A question was posed for the latest Blogs of the Round Table collection. Exactly how important, to games, are goals?

The problem (or, perhaps, the best thing) with a question like this is that “goal” itself is open to interpretation, and I don’t want to get into semantics about it for the whole of this article. On the one hand, you could say that a first-person shooter like FEAR has the overarching goal – finish every level, and get to the end – but also microgoals; stay alive, kill enemies, conserve ammunition. Likewise, even something unended like SimCity has goals of its own; the assumed goal is to create a self-sustaining, successful city. Unlike FEAR, there’s no necessary reason to do this, though. Because it’s doesn’t have an ending and is open to various playing styles, the player can experiment and create a terrible dystopia, with coal power-plants sited next to low-quality, skyscraper accommodations. For the sake of this, I’m going to assume that “goal” refers to the ending of the main game; the finish of the plot, the point at which you can say you’ve “completed” the game. SimCity is open-ended and does not have a strict “goal”. Quake 4 does. Oblivion and the Grand Theft Auto 3 series are sandbox games with main “goals” to attend to, if you wish to.

So, semantics over. How important are goals?

Well, not very, if you look primarily at sales. Open-ended games have a tendency to sell extraordinarily well. Something about being able to do whatever you want with a game seems to strike the average gamer as being extremely exciting and novel – and, to some extent, it is, because (discounting god games like SimCity) there aren’t a great deal of games that simply plonk you in a world and let you do whatever you want. This begs the question as to why there aren’t, considering that they almost always seem to sell well and be fairly high profile, but I’ll touch on that shortly.

That’s not to say there aren’t any that don’t sell well; as with all other games, marketing is a huge part of sales. Boiling Point, an ambitious sandbox FPS/RPG, became a cult favourite due largely to some hilarious bugs. Despite this, one would be hard-pressed to say that it attained high sales figures. We gamers are a notoriously fickle breed, after all. This is also shown in the recent release of STALKER. Most of the previews for the game focused on the fact that, due to the complex AI, the game would have a “living world”, which would carry on around you. The idea presented was such that it would seem to be the ultimate sandbox game with biological cycles for the local animals, having them hunt each other, flee, eat, and what have you. On release, it was considered an accomplished game by many, but fans were disappointed by the fact that the side-missions were almost completely pointless, removing the main thrust of the sandbox aspect, and that the game was not truly free-roaming, instead herding the player through (admittedly large) maps towards the endgame. What was rumoured to be an amazingly freeform game instead became an almost bog-standard first-person shooter, albeit with larger areas. The option for sidequests and some freeroaming was there, but both aspects were vastly cut down. A map of the game area released online showed what was presumably the full area of the game with the boundaries of the levels drawn on it, and the latter made up perhaps 50% of the map. Why?

This links into the previous question as to why there aren’t a great deal of sandbox games – they must be extraordinarily hard to make, and do well, requiring a vastly different design aesthetic to most games. Rather than knowing exactly what a player’s done, what they’re equipped with, and designing the game and set pieces to fit, the player can – at any stage – have accomplished far more or far less than expected, and be either over or underpowered. The game area in a sandbox game is usually far larger and requires a lot of work at every stage to make sure the world is cohesive and coherent. There will usually be far more NPCs to interact with and quests to undertake, again, requiring a lot of effort to make sure everything works out fine, and as previously stated, we’re a fickle lot. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, a genuine triumph of the freeform RPG, was lambasted by many (myself included) for there being roughly 20 different voices between the thousands of NPCs in the game. When something isn’t quite right, we notice, regardless of how difficult any potential fix may have been. It seems likely that the STALKER development team realised the scope of the task they’d set themselves and were forced to cut it down, to the disappointment of many.

That’s only looking at a small percentage of these games, though. There are plenty of other goalless games out there, like The Sims, the best-selling PC game in the world. While still a sandbox game, this doesn’t have many of the development issues that plague open-world games like Oblivion. This relies instead on players making their own goals and experimenting as much as they like, and the vast amounts of custom content, as well as the relative ease of creation, ensures that more is being consistently added to it.

Looking at the potential for sales and the adoration of gamers, it would seem that creating a game that works around the traditional goal structure is the best way to go, but the majority of games still use goals and many sell extraordinarily well. Some, such as STALKER and Just Cause, dabble in sandbox without taking it all the way, certainly, but looking at some of the most successful games of the past few years highlights, sandbox isn’t proof of success. Gears of War, an extremely linear shooter, sold 3 million copies – roughly the same amount as Oblivion. Half-Life 2 sold 4 million. The industry is rife with examples such as these, and the ones listed here aren’t nearly the most extreme.

In the end, it’s the individual gamer who has to decide whether goals are important to them. I imagine that, should everything be reversed and sandbox games were the most commonly released with a few linear, goal-driven games released every once in awhile, the situation would be reversed, with the more unusual games getting the blood pumping and being the most widely hyped. For my part, until a game like Oblivion can make each of the thousands of NPCs genuinely unique, individual characters, each with heart, there will always be things that linear games can do much better.

I mean, Cyrodiil’s nice and all, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Tim McDonald