Exploration Pattern Paralysis (ft. Darkside of Xeen)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. And sorry I could not travel both, and be one traveler, long I stood.

          

My experience this session with Darkside of Xeen led me to a long contemplation of exploration patterns in RPGs and why I find the Xeen games particularly confounding in this area. To understand, it's probably worth first considering the extremes.

   

One extreme would be a dungeon crawler like Wizardry. It would certainly be possible to win the game without mapping the entire 10-level dungeon, but I doubt any serious player would try. Too much depends on finding key items and encounters in key squares. Even when there's nothing to find in a particular corridor, the act of exploring it generates random encounters that you need for character development. This is why when I replay a game, I almost always make a new set of maps. Sure, I could use the old ones, but then I wouldn't have anything to do while trying to build experience points.

  

At the same time, there's also little mystery in how to explore the Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. You map each level completely, then move to the next one. Since this system also works with enemy difficulty and character development, it's a no-brainer. To do something different--say, roll a random number from 1 to 10 and head directly for that level--would not only be weird, you'd probably just end up dying.

        

When I'm mapping a walled dungeon, there's no exploration angst. It's just right or left.

       

At the other extreme would be the game that's currently occupying my console time--Assassin's Creed: Odyssey--but also any of the open-world titles in the Elder Scrolls or Fallout series. Only the most insane player would try to explore everything. In a continuous-surface game (which almost all games are after the mid-1990s), what does it even mean to "explore everything"? To look behind every rock? To map every tree? Your exploration patterns in such games are heavily quest-driven, and while many players take time to stop and smell the roses, investigating ruins or stopping at encounters along the way, their tendency is to move from quest to quest. Nobody plays Skyrim by starting in the northwest corner and moving systematically eastward in north-south strips, yet using this system to explore Xeen doesn't feel quite as risible.

   

A related question, of course, is how much content you feel comfortable missing. The player who insists on solving every quest and clearing every dungeon in Skyrim makes as much sense to me as the tourist who insists on walking down every street in whatever city he's visiting. If your friend told you he was going to visit Manhattan and his plan was to visit every single building--whether systematically or randomly--you'd think he was mental. And yet thousands of players cheerfully say, "I'm a completionist!" as if they weren't essentially announcing that they have a crippling disorder. (And yes, I understand the irony of someone who's spent 11 years on a quest to play every RPG ever made commenting on someone else's mental health.) That isn't to say that when I play those games, I simply follow the main quest line. I guess I would describe myself as a serendipitist. I work my way through quests organically, systematically, or even sometimes randomly, and if I encounter something interesting along the way, I'm happy to explore it, but I otherwise don't mind if I finish the game leaving large parts of it unexplored.

    

Odyssey and Skyrim, however, were made well past the era in which a player needed to explore every corner to get strong enough to win. In the era I'm playing in, it was generally understood that you had to do everything, or almost everything, to prepare yourself for the final battle. There are some exceptions even in these years--Darklands, Legends of Valour, and Realms of Arkania all spring to mind--but needing to do all the precursor quests is the norm. I don't think that Clouds and Darkside require you to do all their quests to get strong enough to win, but they certainly require you to do a good portion of them.

   

Put all of this together, and you find that no approach is entirely satisfying. Lawnmowing (systematically exploring each map in rows or columns) seems artificial. Simply pursuing the main quest would leave you too weak to win (and you'd miss a lot of great content). The tiled nature of the game makes it difficult to explore organically. There's no natural pattern to the geography the way there was in Might and Magic III or, say, Ishar. And the difficultly level ramps up too quickly between areas to do something like, for instance, exploring the road network before everything else. I tried this and got stomped by an "armadillo" five minutes in.

          

What "organic" exploration gets you.

          

By starting a new party, I was hoping to limit my options a bit, as the new party doesn't have "Pathfinding," "Mountaineering," or "Swimming." But these skills never really made any sense anyway--I can't walk through a frigging forest without a special skill?--and the lack of them just makes the terrain feel artificially restrictive. Plus, I know where I can get them, so honestly, what am I waiting for? Do I need to somehow prove myself exploring more limited terrain before I can feel comfortable buying the skill? What milestone am I looking for? And in the meantime, do I just lawn-mow the terrain that I can explore, or do I try to do it "organically"? Honestly, those of you who encouraged me to start Darkside without those abilities, what did you expect I was going to gain from the experience? What do you get out of it?

      

"Organic" exploration isn't really possible at this point anyway because the game gives you no idea where to go. All I know is that I need a bunch of power discs. I know that most of the dungeons and towers will require stones and keys I haven't found yet, so heading directly for them seems like a waste of time. My only thought was to go look for hints in the next town's tavern, which is east across the map. That got me eaten by an armadillo.

        

For at least a 3 x 3 area ahead of me, there's nothing to find. Is it somehow better role-playing if I refuse to step on those squares?

       

There's yet another element to consider: the Xeen games feature visible encounters. Unlike most tiled games, NPCs, treasures, and enemies never just pop up in otherwise generic squares. You can see that there's something there from several squares away. It's not necessary to hit every one in Clouds or Darkside; you just have to look in the direction of every one. But try something like that and you'll drive yourself crazy. The game keeps track of the tiles you've stepped on, not the ones you've "seen." Are you really going to leave three grass tiles gray on your map just because you can tell there's nothing there? Please. But then you get to a lava area, and you start to wonder if you're really epitomizing the spirit of role-playing by forcing your party to walk on it.

   

Given all of this, you can understand why I found myself wishing I could just start in the southwest corner of the world and mow my way eastward. Doesn't it make more sense to explore the area around the starting town before tearing across the map? And if I'm going to do that, how do I do it? Rows and columns are "artificial." So is concentric circles around the town. How do you comprehensively explore a tiled open world in a way that isn't fundamentally "artificial"?

     

This started as a Darkside of Xeen posting, but I realized I wanted to hear your thoughts about exploration patterns before committing to one for Darkside, so I'll put this out as more of a "special topic" instead. In the meantime, here's the basic approach I've taken to some recent games, both on this blog and off:

   

• Assassin's Creed: Origins and Odyssey: Select the next quest in order of level, find the location (or most likely location) on the map, and mark it. (I try to avoid the actual quest markers.) Head there in as direct a path as possible, but if any unexplored sites (annotated with a ?) appear on my radar on the way, I have to detour to explore them before continuing. If there are multiple ?s, I detour to the closest one. This method has me backtracking a lot, sometimes over very long distances, but I don't mind because the terrain is gorgeous and the random encounters and natural resources you find on the way leave you wealthier. Last year, I played The Witcher 3 basically the same way.

      

Looks like I have an oasis to explore.

       

• Far Cry 5: Pretty much the same as above except I selected the quests more organically (e.g., which seemed the most pressing).

• Mission: Thunderbolt: Moot point because it's a mostly-linear game. Fully explore each level using the "rightmost wall" approach.

• The Magic Candle III: Went systematically across the game world from west to east. This was a fairly dumb way to do it. Top-down open-world games often leave me with the same angst (cf. Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan) as Xeen. The Magic Candle III is a bit different because you don't reveal squares as you explore, but you still have to hit most of them because hidden locations only show up if you're in an adjacent square. This meant that I had to explore the world like Xeen but also remember where I had been.

• Ultima Underworld: Not tiled, so you don't have to hit every spot, just enough to basically fill in the auto-map, which ensure that you've seen everything. At the same time, it's not quite an open-world game, so there's a natural linear pattern to vertical exploration, at least, and I used the "right wall" approach for lateral exploration.

• Ultima VII: The Black Gate: I tried to do this one organically, setting destinations in a logical order, but after creating a role-playing reason not to do things in the order that the game clearly wanted me to do. This created some problems, as we saw, but it also created some fun moments and probably led me to experience more of the game world than if I'd done things in the "official" order.

        

Exploring serendipitously meant that I found interesting places like this.

     

• Legends of Valour: It's an open-world game with a fairly linear quest order. I just went in the natural order of quests. I made small detours if I saw something interesting, but I mostly didn't worry if I didn't explore 50% of the buildings in the city. The nature of character development (i.e., there is none) doesn't reward dallying, nor does the game's inventory system (you only ever find three items). If the game had proper experience or leveling, I think my approach would have been different.

• The Dark Queen of Krynn: All of the Gold Box games with overworlds lack visible encounters. You have to step on every square to ensure you find anything--and the nature of character development makes you want to find everything. I went between locations in the natural order of the somewhat linear quests, but I made sure to step on all the squares in between.

• Fallout 4: I did the quests in a relatively organic order, but my rule was that if my quest marker touched any unexplored icon in the 3D compass, I had to go there before continuing.

       

From this list, we can see how other factors--side quests, difficulty, character development, the economy, the possibility of finding treasures--all affects the decision for what feels like the "right" exploration pattern. Thus, in most games, I don't really struggle with it; some combination of the above leaves me with a single path that feels natural. My paralysis here is yet another way in which the Might and Magic games are unique.