The importance of empty rooms & larger worlds

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

I know that this is a very weird complaint to have (specially given the downright rotten state of modern gaming), but someone brought this up on a video a while back and I thought they had a decent point.

Basically: you know how every road and room you visit on modern games has a specific purpose and you are actively blocked from wandering outside of the intended path (either by invisible walls, bits of the scenario set-up as barriers or NPCs)? I hadn't thought about it before, but games are really hurt by this. Like, I remember straying into completely empty rooms and houses with no purpose in games like Quest64, Alone In The Dark, Zelda and countless JRPGs (even old Pokemon games) and never thinking that the devs were wasting my time, but that the game world felt lived-in by virtue of having locations in which life just happened "off camera", unwitnessed by the player.

Those bedrooms, hallways and fields, while pretty pointless from a pure gameplay angle, hinted at a much larger world that just isn't seen in the vast majority of modern games -- an impressive-looking collection of background buildings that you don't get to go to or a single, heavily-detailed location don't really trigger the same part of my brain that felt in utter wonder when roaming around a gigantic castle or a quaint town that I got to explore to my heart's content.

I guess it's something to ponder about.

Ever felt this way?

 

[UnDubious]

The reason I got into RPGs as a kid was because they let me explore a world. So visiting towns and exploring the world map was a big part of why I liked the genre. The world feeling lived it and the NPCs feeling like little characters with their own lives are as important as finding things that are useful for the gameplay aspect to me. Almost every other game in those days (late 16-bit era) was about going from left to right, so RPGs felt like an entirely separate thing.

The line got blurred a long time ago. I don't mind if a pure action game is all about action - in fact, that's great. But if it's action-adventure or a RPG, streamlining things too much hurts the experience a lot for me.

 

[Stingy Perry Stingy Perry]

Some say that it’s empty because of some “limitations” and some says it’s part of the grand design. I usually encounter it in towns mostly in the inn of some jrpg. For me back then those portray what a typical place in time would be that a town how lively it may be there’s always a vacant space.

Those empty spaces/rooms are part of the set pieces even though their main purpose is to hinder or contain you in a specific spot.

 

[χKai]

I try to remove this in my Fallout gameplay; in Fallout 3 and Mew Vegas everyone is on a schedule, and makes their rounds or goes about their business in a timely fashion; everyone either has a place to be or some sort of path they're routed to. By implementing additional creatures and other NPCs, I can disrupt that order a little by adding activity where normally there is none.

 

[bjork]

I get why they try and keep it to a minimum as far as trying to keep the narrative tight, but being able to explore is also part of the experience imo, so it's good when a game lets you. My dream coftware is a fully explorable earth, so give me them empty buildings and caves!