Game Flow
So I’ve been thinking an awful lot about flow in video game design, and how to reduce the sense of endless traveling. The two Borderlands expansions I’ve played are excellent subjects for this, since one of them does a great job and the other does a terrible job.
But first let’s define our terms. When I say "flow," what I mean is the sense that you’re following a path and not just going off somewhere, doing a mission, returning to base, and then going somewhere else for another mission. This is important for two reasons. First off, it adds to the immersiveness of the experience; it makes it seem like the adventure is happening all around you, rather than like it’s taking place according to a script and you need to go out and track it down. The other — and more important — reason is that endless back-and-forth travel is boring.
That said, let’s take a look at my cheap-ass flow map for Zombie Island of Dr. Ned. Those of you who are familiar with my previous work — such as my award-winning diagrams of Karazhan boss fights — will be familiar with the style. The circles represent all the areas in the game, the lines are zone connections, and the numbers are the order you travel through the zones in along the main quest line. You can consider this to contain minor spoilers if you don’t want to know the names of the zones or like what order they’re in.
As we can see, this expansion uses a very efficient flow. It does have a bit of back-and-forth to Jakobs Cove, but it doesn’t become as galling as it could, since the sections of Jakobs Cove you’ll be travelling to are different each time. And you never need to visit any other area a second time.
The side missions — which I don’t reflect on the chart, since they don’t have a coherent flow to them — also pretty much follow this course; most side missions are discovered in the zones they take place in, and the few that come from Jakobs Cove go to the place you’re headed next when you pick them up.
Now let’s take a look at Secret Armory of General Knoxx.
Sorry that’s so huge, but the game’s laid out in a big line like that. If you can follow the flow numbers, you see that the game plays out basically in four long excursions from T-Bone Junction. But you’re going through the exact same zones each time, which means that you’ve done all this before. Making it even worse, the Ridgeway and the Crimson Tollway may as well be the same zone — they’re both just long roads. And the side quests don’t unlock in any sensible way — it’s quite frequent that you’ll finally get out to the zone you’re headed to, and then a new mission that goes to that same zone unlocks back in T-Bone Junction. Missions also unlock at Moxxi’s Red Light, which is in the exact centre of fucking noplace.
The worst part of this design, though, is that, with no fast travel, you really need to do an entire "arm" of the main quest in one go or you’ll have to repeat a substantial amount of travel (this is especially true of the second arm, since the Ridgeway has a big barricade on it at that time that necessitates a half-hour on-foot detour through a fortified area). This is totally counter to the way Borderlands has always been designed — it’s a very casual-friendly game, since you can log in for half an hour, knock out a quest or two, and actually make some progress. In General Knoxx, you really can’t do that. Half an hour generally gets you more or less to the zone you need to be in.
So, to sum up: Proper game flow does not involve traveling through the exact same areas over and over again, and requiring big lumps of the game to be completed all at once is very unfriendly to those of us who have full-time jobs and can’t necessarily devote multiple-hour-long chunks of time to playing. So cut it out, Gearbox. The end.
