ARTEMIS in NO MAN’S SKY by HELLO GAMES
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Outward: when the journey is more important (part 2)
Part 2: The quiet moments
In a lot of ways a good traversal game is a lot like a tense survival-horror game. The downtime between scares is necessary for building tension. For example, Silent Hill and Doom (original or reboot) both have horror themes. They both feature monsters and use guns as the primary way of dealing with threats but Doom’s near-constant combat means that the monsters will cease to be scary once you’ve blasted through a few hundred of them. The Silent Hill series, on the other hand, utilizes long sections without combat to build tension. It gives your brain time to imagine what monster could be behind the next door and fill in every dark corner with a potential threat. Each potential threat has a cost and asks you to consider how you might approach it or if you approach it at all.
A good traversal game needs a similar balance. If you’re constantly fighting, the world becomes a simple backdrop to the action. If there’s no tension or danger, you have little reason to engage with the systems. And if there’s little choice in how you approach a given encounter, then you’re incentivized to treat the world like game, rather than a living, breathing place.
Starting with the frequency of encounters, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a good example of how too many can quickly make traversal tedious. Despite the many criticisms of the fast travel system on release, I loved exploring the world and appreciated the developer’s commitment to forcing you to travel through it. However, after about 10-15 hours, the frequency and repetition of the encounters started to become tiresome. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is primarily a combat-focused game, so this ratio makes sense but it feels like it also wanted to be a game about traveling and exploring and the combat can take away from the flow of the exploration. It can start to feel more “gamey” when you run across the same respawning band of goblins every time you leave the city.
Outward’s world, by contrast, is a bit more empty, which, in most cases, is a boon to its pacing. You’re meant to anticipate and plan for combat and the quiet moments gives you time to think. You anticipate challenges and plan for how you might overcome or completely avoid them. If you happen to be walking back to town, loaded down with a full backpack, and running low on health and stamina, each step becomes tense. You’re constantly scanning the horizon, hoping not to run into anything and prepared to book it if something does see you. Every shape in the distance becomes a potential threat but this threat would be meaningless if the world wasn’t sufficiently dangerous.
Outward’s world is consistently dangerous and a drain on your resources. Especially in the beginning, but even later on, it’s possible to get caught unprepared and get taken down by just about any enemy you encounter. And because there’s no level scaling or caps of the enemy strength of a given area, every new obstacle has you asking “is this something I’m prepared for?” Each individual encounter carries weight. Each one is a potential emergent story. Kingdom Come: Deliverance (1 and 2) also does this well. Since you can go long stretches without combat, you may be rusty and unprepared when it does come up. And in that moment, you might hesitate and forget to draw your sword or get too close, too soon and spook your horse. No matter how high level you are and how good your equipment is, the hesitation can be enough to get you killed. You’ll find yourself hopping off your horse and drawing your sword for every human-shaped object, whether bandit or simple traveler. Each individual threat or potential threat forces you to pause, to think, and to make a choice.
The feel of the combat is also important here. Outward’s combat is clunky and especially in the early going can be incredibly punishing. It can only take one hit to throw you off and leave you scrambling. Once again, the comparison to a horror game is apt. If the combat feels too good or you’re regularly taking down large groups of enemies, it can become too much of a power fantasy. There needs to be a sense of danger to make that choice of engaging in combat impactful. The remakes of RE2 and 4 are great comparison’s here. Even in the same engine, RE4’s more experienced Leon is smooth to control, has steadier aim and more tools at his disposal. It matches the more action-oriented focus of 4 versus the tense horror game that is 2. Looking to RPGs, Dragon’s Dogma once again provides a great counter example. There are lots of enemies, the combat system feel good to engage with and, as you rely on these encounters to level up and build up your character’s strength, there is little incentive to avoid them even when they become tedious. This leads to the third factor - your ability to choose how you engage.
In my mind, the most important mechanic in any game, particularly RPGs, is player choice. It doesn’t necessarily need to be major story choices that impact the narrative but the smaller moment-to-moment choices that make up your experience. The more choices you have, the more the player is participating and the more immersive and impactful the player experience becomes. Now obviously to my previous point, there needs to be a balance, you need the moments of quiet reflection to make those choices more impactful and the choices need to have consequences. When the threat arises, the choice of whether to engage or run away, to push an advantage or use the extra time to put more distance between you and the threat, is much more interesting to me than which ability or weapon you choose to open the fight with. You can bypass the fights in Dragon’s Dogma, and similar action RPGs, but you won’t in most cases. This is a heroic RPG. Combat is how you get loot, level up your character and it’s the primary mechanism that you use to interact with the game world. It’s why Dragon’s Dogma often tries to have a more immersive open world but can’t help but remind you that it’s a video game. Combat is the focus and that’s fine but when so much effort is put into smooth combat and not much else, it feels like you’re playing it wrong when you’re not fully engaging with it.
Outward, lacking XP points or a traditional leveling up system, makes you consider if an encounter is worth the time and potential cost. Even a weak enemy could get a lucky hit that puts you at a disadvantage for the next encounter. And the reward is generally small. A common resource or something extra to weigh down your already full backpack. Maybe a weapon that sells for a handful of coins. If it’s not connected to a specific quest or goal, you’re often better off skipping it.
A game world becomes impactful and immersive when you have the time and space to just be in it, when it’s dangerous and dynamic enough to feel real and when it’s set up in a way to facilitate player choice. Which brings us to interesting question that I’ll cover in part 3 - if combat isn’t the focus, then what are you doing for the 30-50 hours it takes to complete this game?
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Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core gets new trailer, releases May 20
A new trailer has been released for Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core, which is set to release May 20, 2026.
[[MORE]]DEEP ROCK GALACTIC: ROGUE CORE is a 1-4 player co-op FPS action roguelite featuring sci-fi dwarves, alien horrors and procedurally-generated caves. Join the elite dwarven Reclaimers and fight through perilous mining facilities infested with deadly Core Spawn. For Rock and Stone!
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Deep Dish Dungeon gets new trailer, no release date specified
A new trailer has been released for Deep Dish Dungeon. No release date was specified.
[[MORE]]A survival exploration game where you navigate through a puzzly hand-crafted dungeon, with metroidvania and crafting elements. Unravel the enigmas of the dungeon’s depths solo or online co-op multiplayer.
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psychological horror, supernatural/paranormal horror, monster horror, folk horror, survival, found footage, slasher, body horror, gothic horror, cyber horror
HORROR GENRE SUPREMACY
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A Happy Childhood
In grade school, the block around our street turned into a little universe of its own. Our days were filled with running races, make-belief battlefields, and simple games that made time feel endless – with native fun-filled sports scrimmages such as patintero, tumbang preso, teks, holen, and syato. We played under the bright sun, and sometimes under a silver full moon; our laughter piercing the…
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The nice thing about writing stories for my ttrpg characters is that I can do my little fable without asking my friends to sit for a monolog. :)
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Now that I finished Great Ace Attorney, what should I play next?
Go back to Epic Mickey (started last year but lost interest)
Lost in Random
Okami HD
Psychonauts 2
Dragon Ball Z Kakarot
Hades
Stray
Star Wars Dark Forces Remastered
One of the Sherlock Holmes games I got from humble recently
Ghost trick Phantom Detective
Try to emulate an old game on steam deck
Other
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ICYMI: Videos You Probably Missed - Falling for My Hot Neighbor, Battling Through Purgatory, and More
It’s a new week! In case you’ve been living under a rock, I have a YouTube channel! I mostly upload playthroughs of games I’ve played on stream, with the occasional video review sprinkled in. This week, I had two new uploads, but I’m going to also include some video that you may have missed previously! So, let’s get to it, here are the videos you missed over on YouTube this week (and few from…
