Funny thing is, there is a kind of game where you can “go anywhere and do anything.” Table Top RPGs, the only limits really come down to your imagination and how bad of a drinking problem you are willing to give the DM
The only mainstream game that comes close to the level of interaction in TTRPGs is Divinity Original Sin 2 and Baldur's Gate 3. I will forever stand by that.
Here's the thing, though: you still can't do anything. Every TTRPG has rules and templates for you to use, there's still a structure applied, you don't just sit on the table and start rambling random shit out of your mouth.
DM: "congratulations you saved the ship! The big scary mercenary leader lady comes to give you your reward" A player: "I try to sedate her" Dm: O.o *rolls* "you fail and get shot on the spot by her armed guard" (Thank god my friend group does one-shot sessions, because we don't have to worry about consequences)
Funny thing about "Everything, Everywhere, All at once" is that it focuses on one thing, from start to finish, and never deviates from it. Mending broken relationships. Either between daughter and mother, wife and husband, father and daughter, etc. The entirety of the movie, in all aspects of it's creation, on every plane of it's existence, within every moment from it's inception, it focuses on relationships.
I had a friend years ago who was really hyped about the idea of a "do anything" game, but when asked what he'd actually do in it I think a fuse broke in his brain. I'll take a polished, unique experience over "anything" any day.
@@amaryllis0 Well except of course in a TTRPG you only get to do whatever the person running the campaign lets you do. It's only 'ideal' if you're dead-set on ruining everyone else's fun to make your own ambitions come true. Which is why the concept of the 1-person Do Anything game is so appealing, it's all the wish fulfillment without all the broken friendships.
@@amaryllis0 Wasn't there that comedy skit where one of the "party members" refuses to go stop the lich & save the world and instead was just flirting with a waitress in a tavern. Which just kills the pace for everyone else and dooms them to fail.
In nearly every creative industry there’s an impression among consumers that the “idea” is the key. Anyone who’s actually tried to create knows that getting ideas is easy but enacting them is the real challenge. “Having just a vision’s no solution, everything depends on execution.” -Stephen Sondheim
Okay, glad it wasn’t just me. Love the video and insight, 100%. But I reread that title so many times I thought I was going mad until I finally had full context.
When I saw the title, I didn't connect it to "Everything, Everywhere at Once" at all. I assumed Yahtzee was going to take a hypothetical look at what could potentially be happening at an E3 or similar event in the future. A nice "Future of the Industry" video. I'd have liked that, but I love this too!
This one hit home for me. A handful of years back a few old friends from my WoW days wanted to get together and make a game, and they wanted my help. They'd somehow managed to attract the attention of investors, yet when I asked what the core gameplay loop was the self-appointed project lead (aka the ideas guy) just said "A story-centric RPG with primarily a Diablo II gameplay style with elements of the original Deus Ex and original Fallouts". Setting aside how that is a wildly ambitious and mostly nonsense concept, I ask how much they've played those games. That seemed to cause offense, which made sense when push came to shove and the answer was almost not. Long story short, I got out within a few weeks of that shitshow reeling me in but a lot of the other volunteers on the project didn't, despite running into the same issues. I guess the lesson is that charismatic lunatics will launch as many catchy buzzwords as they can at you to get either your money or your labour, without even the faintest shred of a plan in sight, and a lot of people fall for that like you address in the video.
After watching the video and reading some of the comments here, I think this is probably some sort of dreamer vs. craftsman sorta thing. The dreamer, usually an individual not yet versed in the process of developing games, is all about ambition, all about the potential that evaded all the other games. They're full of ideas, not realizing they haven't taken into account why those games haven't been made yet. Reality hasn't slapped them in the face enough to make them realize they're way over their head. The craftsman, however, has experienced successes and failures, and as such, has a proper idea of what their limits are. They're all about feasibility, scope and planning. These guys may not promise you the moon and the stars, but their ideas have an undeniable tangibility to them, either because it's something they've shown to have done before, or they just know how to explain their stuff without using grandiose language. Writing this, I just remembered watching a comedy skit where multiple executives in a room are talking about impossible projects using impressive words and superlatives in an attempt to flaunt their wealth and vocabulary at each other, meanwhile the only actual expert in the room is panicking and declining the propositions as he's trying to reel them all back in. I think kickstarter hype is a lot like that.
Ghost Recon: Wildlands was my personal open world fix. That and Warframe but the "structure" in a Warframe open world isn't easy to see until you know the mechanics.
Agreed. The Ubisoft style Jiminy Cockthroat model was fun for a while when it was new, but it quickly got stale. I've finally gotten around to playing the Dishonored games lately, and while not without their flaws, HOLY SHIT was it refreshing to play something well-structured. An insanely fun core gameplay loop, a broadly linear series of levels that individually are fairly open and contain things that actually contribute meaningfully to that core gameplay loop to make them worth exploring, and all layered with (and this was more true of the second game) an actually paced story with a narrative I could follow, background narrative well-conveyed through environment design, and even one or two characters I actually liked. Fucking wild how actually crafting an even marginally refined experience yields a better game than all but a tiny handful of the huge open world sandbox games I've ever played.
I think Minecraft was successful because the survival gameplay gave the game juuust enough structure to feel like an actual game instead of an aimless sandbox. "Build anything" wouldn't be as compelling if there wasn't the threat of monsters.
@@pokemnfan1 Disagree, as there are people who devote themselves to the pursuit of building and design (and sometimes coding,) who never step foot into the survival aspect of the game
There is a reason for "the Dad Game", such as ETS2 or Farming Simulator 22, or Elite Dangerous (solo), etc., there may be an optimal method to complete, but there isn't any real losing game here, just variations of how to continue. They are often open worlds for that reason, and often without structure, because structure can lead easily to a lose scenario.
As others have mentioned, TTRPGs do scratch this "do anything" itch. But your DM is basically your own personal game developer that designs much of the game in real time as a reaction to whatever you do. They are their own breed, and finding a good one is difficult. Saying "Play D&D" works if the person your talking to already has a group of friends who are interested and enthusiastic about it, and they're all willing to put up with the awkward months of learning. But if the stars don't align, you're out of luck.
I agree that most groups won’t be able to form. It usually takes a very dedicated DM to bring new players up to speed, and then keep them engaged with concepts that interest them.
If the stars do align though, it's pretty great. DMing can be stressful and difficult sometimes, but once I started running games, I never wanted to go back to being a player. Really, it's kind of hard to believe that DM is usually the job that's hard to fill. But regardless, the right combination of players is indeed absolutely vital, and on that note I'm definitely glad I somehow stumbled into a group in sync with the adventures I wanted to create. The right players for the DM are just as important as the right DM for the players.
It kind of reminds me of the excitement one feels when falling in love. How in the early points you can feel obsessive and that this person is your whole world. But even if you are the type to get so revved, a healthy person eventually comes down off the initial high and realizes that their life is more than just their relationship with this one person.
that’s a pretty great comparison. every time a new game comes out promising you can “do anything”, it’s like a new relationship. the possibilities are endless. the healthy people eventually recognize that feeling as infatuation and settle into what is rather than what could be. the unhealthy ones jump hopelessly from paramour to paramour, never realizing that anyone can be anything, but everyone has to be something eventually.
@@TaeyxBlack The thing is, we can enjoy these games that try to be everything for everyone all the time, but we don't form good long-term relationships with these games. Those fires burn hot and die fast, and if that's what you want then great. We only form long-lasting relationships for games, and people, that have distinct personalities and present themselves as possessing a genuine and authentic character. People can look past appearances if character is being displayed.
@@CJusticeHappen21 yea and authentic character is hard to come by when it's "design by committee". the fruits of those sorts of organizations are often more timid. they give you the blank sheet because to actually give an opinion or perspective puts you in the vulnerable position of not having that perspective being validated or liked (read: the customers don't buy your product).
@@TaeyxBlack Same with people. If you base your personality off of what a lot of people say is good, then you'll appeal to a lot of folks but you won't engage with them personally.
I’ve started to enjoy Extra Punctuation a lot more than ZP lately, it really puts things about the broader games industry into perspective with a good balance of humor and proper opinions instead of just swearing repeatedly at a single fucked up game ZP is still great too, Extra Punctuation is just…a little bit more. Some would even say ‘Extra’
5:09 Thank you. I watch the whole "metaverse" fad and I'm absolutely gobsmacked by how such a large section of the tech industry doesn't seem to understand this. Efficiency is EVERYTHING. We text instead of call because it's more efficient. We stream movies instead of going to the theater because it's more efficient. We use the dungeon finder instead of shouting in town because it's more efficient. Tiktok's popularity against TH-cam is likely due in large part to the fact that it's more efficient to just have an algorithm show you another video instead of having to pick one out yourself.
These days I get my groceries mostly by making a list on an app that employees fill in-store, then drive over and have them load my car. The ability to virtually shop in a grocery store might be appealing if it were the only alternative to shopping in person.
still not exactly do anything. Main gameplay loops built in the game are mining, crafting, building, exploring, and fighting. Those are the gameplay loops, and they are intertwined pretty well. There are no bloated "manage a kingdom" or "marry a villager" mechanics "do anything" games seem to love showing off. Mods and your imagination don't count.
Lol, I know someone who did a game development degree. Everyone he met aspired to being the ideas man of a successful indie dev company and shunned any suggestion they might want to learn to code.
I recall playing World of Warcraft and that's still my general starting point for a do everything game. I only ever played vanilla, but that still has mining, fishing, herb gathering, and three different crafting areas. All of that was central to getting better gear in the process toward raiding. All in this secondary loop of gearing up for the primary actions. I've spent a lot of time in Elden Ring, but I don't think a specific fishing game would help. I really should start up and play the arena before the dlc drops whenever that happens
“They can go anywhere in a huge, complex open world; and maybe they could be a warrior, or maybe they could be a blacksmith, or own a restaurant, or become a king or a general, and order other players around. And you’ll play in a huge, persistent, always online open world, and there’ll be player run economy, government, and law enforcement. And there’ll be crafting and vehicles and farming. You basically won’t need any other games cause it’ll have every other game in it.” I heard about a game like that once. I heard the guy who made it threw it all together in just six days and took a nap on the seventh. It’s still kicking if you know where to look.
The other issue, as an often DM, is that it takes an incredible amount of effort to create from scratch. Turns out anticipating ‘everything’ is very hard for a single person to do, even in the theatre of the mind, let alone with the need to actually build, design and animate a thing.
This is a result of what marketing experts would call "broad appeal." As stated, people will typically buy games in the genres that interest them, so the goal is to make a game that touches on basically every genre (at least the popular ones) just enough to trick people into thinking you're offering a worthwhile experience in that genre.
I think we ought to mention Rodina, the indie passion project to create "Daggerfall in space!" complete with four full-size planets to explore. One guy has been working on that game more or less continuously for _at least eleven years_ . Most recent update was in February: there is now a system for increasing your stats!
Remember Scriblenauts? And how when given the infinite I myself would struggle to come up with anything interesting and new after 5 minutes? A little bit of focus and structure is a good thing ^_^
I think the core of this issue comes from a conflation of freedom and agency. People think they want the freedom to do anything when really they just want the agency to do what they want. A game with a tight scope can give the player a lot of agency, but a game that tries to let you do anything often lacks the depth to actually let the player do what they really want
4:45 I find it hilarious Yahtzee dropped that "hardcore roleplayers" line because Outer Worlds actually fits the exact complaints of this video. It was hyped to hell and back about being a HUGE ROLEPLAYING EXPERIENCE BY THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT YOU NEW VEGAS, where all the commercials showed a slot machine (HA HA NEW VEGAS SPIRITUAL SUCCESSOR GUYZ) that kept rolling through all the different "roles" you could play in the Outer Worlds, being whomever you wanted to be!...and then the game came out and your two options were "rebel hero" and "corporate stooge", in a storyline with exactly two real endings and one joke ending.
@@horstherbert35that’s a false dichotomy. What about cautious optimism? Or my go to, indifference. If something’s genuinely good, then it’ll still be talked about and praised even years later. Combine that with all the shit major game publishers pull, and there’s literally no benefit to buying games when they’re brand new other than FOMO, which I don’t care about. Exercising even just a little patience can let you see a game’s actual quality, while buying something brand new is just an unnecessary gamble that could go either way.
To quote The Stanley's Parable "Raphael trailer" sarcastically talking about a theoretical game where one could do "LITERALLY ANYTHING": "In this scenario the player has just infused a bicycle with the soul of with the soul of his great-great-uncle Hermophules. From this point he may use Hermopules' ethereal presence to detect nearby mineral deposits, or perhaps he might train the bicycle in the art of undoing temporal paradoxes. Ah, it seems the player has has chosen to use the haunted bicycle to deceive townsfolk as a part of his snake oil salesman ruse. How bold."
When you get down to it, games are about the things you can't do and how you get around those limitations, it's the definition of challenge and the idea you can do anything means you don't have anything to overcome outside of imposing silly challenges on yourself. Like how Jurassic World at a point had a gun that when pointed at a person, causes a dinosaur to go and kill them, but you could just have a regular gun and shoot the fucker.
I think most of us wanted this type of game and thought it would be excellent when we were teens and otherwise young and inexperienced. Experience is what dispels the notion of this being interesting, fun or achievable in reality. We think we want this because we all have that experience in one game or another of going "this is fun, but I wish the game didn't stop me doing X or took me in Y direction instead." It takes experience and thought to realize that "this is fun" because it was designed to be fun within those borders, if they were removed it stops being fun. Sorta like going into the ini file in Skyrim and removing the world borders and expecting to find more Skyrim and not just a blank void. Personally I sated my desire for this via modding and I think modding is the best answer to those who seek this. Scammers, inadvertent or intentional, have always lived off of people's dreams, making people think the scammer can fulfill those dreams for money, taking the money and going away. This happens everywhere in society, politics, gambling, jobs, education, social relations, etc and won't ever go away because people want to fulfill their dreams and will forever be liable to be cheated on the way.
Here's the simple reason the reason I know some people fall for them. It isn't the aspect of "do anything" so much as a very specific fantasy that you and your mates can all play one game, and work towards one goal separately. It is the mmo cycle of crafters, gatherers, and raiders. They don't really want the matrix, they want EVE, but to be in on the ground floor.
Option 1: Try to do everything and be bad at all of it. Stand out for being garbage or never even getting that far. Option 2: Do a few things really well. Stand out for offering a polished, distinct, and focused experience. Crowd: OOH OOH! OPTION 1!!!!
I appreciate that the title is the final punchline; didn't know what to expect when watching this. I was talking to some friends recently about how few games there are that fill the same niche as a movie. We have lots of games that let have "endless" hours of gameplay but they all require a massive investment both learning the systems and acquiring things in-game to be fun and accessible for short play sessions. There are few games, I think where you can pick them up and play them for an hour after first purchasing and stop feeling like you've accomplished something. Seeing this made me realise that's a symptom of these overly-broad games; of course the player is going to be left wistful in a bad way after the first hour or two, they had to learn the combat, realise their gear is underleveled, go through heaps of exposition for stuff as simple as crafting, learn the fishing minigame, and probably get plugged for the DLC or in-game shop a few dozen times along the way.
This is a big thing in the Tabletop RPG industry. We have so very many TTRPG systems that are called "Generic" and pretend to handle anything and everything. Which means whoever runs the game as the Game Master generally has to do a lot more work or the game is a lot less generic than it pretends - usually they handle Pulp Action in various genre but not real emulation of those genres. So those that have specialized tend to have the system better handle actually making the game interesting. They have loops that are fun and engaging.
Absolutely. Another problem of the "generic" system is that, once you find a couple you like, that's kind of it. You just use those and don't need more. FATE or Cypher or Savage Worlds could run pretty much anything I'd ever need a generic system to run, so why would I want another one? Make something specific instead!
I think games like kenshi and dwarf fortress are the best examples of the "do anything" game... Thats because they focus on making a world you can interact with however you want especially kenshi due to it's lack of random generation
I was recently discussing Tears of the Kingdom on a forum, and lamenting the fact that we can apparently build vehicles in it. Obviously I'm gonna wait and actually play the game before I solidify my opinion, but it's not something I remotely associate with or want out of Zelda and so my hype is nonexistent. But as I was airing this opinion, I came across an enthusiastic discussion about the prospect of being able to build houses in each region of Hyrule, Skyrim Hearthfire style, with someone saying something along the lines of "I love doing life sim stuff in games like Animal Crossing, I'd really like it here!" And I felt simultaneous utter bafflement and complete despair. I know tightly focused, small experiences are still around (mainly in indie circles), but I seriously miss when they were decently common, and gamers as a whole weren't so spoiled and demanding.
I remember a friend who wanted to do exactly this. His first name was James. I won’t mention his last name but it sounded like “Pierce”. James if you’re out there, I hope your game development career is going well and you didn’t fall down the AAA cesspit.
I can't imagine how hard it would be for a development team to develop a game where you can "do anything". Keeping all those systems balanced, engaging, and worth pursuing sounds like the recipe for burn out. From a support perspective where do you even start when things break? A game that tries to everything ends up doing nothing well.
For months, I've assumed the title was referring to a bunch of predictions Yahtzee had for the future. Nope. Just a decently clever joke referencing the video's point
Apparently Peter Moluneax would always be intoxicated at events like E3, so that's why he'd just sorta run his mouth and promise the world lol. The story behind Fable's development is really fascinating tbh
I love VR but there is no way what Facebook wants will ever be popular. Vr is only used for gaming and certain jobs and that’s probably all it will be used for
I mean, some version of it may, but there's a reason all the reasonably successful immersive 3D worlds (vr or otherwise) have been games, and not real world simulations. You need a reason for that VR world to exist, and for you to engage with it, and standing around talking, having a meeting, or shopping are not things you need a VR world for. You can do all those things far easier in RL, or other digital formats. Fighting dragons however, is much more their speed.
The funniest part of Ready Player One to me is how, with all the cameos on it, the ones that show up all across the film are characters from Battleborn and the game was dead before the film even came out.
as i always say: "don't hate the supply, hate the demand". they make this shit because enough cretins fall for it and buy it. PLEASE continue calling out the consumer!! Mad respect to everyone at the escapist!
These types of videos are my favorites from Yhatzee as they highlight his cumulative knowledge of game design and skill as a writer to make a persuasive and convincing argument.
The AI Dungeon segue does point out how perilously close we are to technology that can interpret player input to fabricate the "do anything" game of their dreams. (Or nightmares: be careful what you wish for.) But, in the meanwhile, I think we can separate a lot of wheat from the chaff by requiring they at least get a prototype up with an appropriate core gameplay loop. There's an odd correlation between "do anything" claims and people who can't even do that.
if AI game development is anything like AI art, AI games will consist of shoddily written Dark Souls clones full of racial slurs and characters with fucked up eyes and hands. which for some will be the perfect game, but regardless.
@@boarfaceswinejaw4516 I feel like you haven't looked at AI art recently. It's gotten vastly better in just a few months. If it progresses like it has been, AI art will be the new norm. AI game development will follow a similar path. No doubt it will take longer, but it can progress all the same.
@@boarfaceswinejaw4516 GJ intentionally dropping the important part of my sentence and intentionally misquoting me. Let's try again. "If it progresses like it has been, AI art will be the new norm." Doesn't sound so silly with full context. Go bag ice.
@@DNAOrbb joy. I love soulless creations that are products of taking other peoples work without permission. I love the risk that artists will become increasingly obsolete because people think a machine can do the job just as well as an actual person.
I play games to have fun, but all I can think of when I hear "do anything" is "obfuscated busywork simulator." I want to experience a good story or a tight gameplay loop, not do my digital taxes or sweep the digital floors.
For the record, spore is a perfectly fine game. I wasn't around for the hype when it was coming out, I imagine it was over-hyped. It's an amazing game if you take what's there.
I was around when it came out, and it was overhyped to hell and back. And that's the problem. When something fails to live up to expectations, especially the expectations the developers themselves set for the masses to hype over, then any game that falls short of it is going to be heavily bashed. I don't even remember what we were expecting, and i never ended up playing it, but even now, hearing the title makes me winge.
Of course, being an outsider of the promises will do that. That said, all those ideas and cut content we eventually see from Spore archives really hurt. It was going to be real complex before it got simplified to heck. Especially since we pretty much lost the fish stage which should had added one of the many aspects to the game/life loop we didn't get in the end. And I did enjoy the game even post hype, but I do know somethings feels missing.
Spore was the first and only time I ever pre-ordered a game. The marketing and articles written about that game made it seem like some grand simulation of life and the universe itself. Once everyone and myself got my hands on it, it became immediately clear that it was just 5 different okay games taped together with a (admittedly really good) character creator. Also the last "game" of the 5 was the worst but also took up 90% of your playtime.
So was Fable tbh, it was an okay game for 2003 if you're a kid with no expectations (like me). Hell, it completely blew my socks off when I first played it at like 8 years old: "you mean I can equip these boots? And they show up on my character mid-game?? Woahh"
Yeah, that's what hype will do for you. I made it a point to not expose myself to anything Cyberpunk '77 related before it came out and as a result I came away from the game underwhelmed but satisfied. Was quite a surreal feeling when I then watched a video detailing all the cut content and broken promises. Perspective truly is a magical thing.
Ehh, I think Yatz is forgetting that there are beloved games more or less let you go anywhere and do anything. EVE Online is the first to come to mind. But good do-anything games have three things going for them: 1) Limits on the player, so you have to get creative 2) Consequences, so your choices still matter, and 3) A fully authored world to do things in, which gives you decisions to make and reasons to make them. Technology used to limit the scope of virtual worlds, but between better hardware and procedural generation, making big worlds with lots of interactivity isn't impossible anymore. The limiting factor now is custom content. Procedural worlds aren't infinitely replayable like we once hoped, although they're slowly getting better. Theoretically infinite content doesn't mean infinite replayability when the rules which govern content generation are finite and easy to learn. The limiting factor now is the man-hours it takes to continuously flesh out a world.
I get the impression that a lot of the people who have these ideas in their heads play games a lot, but have next to zero experience with actually making them. I've played games my entire life, and I've taken classes where they teach you to make *very* basic games, and I can tell you that playing games and creating games are two completely different animals. Even making an extremely simple game takes a couple of hours. Making a game as described in this video would be basically impossible, and the people who have those desires haven't even the slightest inkling as to the scope of that problem.
Ironically many early RPG devs were explicitly trying to emulate DnD, a game where you *can* go anywhere and do anything. The thing is, even though you could theoretically do anything, the only fun things to do were the ones the game was actually designed around - exploring dungeons and fighting dragons.
Starsector at first glance seems like you can 'do anything and go anywhere', but the gameplay loops involved are so well done that it's hard to get bored of it. Start a game, fly around, then mine shit/hunt shit/trade shit/build shit to your heart's content. And, best of all, you can break all of it!
My thoughts exactly, and also what I was trying to explain many times to people who fundamentally misunderstand D&D. It's not unique to video games, it's just a lot easier to do in TTRPGs, and a bit harder for laymen to notice it's broken
When I was a child I was obsessed with the idea of the "do anything" game, and GTA San Andreas was the first time that notion was challenged. Sure the game world was massive and there were tons of things to do in it. But none of it was very deep. The movement wasn't as satisfying as Prince of Persia; the shooting not as good as Timesplitters. It was a buffet of lesser gameplay elements. That realization sort of changed my attitude toward the "do anything" mega game
While I appreciate the importance of a satisfying or engaging core gameplay loop, I suspect that many developers are still afraid that players will eventually grow bored of playing their game. Consequently, a game that was initially designed to let the player do a single but very fun activity - now becomes a game that lets the player do a plethora of chores to keep them busy. That being said, I believe a game today is much easier to sell if it's truly unlike anything that's come before.
That's human nature though, no? Humans crave novelty. Nothing lasts forever and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. A game doesn't need to last thousands of hours to be a satisfying experience.
Out comes elden ring with avg player clocking 200+hrs. You can see why ER's success pissed off so many devs. Having a core engaging loop is still the most important thing. Recent successful games like hi fi rush ovef open world blockbusters like Harry Potter proves the point
I'm so glad someone said this, and so articulate. Because yes, my office job would be a lot more interesting if my desk was next to a window that looked out into space, but then I'd either have to commute on a space elevator each day, or live in an space habitat and have messed up mental health because I'm constantly breathinig recycled air and never seeing actual sunlight. To these people who want to do anything in a game, I highly suggest you take up table top role-playing. You can have your fantasy of being in space, or being a flower in a meadow, or whatever you like, but crucially, you'll be getting out and making friends. Actual friends. Because this desire to have a game where you "Have a life" screams to me that you rarely leave the house, and all your friends are digital. Just face it, we humans cannot replace our social needs with machines, despite what Zuckerberg the Obvious Robot says. We need to go outside, see people, touch grass. Our biology literally needs it.
Early Sea of Thieves fell into this trap I think. The water physics are really cool and you can be the captain of your own ship! Awesome, sounds great! What do you do with said ship...? Apparently visit a bunch of samey generic islands to kill samey generic skeletons for loot that you give to 3 guys to increase a number associated with each guy. Also we peddle cosmetics. SoT has improved over the years but periodically I'll still load into the game and be like "Now what?"
I remember being in 5th grade in 1995 and I had these two friends who talked about this game that their older brother knew about called "Castle in the Sky" that was being made and it was the best game ever because you could do anything you wanted. But even at that age I had doubts that such a game would be any fun at all.
Much agreed. This is the maximalist variant of the central challenge of game design - building rollercoasters with invisible rails. Players want to believe they have total freedom and all this magnificent adventure is happening to them because they are innately amazing, but if you were to give them total freedom the illusion would instantly fall apart, leaving them pushing their roller coaster car across a flat plain, pretending it's fun.
It think it's a common dream friend of mine told be such idea in the early 90s. To some degree we even got something like that. Open Word Games or even MMOs do have several things in one. IN GTA you get car races, shooty parts, planes flights and mini games. You can't do many things but you can't do everything.
You know, there's an interesting point here to be made about abstraction. In the medium of text, you really can do anything: "the blue polar bear transformed into a stoplight." There, see? Trivial. But imagine trying to put that in a play, or a movie, or a video game. In a play, you might be able to do some wibbly-wobbly special effects, and the audience will go along with it. But in a movie, you'd have to make it look convincing, and in a video game you'd have to animate every little bit of it. So the promise isn't just "do anything," because as you said, you can "do anything" on a blank sheet of paper, too. They want to be able to do anything, and have it be incredibly life-like and realistic. They want all the physicality, and animations, and game mechanics that would go along with it. Whereas when we talk about "elegant" game design, we're talking about choosing just a couple of game mechanics, etc. and doing as much as you can with a little.
What i dislike about the "sim" genre vagueness is that it ranges from "games with a thousand shitty loops" to "game with one great complex loop". I remember playing a sort of minecraft survival mod that allowed me to build a village, fill it with npcs of my choosing who would in turn tend to farms and collect resources whilst i was out dungeoneering. i felt a lot more invested in my little minecraft village than i did for the settlements in fallout 4, because the minecraft villages contributed to my gameplay, rather than act as a distraction from it.
I saw Celeste come up at the start of the “indie games people actually care about” segment, and was briefly worried he had another “actually good anime” situation on our hands.
EVE Online is kinda like these "Do Anything" games. They definitely have the player run economy and government down. You can participate at any level from mining materials, to constructing things, to being a speculative trader on popular goods.
Even EVE knows its limits though - despite the cool player-driven economy it's still one based around a fairly constrained number of interlocking systems (the aforementioned mine, trade, build, fight, etc). Turns out you can get a lot of complexity from that! But it still took a fairly large team of experienced developers a long time to accomplish. Also, the impressively functional player-driven economy is very impressive and interesting, but it comes at a very obvious cost to the core gameplay loops, which are much less fun (subjectively, according to most) than games which don't have to care about balancing an intricate economy on top of 'is this part fun?'. The game is mainly worth playing for people who find economics and diplomacy fun in themselves - people who just want to mine and build are better off playing minecraft.
Except you can only truly do anything _inside_ of the game's boundaries. That's what Yahtzee meant with the fundamental misunderstanding bit, from what I could tell. There are no games where you can truly do anything (start a bus service in isreal for penguins) because that's not how games work.
5:04 Y'know, generally speaking, you're right, but for certain things it might actually be pretty neat. Like, using the front cameras and augmented reality to size up a desk from IKEA or otherwise trying to determine the dimensions of something, it could be somewhat useful and possibly save time. At the same time though, you could just grab a tape measure and measure twice.
It's also worth pointing out that the "good examples", Elite: Dangerous and NMS launched with *at least one* very tight and engaging core loop. Go somewhere and shoot space stuff in case of E:D and go somewhere and discover space stuff in case of NMS.
The game where you could genuinely go anywhere and do anything was Second Life. Tons of people sank countless hours into creating an endless amount of content. The end result was basically a recreation of the internet. It was difficult and slow to find what you were looking for, and a huge slog to wade through all the stuff you didn't want.
What I am hearing is, a do anything game for a player is the equivalent of a self checkout at the grocer. They market it as for your convenience, but have actually convinced you to work in a job position for free. You supply the fun! You simply the cashier!
I do like how you bring up the player being overload with choice. As someone with autism, I get overload with 3 choices in a game, I don't need 15 more to overload me more.
There have been a couple games I got sucked into at some low points in my life as just a "life simulation" like the ones that keep getting promised: Skyrim(worked as a woodcutter to save up for a house and raise a family), Saints Row 2(There's a few day to day jobs you can take like taxi driver, tow truck driver, ambulance driver, etc) and the actual king of the "do anything" game which is Minecraft...but the thing with those and ACTUAL life simulator games like Stardew valley is that they still gamify the "everything" you can do. Real life is where you can theoretically do anything but what we're looking for in a virtual reality is being able to "accomplish everything". Even if I had the patience to do so, working by myself I'd never have the time to quarry all the stone, shape them into pricks, and build a castle, and even if I did I'd have no real use for it...but in Minecraft? Give me a couple days to start and then I'll pick off zombies trying to break down the front gates so I feel like there's actually some purpose to the building.
On the other hand, a few games come to my mind that potentially qualify as actually scratching that itch of the concept: "you can do everything." They don't actually let you do anything, but they create a convincing illusion of it. In the order they popped into my head: Elden Ring, Breath of the Wild, and Minecraft. There's something about Soulsborne games (and others that successfully take inspiration from them) that often nail that feeling like you can do anything just by allowing you to go anywhere at any time. Further, the fact that it's generally inadvisable to go certain places "out of order" gives weight, meaning, and consequence to the player decision to boldly go into the area they aren't supposed to be ready for yet. It truly does give the player a small amount of ability to make their own game out of them game. The core loop doesn't change, but by exploring and learning the game, the player can control their own experience moderately. Minecraft takes a slightly different spin by letting players shape and define their very environment. You can't *do anything* in minecraft (unless you mod it, but that might be a valid tangent to the topic as well), but the ability to treat the game as a pixel art engine massively opens the game to creative reinterpretation. It *feels* like you can do anything in the game.
Couldn't agree more - even with the games I love, there are multiple systems that are extraneous to what I actually like about the game. For example, when Mass Effect 3 came out and there was the massive pushback about the ending, I found myself really liking the game because I was engaged with the third person combat, skill combinations, party-based tactics, and over-arching narrative. Sure, I was disappointed by the ending, but the journey to get there was still a blast. It was right around that time that open world games were gaining more and more traction, and soon it became this "go anywhere, make your own fun" style of game, and I've always thought "but I really like these handcrafted set pieces from games like Mass Effect, Uncharted, and others". So I find myself more and more turned off by my own options - like Yahtzee said, I'm paralyzed by choice. I'd rather be taken for a ride than have to carve my own amusement park.
Ha, I knew the title had to be a reference to Everything, Everywhere, All At Once 6:21 Correction: Hi-Fi Rush isn’t an indie game, it was made by Bethesda/Tango Gameworks
I think the concept of "doing whatever you like" should be followed by "within the context of this situation" because I LOVE a game where there's one central goal, but many different people working on it. For a weird example, there's a game in Roblox called "Work in a pizza place" and you can do "anything" within that context. Take orders, cook the pizzas, box the pizza, deliver... if you don't want to do any of that you can bring supplies in to the store, and if you don't want to do ANYTHING you can just chill in your in game house decorating it. I personally love it! It's stupid, it's simple, I can do "anything" but i'm never at risk of doing nothing either. It's great! Point is, i think a fence around the concept of anything is what keeps the fun contained.
I always remember what the videogame developtmer main character said in the ending* of _Black Mirror: Bandersnatch_ "my mistake was trying to give the player to many choices. The secret was to give them the illusion of having choices, when in reallity I control how the game's story ends". That's what succesful open world sandbox games do, after all there's a reason why is almost impossible to abide the law in games like GTA or Saints Row *to me, that's the true ending of that Netflix's FMV game, the other endings are game over screens
Zero Punctuation always turns in quality work, but once in awhile, he releases a jewel of a video so shiny, it makes my eyes water from happiness. This is one of those times. 💎
This is why i dont ask "what can i do in your game" in favour of "why would i (the player) do things in your game" whenever im presented with games like this. For some reason very few developers can give an answer beyond "to experience our rich world" which tells you how widespread the whole "fun is something the players bring themselves" mentality actually is.
Yeah, motivation to use gameplay systems is a big issue in lots of open world games. For example, Rust has added lots of interesting systems from modular cars to an entire logic-gate based electricity system, but often fails to make the systems easily accessible so people can experiment. So many interesting systems in that game are left in the dust because actually getting your hands on them is a pain if you aren't in the top 5% of skill.
@@Toaster_Toastr Applies to entire games too. Take that Necromunda game for example where the entire marketing came down to "experience life as a bounty hunter!" and i just kept asking "yes but why? Why should i play this game?" Contrast with the game it was inspired by (Doom 2016) where we had a clear premise from the get go, "Stop hell from invading". And every piece of gameplay was then presented as something we should use to achieve this rather than the reverse.
The "Everything Everywhere All At Once" comparison is even more important because that movie is a full-hearted endorsement of looking at the vastness of all possibility and choosing to be "Now, Here, Completely" with the people who matter to you. Choices are not meaningless just because alternate choices exist with outcomes that you might like better. Don't put everything on a bagel and call it a good video game. That's a recipe for utter despair and nihilism in the face of an uncaring and meaningless universe and also a recipe for a bad video game.
Fun fact: Spore basically inspired a more realistic analogue to it called Thrive. Thrive is still in development/early access. So far, the cell stage is almost done. Yep, Spore was absolutely batshit ambitious lol
Funny thing is, there is a kind of game where you can “go anywhere and do anything.” Table Top RPGs, the only limits really come down to your imagination and how bad of a drinking problem you are willing to give the DM
Joke's on you, many of us DMs come to the table with our drinking problems pre-installed.
The only mainstream game that comes close to the level of interaction in TTRPGs is Divinity Original Sin 2 and Baldur's Gate 3.
I will forever stand by that.
@@utisti4976 Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous is also kind of open.
Here's the thing, though: you still can't do anything.
Every TTRPG has rules and templates for you to use, there's still a structure applied, you don't just sit on the table and start rambling random shit out of your mouth.
DM: "congratulations you saved the ship! The big scary mercenary leader lady comes to give you your reward"
A player: "I try to sedate her"
Dm: O.o *rolls* "you fail and get shot on the spot by her armed guard"
(Thank god my friend group does one-shot sessions, because we don't have to worry about consequences)
Funny thing about "Everything, Everywhere, All at once" is that it focuses on one thing, from start to finish, and never deviates from it. Mending broken relationships. Either between daughter and mother, wife and husband, father and daughter, etc. The entirety of the movie, in all aspects of it's creation, on every plane of it's existence, within every moment from it's inception, it focuses on relationships.
Yeah, it's what makes the film special, it's all about finding the one thing that matters to you instead of worrying about what could've been.
I'm so glad they did a theater re-release. My first attempt to watch it on a plane was... unsuccessful.
I had a friend years ago who was really hyped about the idea of a "do anything" game, but when asked what he'd actually do in it I think a fuse broke in his brain.
I'll take a polished, unique experience over "anything" any day.
I think "do anything" is a bad fit for a sandbox type game, but it's a perfect ideal for an RPG. That's essentially what TTRPG is.
@@amaryllis0 true, and a mechanically strict system with a large database of options also makes me think of noita or terraria
@@amaryllis0 Well except of course in a TTRPG you only get to do whatever the person running the campaign lets you do. It's only 'ideal' if you're dead-set on ruining everyone else's fun to make your own ambitions come true. Which is why the concept of the 1-person Do Anything game is so appealing, it's all the wish fulfillment without all the broken friendships.
'But a game in which the player can do anything is a game that focuses on nothing'
- Some video game review guy
@@amaryllis0 Wasn't there that comedy skit where one of the "party members" refuses to go stop the lich & save the world and instead was just flirting with a waitress in a tavern. Which just kills the pace for everyone else and dooms them to fail.
"It's the core gameplay loop that matters most, not abstract ideas of untapped potential."
Succinct and perfect. Good job as always, Yahtzee.
In nearly every creative industry there’s an impression among consumers that the “idea” is the key. Anyone who’s actually tried to create knows that getting ideas is easy but enacting them is the real challenge. “Having just a vision’s no solution, everything depends on execution.” -Stephen Sondheim
Yep, idea guys get into this industry and think they can solve problems other people have already solved or don't need to solve.
“I fear not the man who’s made 10,000 shitty gameplay loops. I fear the man who’s made one really good game” - Bruce Lee
Man was so amazing he could see into the future and predict the industry
I'll assume you paraphrased that.
“I fear not the man who made 10,000 shitty shitty openworlds. I fear the man who’s made one shitty open world and sold it 10,000 times” - Todd Howard
I don't think that means what you think it means.
Bruce was true gamer.
This title had me thinking you accidentally published the video with a working title, and not the final one, but it all makes sense now
Okay, glad it wasn’t just me. Love the video and insight, 100%. But I reread that title so many times I thought I was going mad until I finally had full context.
It was a real cool plot twist I think, better than most AAA shit coming out.
When I saw the title, I didn't connect it to "Everything, Everywhere at Once" at all. I assumed Yahtzee was going to take a hypothetical look at what could potentially be happening at an E3 or similar event in the future. A nice "Future of the Industry" video. I'd have liked that, but I love this too!
This one hit home for me. A handful of years back a few old friends from my WoW days wanted to get together and make a game, and they wanted my help. They'd somehow managed to attract the attention of investors, yet when I asked what the core gameplay loop was the self-appointed project lead (aka the ideas guy) just said "A story-centric RPG with primarily a Diablo II gameplay style with elements of the original Deus Ex and original Fallouts".
Setting aside how that is a wildly ambitious and mostly nonsense concept, I ask how much they've played those games. That seemed to cause offense, which made sense when push came to shove and the answer was almost not. Long story short, I got out within a few weeks of that shitshow reeling me in but a lot of the other volunteers on the project didn't, despite running into the same issues.
I guess the lesson is that charismatic lunatics will launch as many catchy buzzwords as they can at you to get either your money or your labour, without even the faintest shred of a plan in sight, and a lot of people fall for that like you address in the video.
After watching the video and reading some of the comments here, I think this is probably some sort of dreamer vs. craftsman sorta thing.
The dreamer, usually an individual not yet versed in the process of developing games, is all about ambition, all about the potential that evaded all the other games. They're full of ideas, not realizing they haven't taken into account why those games haven't been made yet. Reality hasn't slapped them in the face enough to make them realize they're way over their head.
The craftsman, however, has experienced successes and failures, and as such, has a proper idea of what their limits are. They're all about feasibility, scope and planning. These guys may not promise you the moon and the stars, but their ideas have an undeniable tangibility to them, either because it's something they've shown to have done before, or they just know how to explain their stuff without using grandiose language.
Writing this, I just remembered watching a comedy skit where multiple executives in a room are talking about impossible projects using impressive words and superlatives in an attempt to flaunt their wealth and vocabulary at each other, meanwhile the only actual expert in the room is panicking and declining the propositions as he's trying to reel them all back in.
I think kickstarter hype is a lot like that.
Honestly after a hards day work I want a game with some structure. Can be a open world but they can have structure.
Ghost Recon: Wildlands was my personal open world fix.
That and Warframe but the "structure" in a Warframe open world isn't easy to see until you know the mechanics.
Agreed. The Ubisoft style Jiminy Cockthroat model was fun for a while when it was new, but it quickly got stale. I've finally gotten around to playing the Dishonored games lately, and while not without their flaws, HOLY SHIT was it refreshing to play something well-structured. An insanely fun core gameplay loop, a broadly linear series of levels that individually are fairly open and contain things that actually contribute meaningfully to that core gameplay loop to make them worth exploring, and all layered with (and this was more true of the second game) an actually paced story with a narrative I could follow, background narrative well-conveyed through environment design, and even one or two characters I actually liked. Fucking wild how actually crafting an even marginally refined experience yields a better game than all but a tiny handful of the huge open world sandbox games I've ever played.
I think Minecraft was successful because the survival gameplay gave the game juuust enough structure to feel like an actual game instead of an aimless sandbox.
"Build anything" wouldn't be as compelling if there wasn't the threat of monsters.
@@pokemnfan1 Disagree, as there are people who devote themselves to the pursuit of building and design (and sometimes coding,) who never step foot into the survival aspect of the game
There is a reason for "the Dad Game", such as ETS2 or Farming Simulator 22, or Elite Dangerous (solo), etc., there may be an optimal method to complete, but there isn't any real losing game here, just variations of how to continue. They are often open worlds for that reason, and often without structure, because structure can lead easily to a lose scenario.
As others have mentioned, TTRPGs do scratch this "do anything" itch. But your DM is basically your own personal game developer that designs much of the game in real time as a reaction to whatever you do. They are their own breed, and finding a good one is difficult. Saying "Play D&D" works if the person your talking to already has a group of friends who are interested and enthusiastic about it, and they're all willing to put up with the awkward months of learning. But if the stars don't align, you're out of luck.
I agree that most groups won’t be able to form. It usually takes a very dedicated DM to bring new players up to speed, and then keep them engaged with concepts that interest them.
If the stars do align though, it's pretty great. DMing can be stressful and difficult sometimes, but once I started running games, I never wanted to go back to being a player. Really, it's kind of hard to believe that DM is usually the job that's hard to fill.
But regardless, the right combination of players is indeed absolutely vital, and on that note I'm definitely glad I somehow stumbled into a group in sync with the adventures I wanted to create. The right players for the DM are just as important as the right DM for the players.
also doesn't help for playing solo.
It kind of reminds me of the excitement one feels when falling in love. How in the early points you can feel obsessive and that this person is your whole world. But even if you are the type to get so revved, a healthy person eventually comes down off the initial high and realizes that their life is more than just their relationship with this one person.
that’s a pretty great comparison. every time a new game comes out promising you can “do anything”, it’s like a new relationship. the possibilities are endless. the healthy people eventually recognize that feeling as infatuation and settle into what is rather than what could be. the unhealthy ones jump hopelessly from paramour to paramour, never realizing that anyone can be anything, but everyone has to be something eventually.
That's an incredibly stupid analogy, which makes me think you do buy into the hype for these games.
@@TaeyxBlack The thing is, we can enjoy these games that try to be everything for everyone all the time, but we don't form good long-term relationships with these games. Those fires burn hot and die fast, and if that's what you want then great. We only form long-lasting relationships for games, and people, that have distinct personalities and present themselves as possessing a genuine and authentic character. People can look past appearances if character is being displayed.
@@CJusticeHappen21 yea and authentic character is hard to come by when it's "design by committee". the fruits of those sorts of organizations are often more timid. they give you the blank sheet because to actually give an opinion or perspective puts you in the vulnerable position of not having that perspective being validated or liked (read: the customers don't buy your product).
@@TaeyxBlack Same with people. If you base your personality off of what a lot of people say is good, then you'll appeal to a lot of folks but you won't engage with them personally.
"It's like handing someone a pen and stack of paper and saying 'Now you can write the novel /you/ want to read!'" Absolutely fuckin nailed it, m8.
I’ve started to enjoy Extra Punctuation a lot more than ZP lately, it really puts things about the broader games industry into perspective with a good balance of humor and proper opinions instead of just swearing repeatedly at a single fucked up game
ZP is still great too, Extra Punctuation is just…a little bit more. Some would even say ‘Extra’
5:09
Thank you. I watch the whole "metaverse" fad and I'm absolutely gobsmacked by how such a large section of the tech industry doesn't seem to understand this.
Efficiency is EVERYTHING. We text instead of call because it's more efficient. We stream movies instead of going to the theater because it's more efficient. We use the dungeon finder instead of shouting in town because it's more efficient. Tiktok's popularity against TH-cam is likely due in large part to the fact that it's more efficient to just have an algorithm show you another video instead of having to pick one out yourself.
These days I get my groceries mostly by making a list on an app that employees fill in-store, then drive over and have them load my car. The ability to virtually shop in a grocery store might be appealing if it were the only alternative to shopping in person.
I can feel the Josh Strife Hayes in this video
with a touch of Callum Upton
Anyone who likes JSH might enjoy WickedWiz too.
KiraTV
@@chocohex5395 and KiraTV
We have a go anywhere, do anything game. It's called Minecraft. Came out in 2011. I think it was pretty successful.
The problem is someone other than Mojang/Microsoft wants to make the same amount of money.
Also Roblox
still not exactly do anything. Main gameplay loops built in the game are mining, crafting, building, exploring, and fighting. Those are the gameplay loops, and they are intertwined pretty well. There are no bloated "manage a kingdom" or "marry a villager" mechanics "do anything" games seem to love showing off. Mods and your imagination don't count.
Can you move to Israel and set up a bus network for penguins in Minecraft?
@@CornishCreamtea07 regards will say "of course we can, with mods", which misses the point of the video
Lol, I know someone who did a game development degree. Everyone he met aspired to being the ideas man of a successful indie dev company and shunned any suggestion they might want to learn to code.
Been there many times. Also happens a lot when it comes to animation, everyone wants to be a writer, never the animator.
Like how the final joke comes full circle with the title of the EP, nice touch
I recall playing World of Warcraft and that's still my general starting point for a do everything game. I only ever played vanilla, but that still has mining, fishing, herb gathering, and three different crafting areas. All of that was central to getting better gear in the process toward raiding. All in this secondary loop of gearing up for the primary actions. I've spent a lot of time in Elden Ring, but I don't think a specific fishing game would help. I really should start up and play the arena before the dlc drops whenever that happens
“They can go anywhere in a huge, complex open world; and maybe they could be a warrior, or maybe they could be a blacksmith, or own a restaurant, or become a king or a general, and order other players around. And you’ll play in a huge, persistent, always online open world, and there’ll be player run economy, government, and law enforcement. And there’ll be crafting and vehicles and farming. You basically won’t need any other games cause it’ll have every other game in it.”
I heard about a game like that once. I heard the guy who made it threw it all together in just six days and took a nap on the seventh. It’s still kicking if you know where to look.
The funniest thing about this is: there’s already an entire genre of games that let you go anywhere and do anything: it’s called the tabletop RPG.
And divinity original sin 2 with its GM mode
And... life.
@@draketheduelist life is too pay to win for most gamers desires of instant gratification
Small issue with them: you have to talk to other people to do it
The other issue, as an often DM, is that it takes an incredible amount of effort to create from scratch. Turns out anticipating ‘everything’ is very hard for a single person to do, even in the theatre of the mind, let alone with the need to actually build, design and animate a thing.
This is a result of what marketing experts would call "broad appeal." As stated, people will typically buy games in the genres that interest them, so the goal is to make a game that touches on basically every genre (at least the popular ones) just enough to trick people into thinking you're offering a worthwhile experience in that genre.
Is that why people still buy jimminy cockthroat games?
I think we ought to mention Rodina, the indie passion project to create "Daggerfall in space!" complete with four full-size planets to explore.
One guy has been working on that game more or less continuously for _at least eleven years_ . Most recent update was in February: there is now a system for increasing your stats!
Remember Scriblenauts? And how when given the infinite I myself would struggle to come up with anything interesting and new after 5 minutes? A little bit of focus and structure is a good thing ^_^
You can beat Scribblenauts by summoning Cthulhu at almost every single challenge.
I think the core of this issue comes from a conflation of freedom and agency. People think they want the freedom to do anything when really they just want the agency to do what they want. A game with a tight scope can give the player a lot of agency, but a game that tries to let you do anything often lacks the depth to actually let the player do what they really want
Watched the whole vid to figure out the meaning of the title, and, as always, never ceases to both entertain and educate.
The final punchline wrapping around to being the title was perfect.
4:45 I find it hilarious Yahtzee dropped that "hardcore roleplayers" line because Outer Worlds actually fits the exact complaints of this video. It was hyped to hell and back about being a HUGE ROLEPLAYING EXPERIENCE BY THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT YOU NEW VEGAS, where all the commercials showed a slot machine (HA HA NEW VEGAS SPIRITUAL SUCCESSOR GUYZ) that kept rolling through all the different "roles" you could play in the Outer Worlds, being whomever you wanted to be!...and then the game came out and your two options were "rebel hero" and "corporate stooge", in a storyline with exactly two real endings and one joke ending.
And hype continues to be the poison that everyone seems to willingly swallow
It's a poison with addictive qualities. It feels good to be excited about something.
@@rahcollier7006 and hurts twice as much to be disappointed
@@rahcollier7006 “Hype is just one letter off from hope”
it's hype or existential dread
pick your poison
@@horstherbert35that’s a false dichotomy. What about cautious optimism? Or my go to, indifference. If something’s genuinely good, then it’ll still be talked about and praised even years later. Combine that with all the shit major game publishers pull, and there’s literally no benefit to buying games when they’re brand new other than FOMO, which I don’t care about. Exercising even just a little patience can let you see a game’s actual quality, while buying something brand new is just an unnecessary gamble that could go either way.
To quote The Stanley's Parable "Raphael trailer" sarcastically talking about a theoretical game where one could do "LITERALLY ANYTHING":
"In this scenario the player has just infused a bicycle with the soul of with the soul of his great-great-uncle Hermophules. From this point he may use Hermopules' ethereal presence to detect nearby mineral deposits, or perhaps he might train the bicycle in the art of undoing temporal paradoxes. Ah, it seems the player has has chosen to use the haunted bicycle to deceive townsfolk as a part of his snake oil salesman ruse. How bold."
When you get down to it, games are about the things you can't do and how you get around those limitations, it's the definition of challenge and the idea you can do anything means you don't have anything to overcome outside of imposing silly challenges on yourself. Like how Jurassic World at a point had a gun that when pointed at a person, causes a dinosaur to go and kill them, but you could just have a regular gun and shoot the fucker.
I think most of us wanted this type of game and thought it would be excellent when we were teens and otherwise young and inexperienced. Experience is what dispels the notion of this being interesting, fun or achievable in reality.
We think we want this because we all have that experience in one game or another of going "this is fun, but I wish the game didn't stop me doing X or took me in Y direction instead." It takes experience and thought to realize that "this is fun" because it was designed to be fun within those borders, if they were removed it stops being fun. Sorta like going into the ini file in Skyrim and removing the world borders and expecting to find more Skyrim and not just a blank void.
Personally I sated my desire for this via modding and I think modding is the best answer to those who seek this.
Scammers, inadvertent or intentional, have always lived off of people's dreams, making people think the scammer can fulfill those dreams for money, taking the money and going away. This happens everywhere in society, politics, gambling, jobs, education, social relations, etc and won't ever go away because people want to fulfill their dreams and will forever be liable to be cheated on the way.
Here's the simple reason the reason I know some people fall for them. It isn't the aspect of "do anything" so much as a very specific fantasy that you and your mates can all play one game, and work towards one goal separately. It is the mmo cycle of crafters, gatherers, and raiders. They don't really want the matrix, they want EVE, but to be in on the ground floor.
Option 1: Try to do everything and be bad at all of it. Stand out for being garbage or never even getting that far.
Option 2: Do a few things really well. Stand out for offering a polished, distinct, and focused experience.
Crowd: OOH OOH! OPTION 1!!!!
I appreciate that the title is the final punchline; didn't know what to expect when watching this.
I was talking to some friends recently about how few games there are that fill the same niche as a movie. We have lots of games that let have "endless" hours of gameplay but they all require a massive investment both learning the systems and acquiring things in-game to be fun and accessible for short play sessions. There are few games, I think where you can pick them up and play them for an hour after first purchasing and stop feeling like you've accomplished something. Seeing this made me realise that's a symptom of these overly-broad games; of course the player is going to be left wistful in a bad way after the first hour or two, they had to learn the combat, realise their gear is underleveled, go through heaps of exposition for stuff as simple as crafting, learn the fishing minigame, and probably get plugged for the DLC or in-game shop a few dozen times along the way.
Thanks! you eloquently explain a thing that I've felt for a long time but couldn't quite put into words.
This is a big thing in the Tabletop RPG industry. We have so very many TTRPG systems that are called "Generic" and pretend to handle anything and everything. Which means whoever runs the game as the Game Master generally has to do a lot more work or the game is a lot less generic than it pretends - usually they handle Pulp Action in various genre but not real emulation of those genres. So those that have specialized tend to have the system better handle actually making the game interesting. They have loops that are fun and engaging.
Absolutely. Another problem of the "generic" system is that, once you find a couple you like, that's kind of it. You just use those and don't need more. FATE or Cypher or Savage Worlds could run pretty much anything I'd ever need a generic system to run, so why would I want another one? Make something specific instead!
I think games like kenshi and dwarf fortress are the best examples of the "do anything" game... Thats because they focus on making a world you can interact with however you want especially kenshi due to it's lack of random generation
You can interact with it however you want, provided what you want is to either whack something with a stick or run away from said thing.
I was recently discussing Tears of the Kingdom on a forum, and lamenting the fact that we can apparently build vehicles in it. Obviously I'm gonna wait and actually play the game before I solidify my opinion, but it's not something I remotely associate with or want out of Zelda and so my hype is nonexistent. But as I was airing this opinion, I came across an enthusiastic discussion about the prospect of being able to build houses in each region of Hyrule, Skyrim Hearthfire style, with someone saying something along the lines of "I love doing life sim stuff in games like Animal Crossing, I'd really like it here!" And I felt simultaneous utter bafflement and complete despair.
I know tightly focused, small experiences are still around (mainly in indie circles), but I seriously miss when they were decently common, and gamers as a whole weren't so spoiled and demanding.
I remember a friend who wanted to do exactly this. His first name was James. I won’t mention his last name but it sounded like “Pierce”. James if you’re out there, I hope your game development career is going well and you didn’t fall down the AAA cesspit.
Be careful Yahtzee. You must not anger the Star Citizen fan boys.😂😂😂
I can't imagine how hard it would be for a development team to develop a game where you can "do anything". Keeping all those systems balanced, engaging, and worth pursuing sounds like the recipe for burn out. From a support perspective where do you even start when things break? A game that tries to everything ends up doing nothing well.
For months, I've assumed the title was referring to a bunch of predictions Yahtzee had for the future.
Nope. Just a decently clever joke referencing the video's point
Best title drop ever
Apparently Peter Moluneax would always be intoxicated at events like E3, so that's why he'd just sorta run his mouth and promise the world lol. The story behind Fable's development is really fascinating tbh
That VR metaverse thing reminds me of Ready Player One. And it's funny there are still people who think that is still able to become reality
I love VR but there is no way what Facebook wants will ever be popular. Vr is only used for gaming and certain jobs and that’s probably all it will be used for
I mean, some version of it may, but there's a reason all the reasonably successful immersive 3D worlds (vr or otherwise) have been games, and not real world simulations.
You need a reason for that VR world to exist, and for you to engage with it, and standing around talking, having a meeting, or shopping are not things you need a VR world for. You can do all those things far easier in RL, or other digital formats.
Fighting dragons however, is much more their speed.
The funniest part of Ready Player One to me is how, with all the cameos on it, the ones that show up all across the film are characters from Battleborn and the game was dead before the film even came out.
as i always say: "don't hate the supply, hate the demand".
they make this shit because enough cretins fall for it and buy it.
PLEASE continue calling out the consumer!!
Mad respect to everyone at the escapist!
Feel that the editor this time was really in tuned with what Yahtzee was thinking. Maybe having clear vision well communicated is a good thing!(?)
Matt is emulating classic ZP humor better and better as time goes on. Don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing.
These types of videos are my favorites from Yhatzee as they highlight his cumulative knowledge of game design and skill as a writer to make a persuasive and convincing argument.
The AI Dungeon segue does point out how perilously close we are to technology that can interpret player input to fabricate the "do anything" game of their dreams. (Or nightmares: be careful what you wish for.) But, in the meanwhile, I think we can separate a lot of wheat from the chaff by requiring they at least get a prototype up with an appropriate core gameplay loop. There's an odd correlation between "do anything" claims and people who can't even do that.
if AI game development is anything like AI art, AI games will consist of shoddily written Dark Souls clones full of racial slurs and characters with fucked up eyes and hands.
which for some will be the perfect game, but regardless.
@@boarfaceswinejaw4516 I feel like you haven't looked at AI art recently. It's gotten vastly better in just a few months. If it progresses like it has been, AI art will be the new norm. AI game development will follow a similar path. No doubt it will take longer, but it can progress all the same.
@@DNAOrbb
"AI art will be the new norm"
just like NFTs.
@@boarfaceswinejaw4516 GJ intentionally dropping the important part of my sentence and intentionally misquoting me. Let's try again.
"If it progresses like it has been, AI art will be the new norm."
Doesn't sound so silly with full context. Go bag ice.
@@DNAOrbb joy. I love soulless creations that are products of taking other peoples work without permission. I love the risk that artists will become increasingly obsolete because people think a machine can do the job just as well as an actual person.
I take your point, Yahtzee, but let's be clear about this. "Everything Everywhere All At Once" is a genuinely great movie.
And if any movie deserved that title it's that one. On your first watch, you could reasonably expect anything to happen
@SloppyDetective why don't you just watch it instead of depending on people on the internet to tell you what to think of it then?
Not really that great
@SloppyDetective Never said I was a fan. Just find it strange you're giving your opinion without watching it.
@SloppyDetective If your bar for Rick and Morty style fans is "Telling you to watch a thing before judging it" you're gonna find them everywhere.
I play games to have fun, but all I can think of when I hear "do anything" is "obfuscated busywork simulator." I want to experience a good story or a tight gameplay loop, not do my digital taxes or sweep the digital floors.
For the record, spore is a perfectly fine game. I wasn't around for the hype when it was coming out, I imagine it was over-hyped. It's an amazing game if you take what's there.
I was around when it came out, and it was overhyped to hell and back. And that's the problem. When something fails to live up to expectations, especially the expectations the developers themselves set for the masses to hype over, then any game that falls short of it is going to be heavily bashed. I don't even remember what we were expecting, and i never ended up playing it, but even now, hearing the title makes me winge.
Of course, being an outsider of the promises will do that. That said, all those ideas and cut content we eventually see from Spore archives really hurt. It was going to be real complex before it got simplified to heck. Especially since we pretty much lost the fish stage which should had added one of the many aspects to the game/life loop we didn't get in the end. And I did enjoy the game even post hype, but I do know somethings feels missing.
Spore was the first and only time I ever pre-ordered a game. The marketing and articles written about that game made it seem like some grand simulation of life and the universe itself.
Once everyone and myself got my hands on it, it became immediately clear that it was just 5 different okay games taped together with a (admittedly really good) character creator. Also the last "game" of the 5 was the worst but also took up 90% of your playtime.
So was Fable tbh, it was an okay game for 2003 if you're a kid with no expectations (like me). Hell, it completely blew my socks off when I first played it at like 8 years old: "you mean I can equip these boots? And they show up on my character mid-game?? Woahh"
Yeah, that's what hype will do for you. I made it a point to not expose myself to anything Cyberpunk '77 related before it came out and as a result I came away from the game underwhelmed but satisfied. Was quite a surreal feeling when I then watched a video detailing all the cut content and broken promises. Perspective truly is a magical thing.
got really giddy on that title drop
Ehh, I think Yatz is forgetting that there are beloved games more or less let you go anywhere and do anything. EVE Online is the first to come to mind. But good do-anything games have three things going for them:
1) Limits on the player, so you have to get creative
2) Consequences, so your choices still matter, and
3) A fully authored world to do things in, which gives you decisions to make and reasons to make them.
Technology used to limit the scope of virtual worlds, but between better hardware and procedural generation, making big worlds with lots of interactivity isn't impossible anymore. The limiting factor now is custom content. Procedural worlds aren't infinitely replayable like we once hoped, although they're slowly getting better. Theoretically infinite content doesn't mean infinite replayability when the rules which govern content generation are finite and easy to learn. The limiting factor now is the man-hours it takes to continuously flesh out a world.
The microwave analogy is just *chefs kiss*
Great video 5:54
I get the impression that a lot of the people who have these ideas in their heads play games a lot, but have next to zero experience with actually making them. I've played games my entire life, and I've taken classes where they teach you to make *very* basic games, and I can tell you that playing games and creating games are two completely different animals. Even making an extremely simple game takes a couple of hours. Making a game as described in this video would be basically impossible, and the people who have those desires haven't even the slightest inkling as to the scope of that problem.
Except that the end result of "Three Things, Somewhere, Q4 2027" won't be more awards than Return of the King. Quite the opposite.
Ironically many early RPG devs were explicitly trying to emulate DnD, a game where you *can* go anywhere and do anything. The thing is, even though you could theoretically do anything, the only fun things to do were the ones the game was actually designed around - exploring dungeons and fighting dragons.
Starsector at first glance seems like you can 'do anything and go anywhere', but the gameplay loops involved are so well done that it's hard to get bored of it. Start a game, fly around, then mine shit/hunt shit/trade shit/build shit to your heart's content. And, best of all, you can break all of it!
Sat bomb Chico
ALWAYS SAT BOMB CHICO
@@williamwhitehouse8741 Ain't that the truth.
My thoughts exactly, and also what I was trying to explain many times to people who fundamentally misunderstand D&D. It's not unique to video games, it's just a lot easier to do in TTRPGs, and a bit harder for laymen to notice it's broken
When I was a child I was obsessed with the idea of the "do anything" game, and GTA San Andreas was the first time that notion was challenged. Sure the game world was massive and there were tons of things to do in it. But none of it was very deep. The movement wasn't as satisfying as Prince of Persia; the shooting not as good as Timesplitters. It was a buffet of lesser gameplay elements. That realization sort of changed my attitude toward the "do anything" mega game
While I appreciate the importance of a satisfying or engaging core gameplay loop, I suspect that many developers are still afraid that players will eventually grow bored of playing their game. Consequently, a game that was initially designed to let the player do a single but very fun activity - now becomes a game that lets the player do a plethora of chores to keep them busy. That being said, I believe a game today is much easier to sell if it's truly unlike anything that's come before.
That's human nature though, no? Humans crave novelty. Nothing lasts forever and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. A game doesn't need to last thousands of hours to be a satisfying experience.
Out comes elden ring with avg player clocking 200+hrs. You can see why ER's success pissed off so many devs. Having a core engaging loop is still the most important thing. Recent successful games like hi fi rush ovef open world blockbusters like Harry Potter proves the point
It's funny, because I remember you talking about this in a "Let's Drown out" many years ago.
I'm so glad someone said this, and so articulate. Because yes, my office job would be a lot more interesting if my desk was next to a window that looked out into space, but then I'd either have to commute on a space elevator each day, or live in an space habitat and have messed up mental health because I'm constantly breathinig recycled air and never seeing actual sunlight.
To these people who want to do anything in a game, I highly suggest you take up table top role-playing. You can have your fantasy of being in space, or being a flower in a meadow, or whatever you like, but crucially, you'll be getting out and making friends. Actual friends. Because this desire to have a game where you "Have a life" screams to me that you rarely leave the house, and all your friends are digital. Just face it, we humans cannot replace our social needs with machines, despite what Zuckerberg the Obvious Robot says. We need to go outside, see people, touch grass. Our biology literally needs it.
Ive always felt Indie devs are the most guilt of trying to "bite off more than they can chew" in terms of development.
Early Sea of Thieves fell into this trap I think. The water physics are really cool and you can be the captain of your own ship! Awesome, sounds great!
What do you do with said ship...?
Apparently visit a bunch of samey generic islands to kill samey generic skeletons for loot that you give to 3 guys to increase a number associated with each guy. Also we peddle cosmetics.
SoT has improved over the years but periodically I'll still load into the game and be like "Now what?"
I remember being in 5th grade in 1995 and I had these two friends who talked about this game that their older brother knew about called "Castle in the Sky" that was being made and it was the best game ever because you could do anything you wanted. But even at that age I had doubts that such a game would be any fun at all.
That title drop at the end was gold
Much agreed. This is the maximalist variant of the central challenge of game design - building rollercoasters with invisible rails. Players want to believe they have total freedom and all this magnificent adventure is happening to them because they are innately amazing, but if you were to give them total freedom the illusion would instantly fall apart, leaving them pushing their roller coaster car across a flat plain, pretending it's fun.
It think it's a common dream friend of mine told be such idea in the early 90s. To some degree we even got something like that. Open Word Games or even MMOs do have several things in one. IN GTA you get car races, shooty parts, planes flights and mini games. You can't do many things but you can't do everything.
You know, there's an interesting point here to be made about abstraction. In the medium of text, you really can do anything: "the blue polar bear transformed into a stoplight." There, see? Trivial. But imagine trying to put that in a play, or a movie, or a video game. In a play, you might be able to do some wibbly-wobbly special effects, and the audience will go along with it. But in a movie, you'd have to make it look convincing, and in a video game you'd have to animate every little bit of it.
So the promise isn't just "do anything," because as you said, you can "do anything" on a blank sheet of paper, too. They want to be able to do anything, and have it be incredibly life-like and realistic. They want all the physicality, and animations, and game mechanics that would go along with it. Whereas when we talk about "elegant" game design, we're talking about choosing just a couple of game mechanics, etc. and doing as much as you can with a little.
What i dislike about the "sim" genre vagueness is that it ranges from "games with a thousand shitty loops" to "game with one great complex loop".
I remember playing a sort of minecraft survival mod that allowed me to build a village, fill it with npcs of my choosing who would in turn tend to farms and collect resources whilst i was out dungeoneering.
i felt a lot more invested in my little minecraft village than i did for the settlements in fallout 4, because the minecraft villages contributed to my gameplay, rather than act as a distraction from it.
I saw Celeste come up at the start of the “indie games people actually care about” segment, and was briefly worried he had another “actually good anime” situation on our hands.
Seems he warmed up on Celeste
Pretty odd, since that game wasn't that good
@@jimmyjohnjoejr To each his own.
EVE Online is kinda like these "Do Anything" games. They definitely have the player run economy and government down. You can participate at any level from mining materials, to constructing things, to being a speculative trader on popular goods.
Even EVE knows its limits though - despite the cool player-driven economy it's still one based around a fairly constrained number of interlocking systems (the aforementioned mine, trade, build, fight, etc). Turns out you can get a lot of complexity from that! But it still took a fairly large team of experienced developers a long time to accomplish. Also, the impressively functional player-driven economy is very impressive and interesting, but it comes at a very obvious cost to the core gameplay loops, which are much less fun (subjectively, according to most) than games which don't have to care about balancing an intricate economy on top of 'is this part fun?'. The game is mainly worth playing for people who find economics and diplomacy fun in themselves - people who just want to mine and build are better off playing minecraft.
Hell I think games like team fortress 2 is a FPS version of "Do anything" with the mods and communities.
yes and there's a reason why eve online's playerbase is almost exclusively american gen X whales with more money than braincells
Except you can only truly do anything _inside_ of the game's boundaries. That's what Yahtzee meant with the fundamental misunderstanding bit, from what I could tell. There are no games where you can truly do anything (start a bus service in isreal for penguins) because that's not how games work.
5:04
Y'know, generally speaking, you're right, but for certain things it might actually be pretty neat. Like, using the front cameras and augmented reality to size up a desk from IKEA or otherwise trying to determine the dimensions of something, it could be somewhat useful and possibly save time. At the same time though, you could just grab a tape measure and measure twice.
Visions of the Battlecruiser 3000AD flamewar dance in my head now.
Same here.
It's also worth pointing out that the "good examples", Elite: Dangerous and NMS launched with *at least one* very tight and engaging core loop. Go somewhere and shoot space stuff in case of E:D and go somewhere and discover space stuff in case of NMS.
That was a great reveal of what the title of the video meant. I don't know how I didn't put it together earlier
This just might be one of his best videos.
Developer: “In our game you can do anything!”
Me: “I can? Awesome. I want to play a game with a beginning middle and end. Now, get cracking!”
Q4 2027 is still faster than TES6 after the teaser video.
The game where you could genuinely go anywhere and do anything was Second Life. Tons of people sank countless hours into creating an endless amount of content.
The end result was basically a recreation of the internet. It was difficult and slow to find what you were looking for, and a huge slog to wade through all the stuff you didn't want.
Isn't that game mostly used for sex rp
@@sgtmarcusharris4260 "Now"? Like I said, basically a recreation of the internet.
What I am hearing is, a do anything game for a player is the equivalent of a self checkout at the grocer. They market it as for your convenience, but have actually convinced you to work in a job position for free. You supply the fun! You simply the cashier!
I do like how you bring up the player being overload with choice. As someone with autism, I get overload with 3 choices in a game, I don't need 15 more to overload me more.
There have been a couple games I got sucked into at some low points in my life as just a "life simulation" like the ones that keep getting promised: Skyrim(worked as a woodcutter to save up for a house and raise a family), Saints Row 2(There's a few day to day jobs you can take like taxi driver, tow truck driver, ambulance driver, etc) and the actual king of the "do anything" game which is Minecraft...but the thing with those and ACTUAL life simulator games like Stardew valley is that they still gamify the "everything" you can do. Real life is where you can theoretically do anything but what we're looking for in a virtual reality is being able to "accomplish everything". Even if I had the patience to do so, working by myself I'd never have the time to quarry all the stone, shape them into pricks, and build a castle, and even if I did I'd have no real use for it...but in Minecraft? Give me a couple days to start and then I'll pick off zombies trying to break down the front gates so I feel like there's actually some purpose to the building.
On the other hand, a few games come to my mind that potentially qualify as actually scratching that itch of the concept: "you can do everything."
They don't actually let you do anything, but they create a convincing illusion of it.
In the order they popped into my head: Elden Ring, Breath of the Wild, and Minecraft.
There's something about Soulsborne games (and others that successfully take inspiration from them) that often nail that feeling like you can do anything just by allowing you to go anywhere at any time. Further, the fact that it's generally inadvisable to go certain places "out of order" gives weight, meaning, and consequence to the player decision to boldly go into the area they aren't supposed to be ready for yet. It truly does give the player a small amount of ability to make their own game out of them game. The core loop doesn't change, but by exploring and learning the game, the player can control their own experience moderately.
Minecraft takes a slightly different spin by letting players shape and define their very environment. You can't *do anything* in minecraft (unless you mod it, but that might be a valid tangent to the topic as well), but the ability to treat the game as a pixel art engine massively opens the game to creative reinterpretation. It *feels* like you can do anything in the game.
A do anything game is like tossing someone a dictionary and going “now you can write any book, recite any poem”
Couldn't agree more - even with the games I love, there are multiple systems that are extraneous to what I actually like about the game. For example, when Mass Effect 3 came out and there was the massive pushback about the ending, I found myself really liking the game because I was engaged with the third person combat, skill combinations, party-based tactics, and over-arching narrative. Sure, I was disappointed by the ending, but the journey to get there was still a blast.
It was right around that time that open world games were gaining more and more traction, and soon it became this "go anywhere, make your own fun" style of game, and I've always thought "but I really like these handcrafted set pieces from games like Mass Effect, Uncharted, and others". So I find myself more and more turned off by my own options - like Yahtzee said, I'm paralyzed by choice. I'd rather be taken for a ride than have to carve my own amusement park.
Ha, I knew the title had to be a reference to Everything, Everywhere, All At Once
6:21 Correction: Hi-Fi Rush isn’t an indie game, it was made by Bethesda/Tango Gameworks
Dwarf Fortress is probably the closest to a literal "Do Anything" game that I've ever played, but like you said, it is literally a simulation game.
Israeli here: We could use a dedicated bus system for our penguins
I think the concept of "doing whatever you like" should be followed by "within the context of this situation" because I LOVE a game where there's one central goal, but many different people working on it. For a weird example, there's a game in Roblox called "Work in a pizza place" and you can do "anything" within that context. Take orders, cook the pizzas, box the pizza, deliver... if you don't want to do any of that you can bring supplies in to the store, and if you don't want to do ANYTHING you can just chill in your in game house decorating it. I personally love it! It's stupid, it's simple, I can do "anything" but i'm never at risk of doing nothing either. It's great! Point is, i think a fence around the concept of anything is what keeps the fun contained.
I always remember what the videogame developtmer main character said in the ending* of _Black Mirror: Bandersnatch_ "my mistake was trying to give the player to many choices. The secret was to give them the illusion of having choices, when in reallity I control how the game's story ends". That's what succesful open world sandbox games do, after all there's a reason why is almost impossible to abide the law in games like GTA or Saints Row
*to me, that's the true ending of that Netflix's FMV game, the other endings are game over screens
Zero Punctuation always turns in quality work, but once in awhile, he releases a jewel of a video so shiny, it makes my eyes water from happiness.
This is one of those times. 💎
This is a particularly good one! Thumbs up!
This is why i dont ask "what can i do in your game" in favour of "why would i (the player) do things in your game" whenever im presented with games like this. For some reason very few developers can give an answer beyond "to experience our rich world" which tells you how widespread the whole "fun is something the players bring themselves" mentality actually is.
Yeah, motivation to use gameplay systems is a big issue in lots of open world games. For example, Rust has added lots of interesting systems from modular cars to an entire logic-gate based electricity system, but often fails to make the systems easily accessible so people can experiment. So many interesting systems in that game are left in the dust because actually getting your hands on them is a pain if you aren't in the top 5% of skill.
@@Toaster_Toastr Applies to entire games too. Take that Necromunda game for example where the entire marketing came down to "experience life as a bounty hunter!" and i just kept asking "yes but why? Why should i play this game?"
Contrast with the game it was inspired by (Doom 2016) where we had a clear premise from the get go, "Stop hell from invading". And every piece of gameplay was then presented as something we should use to achieve this rather than the reverse.
The "Everything Everywhere All At Once" comparison is even more important because that movie is a full-hearted endorsement of looking at the vastness of all possibility and choosing to be "Now, Here, Completely" with the people who matter to you. Choices are not meaningless just because alternate choices exist with outcomes that you might like better. Don't put everything on a bagel and call it a good video game. That's a recipe for utter despair and nihilism in the face of an uncaring and meaningless universe and also a recipe for a bad video game.
Fun fact: Spore basically inspired a more realistic analogue to it called Thrive.
Thrive is still in development/early access. So far, the cell stage is almost done.
Yep, Spore was absolutely batshit ambitious lol