"I'm so glad that I'm an island now"
Metric - Empty
Despite my disdain for the series, one aspect Sunless Skies did get right (and for which it's unfairly bashed from what comments I've seen) is travel. Towns are spaced widely enough that every so often you'll find yourself alone on your screen, chugging desperately almost motionless against a distant parallaxed view of foaming, uncertain infinity.
I've said this many times before, but it bears repeating: a good virtual world makes you feel small. The rabble expect a hefty helping of power trip from their fantasies: you're the chosen one, you get everything done, you save the world six impossible times before breakfast, you're the most important person in the universe.* But when trying to backdrop that frontloading, even small doses of such infantile narcissism render that world meaningless by comparison with the protagonist's omnipotence... and omnipresence. I shouldn't have to specify, but the world you inhabit is supposed to be bigger than you!
"Walking simulator" has been both a slam and a semi-official category for some years now. It's usually what you get when you remove too much puzzle-solving from the adventure game formula, by which it most closely relates to the "where's Waldo" hidden object subgenre. But the earliest I heard the term was ~2004 when WoW broke into the mass market, and both critics and a wider public which had dismissed MMOs as the exclusive domain of obsessive nerds suddenly found themselves amazed at the existence of persistent virtual worlds.
And the first thing they did was bitch about worlds being too big. One of the first critics to review WoW at launch slammed it as "world of walkcraft" and every single change in the intervening two decades has done nothing but shrink such worlds down and let you effortlessly teleport to the next goblin to hit it over the head, because to the average retard every game is a Skinner box; just like every movie must be nothing but plotless heroic set pieces, love declarations, tits and explosions from start to finish, so every game must boil down to hitting the dopaminurging "I win" button faster, faster, fasterFASTERFASTERRR!!! or better yet remove even the need for success and simply reward you for clicking "next" or pulling a slot machine lever.
In case you can't tell, I disagree.
Just to hedge a bit here, I'm aware dead air is all too common in this field. Game developers certainly love timesinks, especially ever since "hours played" grew to prominence among marketing gimmicks, and even some otherwise good titles like Battletech or Darkest Dungeon have abused half-second interface pauses by the million to create anticipatory addiction or stretch out their run time. Making you scroll through endless unsorted lists every time you want to buy or use an item, dramatic "bullet time" camera work, damage sponge monsters taking forever to kill (remember those ogres in Oblivion?) interminable cutscenes, hell, even listing all the timesinks they abuse would turn into a timesink itself.
So is travel a timesink in Sunless Skies? In one sense yes, because you can only save at ports as checkpoints any trip more roundabout than directly steaming from port to port becomes an exercise in checkpoint scarcity, forcing you to replay the entire sequence of events over and over again. But aside from dying while defogging the far corners of each map, most trips are quite well measured to make you actively weigh supply/fuel costs vs. possible payoffs, modified by random shipboard events (especially with high nightmares) and loot
pick-ups / encounters randomized each time you leave
port. Points of interest generally don't pop up either right on top of you or completely out of your reach, imposing a cost/benefit analysis on every detour. Distance is not just empty space. It's difficulty. For instance the second map you'll likely visit in Skies, Albion, is slightly less dangerous than the starter zone but also gives less frequent loot opportunities so I found myself gradually getting starved of cash, and the sheer logistical challenge of exploring a new map forced me to put off visiting it for some time.
Back in 2014 I called for more extreme environments understanding that it's the contrast with safety which makes hardship relevant, and distance makes destinations more appealing: "An oasis in the desert, the edge of the taiga in the tundra, a port in a
storm, a planet in space... it is the sand, the ice, the sea, the
black, it's contrast that lends them their poignancy." Better caravan management games like Vagrus or Mount&Blade also treat distance as a necessity, not only for the sake of immersion but to reward forward planning and allow for small decisions to accumulate along the way, never dropping anvils on the player but also never letting you sleepwalk your way to destination. Your first trip across the Mediterranean in Bannerlord, striking out toward a new regional hub like Avernum in Vagrus, what would be treated in most games as mere loading screens between hitting the next goblin over the head become momentous decisions and tense balancing acts for which you alter your party composition, stock up and prepare contingencies, and can play out very differently according not only to the whim of the randomizer but your own foresight and priorities.
Playing the loading screens, weird as it may sound, was originally also an important part of the MMO concept. You'd hear people complain about being made to run back and forth questing, and many times developers do make the same quest line rubberband you around nonsensically... but just as often this was lack of planning on players' part. Grabbing twenty objectives strung out all over the map is a good way of increasing the complexity of even the most simpleminded "kill ten rats" tedium by challenging you to plan the most efficient route and avoid hazards or delays. Plotting your circuits was ideally a quest in itself and damn well should be, a measure of player mental ability - suffer less by thinking more. Dungeons requiring every group member to travel to the entrance were again an exercise in planning, organization and coordination. You could see a great real-time indication of how precipitously customers' intelligence level dropped over a few short years up to 2010 in their bitching for more teleportation so they wouldn't get "bored" on the way, only to use that faster access to mindlessly grind the same instance, the same fights, the same mobs, repeating all the same motions in all the same order three or ten times more than before.
Intellect does not flatter itself devolving toward the simpler, shorter and more repetitive.
Mechwarrior 5 trivializes the franchise's custom bot-building or tactical aspects in favor of skeet-shooting infinitely spawning adds. Online FPS was degraded from team games backwards to 1990s deathmatch with Fortnite. League of Legends put out a patch last month hiking up damage/health ratios to allow for more 1v1 insta-gibs instead of actual teamwork and gradual terrain control (you know, the whole point of lane-pushing?) Magic: the Gathering's online version still held to its core charm years ago when I got back into it for lack of any decent multiplayer options. It allowed you to gradually build up interdependencies among your cards to eventually outposition your opponent for a decisive advantage. Now?
A 6/5 trample creature on round 3 is just the tip of the iceberg. Everything spawns tokens, everything insta-kills an enemy when cast or does player damage, everything auto-stacks +1 counters, nothing requires an extra mana cost or deliberate activation, every deck is a rush deck, most matches end by round 5.
When Starcraft came out, it was the players themselves who imposed "no rush" rules for themselves in online matches. In '98 even twitch-gamer idiots who wanted infinite resources understood that just getting a "you win" message was pointless and the real fun was making big and complex things happen on screen. Is it any wonder that now, good games are by definition single-player? What worthwhile individual would willingly wade in the sea of subhuman garbage which live only for gratuitous validation and can't even be bothered to amble a few steps towards it? Don't hate the game. Hate the players.
I know I've harped on such degradation before, and the same incapacity for coordination, cooperation, planning or organization or deferred gratification crops up everywhere. This is not games' problem. It's a symptom of degeneration pervading all our society as it collapses, heralded (as we knew from the start) decades ago by "reality" TV and the "like button" and presaged by Ray Bradbury's warning against digest digest digests back in 1953 and Isaac Asimov warning against the cult of ignorance in 1980 and universities embracing Fashionable Nonsense in the '90s and the snowflakes in the 2010s demanding never to be challenged. Leave politics aside as low-hanging fruit. I talked to someone in academia recently who confirmed pretty much what I already knew was happening, having watched it unfurl online: graduate students even in the hard sciences now increasingly lack the attention span to read and discern the value/point of even one scientific paper.
But we're still handing them diplomas.
Everyone loves a "LEVEL UP"
Mmm that's good dopamine.
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* It's no accident that the fantasies to which humans cling hardest, religions, also function on this principle. The embodiment(s) of cosmic force have nothing better to do than to love you, or to haunt you, or to remove obstacles for you or spy on your sex life. Don'tcha feel speshul?
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