Welcome back to another Developer Diary for The Legend of Khiimori! Last time, we talked about how and why we chose historical Mongolia as our setting for the game, and today we want to go more in depth about what that choice means for our open world. Designing an Open World for a game is a matter of balances: players want game worlds to feel large and expansive, but not so much that exploring them becomes tedious. Empty worlds quickly become boring, but at the same time, a Mongolian steppe setting should not feel overly busy and crowded. Read on to find out how we’re working on achieving that balance.
🚧Work in Progress🚧
Steppe, Forests, Mountains, Rivers
Vast, flat, treeless grasslands are as crucial a characteristic of nomadic life in Mongolia as the short stocky horses and round white tents called ger, the Mongolian word for Yurt. That doesn’t mean however, that steppes are the only type of environment the country has to offer. That’s great for us, because a game world made up solely from flat, grassy terrain wouldn’t make for a particularly interesting place to explore. Not only would it be rather monotonous, but flat, treeless terrain has the additional disadvantage that there’s no parallax effect, meaning no objects or environments passing by at different speeds due to their distance. As such, moving over a featureless plane would feel quite unsatisfying, since the player has little or no sense of covering any distance.
🚧Work in Progress🚧
Early on in our development process, we researched the diversity of Mongolian landscapes, ensuring that we were not dooming our game to monotonous environments by picking this setting. Fortunately, that environmental diversity is quickly evident: The country is large and made up of various ecological zones, from the sand dunes of the Gobi Desert in the South, to the snowy Altai Mountain ranges in the West, to the forested wilderness of Khentii in the North, to the myriad rivers and lakes spotting and splitting the grasslands throughout.
Taking inspiration from a real country and representing it in in a video game is a process of weighing realism and gameplay fun against each other, and finding a compromise that captures the essence of the real place while taking the creative liberty to scale and tweak the environments into something that is fun and intuitive to traverse. What that means is that the ratio of grasslands to mountains to desert that we have in the game is likely not going to match that of a real map of Mongolia, but that we’re shaping those in-game biomes based on their real life counterparts in terms of flora and fauna and environmental characteristics.
🚧Work in Progress🚧
Scale and Sensation
In designing the open world, our level designers emphasize the importance of the vista: entering a new area or hard to reach peak can of course reward the player with concrete gameplay achievements such as quest progress, treasure chests or other types of unlocks, but in a well-designed game world, the environment itself is part of said reward. To this end, trees, rocks, rivers and buildings are placed in conscious composition with consideration for how the player is most likely to see them for the first time. The strategic placement of paths and props defines whether players run up against a cliff wall or see the world open up before them.
For The Legend of Khiimori, a certain grandness and scale is part of what makes a good vista: the sensation of reaching a new part of the map and seeing the world laid out before you, with the knowledge that all you see is ripe to explore and can actually be reached.
Our game map is therefore planned to be quite sizable, even by AAA gaming standards, in order to give players that sense of having vast areas to explore and to suit the scale of the world to feel right when traversed at a horse’s gallop rather than a human’s jog.
For our Early Access release, the world will not be complete yet: We’ll start with an accessible area of about one fourth of what is planned in the end, though exact numbers and proportions remain subject to change. To keep players in that area, we are working with natural borders such as cliffs and deep rivers wherever possible, because of course no one likes to walk up against so-called invisible walls.
🚧Work in Progress🚧
Event Density and Environmental Language
To ensure that the world is interesting to traverse with its significant size, we’re applying a design philosophy inspired by games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption 2: For the player, there should be something happening roughly every 60 seconds of playtime. This something can be an NPC riding by, a swarm of birds soaring overhead, an interactable point of interest, or a wild wolf howling. On their own they might not be all that thrilling of an experience, but together they help make the world feel alive and interesting to travel through.
🚧Work in Progress🚧
Our level designers also employ deliberate environmental language in order to tell the player which points on the map to investigate further, to understand where it makes sense to slow down and have a look around at a walk or trot before continuing an overland journey at high speed.
In the vast wilderness, human-made objects like waypoints of fences can easily draw the player’s attention. At the same time, rocks and tree stumps can be carefully placed to subtly and non-verbally guide the player to notice accessible slopes or river crossings that might otherwise not be immediately obvious.
🚧Work in Progress🚧
Making Travel Intrinsically Interesting
There is one additional key aspect in designing how it feels to explore the world of The Legend of Khiimori: our horses are more than just a means of faster travel. We’ll go into more detail about this topic in future dev diaries, but essentially, the player will make certain small choices about the way they travel (the exact path they go, the speed and gait at which they ride) which then has an effect on the horse’s training.
🚧Work in Progress🚧
Similarly, horses can be trained and they also have personality traits. They may favor one type of terrain or another, meaning the player can make additional choices about whether to actively seek out or to avoid patches of sand, gravel or mud, which then influence their travel speed and efficiency. Those ground types may be further influenced by weather, adding another layer of possible consideration when picking an optimal route. To keep the game accessible and not over complicate things for less experienced players, these path-optimizations are optional: roads serve as an alternative that all horses can use in every weather condition, they just might not be the fastest option.
Our horse controls are one of the first things we will playtest with interested community members, so they’re subject to change based on feedback, but the current implementation allows the player to tweak the speed of their gait. This means that for one player, horse, or situation, traveling at a fast trot might be a better or faster choice than a slow canter, and it adds another layer to play around with.
🚧Work in Progress🚧
Thank you for reading! We’ll be sharing more insight and some WIP footage on our socials, so make sure to give us a follow and join the official Aesir Interactive Discord server! Please also consider Wishlisting if you have not already! 🧡
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