Players Shouldn’t Overlook This Often Underrated Game Mechanic

Gaming innovations are often discussed within the context of combat mechanics, storytelling, and graphics rather than the feature players spend the most amount of time within any game: traversal. The way players move throughout a game’s space underpins all other features and can make or break the gameplay experience. When traversal is thoughtfully planned and integrated with all other parts of the game, it can drastically affect how cohesive the gaming experience feels for gamers. When players complain about traversal, it’s often not about the element itself, but how it’s integrated.

Walking in a game can provide an immersive experience that yields endless gameplay opportunities, but can seem like a boring waste of time between combat sequences in another. When traversal is unique, such as with combinations of features that open up with magic and technology, it might become the reason for a game even to exist and impress players with a new experience they’ve never had before. However, even when it’s innovative, any praise will be for the other features it uplifts. When analyzing the importance of any game’s features, it’s clear that traversal is underrated because when it works well, it’s not the focus, but the undercurrent.

Traversal Is the Most Engaged-With Element in Gaming

Effective Traversal Influences How Players Interact With the Game’s World

Related

Insomniac’s Spider-Man Series Proves Why Good Movement Is So Important In Games

Good movement is a crucial element to every open-world video game, and Spider-Man 2 raises the bar to create an incredible immersive experience.

When gamers picture traversal, they likely picture walking, riding horses, driving cars, and fast travel, but it’s so much more than that. Traversal mechanics don’t simply affect how players go from Point A to Point B in a game; they also influence what, when, and where Point A and Point B are. For example, many players enjoy Red Dead Redemption 2 for all the ways they must realistically care for their primary means of traversal: the horse, along with the faster methods of traversal such as trains, stagecoaches, and even fast travel.

Each of these methods is slower than in other recent games with similar features, and purposefully so. The speed and necessity of slow traversal, especially at the beginning of the game, deliberately increase players’ interaction with the world between mission objectives. These opportunities can sometimes affect the dialogue in a mission, or even players’ ability to play the mission. Not all players enjoy traversal that demands they interact with the environment and would prefer more options, especially some that are faster or offer variety in gameplay. Those who don’t enjoy its slow traversal find constant horse care and riding to be tedious and the opportunities to be unrelated distractions.

What some see as endless opportunities and beautiful scenery, others see as boring, lengthy traversal that is far from innovative. Regardless of whether people enjoy or don’t enjoy the traversal, it’s clearly essential and unavoidable. It’s not simply about how players traverse the world, but how it influences the other features they pay the most attention to. The focus in a game can depend on where each feature is in relation to where players traverse.

The method of traversal a player chooses greatly influences the gameplay they interact with, so writers and developers can use this to their advantage when deciding which options might be most interesting for players. For example, if a game incorporates flight or boats into its traversal, its map can be larger, such as the paraglider in The Legend of Zelda franchise. The downside of a larger map is it needs additional gameplay added to where the type of traversal occurs, or it may feel empty, even with unique traversal.

A fun way games combat this is by adding traversal features that appeal to various gaming motivations. One such gamer motivation is mastery, such as with parkour in the Assassin’s Creed series, and environmental analysis combined with tool use, such as in the Uncharted series. Players have freedom and variety in how they can traverse the terrain between mission points and in combat sequences. This type of freedom in traversal is also prevalent for another type of gaming motivation: puzzle-solving, which is often a primary focus point of the platformer genre. Whichever of these elements developers add, it’s always with thoughtfulness to where those creating the game want traversal to center the players’ focus.

Traversal is Overlooked By Design

Effective Traversal Isn’t Intended to Be Noticed But to Direct Players’ Attention to What Should Be Noticed

Traversal is only noticed when:

1. It’s implemented poorly to stick out, such as critics’ purport about The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt or Starfield with the clunky and slow transportation options.
2. It’s a core gameplay mechanic, such as using webs in the Spider-Man franchise or parkour in the Assassin’s Creed franchise.

Poor implementation happens often, yet games can still be highly successful despite this. That doesn’t mean traversal is unimportant; it simply means many gamers aren’t used to paying attention to it, in a similar vein to sound design. Many games have poor sound optimization between dialogue in cutscenes, combat sounds, and the rest of the gameplay, yet this doesn’t bother all gamers in the same way.

A player’s perception of any feature depends on what the player is focused on, and ironically, both the traversal and sound design are purposefully created to shine attention onto the more central game features such as combat mechanics, storytelling, and graphics. Gamers are trained to look at these features due to the repetition of traversal directing their focus, even when the traversal itself isn’t perfect.

This is likely a reason why so many games have simple and similar features: games can prevent criticisms of their traversal by making it unnoticeable, which many games do by playing it safe and offering the same thing as other games, only innovating in the places they specialize in depending on the particular game. Traversal needs to be added mindfully to the other features since it can add more complexity to any game. When it’s excessively simple, such as in Death Stranding, it can be off-putting to some players, but for its target audience, the experience is focused and cohesive, creating a distinct atmosphere that makes the game unique.

And what about when traversal is innovative? Some studios see the upside potential of not only using it to point in the direction of fun gameplay but also adding to it. Superhero games inherently have magic systems perfect for this, such as in InFAMOUS Second Son, where there’s not just one way of getting around the city, and the mastery of those skills can also be useful in combat.

Many of the most popular AAA games offer the same simple walking, mounting, and climbing, mixed with fast travel to give players options without requiring additional gameplay elements. Fast travel fixes the issue of speed, interactive world, and implementation all at once, since players can choose which part of the gameplay they want at any given moment, justifying those issues because they give way to whichever motivation is pulling players along. Yet, it also skips opportunities for gameplay. Each genre has its own norms; games actively choose not to innovate, and gamers have seen the repetition many times before. Thus, traversal goes unnoticed.

Traversal Has Significantly Evolved But Could Be the Next Industry Focus

Core Gaming Focuses Have Fewer Opportunities for Improvement

Related

10 Best Movement Powers In Video Games

Some games establish their core movement style for maximum fun; for example, creating unusual travel methods like skating, driving, or web-slinging.

Traversal mechanics have evolved from basic parkour and climbing in 1989’s Prince of Persia, to 3D mechanics within platforming in Super Mario 64 in 1996, to open-world horseback riding in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 1998, to open-world seamless parkour in 2007’s Assassin’s Creed, to flying across the entire world in Microsoft Flight Simulator.

There are endless opportunities for traversal, only limited by creativity, especially when paired with technological advancements and AAA budgets. Games have stuck to safe patterns in traversal as they’ve focused on the core gaming features that players and critics alike react to. Yet, that focus has resulted in the innovations in those areas far surpassing those in those such as traversal. Thus, there is far more opportunity for innovation within it in comparison.

What might those innovations look like? While AAA has been distracted in mimicking each other, smaller, experimental projects in indie gaming have flourished, especially when considering traversal:

• Hollow Knight: Wall jumping and climbing focused on vertical exploration
• Ori and the Blind Forest: Spirit Flame and Bash mechanics add creative navigation
• Dead Cells: Unique and fast-paced combination of elements jumping while activating teleportation
• Celeste: Refined dash mechanics integral to the gameplay
• Hyper Light Drifter: Unique combination of dash combos and environmental puzzles
• The Messenger: Time travel is used to create a variety of traversal opportunities and puzzles
• Fez: Traditional platforming traversal is enhanced with a perspective-shifting mechanic allowing players to rotate the 3D world
• A Short Hike: Elements are combined specifically to support the thematic purpose of relaxing gameplay

Translating these mechanics to AAA games and large-scale open worlds can’t always be one-to-one translations, but there is plenty of opportunity for unique combinations of these elements to replace some of the consistent patterns of walking, riding mounts, and climbing, especially when it enhances the game’s other elements. For example, in games such as The Witcher, which have the use of magic spells, it would be intriguing to implement various limited and strategic-use teleportation spells.

Games such as Horizon Zero Dawn, with endless opportunities in technological potential, could offer tech enhancements for faster scaling while climbing or using portals for fast travel, which would be more unique and have the potential to connect to the lore rather than campfires and settlements like dozens of other similar games. Perspective-shifting mechanics like in Fez could be interesting in games like Control, while God of War (2018) could integrate dash mechanics. The unique traversal combinations in games like Dead Cells and Hyper Light Drifter wouldn’t be able to be ignored in any AAA game, even if translating those mechanics to a large-scale game would be an immense undertaking.

Not all of these may be the best ideas for those specific games, but it goes to show the types of creativity that could be added if studios decide to make traversal their focus, especially in light of the increasingly limited options for innovation in the traditionally focused elements in games. Traversal has been relegated to the background in games, but it doesn’t need to be, especially when combined with the other core elements in a way that better expresses what the game is attempting to communicate.

Traversal features are the unsung heroes of gaming, celebrated when refined on smaller scales and overlooked entirely in larger-scale games in favor of the elements they’ve supported for most of gaming’s history. By innovating traversal mechanics, gaming could shift the focus away from players merely getting where they need to go, and instead appreciating the journey.