In my old Dev Diary series I frequently talked about my adherence to the philosophy of game design that focuses on the primary gameplay loop, or the moment to moment, second to second experience. But we’ve been seeing a lot of big games lately where the primary gameplay loop appears to be, well, a secondary concern. For all the merits or demerits of Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 that I’m sure we could argue over until the Metacritic scores come home, neither game would look particularly enticing if you randomly clipped a few seconds of an average runthrough. The Starfield clip would probably just be a mid-conversation staring contest with a dead-eyed NPC and the Baldur’s Gate 3 clip would be me yelling at that bloody Astarion for not automatically jumping over a chasm the way all my other children did.
These games are unapologetically focused on the big picture. It’s usually with these epic-scale RPGs and suchlike that the primary gameplay loop philosophy breaks down. They’re supposed to be about your long term goals, reaching the end of the journey, telling a grand narrative that unfolds over hours upon hours of play. But is that any reason NOT to have a strong primary gameplay loop? Maybe you like Baldur’s Gate, but imagine if you had the option of traversing that game’s maps on the back of a purring motorbike.
Traversal is the subject of the day, and I was recently reminded in the course of playing the eternally awkwardly named Bomb Rush Cyberfunk just how much I appreciate games with a strong traversal focus, that find a way to make the mere act of getting from point A to point B fun and interesting, not just the act of slaughtering the monsters that have taken up residence at point B. And I fear traversal is one of many things that is frequently overlooked in the smashed together genre smorgasbord that is the big-name overly scoped triple-A experience these days.
Back in retro times when genres were more distinct traversal was an entire subset of genres. You had platformers of course, your Mario and your Sonic where obviously it’s fine if you want to stop and murder everything you pass but getting all the way to the right of the starting point is what actually progresses you and where most of the skill challenge lies. I have a personal specific fondness for those old games where you’re flying or travelling down a linear tunnel and have to dodge obstacles as they fly at you. Like the bonus minigame from Sonic 2, or Skyroads. I have fond memories of playing an Amiga game from a magazine coverdisk along these lines in the early 90s that I seem to remember was called Technozone. And I’d be gratified if anyone else knows what the hell I’m taking about because Google sure as hell doesn’t.
In slightly more recent times the first king of traversal in a 3D open world setting was, for me, Spider-Man 2, the movie adaptation on the PS2 and Gamecube. I could web swing around that city all day. Something I got no satisfaction from in later Spider-Man sandboxes like Web of Shadows and the Amazing Spider-Mans, largely because traversal in those was usually just “point in a direction and hold down the web swing button.” And the essence of fun traversal in video games is that it has to be a skill challenge, because what makes it satisfying to pull off is the possibility of completely screwing it up. In Spider-Man 2 and, gratifyingly, the recent Spider-Man games, if you run out of buildings or mistime a change of direction then you’re going to leave primary coloured smears all over the brickwork.
Superhero sandboxes are usually the go-to for fun traversal in my experience, games like Infamous, Prototype, Just Cause and Gravity Rush have all found their own ways to make it fun, but even Grand Theft Auto and its imitators make traversal interesting. The challenge in GTA traversal was to find-stroke-steal a car and drive it to the mission objective without dinging someone’s brake light and getting forced off the road by gun-toting twitchy cops. Feels like I’ve played a lot of triple-A open world games in the recent age, for some reason Horizon: Zero West is what’s currently leaping to mind, where traversal consists mostly of lining yourself up with the objective marker and pushing forwards.
Without interesting traversal, you end up with what I tend to think of as “commute” games, where you’re just arbitrarily obliged to hike across the map in between the actual gameplay. Gotham Knights would be another perfect example. It’s the sure fire sign of a game having gone in an open world direction purely for the status it brings and not because they’ve given any cocking thought as to what the open world actually adds to the experience.
Little surprise then that we’re seeing the indie sphere doing what it does best and filling the genre void that triple-A leaves behind, with such traversal-focused games as Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Exo One and Neon White bubbling to the surface in recent years. Actually, speaking of Neon White, my interest in video game traversal seems to be related to my growing interest in speedrunning culture. Those nutty shitheads found a way to turn Quake 1 into a skill traversal game as long as you’re willing to learn how to jump on the exact right frame 9,000 times for the one time you get a 0.01 second boost from a random enemy bullet.
It is worth considering in the age of professional streaming that, as well as being fun to play, skillful traversal is a hell of a lot more interesting to watch. I’m not about to start Quake speedrunning myself anytime soon, I used up all my wrist muscle memory on masturbation techniques.
But let’s bring things back around to the start. Hypothetically, could we add the element of fun traversal to Starfield and Baldurs Gate 3? Well, I’d say Baldurs Gate 3 gets a hall pass out of this. Let’s not forget that context can take the place of challenge and catharsis, in accordance with my three C’s theory of game appeal. While the mere act of travelling through Baldur’s Gate 3’s world isn’t much to write to your DM about at best and kinda frustrating at worst, especially when I’m trying to get the whole party to sneak through an owlbear cave, but the thrust of that game is a sense of constant discovery. You’re constantly making decisions on what path to take next and stumbling into little random encounters, so it rarely feels like hiking across needlessly long distances to get to the stuff that matters.
But then there’s Starfield, and oh goodness, if there’s any game that clearly wasn’t willing to put the effort into making traversal fun. You can tell, because they gave up. You basically go to places exclusively by fast travelling from the menu. And perhaps that’s understandable, because Starfield is also going for a generally realistic tone, and if there’s a way to make realistic space travel interesting on a moment to moment level, it certainly escapes me. Oh sure, space can have grandeur, you can drink in the sublime majesty of the cosmos, but when you gotta get somewhere in it, all you’re doing is lining up with the objective and pressing forwards again. Because there’s nothing in space. That’s why it’s called space.
You could add some asteroids for the player to dodge around, but it’s not a very interesting challenge. What will I do now?? Oh, I guess I’ll move to this other bit of infinite space that doesn’t have an asteroid in it. No, I can’t pick on Starfield for its lack of fun traversal in the space travel. So I’ll pick on it for the lack of it in the planet exploring, instead.
I found some low-key, contemplative entertainment in surveying planets for specific features, but most of what that entailed was walking across kilometres of randomly generated rocky landscape, sometimes bunny hopping if it was one of those planets with fun gravity, and it wasn’t long before I was sorely hankering for a ground vehicle. The one thing you didn’t rip off from No Man’s Sky and probably should’ve. I wanted a motorbike or a hovercraft or a little Mars rover strapped to each foot. And at the risk of over-scoping the game even further, maybe some kind of Tony Hawk style system that awards you for doing sweet jumps off of craters. And because it wouldn’t be a fun challenge without the possibility of failure, maybe if you faceplanted spectacularly into the rocks it’d leave a mysterious bloodstained dent for the local primitive aliens to base a religion around.
