Re-traversal or backtracking is one of the most common pacing issues in games
and yet it's also one of the easiest types of issues to solve.
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a free 30-day trial, link in the description. Surprisingly we still
see this in an enormous number of games today.
Have you ever cleared an area only to find out that now you gotta walk back
through it with everything already beaten and nothing interesting to do
along the way? That is the re-traversal problem. That is poor level design in
action, and today we're going to talk about how it can be addressed. The
problem looms largest in open world games. We've all had that moment where
you clear your way to the top of a building or you've gotten to the end of
a dungeon in an open world game and you had to tramp back to where you started
to get back outside and carry on your adventure.
We all know how boring that is. It completely kills the pacing of the
experience.
It's easy to fix if you just build your dungeons with a back exit and your
buildings with a ladder from the roof to the ground but before we even talk about
solutions we have to talk about a few subtler aspects of the problem.
First off why is this a larger problem and open world games?
Well because in most linear games, stages simply cut off at the end. When you get
to the top of the building or you beat the boss of the dungeon in most linear
games a cutscene plays and you're taken directly to the start of a new level;
No re-traversal needed. Now that's not to say that re-traversal is any less
bad in linear games, it's just as much of a pace killer as it is in an open world
situation.
Fortunately it's at least less common and more easily addressable. Linear games
do still occasionally have that problem where you go down a side path of an
otherwise linear map and eventually it leads to a dead end. When you get there
and you find whatever goody was down that path,
you now have to waddle all the way back to where you first took the fork with
nothing to shoot or slash along the way which is boring.
The nice thing about linear level design though is that you usually have one main
channel in the level from beginning to end with small side paths off of it.
This means that rather than dead ending, your side paths can simply reconnect with
the main channel and voila,
no re-traversal needed! Our heroes can blow a hole through a wall, knock over a tree
to serve as a bridge, or
simply throw a switch that opens a door to lead them back. Or heck you can have
the path re-converge with the main channel with no sleight of hand at all
and we're back to stomping over old ground. But what makes this trickier and
not always viable in a linear experience is that doing so means you have to dump
the player however far down the main channel the branch went,
which means they skip content which might be something your team wants to
avoid for a plethora of reasons. There are possible workarounds of course if
you're creative.
If your particular design warrants it, say your level takes place in a
spaceship or some such.
You can have the branching path go up a small ladder or a slope and have a
90-degree turn in it and then all of a sudden the branch you're creating can
wind back and forth above or below the main channel, and because your
branch is at a right angle to wherever the player was at the main channel, you
can create long paths without actually pushing the player further down the main
channel at all,
and when you drop them back down by blowing through the floor, or taking an
elevator, or just walking down a gently descending ramp, the player almost
certainly won't even have seen through your trick in the heat of the running
and gunning, because they're not getting a top-down view of what's going on. To
them they're just taking a turn maybe without even noticing it and are
fighting in normal corridors.
So back to open world games. In these games there are often scores if not
hundreds of small buildings and dungeons to explore.
Given that fact it should just become a design best practice for the project to
always have a way for the player to get from the end of them back out into the
open world. Sometimes this can involve having them loop around so that the
player pops back out at the start.
Sometimes these can end with the player stumbling out into an entirely new part
of the world or being teleported off to the distance, but more often than not it
simply involves some vertical trickery. Buildings are easy,
if you send the player up a building then a ladder or a group of conveniently
placed terraces or other rooftops the player can jump down to are all you need.
For small dungeons, if they take place below the surface of your world
you've got a ton of space to build them however you want. There are all sorts of
options for avoiding re-traversal: making them loop back on themselves, having the
lowest floor end right next to where the top floor begins in everything but the
Z dimension, having a convenient lift or a ladder back to the surface.
All very easy solutions and all of this works because game spaces are absolutely
nothing like real world spaces. So long as they look like real world spaces from
moment to moment, we as players buy into
them without hesitation. So you may see a grand castle from a distance but never
think about the fact that when you're inside of it it's really just a bunch of
zigzaggy corridors you're fighting through.
You may be shooting your way through an industrial plant and as long as every
room looks like a room that could be in an industrial plant,
you'll never notice that those rooms are cobbled together in a floor plan that
just makes no sense for any real-world industry ever. But this leads me to a
subtler point about re-traversal in open world games.
Very often the player doesn't want to leave a dungeon only when they get to
the end of them in these sorts of games.
Maybe they need more ammo, maybe they got stuck on some part, or heck maybe they
bought the game to experience an open world and maybe they don't want to be
trapped in one place doing one sort of linear activity for two or three hours
at a time before getting back to exploring new spaces. When people talk
about FromSoftware having amazing level design,
this is a big part of that. If you ever want to examine levels that are built to
allow the player plenty of ways to skip re-traversing through boring or
taxing parts of a level, From games are a great collection to study.
They do everything they can to avoid re-traversal that would kill the pacing and
create frustration,
well ok more frustration. And some other time we can talk about how simply by
creating these exit points that cut down on re-traversal time, From creates
checkpoints for the player and creates smaller more achievable sub goals for
them as opposed to having them simply slog through a whole dungeon. And
specific to their game,
these points that cut down on re-traversal create a whole risk/reward dynamic
around whether the player risks trying to find the next checkpoint or packs up
their souls, and heads back to cash them in, knowing that that means they're
gonna have to fight their way through the whole segment again.
But no matter what your building, cutting down on the time the player has to pass
through areas they've already depopulated of enemies or stripped clean
of loot is always positive.
Those sorts of moments cause your engagement curve to come crashing down
and make the player all too aware that they're playing a game.
These are easy problems to avoid if taken into consideration from the outset
of your level building,
but are almost impossible to compensate for if you didn't think about the
re-traversal problem till later. And the larger the dungeon or the building
you're creating the more important those shortcuts become, but the more
pre-planning they require. So as you're building your levels or even just
playing your games
be mindful of back-tracking
and look for simple solutions to the re-traversal problem. See you
next week.
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