It is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate. You can deceive others, you can deceive your brain-self, but you can't deceive your mind-self — for mind deals only in the discovery of truth and the interrelationship of all truths. The cosmic laws with which mind deals are noncorruptible. Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate.

—R Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (1981)

Environments, like everything else we build for a game, are subject to prioritization. We spend more time on the more important areas of the environment, and we spend less time on the less important areas of the environment. Typically, the metric by which we make those decisions is how much engagement with that area we expect from players. The more players we expect to engage with the environment, the higher priority it is to look good. 

The most important part of any environment is the critical path - the route and areas that we expect (almost) all players to go through in order to progress through the game. The critical path gets the most attention because it gets the most play - every player must go through it. Less important areas would be the optional side content - the more obscure the content, the less important it tends to be. Optional quests and objectives where we expect players to visit are less important than the critical path, but still important because we expect many players to engage. The least important areas are those where we don't place any content for the player to find - the edges of the map, the tops of unclimbable rocks, behind the blocked-off alleys in towns, and so on.

The amount of detail put into each area is also subject to its own prioritization. The placement of environment objects for important gameplay purposes (e.g. this area is a designated boss fight arena, that is where the environmental damage zones are supposed to be, here is where the boss's reinforcements will spawn, etc.) will take priority over most other forms of environmental detail. Equal to or perhaps slightly below gameplay needs are the needs for theming and the general environment - this area must have enough major props placed to make it feel like it is consistent with the rest of the office - this is the cubicle farm, these are the meeting rooms, that is the kitchen, those are the bathrooms. Then, once we have the important layout and areas designated, we can start filling in the individual area details - this cube belongs to Neelo who adores her pet cat, that one is Desmal's so it is very depressed-looking, and Bayn's cube is has lots of little action figures because she loves them so.

As you can see, this tends to fall out in a fairly intuitive descending hierarchy. Making the area where all of the players will have to visit look good is more important than making the part where few players will see. Making the office look like an office in general is more important than making making the cubicles look perfect at the expense of the rest of the office. Making all of the cubicles look like cubicles is more important than making one cubicle look great. And, if there’s still time left after we do the heavy lifting, we can spend it tweaking the details and making it pretty.

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Trying out Critical Path for an hour

When we’re creating content, there’s stuff that’s “critical path” and stuff that’s “modular”. The critical path is the content the player must go through to finish the game, generally in a set order. When we’re working on critical path content, we can assume that players have completed prior elements on the critical path. Critical path content is also usually pretty high fidelity - since every player has to see it, we want it to be the highest quality we can make it.

Modular content, on the other hand, is content that isn’t guaranteed to be played. We can let players skip it, do it early, or do it later in the game. We can gate it behind critical path elements, or we can let them do it whenever they want. Modular content is generally lower quality and cheaper because it’s optional. We want lots of it for players to do, and we hope it is fun, but it’s like a parade of tasty optional side dishes to accompany the main course.

If we want our modular content to acknowledge other events happening in the game, we must guarantee that it is only available at an appropriate time relative to other events. That raises the bar on how much the content costs to build in terms of resources. If the modular content constrained by critical path elements, designers and testers must ensure that the side content is only available during the times where the critical path allows it to exist. Whenever we add constraints, we increase the amount of work needed for the content to pass muster.

If we constrain the modular content, it also means that there will be parts of the game with less modular content available (when those constraints aren’t met). Final Fantasy 6, for example, has the World of Balance and the World of Ruin. If we have the resource budget for 100 side quests total and we distribute them evenly, you’d have 50 side quests in the World of Balance and 50 in the World of Ruin. But maybe players rush through the World of Balance part, get to the “endgame” in the World of Ruin, and run out of things to do because they have only 50 quests available at that time. Maybe the executive producer thinks that it’s better to have all 100 side quests available at all times, so that the players have the maximum amount of content available. This brings some added benefits like the ability to smooth out parts of the game that need more content by redistributing what side quests are available at various parts of the game without having to worry about constraints like plot.

Returning to your original question, the main reason they didn’t add those constraints is probably because they wanted to make as much content available to the player as possible. I suspect that the designers spent their time creating more content in general instead of spending it tailoring the content they made to follow the story more closely. It’s a tradeoff for certain - we lose a little of the cohesion of the game when we don’t acknowledge the core story in the side content, but it also makes the side content much much easier to insert anywhere into the game’s critical path. 

This week we continue the Design Phase of the FANTa Project!

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