Creating a coherent world through detail

"You hear a lot of complaints about game length nowadays, but I think the underlying frustration is that games don’t feel like adventures anymore, regardless of length. They feel like a mish-mash of narrative and set-piece moments instead of an epic journey. Most developers nowadays don’t know the art of crafting a memorable adventure, and instead throw together individual pieces of “memorable” (to the developers, anyway) content without taking the big picture into account."  

                                  - Sean Malstrom (http://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/email-games-should-feel-like-adventures/)

This is an extract from a blog post by Sean Malstrom (industry analyst) in which he puts the forward the idea that in recent generations, games have lost their sense of adventure. They no longer have you traveling through worlds on an epic adventure, rather they have taken all the best parts of the adventure and mashed it into memorable dash to the finish. As one of his examples he sites the evolution of Nintendo's Mario franchise. Super Mario Bro's 1 established the mushroom kingdom and its various worlds. Super Mario Bro's 3 then explored this world in greater detail, while SMB 4 developed the outer kingdoms of Dinosaur land. This tried and tested method was completely detroyed in later Mario games such as Mario galaxy. This lost its connection to the mushroom kingdom, and any kind of home world. Instead it had cannoned to a far away planet, all of which had no connection to the next.

"Super Mario Brothers 3 could not be made today. A modern game designer would look at something like those pipes on the map that were nothing but empty rooms where Mario exited one pipe and entered another as ‘tacky’ and ‘wasteful’ and then remove them entirely. Even though there is no gameplay attached to them, they did help carve out cohesiveness to the world. In order for Mario to go from one side of the map to another, he needed to enter the 

pipe. He did not magically appear there."

When designing my game I need to focus on the idea of creating a coherent world, I feel that this is important to creating a deep and meaningful story as it allows the player to relax within the boundaries of the game, giving them the confidence to explore.

http://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/email-games-should-feel-like-adventures/