The economical adventure
While reading about Beyond Good & Evil, I was struck by this passage in designer Michel Ancel’s Wikipedia page:
Ancel aims for a high degree of freedom in his games. He is critical of games that claim to offer freedom, but present limits or invisible boundaries where players do not expect them.
I’m not sure how laudable a goal that is — constraints are, in my opinion, a important part of design — but if Ancel was aiming for freedom, Beyond Good & Evil falls well short of the mark.
A pile of explosives sits on a mine cart in Black Isle; the tracks beneath it extend for about six yards and end in front of a rickety wall. The Pedestrian District is a thinly disguised path, with its later segments cordoned off by guards and lasers. The upgrades from Mammago Garage ensure that each part of the game world is encountered serially. In short, there are limits and invisible boundaries everywhere you turn in Beyond Good & Evil; Morrowind it is not.
I don’t see player freedom as the goal here, though — unsourced Wikipedia quotations notwithstanding — nor do I see its absence as a fault. Many of my favorite games are entirely linear, some even more so than this one. What really stands out about Beyond Good & Evil is its compactness. There are hidden treasures, side dungeons, minigames, and all the other trappings of a typical adventure title here, but they’re all practically on top of each other.
I’ve complained in the past about game worlds, such as Twilight Princess’s Hyrule or No More Heroes’s Santa Destroy, which are largely unremarkable areas punctuated with interesting spots. Beyond Good & Evil’s Hillys, by contrast, makes the most of the space it offers, offering more entertainment per virtual square mile than any other overworld I can think of. (In this light, Jade’s animal photography is a real master stroke; every vista might contain a flock of birds, every inlet a school of fish.)
The emotional size of the game is similarly cozy. Emerging from the lighthouse at the beginning feels very much like emerging from Kokiri Forest in Ocarina of Time, or the prison sewers in Oblivion: Now the adventure begins! The world is your oyster! But the game doesn’t fulfill its implicit promise; the adrenaline rush of possibility is immediately subverted by the hovercraft getting towed to the neighborhood shop. Indeed, excepting the secretive members of IRIS, Jade and Pey’j are on a first-name basis with almost every NPC I’ve encountered. Hillys is, literally and figuratively, a small world.
Frankly, I find this compactness refreshing. There’s very little here that could be called filler; I can scratch my adventuring itch without the enormous time investment these games normally require.
More thoughts on Beyond Good & Evil when I finish the game.
I hadn’t really looked at it in that light before (the notion that Hillys is “compacted” with adventure), but I think you’ve nailed it. I think this helps to explain why Hillys always felt like a true world to me: it may be small, but it’s definitely not lacking.
And in terms of the Wikipedia quote, I imagine it was meant in terms of running into actual invisible walls. Even so, it is a bit of a false claim for the reasons you mentioned.
And the animal photography was always a big plus in the game for me too. It taps into the same part of my brain that hunted down every scannable thing in the Metroid Prime games. The curious/collecter part of the brain, I guess. But besides that, it really does help the world feel more real. These things you photograph/scan aren’t just creatures, but animals with names. It may not be a lot, but it is much better than nothing.
As The Unknown picks up on. I think his main complain is with regards to “…invisible boundaries where players do not expect them.”
The world of Hillys is largely devoid of permanently locked doors, or other elements you can’t interact in some way with. There are a much smaller number of doors or location than a similar game might include but everything that exists is there to serve a purpose.
You can notice a similar thing with System Shock 2 and BioShock, though somewhat counter intuitively they feel less compact because they are representing an enclosed environment. It’s possible (I believe) to find a way through ever door in the game, because of that even though there’s generally a very linear progression it doesn’t feel so obvious.
Nice insight. I remember when I played beyond BGandE thinking how small everything is. While true, there’s a ton of stuff to do within that space, revisiting areas more than once in interesting ways. It is very refreshing from a Zelda or Final Fantasy where the world is huge with little to do it beyond show exactly how expansive they could make the world.