Outer Wilds: Freedom of Curiosity in Gaming
Last Updated on: 26th June 2022, 07:21 pm
Outer Wilds is by far one of the most breathtaking experiences in a single player story campaign I’ve had the pleasure of being a part of.
To say that Outer Wilds is just a ‘great game’ would take away from the deep sense of curiosity it instills upon me. The desire to get in the ship and figure out what’s floating around Giant’s Deep, what’s under the sand on the Ash Twin, and what the hell happened to the Nomai. I’m getting a little ahead of myself though.
If any of these questions strike your curiosity, I strongly urge you to figure them out on your own through the game. It goes on sale often on steam, and it was just announced for Switch in Summer 2021 during the most recent Nintendo Direct. This game is like no other and easily worth whatever you end up paying for it.
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An aspect of the game that I adore is simply how cozy most of the game feels. At most of the celestial bodies you can land on, there will be a campfire somewhere for you to roast a marshmallow and make it feel like one big hike rather than a solar exploration mystery game. Not to mention the travelers and their choice of instruments, but I’ll leave that for you to discover.
Another layer to the cozy atmosphere in the game comes from the music. There’s several tracks I’ve listened to while trying to sleep because of how calming they are. The end is coming, so why not have some music to help you take a load off.
On Steam I currently have over 50 hours in Outer Wilds. After taking my time and exploring, I would constantly take breaks to just have fun.
The ship itself is a lot of fun to fly, and one of my favorite activities is to speed through Giant’s Deep atmosphere and dodge the small tornadoes as I’m zipping between them. Another fun one was to go a hundred-thousand kilometers away and come crashing into whatever planet sounded fun to hit. Admittedly though, it’s painful to go all that way just to miss.
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In Outer Wilds, they wanted to put a focus on letting the player decide what they want to do – let the player explore and find their own curiosity through cleverly placed clues and hints.
“The last version of the writing for Hornfels was is the person who gives you the launch codes, and he’s also the only mandatory conversation in the entire game, and you know initially we were trying things like giving the player the option to ask what their mission was, or where to go next, and then he would go like, eh, it’s up to you. And what we ended up with instead was we reversed it. You, as a player. What do you want to do next? That ended up working, like surprisingly well, because you know, you have– you know, it’s a selection. We gave them a few ideas too, right? It’s like, if they didn’t know what to do, we still give, like, yeah, there’s some things you could be interested in.”
Loan Verneau
Loan Verneau, the Co-Creative Lead on Outer Wilds, talks as though even giving you a direct objective could squander the awe from discover all that lies under the surface after following a small hunch or even just wandering aimlessly away from your home planet.
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The fact that they have so much diligence in making sure the game is as close to their vision as possible is truly awe-inspiring.
At a Full Indie Summit meetup in 2019, Alex Beachum, another Co-Creative Lead on Outer Wilds, spoke about designing for curiosity in gaming and how Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was a strong contributing factor to why they were so hell bent on giving so much freedom to the player.
“This game, I love, I really love how the Zelda series as a whole handles exploration. It’s one of the reasons why I love those games so much, but this game, and I’m sure all of you played it, it just sorta goes out of its way to just over explain everything, and it’s a good example of how doing that can really drain the sense of player discovery. This game just had no faith in it’s players own curiosity. And it made us wonder, could we make a game that has absolutely no explicit objectives, but still encourages and rewards player curiosity.”
Alex Beachum
In the above quote, Alex was in the first quarter of his presentation, and was going on to talk about how important it was to him and the team to make sure that the player could find their own way through Outer Wilds without the distractions of progression to distract from the story being told.
Later in the presentation he went on to explain how much inspiration he had gotten from another Legend of Zelda title, but not in such a negative way as Skyward Sword. Wind Waker’s gallery gives you hints on where these interesting and strange pictures were taken, and by extension rewards you for being curious enough to go out and find them without being told. Making your own missions with not objective marker.
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Here’s to hoping Wind Waker HD will be the next Legend of Zelda title announced for Switch at next year’s Nintendo Direct. I’d love to give it a shot from the comfort of my own Switch.
A little unrelated, but I really want to bring up just how funny it is that he said the lack of trust in the player’s curiosity in Skyward Sword inspired Alex to eventually go on to make a game that would receive it’s port announcement on the same presentation that Skyward Sword gets its HD rerelease. Beachum even stated that “Skyward Sword broke me as a person.”
All of this being said, I admit that I might be just a tad biased on account of how much I adore the game and respect the man and the rest of the team that worked on Outer Wilds with him. They all had the passion and drive to make this game into what I would consider some of the best that gaming has to offer.
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