Excerpt from the Skyrim cover story in Game Informer:

“ You move out into the crisp morning air, and look out across the windswept mountainside. Scattered copses of pine dot the slope; the foliage rustles softly in the brisk breeze. Distant peaks glimmer amid the clouds in the panorama spread out in front of you. It’s been a long trek across the range, but now you near your destination. A lone village hidden among the mountains will offer rest. Striding down the curving path, you pause by an icy cold river where it rushes through the gorge to watch fish leap among the rocks while heading upstream.” 

Your eyelids are getting very heavy. You lie down on a bed of moss that feels like a cloud. You slip into a dream and picture a castle, a damp cave, a gently wavering flower, another castle, a deer, a rock, another cave, a beautiful sunset, a babbling brook, a unicorn! Rock. Pond. Castle. Snowflake. Mushroom. Grass . . .

I don’t doubt that I will buy Skyrim and play it, for a gratuitous amount of time. I don’t really doubt that I’ll like it. I don’t doubt that it will be a grand spectacle, a tour-de-force whiz-bang marvel of technology, immensity, content, purdiness, and lots of time and money. I’m sure it will receive a big, handsome, raging Metacritic score, as if it popped a marital aid, and everyone at Bethesda will get bonuses and drink, and screw, and snort lines with rolled Bethsoft stock certificates, and do it all over again, and live happily ever after. What I’m saying is Bethesda has earned much of my trust and confidence at this point.

What concerns me in a specific theoretical sense is the game’s world and environments. Now, that sounds awfully broad. I suppose a game’s world does contain everything in it, but with regard to distinct, atmospheric, open landscape, another jaunt through a fantasy world isn’t terribly appealing to me. However, it’s more than just that.

Environment is the biggest character in an open world game. Even if a fast-travel feature is used and abused wantonly -- rendering the player into some teleporting deity whose feet would prefer not to touch the ground -- a good amount of on foot locomotion is still required to grow and progress. Thus, a lot of virtual tourism is par for the course.

Reminiscing about my past lives in Oblivion only offers me a meager collection of fragmented, hazy memories of the game’s world. I remember going inside a painting, exploring someone’s dream, I remember the shrine of some trickster god, a unicorn with a minotaur entourage, lots of trees, castles, snowy mountains, caves, stuffy taverns, Ayleid ruins, and nirnroot. I remember the realm of Oblivion in all of its red, molten uniformity. The chalets of Bruma, the stone fortress of the Imperial Capitol, Cloudruler Temple, the sleepy rustic villages of the wilderness. Wasn’t there some little cultish village in the forest?

My memory of the game is much like the sleeper’s recollection of his dream, a fuzzy memory, a vague, oblique thing. After nearly 200 hours of play, only a few memorable setpieces and locales managed to avoid being drown by all of the momentarily beautiful, yet redundant chaff.

Even with less time spent playing Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, I can more fondly and vividly recall the wasteland:

• A charred skeleton sitting upright on a park bench.
• A maintenance room filled with wittily arranged plungers. One is even stuck to the head of a manikin, like the art of some bored custodian, surrounded by a universal mess and possessing no means of possibly cleaning it.
• A shattered UFO that crash-landed some time ago.
• The deranged black and white VR world of Tranquility Lane.
• Telephone pole crucifixions.
• The Ghoul dwelling of Underworld.
• Hallucinations of explosions and abstract forms in Point Lookout.
• A raider city at the bottom of a steep canyon, housing a super mutant Behemoth in a caged pen.
• A locked door that once opened reveals a graffitied cement wall that reads, “Fuck you.”
• Tenpenny Tower, the last bastion of aristocratic refinement, civility, and etiquette. A social club surrounded by exterior savagery, one which you can destroy by helping a pack of ghouls invade and brutally maul the residents to death, thereby remodeling its decor to join the ruined, gritty style of the wasteland.
• A scrap metal town that I reduced to dust and scattered atoms.
• A faded suburban cul-de-sac littered with landmines.
• Baby carriages amid trash that house proximity bombs, letting out an infant’s wail before exploding.
• The fertile thicket of Oasis and the rooted plantlike super mutant its residents worship.
• A slave frantically running across the wastes, wearing a bomb collar I could not disarm.
• A ladies man’s bachelor pad, furnished with a chandelier depicting a sexual act, and empty liquor bottles covering every available inch of the place, similar to the leavings of some hungry octopus’s shell pile.
• A robotic nanny who continues about his servile rituals, unaware that his family is long dead, telling bed time stories to ghost children, shopping at an empty store, and taking an invisible dog for a walk.
• The vacant carcass of the Bethesda Softworks offices.
• A found suicide note and the atomic shadow of its author.
• A looted grocery store, the Metro tunnels, the Mall, an aircraft carrier converted into a city, Vaults and their unique downfalls, Little Lamplight and Big Town, etc.
• Not to mention all of the amazing sights, big and small in New Vegas, which I am still exploring.

For me, Fallout 3 is a much more lucid dream than Oblivion. I was flying above a foreign wasteland, witnessing tiny marvels and isolated wonders across the passing world. My dream in Oblivion was like waking up to indistinctly recall something about being in a familiar house, and asked by some pale blur to collect firewood.

Now, how do I account for this? What about the world of Fallout 3 left a much more indelible impression on me than Oblivion? What concerns does this suggest about the prospect of traversing another Elder Scrolls game? Let’s start at the foundations of an open world.

I believe that that the success of an interactive landscape is predicated on a strong balance of setting and world events.

A game’s setting is influenced by a chosen historical period, the natural mechanical laws of that world (how realistic or unrealistic it aims to be), the tone of the game, and climatic and geographical considerations.

There can be visible world events and expository world events, but any world event is a moment that transforms the game’s world in grand and small ways.

Visible world events are such moments that are witnessed by the player and can be scripted or emergent, player-enacted or procedural, such as bombing Megaton.

Expository world events are incidents that either occurred prior to the beginning of the game, or simply cannot be witnessed by the player in the moment they transpire. They give the world its embedded history, wear, and age.

Setting and world events can certainly play into each other, namely when you have a grand expository world event.

So, with what I consider to be the crude founding elements of open worlds outlined, let’s hold them up to both Oblivion and Fallout 3.

Fantasy and surreal phenomena

I’ll be blunt, Tolkien-esque sword and sorcery/medievalist fantasy doesn’t do much for me. For one, I think it’s well-worn and incredibly hard to reinvent, and to populate that fantasy space with interesting, novel setpieces and stories.

Fantasy is very much an amalgam of inherited tropes and archetypes, a more uniform and constrained composition than the fertile ground of post-nuclear, sci-fi westerns, a genre-blending offering of germane and original ideas.

Fantastical and surreal elements are predominantly attributed to magic and prophecy, which makes sword and sorcery fantasy very thin and monocausal. The world suffers for it.

Why can’t Skyrim have a small city governed by children (Fallout 3)? Why can’t it have a fungus that turned men into plant monsters (New Vegas)? Why can’t it have a Megaton moment, or a town like Oasis, these manifold imaginative events and places that were largely absent in Oblivion? It’s not that it can’t, but the magical context ascribed to them will diminish their impact and wonder.

Fallout 3 re-contextualizes the fantastical, magical, and surreal in a modern and largely unambiguous way. It gives these sights and places much more significance and distinction.

The soil of the wasteland is a lively compost of gamma rays, junk technology, and the bones of hardscrabble people, not ancient rune stones, doomstones, and the stardust of astrological signs -- human personalities instead of deities and devout, splintered societies instead of a universal righteous good or evil, manmade disaster instead of malicious magic.

In a fantasy setting, magic is omnipresent, so nothing really feels unexpected. “Angry reptiles are coming out of a fiery, inter-dimensional hole? Oh, that’s just magic for ya. Ghost wizards shot lightning at you? Magic again.” It feels trite when everything is attributed to the nebulous and overwhelming pardon of magic. It’s a place of cheap tired tricks that the inhabitants and designers insist are miracles, and a world where those miracles of magic are commonplace and store-bought.

There are not many miracles in Fallout 3. Perhaps the miracle of speculative technology, but its uses, contexts, and creators are all so layered and compelling. These are people fabricating and using technology from inherited scrap, and discarding it out of necessity, which gives more character to individuals and the fantastic world they inhabit.

Fallout 3 is thematically multi-lingual, creating a world shaped by radical ideologies, high technology, mysticism, tribal customs, worship, and some unexplained magical anomalies; technology as god, man as god, god against man, man against beast, man against machine, man against man. The dialectics of Oblivion largely center on man against beast, man against evil, and man against man (to a much smaller degree).

Man has created his own enemies in Fallout 3. Evil is not a rat, it’s not a portal from hell that ushers in uninvited and savage guests, and it’s not a troll. Human evil created the wasteland and has become the wasteland, and it is a human necessity in order to survive the feedback loop of post-nuclear atrocities. The evidence of human cruelty is everywhere, it’s been crucified on a telephone pole, it’s a steak of human meat in a refrigerator, it’s a wayward Ghoul, driven out of smoothskin cities.

Evil agency in the landscape of Cyrodil usually takes the form of vermin, petty thieves, and hellacious Daedric brutes. Of course there is the Dark Brotherhood, the only significant source of human cruelty in the game, apart from player choice. But, even the Dark brotherhood answers to the Night Mother, a magical deity who issues orders to these blank disciples. They are a cultish hivemind motivated by the word of a divine, “evil” presence, making this institution of elementary evil less grounded in human interest. Real human evil permeates most of Fallout 3; evil motivated by business interests, by societal and political aims, starvation, revenge, supremacy, contests over cheap comforts, xenophobia, racial and class warfare.

Ultimately, I think the personality of the wasteland stems from it being a place you know (the real world) and a place you don’t know (unique game sci-fi). Oblivion, by and large is a place I know (fantasy).

Sword and sorcery fantasy franchises such as The Legend of Zelda, and to a lesser extent the Soul Reaver games have managed to reinvent the redundancy of fantasy landscape. The Zelda games create a stylized, whimsical rendering of the fantastical, while Soul Reaver possesses a more grim and gothic tone throughout its varied cryptworld. But let’s not forget that these are not open world games as we have come to think of them, making the prospect of fantasy reinvention within a massive, asset-heavy, realistic landscape all the more difficult.

Open space

Many have written about how open space in games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 can be a thorn in one’s side. Do they want chauffeurs? Segways? A bullet train? More likely they want an unrestrained fast-travel feature, thereby making an open world superfluous. Or, they want no vast open space at all.

I don’t think developers need to build gift shops, restaurants, and theme parks on land that some perceive as being unused and unvirtuous. Interactive space doesn’t need to be constructed in every square foot of open landscape. The open world depictions of modern metropolitan centers in some games certainly seem vacant and false, because we expect that sort of dense interactivity and explorable space in cities, which games cannot faithfully emulate.

However, Oblivion and Fallout 3 both have settings that avoid this disparity between real-world place and the expectations that come with its in-game representation, by creating worlds that are not densely urbanized and richly developed for modern uses.

Oblivion depicts a medievalist fantasy world, thus, primitive and not necessary to crowd with sweeping nodes of interactive buildings and events. Fallout 3 portrays what was a modern world -- teeming with buildings, storefronts, and interactive space -- and reduces it to radioactive dust, destroying much of that infrastructure it could not accommodate.

Open world space can’t be completely blank of course, there still is a setting to adhere to and a world to create. Open space in such games is essentially those areas in-between composite interactive environments -- the exterior natural world. Oblivion values diverse natural space, procedurally rendering more realistic ecosystems, populating open space with forests, grass, boulders, precipitation, etc. Fallout 3 also does this, but to a much smaller extent. The wasteland is a desert with far less biodiversity and interrupted space. It’s a sandy, windswept plain dotted by withered vegetation, corrosive ponds, and rocky plateaus. It never rains in the wasteland.

All open world games are essentially wastelands, but Fallout 3 takes this literally. Oblivion aims to create a much more complicated environmental system, a natural world brimming with biota, but still cannot completely make every acre feel diverse and unique, despite procedural generation. Fallout 3 makes uniformity and vacant space feel more natural by creating a wasteland, without sacrificing charm.

In addition, the sensation of traversing uninterrupted space in the wasteland was, in a strange way, constantly meditative. In the forests and mountains of Cyrodil, leisurely nature walks and outings with my horse did fill me with a certain amount of awe in the face of virtual nature. But, seeing as in reality I have a forest behind my backyard, I get that same feeling in an infinitely grander way by walking along a trail, not a polygon forest. With the hefty dedication of time I gave to Oblivion, it wasn’t very long before the game’s natural world became increasingly uniform and monotonous, at which point it did feel more like an expansive void keeping me from my chores.

In a sense, the exterior world of Fallout 3 is especially uniform, so why didn’t I tire of it? Because it is more alien, contextual, and open than Cyrodil. The reductionist approach it takes, coupled with its expository world event of nuclear holocaust tills a more distinctive, significant, and ruminative landscape.

In the absence of much visual and auditory information -- polygon forests and chirping birds -- my mind often sought refuge from that void by filling it with imagination. Long excursions in the great yellow yonder bore many more mental wanderings than Oblivion. It’s a kind of desert meditation that reveals itself when navigating a more vacant external space, then venturing into internal space, similar to 2001: A Space Odyssey (not in terms of imagery, but action and dialogue).

At the same time it’s a suggestive space. Your minds wanders, but it stays rooted in the world. The meditations were concerned with the subjects of nuclear deconstruction, perversion of nature, endangered historical preservation and the library of Alexandria, etc. -- many more topics than Cyrodil implicitly and emergently endorses. 

Also, seeing a distant, obscure landmark on the horizon is encouraging, like thirsting for an oasis. This sensation is much more pronounced in Fallout 3 because it places you in a desert, because these far-off respites are more visible and solitary. 

Not every open world game should be set in a literal wasteland. The strength and originality of Fallout 3’s approach to the inherent wasteland is encouraging insofar as there is much more unexplored territory in creating interesting virtual space. A relatively unembellished wasteland is not the only option.

This is not to say that the world of Fallout 3 is simply vacant and expressionless, far from it.

History in Oblivion

World history is important to the type of open world games Bethesda makes. To some extent, their games are mechanically predisposed to being living museums of an imagined civilization, natural history, and personal records of NPCs. Their worlds are sandboxes, but not really playgrounds. They’re not free-for-all demolition derby arenas, or playpens of boisterous destruction. They’re not platforming bouncy castles, or any kind of kinesthetic, hyperactive rumpus room. 

Bethesda constrains player mobility and vandalism because they want you to explore this detailed world they’ve created, instead of glimpsing it in fast-forward from the comfort of a dune buggy and flattening a microscopic artifact. It’s nowhere near being a sim, but real-world conditions and processes are closely considered in carving their worlds. Much of the technology and scope they push aims to create a living, breathing world in some capacity. Story and realistic landscape figure so prominently in their games that historical detail in the environment becomes essential.

This variety of virtual tourism is more akin to visiting Stonehenge, instead of jet skiing in Cabo or shopping in New York City. Bethesda’s sandbox is not complete without a healthy sprinkling of fossils to join their ants.

The setting of Oblivion is not bound to a grand expository world event. There are the large architectural fossils of a bygone era: the Romanesque Imperial City, English medieval castles in disrepair, ancient Elven strongholds, Nordic cottages, etc. I can scarcely remember any small fossils in the game aside from bones strewn about dungeon floors, statues of nondescript heroes and gods, and some Daedric articles. But, all of these fossils are painfully ordinary, the expected furnishings and building blocks of the boilerplate fantasy amphitheater.     

Cyrodil is too clean. The battlefields seem too clean, the forests appear to have custodians, the houses, the shops, and even the musty taverns -- boarding houses for the congress of all manner of filth and louts -- are spotless. What is going on in Cyrodil? It doesn’t feel lived-in. What crazy, hardworking prisoners and sanitation squads are keeping this world clean, and when? How is it so uncluttered and unsullied with historical residue?

Now entering historic Cyrodil

No need for silly ornamentation that distracts from organization and labor. A place for everything, and everything in its right place. Cups, bowls, boxes, sword racks, fireplaces, chairs, tables, sacks, barrels, chests, cupboards, rugs, bottles, and so on. Filigree is fine, but not too many personal effects! God forbid this wooden creature, proprietor of this fine and honest inn should ever let their personality come out via their surroundings, because they do not have one! Wood will do just fine.

The working utilitarian accouterments of humans are present, but what about the obsolete and discarded objects of the human footprint? The real historical articles of people, and not simply the dressed and restored antiques of a dry tradition.

Before I venture a reason as to why the world of Oblivion suffers from a famine of unique and interesting history, let’s examine the role of history in Fallout 3.

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History in Fallout 3

If Oblivion can be compared to the Roman Colosseum, then Fallout 3 resembles the ruins of Pompeii. Cyrodil involves history in its world primarily by way of ancient structures (usually institutions and martial outposts) and inherited architectural styles. Fallout 3 realizes this same approach in a grander way, while also presenting intimate domestic ruins and portraits of human remains. Unlike Oblivion, Fallout’s setting is bound to an expository world event, and it’s a pretty big one: Nuclear apocalypse. The bomb dropping is everything in Fallout 3.

Surprising and enthralling fossils abound in the wasteland. There are the awe-inspiring large fossils of desecrated national artifacts in The Mall, a colony of people housed in an abandoned aircraft carrier (Rivet City), a town assembled from waste with a dormant nuke in its center (Megaton), an old shopping mall turned slave compound (Paradise Falls), a small settlement on a crumbling bridge (Arefu), the sole nursery of living trees and plant life in the wasteland (Oasis), a cave city of children, decorated with Christmas lights and toys (Little Lamplight), and a haven for slaves, run by freed slaves with the decapitated head of the Lincoln Memorial serving as a centerpiece (Temple of the Union).

In addition, the wasteland is littered with memorable small fossils: A concrete treehouse, a drive-in cinema filled with the skeletons of cars, an irradiated outhouse enclosed by a shelter of stacked cars, a macabre diner crowded with arranged animal and human body parts, an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine built from junk, a grocery store called Lucky’s (presumably because a large impact crater can be found near the building), a car dealership advertising “the brand new Chryslus 2077 Corvega for the low, low price of $1,600,000,” patriotic picnic areas, the remains of desperate people lying at the foot of a cave wall, trying in vain to escape their Vault, as well as those listed in the first section.

Fallout’s history is instantly recognizable; an amalgam of ’50s and ‘60s pop culture stuck in stasis, stunted and destroyed by the dreaded bomb of the Cold War that did go off. The bright optimism of a prosperous future -- filled with the promise of nutty and impractical appliances like flying cars -- has been bulldozed into submission by the singularity of an atomic payload. It’s both funny and tragic to explore this decimated World’s Fair.

With the established expository world event, pre-war and post-war history fuse to display the dashed expectations of a naïve period vision, and an ugly reality that remains. The bomb is easily understood and leaves a big impression. The threat of nuclear war and those searing film reels of A-bomb tests are very much singed into the modern unconscious, like an atomic shadow. The history of Fallout is identifiable, and in my estimation, much more resonant and relevant.

Using the example of the charred skeleton sitting upright on a park bench, it can be easily inferred that given this nuclear context, this man was awaiting the grave and sat down peacefully to glimpse the last fiery sunset of the world he knew, and was then converted into scattered molecules. Or, maybe he just took a nap and unknowingly combusted.

The wasteland is impacting because the entire world was affected, and with this simple premise, one can find many nuanced implicit stories embedded in the landscape, easily inferred because the player is well-aware of their inciting incident. Even the more localized stories (such as the aftermath of a specific tragedy that befell a Vault), which need some exposition via computer logs, are tied to a string of causes, but all relating back to that common ancestor of the apocalypse.