When I first started playing Final Fantasy XI, I had no idea what I was doing, so I walked outside and I started killing bees. I did this because outside of the town I started in, there were bees. And once I had killed a bee, I got some experience that pushed my level up! This was important because… well, eventually I assumed that was going to matter. Level 1 was just the start, I was going to be level… something. Sooner or later.
When I first started playingFinal Fantasy XIV, I knew what I was doing because I was given a quest when I started that directed me forward. After some introductions, I was sent out into Thanalan to kill some bees. This was to get me used to the idea of killing things before I went back to the city and continued the story. And I never really lacked an understanding of what I was doing, but I think it’s important to note that even then, back when I first played FFXI, I was doing what I was meant to do. I was just doing it through the bump method.
A lot of old JRPGs rely on the bump method. If you ever play a game from the days before reliable guidance, like the originalDragon Quest, then you have probably employed the bump method if you didn’t have a walkthrough. You wander around every place that you can go and bump into every wall, then bump into every NPC, and eventually you find an open spot that you can get through. From there you bump into all of the boundaries again until you can get through.
The thing is that the bump method is basically a solution to a big problem, and that big problem is a problem of structure. These games stillhave a structure.Final Fantasy XI is still a game that is structured with a certain expectation of what you are going to be doing by its very nature. You can argue that it isn’t structured in the same way as more modern games, and that is broadly true, but it’s alsonot true because weare talking about a game with extensive main story quests, cutscenes, and an expected path for players to follow. Saying that the older game is a wide-open sandbox is… well, not true. It isn’t actually built that way.
But it can feel that way because its structure sort of allows that anyhow.
Modern games do not involve a lot of use of the bump method. This is for a lot of reasons, but the most obvious one is the fact that the bump methodhonestly kind of blows. I remember bumping around for ages in various old games wondering where the heck I was supposed to go, and while I was having fun at the time, it also made the games feel a lot slower and a lot more aimless. Eventually, you figure out where you’re supposed to go and what you’re supposed to do, but the answer wasn’t actually a mystery.
The reason sites like GameFAQs originally came around at a specific time was a direct result of the fact that the bump method had long been both dominant and exhausting. And the reality is that most of these games didn’t actually have a whole lot of choices involved. The firstFinal Fantasy had very little evident structure, but there is only really one point in theentire game where you can really break from the expected pattern of clearing things. Youcan get the airship and class change before you take on the volcano, and there are some minor changes if you do… but also it doesn’t actually matterthat much. Everything else has a pretty rigid structure within which you cannot do more than one step at a turn.
Itfeels open. But it’s not actually open. It’s just given very poor structure. Once you actually know the order you have to do things and how, you can blow through the whole game pretty quickly. It’s stillfun, but it’s not actually an open world full of adventure, it’s a single line of adventure that is willing to let you bump into walls for four hours instead of just telling you the thing you have to do.
World of Warcraft has had structure built into it from the start of the game. The first thing you did in the game at launch was have someone standing in front of you with a quest that said “TALK TO ME,” and at the time it was released one of the reasons people pejoratively treated the game like it was babytime frolics was because of just that. But the thing is that at a base level,WoW andFFXI both had a specific line the games expected me to follow. The difference was that one wasn’t structured enough to make that obvious.
I think about this a lot in part because, you know, this is my job. But I also think about it a lot because I think it’s something that is subtly easy to misunderstand. It’s easy to look back at games where the structure was lacking and say that the games were more open than they were, to even genuinely feel that way, when the actual situation was simply that no one had yet decided that it made more sense to just have something to guide you forward and tell you what it was the game wanted you to do.
This is compounded by the fact that a lot of games – then and now –do have genuine open fields.FFXIV has a lot of structure to it, but it also will let you do a lot of things in a more unstructured way. Structure is not a boolean equation, and I’ve written columns about how it’s important to have the ability to guide players in fully open games as well as let players go explore in more guided experiences. Notevery experience of “go out and do whatever” is the result of developers letting you just venture out and bump into things and convince yourself that there’s no structure.
But I do think a lot of this ties into complaints about guides and guidance. I’ve talked before about howUltima Online had plenty of guides and player resources more or less from the start. Wishing for the days where there were no MMO guides is functionally wishing for the day when armored French knights on horseback fought dinosaurs, a wholly fictional time that doesn’t pretend to be real. But sometimes the real wish buried underneath is for that sense of just bumping up against the walls without guidance. Once every game is not guided by the bump method, it becomes memorable and even desirable at times.
Although I’m never going to miss games having controls never explained in-game and only described in an instruction manual you may or may not receive, if I’m being brutally honest. I rented a lot of video games. Some things I am just never going to miss.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
