One of the most important foundational elements of the design of many game genres is a clear definition of the player’s goals.
When players understand the game’s goals, it adds context to the mechanics and gives purpose to the actions they’ll take during play. The best rulebooks for the myriad of board games on my office shelves define the victory conditions in simple, clear terms.
In the video game arena too, most games have clear goals. In role-playing games, it’s finishing the story; in a platformer or level-based shooter, it’s beating the final level; in a game of Civilization, it’s winning the space race or defeating all the other nations.
Most multiplayer games, too, have clear victory conditions. Whether it’s being on the winning team in a Battlefield match, completing a mission in Deep Rock Galactic, or coming out on top in an online chess match, the goal is easy to explain.
Multiplayer and live service games often have secondary long-term progression goals – unlocking new content after repeated matches, or finishing a chain of multiple missions for a special reward – but the goals of any individual session are typically clear.
There are plenty of sandbox titles out there – games that give players a bunch of interesting tools and mechanics, then turn them loose in the world. But the vast majority still, in one way or another, put goals in front of the player.
For instance, Valheim has bosses to kill and an optimum sequence for exploring its biomes that helps guide players through the content.
But there are the rare games that genuinely have no defined goals. It’s a hard type of design to make work – but it is possible.
(and despite a low budget, pretty at times).
The Not-So-Open World
For years, one of the most successful poster children for sandbox games has been Minecraft. Beloved by millions and played by generations, its staying power and success is undeniable.
When the game was first in beta, it was purely a sandbox experience. Only in late 2011 were the End biome and the Ender Dragon fight released. Even after the Ender Dragon was added, many Minecraft players never engaged with the lengthy and somewhat obscure way to get to the End.
I’d suggest those additions indicate the designers didn’t have full confidence in their core mechanics to carry the game and thought a more traditional game goal would draw in customers who didn’t want a pure sandbox experience.
It’s interesting to consider how Minecraft might have evolved without the End and the Ender Dragon. Did a game about creative building and exploration need a “final boss” at all? Without it, would the survival mechanics and building mechanics have been given more attention and iteration time?
When I worked on Creativerse at Playful, a game that owed a lot of its inspiration to Minecraft, we struggled with those questions. Our solution was to build progression mechanics that were mostly absent in Minecraft – a complex tech tree of materials and tiered biomes that, as you dug deeper, required effort and time to conquer the next layer down.
Like Minecraft’s Ender Dragon, this was arguably a less-than-courageous choice. Part of the idea is solid. The process of seeking out and acquiring rarer materials, like Minecraft’s diamonds, to build more interesting things is a solid foundational mechanic for any open-world building game.
But over-tiering of material progression wasn’t fun. It became a barrier to more interesting core mechanics. In the end, the main element it added to the player’s experience was busy work – craft these ten things to get to the thing you REALLY want to build with.
Progression has its place, but overreliance on unlocking content is a mechanic reminiscent of the most exploitative free-to-play tricks. As a player, you put in your time and pay your dues to get to the good bits.
It’s an artificial goal in a genre that may not even need one.
Just take a look at how the audience is playing Minecraft today. Those that stick around for the long haul are playing on custom servers, with custom rulesets. They’re making up their own games – modded, unique experiences – in the virtual space provided.
But at least there’s plenty of fresh
torsos for the bone dogs to eat!
Trust the Core
The games that are successful at being entirely goalless are the games that have enormous faith in their core design.
Kenshi is a quirky, punishing RPG-survival hybrid. Built by a small team with a tiny budget, it’s janky, mechanically complex, unforgiving – and entirely objective-free.
In the default start, you’re dropped into the world wearing rags, with all your stats rock bottom. Your only obvious goal is to survive.
When you play Kenshi, there’s certainly lots to do. You can explore the vast world, a post-apocalyptic landscape of oddities and mutated creatures reminiscent of the quirky biomes of Morrowind. You can recruit a vast army of ragtag companions, and forge them into an elite fighting force. You can build a massive settlement with mines, farms, and industry, and defend it against all attackers. You can get your limbs eaten off by sinister fogmen.
Yes, Kenshi is a game where the kind of progression I criticized in Creativerse is the cornerstone of the design. In fact, progression IS the core mechanic in Kenshi – slow character advancement from a nobody with bottomed-out stats to a killing machine.
And this is the heart of the design that makes Kenshi work.
To progress, your character has to survive – so the survival mechanics are important. To progress, your character needs a safe base of operations – so the base-building mechanics are important. To progress, your character needs friends and allies to protect him – so the RTS-style building and training of an army becomes important.
Despite being a sandbox experience where players make their own fun, every mechanic feeds the core vision of the game. Every system is geared toward creating challenges to overcome.
As of this writing, Kenshi has sold a staggering 2.3 million units – crazy numbers for a hardcore, janky independent game where the best strategy is to spend the first ten hours getting knocked unconscious by half-starved bandits to slowly build up your toughness.
town in Kenshi. They’re probably
destined to lose a limb or two.
The End of the Line
In Bethesda’s great RPGs like Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Morrowind, true fans keep playing long after the story’s over. Some of the most popular mods feature alternate freeform starting conditions or bypass the story entirely.
To put it another way, a lot of people play Skyrim as if it were Kenshi.
In games that don’t have a fixed end or developer-crafted objectives, players eventually get bored and stop playing. They’ll have conquered all they can realistically conquer. Their characters are walking gods, untouchable and unstoppable.
So if a good goalless game design like Kenshi’s has a flaw, it’s that when it ends, it ends with a whimper rather than some story-ending prerendered cinematic reward. That’s okay – Kenshi’s emergent storytelling is powerful because of the journey you take, not where you end up.
The feeling of freedom, flexibility, and rewarding achievement that a game like Kenshi achieves is hard to pull off. In game design, it’s much easier to hang your mechanics on a campaign or story – guiding players through the experience with clear objectives and win conditions.
But when a design like Kenshi’s is firing on all cylinders – when developers build a game that leans into what it does best, and where the mechanics reinforce the core – it can result in a truly special experience.
Kenshi regularly goes on sale on Steam. The Scree Games blog posts new content every Tuesday, with a repost on Medium on Wednesdays.