KEEPING THE PLOT FOCUSED

There are games where everything you do has to do directly with your main goal.

For example, look at almost any game based on the original Star Wars trilogy. Every enemy you fight is either an Imperial soldier, a bounty hunter working for Imperial soldiers, an attack creature under the command of Imperial soldiers, or a robot or vehicle under the control of the Empire. And every time you fight them, it's because you're breaking into or out of some Imperial facility, or being chased because you just got done with breaking into or out of some Imperial facility, or protecting a Rebel base from Imperials that are trying to storm it. You are fighting the Empire, every single step of the entire game.

That's very common in action games, but extremely rare in RPGs, for some reason I can't quite figure out. It's also very common in movies and certain types of books.

There are many other games - and media of other types - where there are major parts of the story where your current goal only seems tangentially related to the primary goal, but is creating a framework and a buildup. In Chrono Trigger, when you go to 65 million BC the first time and get stranded, it feels like a filler dungeon. Especially since you're in the middle of a story arc involving fighting Magus in 600 AD. But, by spending an hour or two in 65 million BC, instead of just the 10 that you would need to spend if the game let you just grab the Dreamstone and immediately leave, the prehistoric setting is established and feels familiar when it becomes extremely important later (because Lavos falls from the sky).

But... even knowing that, it still feels like filler. Why? Because you're not fighting Magus? No, I don't think so. Taking a break from one major conflict to temporarily turn your attention to another one isn't filler. But what is filler is only addressing that conflict at the beginning and end of the dungeon, and not in what I'm doing in between. For a dungeon called the Reptite Lair, you'd think there would be more reptites in it, and that the five who were there would be doing something other than chilling out in the basement. You'd think Azala would have more than one bodyguard, that there would be reptite troops poised to attack the human village, that the gang of reptite thieves who invaded the village would appear throughout the dungeon or at least be mentioned ever agan. Instead, you're told "They went this way! Follow them!" and you fight your way through an hour of wild beasts (plus one easily avoidable battle against actual reptites) before arriving at the boss.

Combat is important, right? This is a video game: story and gameplay are inseperable, the story is told through the gameplay. Why am I effectively spending an hour doing something unrelated to the goal? And yeah, it's in the way of the goal, technically, so it's not totally unrelated; but it's related in about the same way as the fact that I need to get food every few hours and repair the hole that got torn in my clothes in that last battle. It's not telling any part of the story. It's irrelevant and should be skipped - or replaced with something that the player cares about.

And still other games, the worst type, don't even have nearly as much pretext as Chrono Trigger. Your entire explanation for fighting enemies in a given cave is "this cave is on your way to the next town." And the enemies are just wild animals, unrelated to your goal in any way. Why not just skip this, fade to black and cut ahead to the next scene, like anything else that didn't matter to the game would be skipped? Final Fantasy 6, for example, as much as I love it, has at least five dungeons that fall into this category: Mt. Koltz, Figaro Caves, the second trip through Figaro caves, the Serpent Trench, and Baron Falls. Not a shred of reason why any of them aren't just part of the world map, except to make the game longer. And practically all overworld sections in all RPGs fall into this category - though two non sequitor battles on an overworld is certainly vastly better than an entire dungeon of them.

Of course, there are situations in games where what you're doing just isn't part of the action. It's part of the build-up. That's fine! That's not getting in the way of keeping the gameplay focused on the conflict. What does get in the way, I feel strongly, is when you have action that isn't related to the story. Not all the parts of the story have to be action, but all the action has to be part of the story. And if not all of it, then maybe please at least most of it? Otherwise at some point I start to feel like the Empire isn't really what the game is even about. It's about bats and slimes.

What's your opinion on games that spend most of the game just having the player do whatever's on the way to their goal instead of actually fighting for their goal and taking part in the main conflict? Do you think this is all hogwash and story doesn't matter at all in games, and any excuse for battles is fine no matter how flimsy as long as it puts the player in fights? Do you think there are RPGs that successfully keep the player engaged in the main conflict, or where the issue exists but isn't problematic? I'd love to hear about those, and why you think they work when others don't.

Uh. What? Why? Obviously there's a larger world because that's pretty much how worlds work. That's not something that needs to be shown.

Some of the DETAILS of the world matter to the story, sure. So explain those, of course. And I appreciate the attempt to explain them via showing instead of telling, and thus making a dungeon instead of a wall of dialogue. But the irrelevant parts don't matter. Since, you know, that's what irrelevant means. So it just seems super obvious to me to try to create situations that are as relevant as possible when showing what you need to show.

I do. It's right there in the topic title!

The world is there to make the story make sense, to me. It's just a tool, and not a particularly major or important one. Not compared to the characters and events, anyway.

Apparently worldbuilding is a big thing with nerds whose games never get played with certain crowds, so whatever I guess. If you don't care about the story, then I guess feel free to make games for players who don't care about the story. It is a valid answer my original question, I guess.