What exploration means to me

This is an “essay” I wrote up in a conversation on the Discord server a week or two back and thought it would be cool to expand on it a bit and share it!

A long time ago, I talked about how The Waking Cloak would have an exploration focus, in a way acting as the third Oracle game. Ages was focused on puzzles, and Seasons was focused on action. Therefore, The Waking Cloak would be focused on exploration! This is a topic that gets me really excited.

So naturally I’ve done a lot of thinking over the past few years about what exploration means. What do I like about it? What are some of the core “pillars” of exploration that need to go in The Waking Cloak? What are games that I loved exploring in, and why?

Good exploration for me is:

• Finding new and interesting places, visually distinct, but cohesive to the whole
• Atmosphere (hard to pin this down, but has a lot to do with visuals, music, the “scenario” you’re in, how you built up to such-and-such location previously in the game, etc)
• Finding secrets: secret places, lore, treasure, shortcuts, collectibles
• Being able to get into places you’re “not supposed to be” (soft gates)
• Some kind of reason to traverse places you’ve already been (new item unlocks a path, collectibles, NPC side stories, so on)
• Mechanically fun traversal
• Seeing how the world is interconnected. Shortcuts play into this.
• Risk/reward for exploring. No risk = boring (probably). No reward = boring.
• Optional areas are incredibly important for making the player feel like they’re the first to “stumble upon a new place”, making the world feel big, and so on
• Foreshadowing–seeing places you want to get to, but can’t yet for some reason (need to be more skilled, need a new item or key, etc.). “Oh look, there’s a cave down there! How on earth do I get there??”

(Not to say I won’t have fun exploring in games that don’t have all of these)

Some games that do exploration in a way I’d like to mimic:

• Dark Souls 1–the later entries were fun, but nothing quite matched the interconnectivity of the first
• Hollow Knight–there was so much to find, so many great secrets
• Late-game Oracle of Ages–navigating between past and present to progress across the map is still one of my favorite gaming memories.

That is to say, Metroidvanias. These have always been the pinnacle of exploration games for me.

Things that break good exploration for me:

• Tough or tedious to move and get around (no shortcuts, clunky movement, etc)
• Facades, “why can’t I go there”
• Lame rewards (every place looks the same, oh joy more rupees, etc.)

And a really contentious one that I’d like to talk about more:

• Fast travel if done incorrectly… which it almost always is

First, some good alternatives to fast travel:

• Make movement interesting, fun, and/or fast
• Allow the player to find interesting shortcuts–some secret, some obvious
• Incentivize return to certain areas with rewards, previously-unreachable areas, etc.
• Tighten up the map design so walking across the entire map (using shortcuts and so on) actually doesn’t take very long

I’m not entirely against fast travel, but there are some major drawbacks that need to be taken into account. If you’re allowing fast travel, you need to consider that you’re giving the player the easiest way to get from point to point, and even those who like walking everywhere will often give in. It’s a path of least resistance. It prevents the player from learning the lay of the land (one of the things I love most about Dark Souls 1), and more or less entirely nullifies the functionality of shortcuts.

In Sekiro (which I’m enjoying a lot, by the way), there are a few places where you can open up shortcuts to earlier areas. This is neat, and I like seeing how the map is still a little interconnected, but the ability to fast travel more or less negates this. Why would I want to use a shortcut between two checkpoints if I can just warp from checkpoint to checkpoint instead?

Other games need fast travel, especially open world games. I think Morrowind is the best example of fast travel done well: you can travel from place to place via stilt strider (giant bugs!), via ship, or via a certain set of temples which you have to complete a quest to unlock. These are all integrated into the world and have limits which make them interesting to use (you have to pay a small fee, and you can only access them from certain areas, or the quest). You feel like you’re actually doing the traveling instead of taking a cheap way out.

My concept for The Waking Cloak takes this into mind: when you’re out in the middle of nowhere, it’s actually more tense and interesting because you don’t have the “safety net” of just being able to warp back whenever you want. This lends an atmosphere of risk/reward to the far reaches of the map–the further out you get, the more dangerous and far from home you are, but the more interesting things you might find.

Now, I get that not everyone likes this, or some people just don’t have time to walk everywhere. That’s okay! The default for The Waking Cloak will be no fast travel, and I will design the world as best as I can to make exploration and traversal as fun as possible, but I will also include an option to turn it on.