Finally, a survival/construction game forced me to go journeymode
For a long time I've talked about wanting to make a survival/crafting or survival/construction game (like Minecraft, Terraria, Valheim, etc) about traveling rather than building a base. It seems like an interesting design challenge, and I've been curious about what you'd need to do to marry those two fantasies ever since I started playing Minecraft. I wrote a number of incompetent undergrad-esque design docs about this fifteen years ago!
Minecraft has slowly added content over time which requires, rather than encourages, travel. To experience late game dungeon content like the ocean temple or the forest manor, you will have to travel pretty major distances. When I'm trying to play this content, I usually build enormous amounts of infrastructure - railways, portals, bases to turtle in overnight - to move myself and my supplies to these locations.
It still doesn't feel like "travel gameplay" to me, though. Upon reflection, I've decided that I want a game which feels like it is "about travel" - which provides unique gameplay, or items, or art about travel, and about being a traveler.
I know I said I wouldn't post about Vintage Story again until I made cheese, but so much has happened to me in the game - despite not having cheese - that I did want to write about it a bit. The main thing I wanted to talk about was its fascination with long-distance travel! I don't know if this completely fulfills the fantasy for me, but Vintage Story does a couple really unusual things to require and reward travel, and to make the player excited for it through ritual and preparation.
But to talk about this, I'll have to spoil some of the game's extant story. I played through it despite having been spoiled on it myself, and it didn't make my experience worse! But you should skip this post if you want to play it blind.
Basically: Vintage Story is a survival/construction game, but it includes a very straightforward RPG-esque story. There are questgivers, settlements, dungeons, and bosses scattered around the randomly-generated voxel world.
"Act 1" of the story concludes with a boss fight in a hand-designed dungeon. After this, you return to the questgiver to ask questions about what you've discovered. The questgiver tells you that the only way to answer your questions is to travel overland a long, long way to find another hidden dungeon. They then give you a "tamed elk" to ride across that distance.
The elk is a truly bonkers piece of game art. The moment you lay eyes on it, you can tell that the developers also have a fantasy of survival-game travel. You can tell that the elk is their chosen tool for realizing it.
This game has fascinating gradients of detail - the landscape is all meter-high cube blocks, but some objects, flowers, tools, etc. are very detailed. You can tell the dev team really cares about something if they make it extremely visually detailed. The elk is so fucking detailed!! It can take like seven different pieces of attachable gear!!
All of the gear on that elk - the bedroll, the cooking pot, the weapon in the scabbard, the blue gears hanging on its flank, the bridle, the saddlebags, the saddle and saddle blanket - all of that is customizable and attached to the elk manually by the player. I could swap that saddle blanket out for a fancy one. I could put a new ornament on that elk's forehead, to distinguish it from other players' elks. I could travel without most of it, if I wanted.
But the moment you begin reading up on elk add-ons using the in-game manual, you realize that this elk is a warning and a tutorial about what travel in Vintage Story is going to be like. As you mouse over every part of the elk and look at the things you could attach to it, you start to realize:
Oh, fuck. This journey is going to be so long. I'm going to need a cooking pot, and a backup weapon, and extra gears so that I can create extra save-points. I'm going to need more supplies than I can carry. I'm going to need a bed.
This game understands - and needs me to share - a gamer travel fantasy. It wants me to spend like thirty minutes loading the elk up and manufacturing saddlebags and a bedroll and an extra weapon to hang in the scabbard. I love this so much. It's so intentional and smart, and such a great way of making me scared and excited to go on a long trip inside the game world!
Actual travel is pretty unpleasant. The game is, after all, a voxel game... and the elk does not control easily when scaling up voxel slopes. It moves forward jerkily while scaling uphill in particular.
While riding the elk, you are also too tall and bulky to fit between the trees in most forests. I found it very laborious and difficult to walk across the world at all! It feels like you are going uphill or navigating across a forest nearly 50% of the time!
This is the kind of thing where a better character controller for the elk could fix a lot... but to satisfy my tree complaint, too, the rest of the game would also have to change in other more systemic, potentially unwanted ways. Should all trees in the game be taller so that I can ride under them on my elk without wanting to fucking die? Well, I'd have a hard time doing Survival Tree Stuff with some of these trees if I couldn't reach the branches as easily. Then... should forest generation be different? Should trees generate further apart? Would they still look forest-like if they did? Would the randomly-generated shape of the trees themselves have to change to accomplish this? If they did change forests to make it easier to ride my elk around, would tree wood and seed and stick drop rates have to change?
It feels like a daunting but necessary set of questions and changes for the dev team to approach. As it stands, this kind of vista looks awesome when you're on foot, but absolutely soulcrushingly terrible when you're on an elk:
(I collide with most of those low brushy trees!)
The other issue is that the first location you visit is not visually impressive. It is, in fact, so completely subterranean that I found it hard to even see when I arrived. The entrances are all subtle and deliberately hidden. This is not a great reward for a long, hyped-up journey!
The thing is... once you complete that dungeon, your journey continues, and you're breadcrumbed along to another location. Big spoilers... but I eventually saw a whole-ass town cresting the horizon at dusk.
It looked fucking nuts to roll up on this whole town full of chatty NPCs after literally 200 hours of playing in this world ALONE:
I guess the moral of the story is that your travel experience doesn't have to be actually good if you prepare me for it with sufficient ritual, and reward me for it with a horizon-breaking discovery this substantial.
I think I have learned a lot from playing this content. I've always been adamant that ritual matters a lot in games - the way you do something or the way something happens to you can completely change how it feels, and suspense and hesitation and withholding are all "real" artistic tools in games. The elk is a great confirmation of this lesson.
I do, in fact benefit if you make me hang my elk's pot and sword scabbards on his shoulders, instead of putting them invisibly inside his saddlebags. The ritual of needing to attach all his little things all over his body, and the laborious difficulty of having to dismount the elk to grab some of them, does really make it feel more like I am a traveler far from home.
I don't know how easily this translates to the inevitable arguments you always have on game teams about "skip cutscene" buttons and stuff like that, but it's all definitely the same thing to me. Sometimes it pays to require the player to do little roleplay moments like this, even in games which aren't roleplaying games - or games which, like Vintage Story, are pretending to be something else.
You can walk around this game world for literally 2 years and still be surprised by a whole-ass Skyrim-type town appearing on the horizon in front of you. It's great stuff. If you've ever enjoyed Minecraft, you really should be playing this game!!