Final Fantasy XIV: Landmarks

Environmental storytelling is one of the most effective tools in the Narrative Designers toolbox. In most game, the player is navigating an environment, so the inclusion of narrative elements alongside something they are already doing lowers the barrier of entry for soaking in those juicy story bits. You can see great examples of this in Valve games. (They love writing on walls over at Valve.) My recent post about Skyrim shows that Bethesda knows how to do it, too. Of course, text is about the cheapest (monetarily) asset you can put in a game, so environmental storytelling isn't always cost effective.

I want to talk today about an element present in open-world games. Landmarks. I don't know if there is an actual technical name for this kind of thing. I've asked my artist colleagues and they call it everything from pathing to leading the eye, but I'll stick with Landmarks as it most accurately described its function. And I've never seen Landmarks done better than in Final Fantasy XIV.

In any open-world game, you want to give the player a sense of scale. Where open-world games fail is when the world does not feel open, but rather feels like a series of corridors and pathways that the player must navigate. The trick is, that's all the majority of these games are. The notion of "If I can see it, I can go there" exists in games like Minecraft, but many "open-world" scenes in MMO's are just very wide corridors. Eventually, you get cut off and can go no further without a loading screen.

It's a limitation of the technology and if you want the player to feel as though the world is connected, you need to do something to make that loading screen seem like less of an "end level screen."

FFXIV has done this through the use of inter-scene landmarks. There are buildings, structures, and naturally occurring formations that can be seen on the horizon line from different scenes. When I say scene, I mean the an area that exists continuously without a load. Take a look at the picture above. That twisted rock formation in the background can literally be seen on the horizon from two scenes away.

Now take a look at this picture. See way back in the background? That is a rock formation from another scene. That means you need to go through a loading screen to arrive at the scene where that rock formation exists.

I cannot stress enough how important this element is in tying the world together. Despite the fact that the world is not one continuous open world, the world builders make you feel like it is all still a part of the same world. It's all connected. You are in Eorzea (the name of the world in FFXIV) and it is a massive space you can explore. Not only does this allow you to feel the expansiveness of the world, but it also helps you find your way. Seeing those landmarks on the horizon will help place you in the world and give you a sense of direction.

One last tidbit here that would normally belong in its own post, but it may as well tag on the end here: the structure in the picture directly above, the castle in the water; that is an endgame dungeon. Despite the fact that it is a dungeon only accessible when you reach level 50, it is placed in a scene that is home to quests pertaining to level 20-30. That means that as a lower level character you are able to see one of your endgame destinations everyday you run through this area while doing your low level tasks. This is foreshadowing and recurrence used in an amazing way.