tutorial--that shows off the game mechanics.  But you also need to show off the bones of your story.  The Origins handled this fairly well in DAO.  I don't think the intro worked nearly so well in DA2.  Too many things were introduced simultaneously for it to be clear which of them were important story themes and which where only part of the opening.

2.  The climax and ending.  This one is a no-brainer.  Gotta revel in the bones here, as well, and kind of in a very similar fashion to the tutorial/introduction.  From a gameplay perspective, this is where you dust off the game systems, whatever they are, and return them all to prominence.  A lot of games do not do this.  You may have been picking locks, fighting enemies, crafting and managing resources, casting spells, shouting (FUS ROH DAH!!!!), exploring, persuading people, joining organizations, becoming the LEADER of organizations, etc. etc. etc, but the end boils down to a.) murdering a ton of dudes and b.) maaaaaaaaybe one other mechanic, possibly one that was introduced JUST FOR THE FINAL BOSS FIGHT.  C'mon, folks, you went to all this effort to design stuff for us to do and you're going to just ignore if for the end sequence?!   Boo.

Likewise, this is the time when the themes underlying the game story need to get pulled out and revisitied/reiterated.  In Origins, the overall story theme was the darkspawn invasion.  What did you do at the end?  Fought the archdemon.  Soooo . . . what was the theme in DA2?  Anyone?  Anyone?  Here's what I think:  DA2 was "about" people going fanatical/crazy and destroying the very things they were striving to uphold and protect.  You see it everywhere in the game except at the beginning.  This theme *was* brought out and shown off at the end, but because it wasn't really introduced until Act 2, it looked like the actual theme was "something about mages v. templars"--the very first part of the game DOES have references to the mages v. templars conflict, and so does the end.  This was the only story universal uniting the two biggest fringes, and it cast Act II somewhat adrift, because the Qunari problem had only the sketchiest connection to the mages v. templars conflict.  (This is also why what might have been a minorish issue--the Qunari treatment of mages--became ENORMOUSLY prominent.)  The problem wasn't that the ending was in itself bad.  The problem is that the beginning and the end belonged on slightly but noticeably different stories, and because there's absolutely no way to avoid ALL the bones showing at these two times it was an issue.

3.  Side activities.  Tough question here: is there ultimately any way to avoid making the filler *feel* like filler?  I think there must be, but I'm not sure I have a good analysis worked out on this one yet.  I think it may depend on the specific nature of the game.  I certainly have put in my hours running all over the place in open-world games finding locations, crafting stuff, looting things, dragging them back to town, stashing them, selling them, collecting unique weapons and bobble-head dolls, buying every bit of property in the game, heck, even ARRANGING THE DISHES IN MY HOUSE.  Granted, this may be deceptive because you could definitely make the case that these are not SIDE activities in open world games--they ARE the game, and it's the so-called plots that are actually the side activities!  Even so, they don't really feel all that side, because they point you to locations where you can still pursue all the other game activities.  It's only the big quest lines that wind up feeling somewhat deranged in this respect because they're out of scale with the rest of the game (and with each other).  It is really hard to fit the various purposeful "save the world/town/organization" suits on a person who spends most of their time running around poking at things.

I think that may be the ultimate secret--hide the side by tying it to the true core.  The less something relates to what you spend most of the game doing, the more obviously "side" it is and the more effort needed to hide it.  Bethesda could do this by only slightly reworking the content of their quest lines so that the focus is less "SAVE THE CHILDREN!!" (or some version thereof, I'm being facetious here) and more "GO FORTH AND POKE", since you're going to go forth and to poke ANYWAY.  Origins, once again, did this decently well because you picked up the vast majority of the side quests in the hub areas of the four main story locations (Circle Tower, Elven Forest, Redcliffe, Orzammar, Denerim), and you completed them while you were doing the main story lines.  So there was integration there.  This hubbed approach let even the DLC be kinda integrated, 'cause they'd just throw in a new hub for ya and you could go there whenever, just like with the main story areas.  The only real failing from this perspective was with the Board Quests, because they had no integration to anything, where you got the had basically no relation to where you had to go to complete them or anything else that was going on.  So they were pretty obviously Filler.

So, how did DA2 deal with this problem?  Um.  Good question.  DID DA2 deal with this problem?  Didn't feel like it, and this, I think, made the complaints even worse.  80% of the game felt like filler.  Many of the quests that were labeled as main plot quests wound up feeling like filler.  They weren't, but the game was so disintegrated that the only real way to tell what was supposed to be core was to open your journal and look at what section the quest was in.  The lack of any sort of visible hub or organizing principle hit DA2 hard, which is kind of ironic when you think about it because it's the quests that do have hubs and an organizing principle that DON'T work in Skyrim.

So, to sum up, here's my recipe for dealing with the places where the bones show:

1.  At the beginning and the end, the gameplay and game themes need to be on prominent display.
2.  Hide the filler by tying ALL the game activities together somehow.  Exactly how depends on the nature of the game.

Cheers!