Nothing Urgent Was Requested of Me

I was in my bed, before going to sleep. Usually I can scrape an hour, maybe an hour and a half, playing on my handheld in bed. I was playing Onimusha: Way of the Sword, and I was having so much fun with the style of the game.

It reminded me of the old Onimusha; the spirit is still alive. It’s the kind of game I enjoy: challenging, but not too much. Not a Souls-like, where it becomes almost impossible, but a good challenge. I had to repeat the bosses two or three times before getting it right, some even more.

I had completed the game, and I was roaming the city, just finding stuff to do. Saving civilians, killing monsters, that kind of stuff. And that was relaxing.

It was being inside a world and knowing that world, knowing that nothing urgent was requested of me, because the final boss was beaten. I was just completing tasks and enjoying the vibes of the game.

By urgent, I mean a game that is clearly guiding you towards the next step of the story. You should do this, you should do that. And you follow the line, you follow the path.

At that point it’s not an open world anymore. It’s a corridor you need to walk through to reach the point. That constant reminder, that point on the map, that arrow that tells you go there, go there, go now: that’s how the urgency is created.

I see it everywhere. Onimusha itself, before the final boss: the infamous yellow paint to walk on walls, and the yellow fairy path that guides you to the next objective.

In Assassin’s Creed they blend it into the game (Odin Sight, eagle vision, etc.), but it’s still the same thing.

In A Plague Tale: Resonance the paint is white instead of yellow: white marks on the rocks showing where to climb, jump or use the grapnel.

The dot kind of tries to train you, in every single game, to do that instead of enjoying what you have around.

When it’s finished and you don’t have that dot anymore saying go there, you can start experiencing games the way they were supposed to be experienced. You see something far in the distance, and you want to go there and see what’s in there.

Sometimes you go for the main quest. Other times it’s a side quest. Other times it’s just exploration.

That freedom of choice is becoming more and more difficult to have. It’s not impossible. In many games you can turn off the information on the screen and go with the vibes.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s useful to have the dots to experience the story and understand how that story goes on and finishes.

But the goal of those sessions, especially before bed, is not really experiencing the story. It’s more about distracting myself, relaxing myself. I will never try to beat the hardest boss in that session, because I need to relax.

I’ll do something I know how to do: roaming the world, looking for NPCs, looking for materials to gather. The repetitive, menial tasks that during the day are difficult to get into, because they might be boring and I want to see the story.

In those sessions, that’s the perfect thing to do. Fewer cognitive actions, but still something enjoyable, in a world you started to love.

So the urgency is injected by the game creators, for some reasons. I think there is an understanding (whether it’s true or not is definitely not up to me to decide) that modern players want an easy way to complete games. They like the yellow paint to show where to climb. They like the dot, the arrows telling them where to go next.

I’m not sure that’s always the case, but I believe it was conceptualized by a few people and then followed by the entire industry.

Because one thing I can say about this industry is that the people taking gambles, instead of going with what worked in the past, are fewer and fewer. Everybody wants a win, so they play safe. They try not to reinvent anything, not to differentiate too much.

The few that do differentiate are the ones that end up with big wins, so there is space for that as well. But every time it’s a gamble.

So they play it safe by doing whatever works for the huge open worlds. That’s the closest to safety they can get.

Good examples of free roaming are Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, and the Ghost series, with the wind trick that is as optional as you wish it to be.

That’s why I believe it’s not always useful to have that dot. It should be easier to just remove it when you need to.