Also there are parallels to out of bounds exploration here, which has that in its most distilled form. It's difficult AF to pull off, and there is never an extrinsic reward (except in Halo 2)
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Just my personal opinion but if a game rewards out of bounds exploration I feel cheated because I'm obviously not out of bounds at all. I want to find the seams where the game comes apart and that is a reward in itself. But that's just how I feel and I might be alone with this opinion.
I've been itching to make a game that is built around the spirit of out-of-bounds exploration. One idea I have is that maybe you can procedurally generate a lot of the level geometry, and then drop rewards in at random with no regard for whether they are actually reachable or not.
So that it is expected that you might see a thing that it is just impossible to reach. But maybe you can find some glitch, some unexpected way to reach it ANYWAY.
Maybe just trust that those players who seek those moments will appreciate a "soft" reward? As long as it's clear to players that that's it you might filter for those that appreciate purely aesthetic pay-off. If you condition them to expect something more tangible you're in trouble, of course.
Halo 2 is still my gold standard of oob for sticking in my memory long-term and while the secrets you could find were cool idk if they're why. Like it was cool to find rewards for the stuff you'd done, but it was maybe more about never knowing if what you found was something they knew about or not.
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