There is a belief, among a certain school of game designers, that bigger is better – or that the larger and more detailed a simulation gets, the more convincing it becomes. Cases in point: Star Citizen and Starfield, both of which attempt to model entire universes to exacting standards (albeit in pretty different ways) and both of which made headlines this week for all the wrong reasons. The best, most lived-in feeling video game worlds are elaborate illusions. On this week’s Aftermath Hours, we talk about that.
We begin by doing our best impression of that one meme where Jonathan Frakes asks you things: What’s going on with Starfield’s new, poorly-received DLC? Why is Star Citizen – a crowdfunded testament to one man’s hubris that’s been in development for more than a decade – forcing developers to crunch in the year 2024? In light of the upcoming TV show and yet another spinoff game, is the Yakuza series spreading itself too thin? And when is an early access game done, really?
Then we answer questions about the psychic damage we sustain while trying to play games with optimal outcomes and which power Kirby would gain if he swallowed us (anxiety). Luke definitely does not regret the way he phrased his response to the latter question at all.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can make a hyper-realistic, simulated-down-to-the-skin-pore version of Yakuza and then throw it out after realizing that it’s bad.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Nathan: It’s so funny that we were talking about the creaky systems underlying something like Starfield and how people got tired of those after only a handful of installments, really, of games in that engine [in the Elder Scrolls and modern Fallouts, specifically]. Compare that to Yakuza, which has had many more games that are more openly formulaic, and yet people are still hungering for more Yakuza. Meanwhile, with something like Starfield, they’re like “It’s too similar to this one game that came out eight years ago, or this other game that came out 13 years ago.” How do you account for that? What’s going on there?
Luke: It happened on a magic formula. It’s always been open-world to an extent, but an extremely limited one. But the setting for that open world has always been so intimate that nobody minds that it’s actually quite small. By making it a neighborhood that the story’s set in, most people relate to that. We all live in a neighborhood. We all live somewhere. You guys especially, you live in New York. It’s a major city. You’ve got your bodega, you’ve got your department store, you’ve got your pizza place. You’ve got two bars and a cafe. That’s what Yakuza is. The more you run around its streets doing errands, the more you become familiar with the layout of those streets.
I know Harper did a really cool piece a few years ago on Kotaku about this: The cities of Yakuza actually become the star of the series, because that’s what you grow to love and remember and think really fondly about. You just know every street corner by heart. When you play the next game, you can be like “Aw, the burger place closed.” You start to imagine a storyline involving “Oh, maybe they were down on their luck” or “Maybe their wife got sick and they had to sell. Now it’s a fake Irish bar.” And then for the next 11 [in-game] years, that’s a fake Irish bar.
It’s got that limitation, that you don’t mind that it’s a small open world. Then it’s got the main appeal of the dialogue itself. Dialogue’s dialogue; you go up to someone and press a button. But in Yakuza you’re doing it for the writing and the story itself, not for the way it’s delivered. You’re not relying on a clockwork NPC or a dynamic branching storyline. It’s a soap opera. So they can just keep releasing this game forever, and people won’t care because it’s an interactive soap opera.
Nathan: Jarathen in chat says “It also speaks to where the Bethesda formulas fail, and that’s in making a place feel real, lived-in, and engaging.” And like, yeah, it’s that human element. Maybe this also ties back into Star Citizen, so we’ve really come full circle in a lot of ways. You don’t need to simulate everything.
There’s this belief, I think, among at least some people who make games that the closer you get to a simulation, the better your game is, or the more advanced it is. When in reality, Yakuza takes all of these what would be considered shortcuts to create the illusion of life and the illusion of a real place. But that’s so much more effective as a means of conveying the feeling of a place than something like Bethesda’s Radiant AI where everybody’s a little clockwork person that does the same thing every day or Star Citizen trying to model the whole universe and just having this kind of janky tech demo.
Luke: There are few experiences in video games as immersive as putting a modern Yakuza game into first-person mode and walking really slowly through a busy street. I know that sounds ridiculous, but these are really good-looking games. They know that they need to worry about neon lights and rain puddles on a city street as the main things you’re looking at, and they’ve nailed it. Walking through the city streets, all it does is spawn NPCs. You can’t talk to them. They’re not on a clockwork routine where one of them has to be Trevor the blacksmith, who has to be back in his barn by 5 PM to feed his ox, because that’s what Bethesda’s system mandates.
It doesn’t matter, because someone walking past you on the street doesn’t have to be a person with a story. That’s just a model. What’s important is the volume of them to make you feel like you’re in a bustling place that’s alive and full of people. And it absolutely nails that.
One of my favorite things to do in Yakuza is to walk between missions. And you can fast travel in a cab. Most people will run and sprint, but I like to walk. I like to look at every shop, because every shop is unique. You really feel like you’re in a place. Every time I play these games, no matter how many times I’ve been to Kamurocho, I can walk past and notice something new – just because I’m walking in this place that feels alive. I can be like “Oh, there’s a pachinko place here that I never noticed” or “The movie posters here are different this time around. I wonder what this movie is – because it’s all in Japanese and I can’t read it.”
Ironically, for a game that’s able to come out so frequently, that is built on such a repetitive platform, that it can feel so alive every time speaks to how well they’ve got that machine oiled. They know what is special about the game, what they’re good at, and what they can do, and they execute every part of it perfectly every time.
