I haven’t played The Last Guardian and am basing this off of just poking through a longplay of it, but it poses an interesting question about communication and aesthetics in level design, if not also by extension just how much information a game should communicate to the player at any time.
I think we can all agree that just having glowing markers or big obtrusive arrows pointing players toward the critical path at all times can make for a pretty unengaging experience. However, I think we could also all agree that the feeling of being unable to find the critical path and not being given feedback as to what you need to do or where you need to go to keep playing the game is perhaps even more disruptive to a game feeling engaging, if not outright alienating.
Again, I haven’t played The Last Guardian, but the impression I get is that, kind of like how I’ve been saying with regards to the animations being fluid and expressive detracting from how the game feels to control, making the environments look naturalistic seems to take precedent over them being navigable/comprehendable, to the detriment of the ongoing challenge of communicating where you’re supposed to go and what you’re supposed to do to go there. I’m purposefully flitting here and there through this longplay on Youtube, and while that doesn’t give any meaningful substantiation to the claim that it would be disorienting to navigate as a player, I do feel it is fair to say that it looks like it would be.
The favorable position on this aspect of The Last Guardian would, I think, say that if you’re observant you will eventually grok the game’s visual logic and that perhaps the trial and error of more opaque sections and the commitment to a naturalistic visual design are part of its charm. And the unfavorable one would be that that depends on having a generous attitude towards the game in the first place, and if a game without them is ever making you feel like you wish it had glowing arrows and button prompts (or perhaps, to bring up something Tim said way back in 2008 on his actionbutton.net review of Bioshock that I continually think about, an “I Get It” Button), then something is lacking in the communication department. With regards to The Last Guardian neither side is correct or incorrect and it comes down to taste or tolerance as always, both sides I think are seeing something that is definitely observable within the game, though.
More often as technology and design have progressed, a 3D game world’s relationship to realistic physics and geometry, and how players can expect understand, want, expect, to be able to interact with it, has allowed videogames to operate on this, shall we say, kinesthetic, physicality oriented level. By which I mean, in understanding the movement or navigation capabilities of the player character, the player can more or less assume that the boundaries of physical interaction with the game world are closer to how we understand space and movement in the real world than in videogame terms. And, following from that, how interacting with said physical space becomes involved in the gameplay. If this all sounds mundane, I do mean much more than knowing you can walk down a hallway or jump up on to a ledge, more like how knowing your player character can jump 1m off the ground and reach up 200-300cm or whatever, a ledge 1.1m high is something the player character can grab the edge of and climb up on to, without a glowing edge or a pattern or color along said edge that communicates it as climbable, which, at a certain point, is not all that different from a glowing arrow at the top of the screen pointing you toward it.
We’ve had illusions of varying levels of convincingness of this quality for a while–in order to find Assassins’s Creeds’s 1s’s highest scalable buildings, all you need to do is find wagons full of straw or hay and look up to find the nearest conspicuous piece of identical wooden… scaffolding? And you can be sure that you will be able to climb up the nearest high tower. Whether you think the game is fun or not, I think there is something different going on in how one interacts with the game world Death Stranding entirely. Most features of the environment aren’t color-coded or marked with sparkles or placed next to identical models of wagons full of straw to indicate how one can or cannot interact with them. Of course it doesn’t map 1:1, not even close (arguably Death Stranding with more grounded physicality to it would be truly awful to play, and that’s coming from someone who chose to do their first playthrough on hard), and there’s still videogame logic especially along the margins of accessible space, but for a significant part of the accessible space of the game, walking through a rocky field and up or down slopes while wearing a heavy backpack can be informed by having walked through a rocky field and up or down slopes while wearing a heavy backpack in the real world with your physical body. A field strewn with many watermelon sized rocks is not strewn with small rocks just because it’s an interesting aesthetic, our player character will not effortlessly glide over small rocks as if the ground is just a texture layer, or slide along the sides of larger ones because running up against a solid object at a sharp angle doesn’t decrease the player character’s speed like they’re Mario long jumping on to a slope. I’ve ranted and raved about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in this regard on this very forum in the past (I think) but it’s the same thing there. It’s less level design and more geography design.
Uh, okay, where was I going with all of this? Oh yeah. The Last Guardian, again, at least to me having not played it (jeeze I should just fuckin play it at this point (maybe the next time I have an active PS Plus subscription)), looks like it wants to give the impression of having that sort of kinesthetic/tactile/physically grounded world design, but perhaps falling short of designing said world with enough care to prevent those moments where you run into a proverbial invisible wall or wish there were proverbial wagons full of proverbial hay.
I’ll just say that if that’s the case, I honestly think it’s one of the best reasons to dislike not just this game but probably any game.
Jim) which I never had a problem parsing.