I always appreciate games adding shortcuts that can be create once you explore the area so that when you backtrack, its way faster to access those areas than the first time you have to get there.
Alternatively, this new ability you got let you access the same place but way easier and faster Say at first you need to take a side path to access a town because there's a wall in the way of the short path, which takes you through a whole dungeon first, later on you need to go back to the town, but now have the ability to explode walls you got from a later dungeon
What I love even better is shortcuts that were accessible THE WHOLE TIME, but were hidden by perspective or something. And later in the game, you are forced to discover the shortcut. Tunic is great with these!
Even faster way to not play the game is to turn it off. The journo-invented consept of Metroidvania has no bearing on good DESIGN, just self-aggrandizing analysis. It's a forced concept of following platforming models that don't work, so much that you start craving shortcuts AWAY from the gimmick of "interconnected" set pieces. Just calling it "backtracking" exposes what a massive back-handed compliment it is. I would never MAKE a game about "back" tracking, I would just make an interconnected world two things, elective, and hard as balls. Well, it's less novel because I guess Dark Souls beat me to it, plus plenty of actual souls-like platformers. You WANT to WANT to waste your time, in the tracking towards the forward direction. That's the meat of the game. A good way to do it would be every trek a transaction of resources and time, resources for what you LOSe in order to survive harvesting others in their stead. And time, in exchange of HAVING FUN hwile doing it. But that's a WASTE of time to many-a Metroidvania fan. If you liked the gameplay, every repeat playthrough WOULD BE your metroidvania as you speedrun conventional platformer games.
I just wished that Tunic somehow marks the hidden passages after you found them once. Hitting the backtracking part of the story was so frustrating for me. I knew that the world was full of shortcuts, I couldn't just remember exactly where they were. I had to walk the long way all around, and then rediscover the shortcuts from the "visible" side. It felt like teasing me with "the shortcut was here all along" just like the captain in TTYD. But every. single. time.
“The framing is meant to be a joke but it doesn’t quite land right.” I think this is because the player is the butt of the joke. A wild goose chase like that could be funny in tv or a movie (well, somewhat funny at least), but it would probably be presented as a montage, without needing to follow the characters every step of the way, and it would be the characters, not the audience, who’ve been through the pointless search.
If this were an optional quest I think the joke would land. It's not just that you're doing busywork, it's that you're being prevented from continuing the game until you do that busywork. It's a matter of managing expectations-- if you are *forced* to run around talking to NPCs before you continue the game, you feel like the game is just messing with you. If you're already in the headspace that you're doing an optional sidequest -- therefore you're choosing not to continue the main game right now -- then doing something silly is seen less as a waste of time because it was your choice, you were already not continuing the main game.
@@MmeCShadow yeah I totally agree with that, give the player some kind of reward for putting up with the nonesense so they can begrudgingly enjoy being the butt of the joke anyways. Having the roadblock be a necessary waste of time in the main quest always sucks, but if you go out of your way to get pranked by the devs of your own agency that could be funny
yeah I've heard Steph Sterling complain about this a lot. Your joke doesn't land if you are criticizing an unfun or bad game mechanic, and then actually use the bad game mechanic, especially multiple times. Like if you want to criticize bad escort quests, instead of making the player do a bad escort quest and then mock it, you could subvert expectations. have it start as an escort quest and then as soon as the players leave the town the escort dies/is kidnapped or they say screw this and abandon the escort or mug them. have the escort be part of an ambush that attacks you right as you leave town. heck have you play as a group of mercenaries, they are given an escort quest and they turn it down saying how much they hate escort quests, then accept a job from the opposing faction to attack said escort/caravan. You can criticize a bad game mechanic without then subjecting the player to it and become a hypocrite.
I'll be honest, don't even mind the General White quest in isolation, the problem is it's part of a game that has a running theme of wasting as much of your fucking time as possible.
I swear the old sierra games were built that way so they could sell you the guide. Many of the solutions were so obtuse they were impossible. I love them, but yeah, had to be played with a guide.
Hmmmmm _maybe_. Part of the adventure in these games is figuring out how to solve the mystery with all the pieces you were given. Yeah, it's totally unfair that you need a pie for some inscrutable option and that all the logical options you can do with it _aren't_ the solution, but I also feel like that was these games' unique style of trolling you that I've come to super appreciate growing up with them. It's... a special kind of hell haha But oh trust me, I've been frustrated with them as much as I've been in love with them. I wouldn't recommend anyone else picking up their design philosophy ever again. That said, they still hold a special place in my heart for their unique ability to mess you over.
I grew up on classic Sierra games in the day, and can also attest that the solutions to many puzzles/obstacles were nigh impossible without at least a ("sold separately") hint to the solution. Which is probably part of why _Myst_ was such a big deal in its day: its design team made a conscious effort to keep their puzzle solutions intuitive/realistic in the context of the setting/puzzle.
I tend to like when these things happen: -New shortcuts are found (surprise and comfort) -New enemy encounters or events happen on your way back (surprise) -New traversal abilities make the trip different (recontextualizing) -(not actually backtracking, but) Looping back around via a different path (sense of progress/a journey) -There are optional, harder detours for goodies (risk/reward, options)
I think the most important aspect of creating _good_ backtracking is ensuring that the player is making _forward_ progress when they’re retracing their steps, rather than it being a situation of stalling or, worse, undoing the player’s work. It’s a paradoxical thought, but let me explain. The reason why backtracking works well in games like Hollow Knight and Outer Wilds is due the fact that backtracking to previous locations leads directly into the next section of gameplay or the story. When you defeat the Soul Master in the City of Tears and obtain the Desolate Dive, you backtrack into the Forgotten Crossroads via the elevator shortcut (or newly opened Stag Station) that you unlocked while exploring the City and make your way to where you open the pathway to the Crystal Peak, which is a new area with new content for you to see. Similarly, when the player resets or goes back to another planet in Outer Wilds, they’re now equipped with knowledge that allows them to open up access to new parts of that planet that they previously ignored or didn’t know how to interact with, and leading them further into their goal of reaching the explanation behind the game’s core mystery. In contrast, the fetch quest example is a case where backtracking is essentially a stall for time, because going back to a previous location in order to fulfill the quest does not introduce any new content. You go backwards to get the necessary item(s) to do the quest, then return back to where you’re able to use them and unlock the next new section of the game. This is a *huge* design issue with many historical quests in Old School RuneScape, and is the reason why the vast majority of players rely on wiki guides to do the quests. You’re asked to backtrack from the quest location to the bank or, worse yet, a completely different part of the game world in order to get the item or items that you need constantly. It’s so bad to the point that the developers just outright added a feature to the in-game quest log where you can right-click a quest’s name and select an option that’ll open that quest’s wiki guide page in your bowser. I’m not kidding: nobody should ever do OSRS quests without a guide. I challenged myself to not look up the required items in advance and just play the quests through naturally, and I gave up after just 26 out of 158 total quests that’re in the game. (Most people likely would’ve gave up much earlier than that, too.) The way I would describe backtracking being used as forward progress is to take out a sheet of paper and a pencil, and start drawing a straight line across the page. The line represents your progress through the game. When you get to the end of the page, you have hit a “backtracking point” in the game. If you’re backtracking in the latter way, you will draw back _over top_ of your existing line and trace the line through a second time. If you’re using the first example, and you’re making backtracking that creates forward progress, you’ll turn the _page_ over and continue drawing through your existing line, but on the other side of the sheet of paper - on new ground, where the player hasn’t been yet. If you want backtracking in your game, that is what you to have happen. You want to retrace over your existing line, but from a fresh perspective, in a way that the player is always moving _toward_ the end goal - completion of the quest, completion of the area, the story, etc. - never _away_ from it.
That's what I like to call Sidetracking. You know, unlocking new paths when you have new habilities, or TO unlock something. You're not necessarily going the same route, but a parallel one... Now that I think about it, TLOZ dungeons are famous AND infamous for their backtrack-heavy nature, because the whole design is an interactive labyrinth where anything can affect other rooms in the dungeon. People love that unique level design, to the point a gripe many have with BotW and TotK is that dungeons no longer have a structure who incentives and interacting more with the envoriment, partially to avoid backtrack that was honestly never that big of an issue except on terribly paced dungeons.
Then you also have the Elden Ring kind of backtracking, where content is so cleverly hidden by terrain that some entrances are only visible while you go in one direction and not the other. So it rewards players that do the trek back on foot (or on Torrent) with a new perspective on the terrain which leads to new dungeon entrances and sometimes even boss battles hidden away.
@@arenkaiI love exploring Elden Ring for that reason… Stormveil Castle blew my mind! I saw a ledge and it looked interesting so I jumped… I kept going and found a roof path that actually led somewhere, to loot and enemies. I tried a different ledge and crept around and ended up above the front main gate! If you see something that looks interesting, you can probably get there or find a way.. I had so much fun exploring every inch of that castle and then got to Raya Lucaria thinking SV was one of a kind and nope… RL was the same way! Jumping rooftops, ledges, windows, ladders! I love when games reward exploration and initiative, and have the bravery to just let you skip stuff. I don’t think people realize how insane “OPTIONAL” content is these days… I don’t mean little game modes, but you can literally skip like 70% of Elden Ring and beat the game. That’s super are these days because publishers only care about boosting playtime and advertising how big and full their game is and how open world it is… the idea of potentially letting people skip huge sections of the game, with unique assets is something almost no company would do. If they made the assets they will make damn sure we use them! Elden Ring has the equivalent of entire games that you can just never see or touch. That’s awesome to me because “freedom” only means something when you have a choice and exploration only feels genuine and exciting when you don’t have some marker pop up and you know that multiple quests send you there later. Elden Ring has exploration where it feels like you wouldn’t have ever found this catacomb or castle unless you went looking… the game was never going to push you there or show you the way. You feel like you just discovered it because you did! Elden Ring makes backtracking and sidetracking work because there is always something to find, or you open shortcuts and everything feels earned and yours… there is feeling of being puppeted or guided, you just naturally find things on your journey because you want to! “Oh what’s that?” or “Ahh! Bear! Hide!” and suddenly you’re in some cool place finding loot.
Exactly, I started my second save of Elden Ring recently, and I thought I explored Limgrave pretty thoroughly my first time through. I made a point to try and find a lot of stuff in each area before moving on to the Legacy dungeon, so I *thought* I would be retreading a lot of the same ground. Nope. I already found a dungeon and an entire beach area in Limgrave that I never found or thought was reachable in my first placythrough.
One example of backtracking in a video game I really like is hotline miami when you have to walk back to the car as it sets the overall tone of the game as the music stops and the focus is the pile of bodies left on the ground which conveys the question "do you like hurting other people"
I'm surprised you didn't mention Zelda Phantom Hourglass' Temple of the Ocean King. It's infamous for its backtracking, but I think there's a lot of merit in its execution (not that many agree). I personally enjoy it
THANK YOU! People complain about the "backtracking" but the way it is executed you traverse old areas in new ways (and in less time) and gain access to deeper levels of the dungeon. So you are not just retreading old ground. In fact I prefer it to the tower of spirits where they addressed the feedback by just having you climb a staircase to reach the new floor directly. IMO that is less fun and not a creative use of the space. Both games are underrated in general but phantom hourglass especially gets a bad rap.
I really like the Temple of the Ocean King, and honestly, tho most people prefer the tower in PH, the fact that it's divided into floors and you can enter each one at any time, makes it not even make sense to be a tower at all. I think Temple of the Ocean King is a great challenge trying to go up faster than before, and discovering the shortcuts with you're new items. Played the game 3 times and didn't bothered me in any of the
I like both approached, imo they're different enough in a good way. The Tower has great and challenging puzzles, plus it's fun to control the Phantoms.
@@fernando98322 honestly my biggest problem wasn't structuly, I just find Phantom Zelda too slow to control, I feel like I'm waiting for her to do her thing most of the time. That being said, not shitting on ST either, it's a pretty good game
Loads of people hate the repetitiveness of that game but I really liked being able to open all the shortcuts and becoming better and faster at doing it each time.
TTYD also had the side quests where you could only accept one at a time, so that added even more back tracking, where if you could at least accept something like 3 at a time, you might have at least less back tracking.
2D Metroid is usually good with backtracking, because you are going back to an area you have been through before and gave you trouble, but now you have more combat and traversal options that make navigating the old area much easier, plus your new abilities allow you to fetch items you couldn't before and even unlock new passages and shortcuts. Xenoblade 1 also does backtracking really well, since NONE is required to beat the game. You are constantly moving forward in that game if you're just following the story (you will never be sent back to Colony 9 for story reasons after you leave it, Saihate is just a pitstop before the events of the Eryth Sea and Alcamoth with the first big twist, and you only go back to the Fallen Arm and Colony 6 for story reasons but the Junks is right there to take you to the next area you cannot access otherwise). And yet, the game is full of backtracking for the side quests, which are all optional, meaning you will be backtracking out of choice and not necessity! Having fast travel really helps too, and the fact you can then face stronger enemies you had no chance of dealing with before now that you are 20 levels stronger also give you an incentive to go back to previous areas.
XC1 spoilers ahead: Going back to Melias Kingdom in Eryth Sea as the game story advances is absurdly cool, how the kingdom reflects to changes in political power during you're time there is immersive, and it's eventual destruction make you feel so bad. Going in there and seeing it completely empty of NPCs, only with Telethias to fight everywhere, and then seeing the ones that survive camping on different locations of the world to survive. Still can't believe the amount of effort Monolith put into that game even after so many years, it's absurd
Metroid is normally the poster child for good backtracking with how newly unlocked tools in your kit open up new paths and locations, but even the Metroid Prime series caught some flack for their respective endgame fetch quests, with the first one having the worst. It also had the most backtracking period with forcing you to depart and return to the Phazon Mines no less than 3 times before you could find its boss. Compounding the problem were respawning enemies who didn't get appreciably easier with new weapons like many 2D Metroids; you still can only use Power Beam to deal with Chozo Ghosts even if the X-Ray lets you spot them faster.
If you've got the ammo for it, Power Missiles are a good way to deal with Chozo Ghosts, and most of the time you can just run past them if you're just passing through. And being able to track them with the X-Ray Visor means you don't have the periods of waiting for them to stop being invisible. It's still not the best backtracking power fantasy, but realising that you can just "nope" out of a bunch of the combat when you're not exploring makes basic backtracking much smoother.
@@rmsgrey And then there's Metroid Prime 2, where the Space Pirate Commandos are basically the Chozo ghosts but a lot more aggravating. They phase in and out like Chozo ghosts, do a crapload more damage, take either 15 missiles (3 power missiles) or something like 10 Dark Beam Ammo + 1 missile to kill quickly. None of which would be a super huge problem, save for their greatest sin of all: they lock the effing doors while they're alive. So you can either spend a bunch of resources to dispatch them quickly, wait out their timer before they depart on their own (something like a full 2 minutes if I recall correctly), or avoid those rooms entirely, sometimes by taking a much more circuitous route. All of which are lousy options when you're backtracking through areas (sometimes several times) to use new powerups to find new routes, upgrades, keys, etc. The only thing they have going on for them in comparison to the chozo ghosts is that you get the visor to track them properly at the end the same level you first encounter them in, so at least you don't have to wait until 3/4 of the way through the game like you had to for the xray visor
Prime 2's fetch quest is worse. In Prime 1 you really only need to backtrack for the three(?) in Phendrana Drifts, which require the Plasma Beam but the area is otherwise story complete before you pass through the Orpheon wreck, and the last one, but that one just requires the Phazon Suit you get a few rooms later, so it's just a minor annoyance. In comparison, Prime 2 only lets you get two (the one at the landing site and the one just past where you get the Spider Ball) without the Light Suit.
Ahhh, since you kept showing it, I thought you were gunna talk about it. That re2 remake was pretty good. The backtracking felt good too. Since every time you returned to the RPD it was full of even more zombies and lickers and eventually Mr. X. Also makes playing the 4th survivor even more crazy when you eventually play that and had to run through the sewers and the RPD.
I'm a bit surprised that it wasn't mentioned at all since Survival Horror games are also a prime candidate to use backtracking as a very effective tool. Those games revolve heavily around resource management and you have to plan ahead. Travelling back and forth on a limited map helps with this kind of planning and decisions made in the past also won't just disappear. None did it better than the original Resident Evil mansion (and its remake). _Should I save my bullets and just try to slip past these zombies? But then I will also have to run by them again on my way back. I might lose a lot of health. I should check the map, maybe it's better to clear this path if I need it more often._ You get the idea. But that's not the only thing, backtracking can also help with the Horror part by exploiting the false sense of security that a known place might provide. _Hey I've been through this corridor several times before, it's totally safe!_ ...aaand this time something suddenly comes bursting through the windows. And after getting caught off guard like this once, you start to get paranoid and suspect something looming around every corner. Suddenly it doesn't matter anymore if you visited an area before and you just have this constant feeling of threat which creates a wonderful atmosphere for a horror game.
Interesting that you showed the backtracking sequence in Skyward Sword, but didn’t comment further on it. If I recall correctly, in the fetch quest for water you showed, when you re-enter the forest temple, it is infested with new enemy types that weren’t there the first time round. Additionally, the water dragon area only opens up to the player after you’ve already been to 2 completely new areas on the map and completed an entire dungeon each from those areas. There’s also the fast travel in Skyward sword which doesn’t expect you to walk all the way to the temple and all the way back again, you can just teleport straight to and out of the temple. I think overall, this was quite a decent implementation of backtracking, that allows the player to revisit an older area without causing too much trouble or boredom for them!
Halfway through Guacamelee 2, reality starts to collapse which basically means black instant--death boxes spawn everywhere. Gaps that you could just jump over before now have a box above them too high to jump over, so you need to use the chicken slide move. Some gaps have boxes that prevent you from jumping _too_ high. It changes the way you navigate the entire world.
One of my favorite backtracking elements in games is from Skyward Sword's sandship. Exploring the ship, having to go back and forth to find keys, and changing what time the ship is in is amazing. It's almost two dungeons in one, as it's either set in the past or present.
At least with the Skyward Sword one, you have to revisit the same worlds with new equipment, but I loathe the fact the game plays too much like a movie game and very linear. The revisiting in unique ways felt nice even with only three surface worlds to explore.
The best games make the act of movement and exploration fun, so that backtracking essentially means more of that thing you already like. Super Mario 64 involves exploring the same levels 6 or 7 times, but moving Mario around the map is so much fun that it's like being asked if I want more dessert. Of course I do! VVVVVV also gives me this sensation with its gravity-flipping motion mechanic. In making this point, I also notice how the early levels of Super Mario 64 that feel like lived-in worlds are the most fun to navigate multiple times, whereas the levels that feel like glorified obstacle courses are, in my opinion, the least fun to retrace. Tick Tock Clock is maybe the biggest offender of this--having to climb up the gears and windings over and over again is kind of a pain.
@@daniel_361 Actually, you can get about half of them by turning around right at the start of the level and going straight to the obstacle courses. Still not as fun as, say, Snowman Land, but no magic carpets, at least.
One mechanic I'm working on for a long term project of mine is having changes occur in various environments depending on in-game date and plot progression. I took inspiration from games like Harvest Moon, where seasons would change the environment, and even what you could do during that time of the year. I've also played RPGs where they would have major changes happen in towns you already visited, once you moved forward enough in the game. This way if they place a backtracking required quest in that location, the player returns to something aesthetically different, with a new set of activities they can do that weren't there before. This allowed that game to have a smaller game world, but feel like it was a lot.
In the Xenoblade games back tracking is a huge optional part of the lore and world building, as you progress the stories events and circumstances change for the people in the world and you often get huge rewards, changes to the status of the world, and often something contributing to a larger optional goal. And from the very start of Xenoblade games end game monsters can be encountered in the starting areas showing that there is reason to go back and have another look around later. IMO Xenoblade improves it's back tracking in each game and by 3 I was reading every quest and enjoying visiting all the end-game sub areas.
One of the best things about Trails in the Sky and the Kiseki series more broadly is that, much like Hollow Knight, the world changes as the story progresses. Backtracking isn’t “I can’t believe I have to go here again,” but “I can’t believe I get to see this NPC I haven’t seen in 20 hours and they’re going to respond to all of the latest developments!”
It's worth noting that old Cierra games had a partial excuse for their long winded backtracking. Games were less common back then, as Dan Avidan of game grumps explained it, he played those games for hundreds of hours if need be, he didn't have 100 games to choose from, just 3 or 4. So padding out the content with stuff like that was more forgivable at the time.
The games were also (on average) short compared to modern games. After all, once you know the solution to a given puzzle, that (almost) never changed between different runs.
On the one hand I want to bring up the Lucasarts games of the time that didn't do that to you... buuut I have to catch myself and remember that even though I played Sam and Max when I was like 5, even by then Sam and Max were WAY modern in comparison to King's Quest, so they had KQ to learn from by comparison.
Another, more rare case: when the repeated areas are so familiar that it's cozy, or encourages emotional attachment. Like Kamurocho in Yakuza/Like A Dragon games. An LAD fan has spent hundreds of hours wandering the same few blocks, and starting a new game almost feels like revisiting a place you've lived. Or players can get really attached to the worlds of huge RPGs like Skyrim.
Those "intrinsic metroidvanias" are some of my all-time favorite games. I just really like the way they feel to play. Knowing that the door in front of you isn't simply out of your reach due to an item, but rather a mysterious puzzle to eventually be solved- or, even, not knowing that there is a door in front of you -makes metroidvania-style level design feel very different from your typical metroidvania. Besides just Tunic and Outer wilds, a couple other games in this "genre" are Fez and Toki Tori 2.
This video gave me a great idea for a level in one of my many game ideas. Kind of like Subspace Emissary levels with a Pizza Tower escape sequence. Thanks for the idea, and congratulations on 300k. This channel has helped me so much with understanding game design better.
The most important question about backtracking is, is it fun to go from point A to point B in the game? The traversal, the combat you’ll face along the way - are those intrinsically fun to do? Or does one of them kind of suck, and it’s the story or new areas or something else that’s been pushing you forward? Because if it’s the latter, you’re screwed.
I do like me some MMO-style backtracking such as in Xenoblade, where you revisit towns/areas frequently to check for new stuff to do or stuff you might have missed, and you become quite acquainted with those areas. I find it's a nice way to build familiarity and comfort, which is something I really value, while keeping me engaged with new stuff to do and side story or worldbuilding developments. In Gormott, I explored fairly thoroughly early on, but I was still finding neat little things here and there dozens of hours later while filling that time with sidequests. What I want to bring attention to is Ori and the Blind Forest. Nowadays, you have fast travel, and that was certainly a frequently requested feature, but the original game actually did work quite well without fast travel, especially after bash. The game map wasn't excessively large, so it was reasonable to gain intimate familiarity with it while getting to your destination within a couple minutes. In addition, most of the traversal was horizontal, which is where the platforming moveset really shines. I cannot express how good of an idea bash was as a skill. All those enemies and projectiles that got in your way before now help you move through faster instead, and it can make some areas feel almost brand new. Once you get the feather, you fly visibly even farther horizontally, making some areas more like a little dance to traverse through again. As if this weren't enough, there's a glitch/speedrunning tech called bashgliding. It's super easy to perform consistently: rather than holding the direction you want to go after bashing, you aim and then release the left stick. Doing this lets you keep all your horizontal momentum until you touch ground etc. You can still double and triple jump along the way to fly farther. With bashgliding in the picture, the feather has a massive impact because it keeps you in the air for much longer. It can be incredibly fun and satisfying to start at a place like the entrance to the Misty Woods and see how far you can travel eastward from one bash. Once you're focused on stuff like this, traversing through old areas becomes more like a fun little challenge to yourself to see how quickly you can get through and enjoy doing it.
Thank you for the back tracking thing. I like those things that give off a deliberate different feeling like Wario Land 4 and Pizza tower or even something that involves your knowledge being improved rather than relying heavily on the extrinsic changes that require manual work. I sometimes dislike open world games for that reason when there is empty space or repeating events to go through like Breath of the Wild, even if gaining new items and knowledge.
I think the two most important things when it comes to make backtracking fun are having fun entertaining movement and decreasing the time it takes as you progress (with shortcuts, power ups, etc.)
In some games a difference of framing might make something that is technically "backtracking" not feel like it. To bring up stylish action games like Devil May Cry, I can point to the indie MASTERPIECE that is Assault Spy where they did do the "play through the game again, just as a different character" in the Amelia campaign. You unlock it about halfway through the initial Asaru story mode but it gets its own spot in the menu, to frame it as sort of "Option B." But really, in the game as a whole you don't get to fight the final boss in a single run of the game. It's basically the exact same, mechanics-wise, as Devil May Cry 4, but it doesn't feel like something done out of laziness. I mean, yeah that might be because it's an indie game but I don't really think that's the case since there are lower budget games where you CAN feel like the game was padded. It helps that Assault Spy is a short game but also that the Amelia campaign has its own story with a different cast, its own plotline and a way different tone that has a lot of noticeable differences in the overall plot than just "Asaru's story mode but with Amelia instead." But simply placing it as being the second story campaign instead of half of a full story mode makes it seem like it's not backtracking. Or to use a bigger budget game that does the same thing, Scarlet Nexus has the Yuito and Kasane routes which use the same environments and enemies and do converge at some points but because it's a more story-driven game with campaigns that are only occasionally converging and the boss fights are mostly different it certainly doesn't feel like it's just padding.
21:41 : "It's like an intrinsic version of a metroidvania." After I finished Tunic, I've read a few reviews of it, and one of them used a term that I think encapsulates this idea as a whole genre: "knowledgevania", which fits Outer Wilds better than it fits Tunic. Tunic is a mix of the two, since you will need the actual upgrades to reach the end, but the knowledge of how to do some things is also something you need to acquire to finish it. I'm looking for games that would fit that idea.
Okami has some backtracking throughout the whole game, but pretty much evertytime, the area change because of the story and you have new abilities to get items and stuff. Plus you run pretty fast, and the visuals and music make the trip nice. Pokemon doesn't have backtracking per se, but you do find your way back to old places. In the old games, back when HM were a thing, you'd make a mental note of certain obstacles (cut trees, smash rocks, climblable path, or even a body of water that could hide something). And you'd WANT to go back there as soon as you could to explore. It's rarely required, but you could get a TM and even if the reward itself is not to your liking, there is a chance to stumble onto a never before seen Pokemon. I think that's why it works, it's not mandatory, it's player motivated and almost always rewarded with a chance for surprise !
Yeah exactly. I NEVER understood why people complained about abcktracking in Skyward Sword, when each time you revisit, you either explore a new aera, or the land is significantly changed.
@@BJGvideos For anyone who doesn't know, if you talk to the Goron explorer one too many times while completing the Thunder Dragon's quest, the game will glitch and make you unable to complete the quest. So just don't talk to them until you're done. I think it was fixed in HD, but Skyward Sword isn't really the same on the Switch...
I think the worst instance I've seen was in the Chrono Trigger DS Remake. The mountain bonus level added in that game (I forget its name) did not have an option to skip going up or down it. And sometimes you would get to the top, do one thing, get a cutscene, then be warped back to the base of the mountain and have to go back up it immediately.
Yo-Kai Watch is nothing but back tracking, but it never feels tedious because of how small it is. The game takes place in Springdale, and it has only 5 main areas that are unlocked slowly as you progress. This allows you to not be bogged down by running left and right. Also, the game has a Metroidvania element where you upgrade your watch to see and unlock higher ranked Yo-Kai and doors. That way, you can explore well worn areas and find something new. Thirdly, the game has a day and night cycle that opens and closes certain sections of the game, allowing the designers to repaint old rooms with more gameplay. Finally, there are the Mirapos, who can be found late game to teleport you to anywhere you need as long as you have talked to them first. In the end, what makes this map great is its small size and ease of traversal to keep the gameplay almost seamless.
I’m considering making a 2D Collectathon Platformer without a hub or fast travel; levels will have transition points that lead to other levels, and you’ll be able to easily open a map that shows how each of the levels connect to one other (IE, you’ll be able to tell there’s a transition to Level 4 at the top of Level 2, or that there’s a transition to Level 7 at the left edge of Level 8) there will be “teleporters” in some levels that lead to far away levels, but you’ll still have to actually get to said teleporter. The idea is that you’ll have to plan out the best route to get to whichever area you want to go, and there will only be a few times in the game in which you have to go through a specific area. I’m hoping this will help make the world feel really connected and also result in that thing open world games have where you set a destination for yourself and get distracted by a bunch of stuff as you make your way there. The main issue I see arising from this system is when players are going for the last few collectables in order to complete the game (a lot of backtracking with no more stuff to get distracted by) so perhaps I will included a fast travel method that you unlock after getting, say, 90% of the collectables. *Should also mention that most levels would have multiple connections; Level 5 might be connected to levels 2, 4 and 6 for example, and most connections would work both ways. Any critiques or recommendations to this idea would be greatly appreciated.
That a fantastic idea it really makes the world feel like one big screen now for the collectables I think you can you god of war route some doors will be closed in your actual playthrough going through the game but after finishing the game you'll get abilities that help you unlock the locked doors which will have shortcuts to the transition for the levels for example SPOILER WARNING in ragnarok there's an endgame quest which opens up the crater and the crater also becomes even bigger when you take a left turn that turn by itself opens up that map by like 9% Another idea that I have is that not all collectables should be locked up some of them will just need skill for this my examples grimvalor you may have heard of it so in act there's this area which combines both traversal mechanics from both acts act 2 and act 3 for the average player it's gonna be really hard not bc they don't have that item bc they just don't have the required understanding of the controls
Yes! None of the collectables will be locked behind unlockable abilities because you will have all the abilities at the start of the game. I plan to make some collectables that require the abilities of a certain character, however, you'll also have all characters unlocked at the start of the game and will be able to switch between them at any checkpoint. Basically, character-specific collectables will be a test of your understanding of that character's abilities rather than a lock-key situation like Mario 64 DS did. They will also be relatively infrequent, with most collectables being obtainable with any character.@@sourlab
To me this just sounds like a Metroivania without abilities. If the general flow is that you run through levels in order, but only use the shortcuts to travel between them for one-off collectibles, to change things in other levels, or for fun, I think it could work really well. Like imagine Banjo-Tooie connections except it's 2D. An example of Tooie at its best is where a puzzle in say level 5, causes something in level 2 to change and you can shortcut back to it for a collectible (like pouring water from above). It would make the world feel VERY alive compared to a 2D Mario. To beat the game people should be going "one way" (incrementing levels, ie. level 1, 2, 3, 4 ... ), rather than create a huge branching layout of levels that could lead players to getting lost or having to backtrack. Could be cool for occasional converging branches though (like Mario World / Tropical Freeze secret levels). My reasoning is that players that like 2D platformers tend not to want backtracking. The main experience they're looking for is overcoming challenges rather than puzzles or navigation, with speedruns being focused on great platforming. Puzzles are okay for collectables, but as soon as you put navigation as a challenge, it becomes more of a Metroidvania.
I LOVE RPGs with a comfy main hub town that has frequently updating NPC dialog and changes over the course of the game. You get to know the place, and the town itself feels like just as much of a familiar old friend as any of the people living in it
Regarding changing/recontextualising areas, I feel I have to give a nod to Metroid Fusion's tropical sector. Your first time there, it's crawling (heh, bug pun) with Zoros (Zeros? I honestly can't remember the name...) which are slow and display no real aggressive moves. (Think most 2D Mario enemies.) After a certain progress checkpoint (I want to say getting the bombs, but it's been a hot minute...) they turn into pupae that for all intents and purposes might as well be part of the level geometry, blocking off some passages and providing convenient platforms. After a second point, they hatch, (or whatever it is pupae do...) freeing up those passages but both removing those extra platforms (that by that point aren't really needed) and filling those rooms with the agile, flying menaces known as Kihunters.
I thought you would've had easily over a million subscribers, I never paid attention i guess. You are one of the biggest reasons for me becoming a game developer (you, GMTK, adventure time, dark souls, hollow knight and undertale, game jam videos and obviously just my love for video games were my biggest influences for me becoming a game dev), I always wanted to be but was convinced by negative people that it would be a bad idea, it wasn't until I started watching your videos and also some other great game design content creator's videos that I realised I was passionate about game design. So i bought a pc after I graduated high school and got a job so I could begin making games, also found out i love programming aswell lol. Idk, I just always assumed you had over a million subscribers because of the depth and quality of your videos also I see you as an equal to GMTK so just assumed you had equal subscribers. Love the content bro, congrats on 300K, keep it up!
When you talked about DMC 4 I immidiately thought about Pokemon Gold/Silver's Kanto region. It's from a different game, but since probably everyone has played them, it's essentially also a backtrack to a known region with a different order in which you tackle the gyms, different trainers and side quests. I think this is a prime example of how to revisit old areas in a game.
Not really? Kanto is just a boring chore, specially in the originals. Issue? You already had beaten lance yet there's not a single good trainer in Kanto except Blue (Red is in Jotho), everyone so underleveled is boring, with the map so sterile. At least they have proper levels in the remakes... except red that now is way overleveled.
A somewhat better example is Goldenrod City in Gold/Silver. Technically, you do new things when you must go there. First you stroll through the city and then battle Whitney, and next time you come back you’re exploring mazes so as to stop Team Rocket. The battling is not fun, but the exploration of these new places, in my opinion, is.
They change enough to make a novel experience. For new players it's a whole new region and for returning players it's a "where are they now" tour. Not exactly backtracking and definitely decent enough for a post -game campaign. I say this as someone that managed to play Black/White 2 before Black/White. I first experienced the map in reverse, and when I went back and played the previous game there were enough differences to make it feel like I wasn't retreading.
The messenger is one of the most amazing uses of backtracking I've ever seen, the game is an old school action platformer in the style of ninja gaiden, no backtracking at all, just old school level by level, then you get to what seems the end and the game suddenly opens up and becomes a metroidvania... I went into the game knowing very little of it, and I was shocked at how much it made me want to explore old areas once it became a metroidvania
Not fully related, but a gimmick I always like was 'revisiting early areas/bosses with end game weapons' Wind Waker for example, when you're assaulting Ganondorf's Tower you have a bunch of encounters with Darknuts. You can fight them like normal, or use your shiny new Light Arrows to casually one shot them and keep going. It feels good.
One game that comes to mind for this topic is Fez. I loved the game and the puzzles, but I couldn't bring myself to finish the game because all of the backtracking meant I had to solve the same puzzles over and over again if I wanted to keep exploring, and it became so miserable I just gave up
Here’s a personal silly favorite of mine when it comes to Backtracking: Pac-Man World/Pac-Man World Re Pac In this 3D Platformer game you play as Pac-man and do Pac-man things: eat dots, eat ghosts, and of course.. Fruits. You’ll run along locked doors that require a fruit to unlock it, usually by going further into the level before going back to where you last saw the door. Get the fruit, open the door and get your reward: A button to show more dots or progress forward, a letter, and importantly.. Keys to save Pac-Man’s Family. Most find it annoying but I find it a great part of the game. It’s Pac-Man, he navigates through mazes, so arguably the level itself can be considered a maze to run around and bounce around.
The most memorable instance of backtracking for me was in about 40 hours into FFVIII, when I went back to Balamb Garden specifically so I could get revenge on that goddamn T-Rex 😈
Metroidvanias are exactly what I think of for backtracking: good and bad. It's funny how many things you take for granted. Save points, Warp rooms, maps and abilities that make traversal faster (dash, double-jump, flight and stronger attacks). Also, as a way to avoid backtracking, I love an unlocked gate or shortcut that you get at the end of a level/stage that either allows you to jump back to the beginning or makes it a round trip.
A great form of backtracking is when the player sees a change in the location they are returning to AND when the backtracking makes sense In Tales of Symphonia, (spoilers below) You travel from the starting world Sylvarant and go to the other connected world Tethealla. After some events later, you are forced to return to Sylvarant and the world changes quite a bit. From towns previously visited to even some dungeons because of the mana shift. Not many RPGS utilize world dynamic shifting with backtrack but its great when the games does it right
I don't usually like backtracking. I have huge problems with this done on interconnected map games, is just not my cup of tea. But in the other hand, i like how Wario Land 4 does it, but you already mentioned it on the video, in this case. I like how Sonic Frontiers does something... similar to backtracking? I'm not entirely sure if it works or don't. Since Sonic moves really fast you have easier access to things you're missing, Cyberspace Stages, memory tokens, guardian fights or challenges. I always like to do the challenges so i unlock fast travel and do the story then. But having the gimmick of doing it whenever you feel it's a good moment, feels kinda nice on the islands. It feels linear but at the same time, you have the free option to roam and find more things you're missing to progress. With the new Kocos and the Chain Action challenges, it made me want to revisit some islands to get more new things
Sonics travelsal in frontiers has genuinely became one of my favourites it feels like marvel spiderman swinging or arkham knights gliding it feels really good to just run and it made alot better by the spindash and the jukebox
It's wonderful whenever Radiant Historia is mentioned, considering how low key it seems to be. I've heard much good about the remake as well but have yet to play it.
Technically, characters in Outer Wilds do have different dialogue as you store more info in your ship logs, but it is just a bonus to see their reactions to things you've figured out. And the only character who actually has a clear view of the sun will say different things depending on how far into a cycle you are.
The short answer is to make the environment different the second time around. Sometimes this means changing the environment, but it's more resource-effective to give the player new tools that change how they interact with the environment - or simply have the environment play differently when you do it 'backwards'. Something as simple as a slope that you can't jump up can achieve this, as anyone who's interacted with a ledge in Pokemon knows.
one of my favorite examples of backtracking is in Mega Man Legends 2 where after you find a key you gotta go through the same pathway again but a lot of obstacles that weren't active before are now in action and make it harder and a new fresh experience
The Legend of Heroes: Trails (AKA: Kiseki) is actually (usually) really good with its backtracking because every time the main story updates, (almost) every, single, NPC, in the accessible area gets new dialogue. And it's not just fluff dialogue either, these NPCs are the main characters of their own stories and each of them has their own unique story arc that they're going through while you, the player, is focusing on the player characters. It does get just a little ridiculous when you reach the point in a story arc where you have access to an entire country map, but it's usually worthwhile to keep up with the side stories that you find interesting and if you want to find out what other people have been up to, there's always New Game Plus.
I don't know if it's backtracking but the fact that every mission in mgsv sends you back to mother base really stifled my enjoyment with its pacing. Same with FF16.
Only if you exfiltrate by helicopter! If you exit the mission area on foot, you stay on the area map and don't need to drop in again. It's not communicated well so that's on the game, but it does give you options.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - I loved how backtracking / travelling trough Magmoor Caverns in Metroid Prime 1 worked. That area connects two other areas you need to go to about two or three times, but also serves as a location you need to expolore on it's own, with it's own challenges, collectibles and puzzles. -- spoilers for Prime 1 below -- First time you enter it, you're greeted with both tough monsters and lava pits. But on your second visit, you already have a weapon that can almost one shot most enemies there, plus you can reach new areas. Third and fourth time - you have abilities you can use to skip platforming sections you've already done. And the cherry on top - by the end of the game you have so much health, damage reduction and ability to just run through liquids, which means you can just run through the lava, like it's minor inconvenience lol In essence, the area gets progressively easier as player becomes stronger, but since it's an area you need to travel through ~3-4 times, it actually works in it's favor. Additionally it creates a feeling like you're literally overpowering a hostile environment.
In the coming days, you will hear talk of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door having bad backtracking. I corroborate this as a superfan, as the game starts with the inoffensive Petal Meadows, then builds until the malicious joke that is General White. Don't even get me started on the Troubles. However, most will not know the horrors that lie in Paper Mario: Sticker Star. Just because something is an abnormally poor intersection of quest and level design, even for its time, doesn't mean it can't get so much worse.
As a German player, I know a way to make General White worse: Removing the one clue you do have. The German version translated his name as "General Bob-umm" which completely omits the fact that he's colored white. In any other language, the player at least *might* recall there was a single white Bob-Omb at the very beginning of the game and start the chain this way, but the German version takes away even that possibility.
@@rainpooper7088You would still have the hint fortune teller who lists the full area order (because they knew General White was rough), but that is a HUGE disadvantage and you'd need to remember that fortune teller exists.
With Thousand Year Door as well, the backtracking would be improved significantly with just adding in the Spindash + Speedy Spin early game from PM64. Really hoping the remake adds them, as it would make all the annoying and slow sections of TTYD a lot snappier and easier to replay. Meanwhile with Sticker Star, you would likely have to overhaul the game to fix its issues with annoying backtracks.
I do. Chuggaa is making a "Gameplay" of Sticker Star and everyone who made it to chapter 3 knows that thing is backtracking the videogame, alongside being a walking simulator. He even had a mini-rant about that in chapter 5. BTW, he's not being unfair, chapter 4 was mostly praised because it was actually good.
Backtracking can be fun if the Path introduces you to new Challenges... (or even the same old Challenges but seen from a different Perspective, for instance: upside down...). Thank You for another Masterclass Doc 💯👏🏻
This video was great! As someone who dreams of making a detective game based in the same two locations, I find it encouraging to hear that mystery games can work great for that aspect. I’d love a video on detective game design honestly!
18:45 "Some old roads are blocked off". This specifica area is by far the biggest flaw of Hollow Knight, since it blocks the shortest path between a fast travel station and the town.
A possible intent of Paper Mario TTYD's Chapter 7 backtrack-fiesta fetch quest is to get the player back into prior areas in case they've missed something or haven't been back since gaining new abilities/knowledge. The imagery of those areas are more likely to foster a recall of some unsolved mystery or unreachable thing than some NPC generally hinting at doing so. Of course, this is not an engaging method of doing so for some who are more knowledgeable or thorough players.
One game that wasn't mentioned in this video, that I believe does retreading old levels very nicely, is Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, where you can alter levels in various ways, like doing them at night, changing the water levels, freezing the level, or rotating or flipping the level to name a few examples.
Seirra wasn't even the worst of them when it comes to missable stuff to progress the story. Anyone play Jet Force Gemini for the N64? Amazing game, highly recommend. What the game doesn't tell you though is this: there are bears (called tribals) that you need to collect (or rescue) throughout the game. There are just there and you can kill them, but that isn't an issue, you can just replay the level and collect them again... unless you kill them by blowing them up, and they get decapitated, which doesn't respawn them. And you need to collect 100% or you can't get to the final boss. And the game doesn't tell you this... until you get to just before the final boss... lol
I love how in tales of symphonia they made you go through the bad guy's main hq multiple times however you always do it in a different ways and different places until you backtrack to an empty base where you have to look for your crew for story reason and move on. There's also a point where you have to figure how to summon a spirit because it went around to buy milk and never came back where you have to check a few marks by talking to a specific set of npc and have to go back to an old dungeon but at that point you unlocked flight which makes world traversal way faster and your party is way stronger + you would have skills to make dungeon traversal less of a pain didnt like that one as much tho
One thing that makes backtracking suck less is when an area is complex enough for you to learn it and you get new traversal abilities that recontextualize minor aspects of its design. It's kiiinda a similar idea to the games you see these days where you hit trees or whatever for ages to get resources and they take forever, so you hire helpers to do the work for you so you don't have to deal with the tedium. It's introducing a known annoyance and then making you feel good when you have to deal with it less and less. For an example I played recently, having to backtrack for a missed sidequest in Sea of Stars is a little more interesting after you get the Graplou, because it can latch onto any climbable surface, so even areas not designed around it get some fun little micro-optimizations that feel good to do.
Great video! Really glad to see Outer Wilds at the end. I always pitch it to my friends as "the best game you can only ever play once" lol, the way it handles backtracking is pretty masterful.
One of my favorite games, rainworld, does almost all of these correctly. You go through areas over and over, but YOU'RE different. In the many characters there's different timelines. You see the rot slowly corrupt more and more. You see ancient structures collapse. Even the few fetch quests are fun and different. One, you go through the same area, but the item you're bringing to someone (I won't say much for spoiler reasons, but its to save someone) gives you the ability to turn gravity down and fly around for short bursts. There's a complex reputation system for each region. New regions for certain characters. It's a great game. and even after atleast 100 hours of gameplay, it keeps its challenge.
One game that has backtracking and fech quests as the main element and executes it fairly well is the Kindergarden series. The whole thing is a timeing puzzle without litteral time pressure, and completing many of the puzzles involves getting a read on the charaters, and what sort of archetypes they fall into. Each time you get an ending in the game is extremely short, 5 or so minutes. Especially the second entry with many QOL additions, like showing what items you need for what storylines. you nearly always have the information you need to continue, and if not, no biggie. You can reset the day and get back where you were pretty fast, especially in the second game where you can reset to specific times.
My issue with Metroid Prime specifically, having recently done a playthrough of it, is that it feels like they don't give you movement-related stuff fast enough. My friend and I played it together and any time we realized we needed to backtrack somewhere, there was a big groan shared between us as we knew it would be a slog to get back to where we needed to go if it was really far away from us. Especially considering this game has no fast travel system so it's 100% just walking back to where you need to be. Something like the grappling hook which seems like it would speed up getting through the levels ended up being one of the last things we unlocked so it took forever to get anywhere as a result. If there was at least a way to jump back to an area (I think the health + ammo refill areas would have served this purpose very well as "nodes" to fast travel to), it would have been way less of an issue. It was neat putting together what we needed to do but the trip back was usually seen as "well there goes some of our health to chip damage from enemies we run by" or in some cases you just have to take care of the enemies. We've already fought the enemies, it's not a novel experience and nothing really changed about the level itself it's just that we can access a new thing. Even then, the new thing is usually just like, an energy tank or a missile capacity upgrade. Nice, not necessary, but we didn't necessarily always know what it would be going into returning to an area because we got a new ability.
I don’t even have to watch it, I know. Simply make the same enemies harder by varying their moveset, add new enemies, or have the characters be developed since you were last there. I think at least-
I love how hollow knight is such a masterpiece doc always have an example from it for almost every video, and the videos themselves are great (like this one) keep the good work doc!
I feel so validated now for not being a fan of Devil May Cry 4. I knew something was off, but only just now you've made me realize it was all the backtracking.
Scarlet Nexus has one of the coolest cases of backtracking. The final dungeon being remixed level design from every area you had to go to in the game with loads of tough enemy encounters and wonderful cutscenes giving you story on the main antagonist's background. Probably my favorite case of backtracking in gaming ever at this point.
while not technically backtracking, Darktide does something interesting with its maps to mix things up while still avoiding procedural level generation. one big complaint people had with vermintide 2 was that even with so many levels added, when you've played it for hundreds of hours as intended it gets repetitive, even with random enemy placement. What they did in their followup Darktide was make much larger maps that have multiple possible objective. when you play on it you don't see the entire map. Depending on which objective is present on that map, you will have a different starting area and ending area and take a different route. you will pass through some of the same areas, but not all of them and you might even be going in a different direction. one time you start in a certain area and to get to the objective you have to pass a bridge that is up, to lower it you need to grab several power packs and load it up while waves of enemies charge you and you have to defend the person carrying them, and then wait as even more hordes come while it lowers. Thats just halfway through the level. another time you start very close to the opposite side of the bridge and its already down, you just pass over it quickly and then take a different turn and go in a completely different direction and its basically a different map. The first time I realized I was on the same map, just a different area and I hadn't been paying attention to the map names was when we were crossing a catwalk and I noticed far below was a couple small bridges over a chasm. I remember that area very well, we just didn't visit it in this playthrough, we went over it. this also does a great job at making it feel like a true hive city, its huge and its a mess of a maze you can get lost in. instead of all the cool areas we can see in the distance being just background areas that arent fleshed out, some of them actually are areas you could visit in different versions of the same map. really makes it feel massive and it doesnt' feel as repetitive, and yet the devs don't have to make 30+ maps. they can make half that and make several different versions.
Ghost Song does a brilliant thing where at one point in the game, a corridor you've been through dozens of times suddenly has a boss fight in it. It catches you off-guard in such an unexpected way that you spend the entire rest of the game never feeling like you know *exactly* what's going to happen the next time you run through some random corridor you've been in before. NPCs will also move around the map in significant ways, leading to lots of unexpected random encounters in places you've already been.
4:46 SO glad that the remake adds the fast-travel room (as well as an extra set of pipes that allows you to skip the fourth and fifth required trips through the Twilight Trail). Makes the joke land MUCH better.
Man, every video I see showing a Sierra game makes me so happy I started off with Lucasarts. I had a hard time trying to make it through that one as a five-year old, imagining that but with a lot of perma-death options forcing a restart... torture. Also I didn't even remember that Zero Mission does that to you at the end? Then again I was someone who went through Shadow Hearts Covenant which to my memory does something JUST like that (JRPG's in general feel like they suffer from this issue) and I am just happy I got more stuff to play with back then. Perhaps my mindset is what backtrack implementers think everyone feels like- just simpleminded gratitude for "more game".
I fibd it quite odd. I personally loved my time in TTYD and was quite surprised when people were complaining about backtracking. I think the game is quirky, charming and the whole running about looking for a character for me felt mostly like the dev's humor of the situation. Never annoyed me as I already liked the locations from the get-go.
The three biggest things I think of when it comes to this: 1. Design a "two-way road." By this, I mean a level sequence where moving through it one direction is significantly *different* of a solve than moving through it the first way. Maybe this means committing part of each level a in unidirectional way that just criss-crosses at some point in the middle. Speaking of: 2. Design an "intersection." Let's say there's a route that's left-to-right primarily by design, but something that looks like one hidden path going down and one hidden path going up. But the bigger metadesign makes one of these hidden paths a 'secret entrance' with one kind of item check, and the second a 'secret exit' to a new road with a different item check after a point where the player has them both. It's a satisfying combination of familiar and "okay, this is neat." 3. Design a "forked road." You have a path where there's a check at the end, and if you make the check you proceed forward, and if you fail the check, you proceed to a loopback point where the loopback gives you a tool that then "solved" the check you went to before. You'll want the loopback to feel substantial enough though, that it's a feature and not a punishment for "failing the check."
I havent watched this video yet, but i gotta comment Stalker: SOC did backtracking beautifully. After raiding the lab (labs are equivalent of dungeons/zelda temples in stalker) you gotta return to safe territory. But you're low on ammo, low on medical supplies and anti radiation kits. You're possibly over cumbered from all the loot you picked up in the lab. You also wont exit at the same place you entered and due to night/day cycle you could exit in the middle of the night (after you entered the lab in daylight ) and encounter all kinds of monsters and anomalies in the dark. It really makes you feel relieved after you reach the bar or some other safe zone. Also you probably found some type of document or flash drive that will advance the story forward.
I would like to mention the Trails series, which does a phenomenal job of rewarding backtracking without giving you anything new to do in an area, simply by advancing NPC plots. Every NPC in Trails has their own arc -- they're living their own lives while you're off doing your own thing. It's definitely not something everyone will care about, but I religiously walk around and talk to everyone just to see what they've been up to. Did the shopkeeper's mother finally manage to find him a girlfriend? Did that awkward young man ever manage to confess to the girl he liked? What about that merchant whose his niece sent you to rescue him? Bet you didn't think he'd show up seven games later! As far as development resources go, it's extremely cheap (so long as they aren't voiced -- though AI might make that more viable sooner than we expect). The only hard part is making sure the characters actually have interesting stories, which, admittedly, requires a lot of talent (and a fleshed out world). That, and it helps to have most of the characters show up in a sidequest at some point -- coordinating that can be a challenge. It's obviously not something everyone will enjoy (the later Trails games are among the longest video game scripts ever written, being the same length as the Harry Potter SERIES), but for anyone who likes a living, breathing world, it can't be beat.
yeah exactly. When I plan long tracks in games, and the route is pretty or the traversal interesting enough to walk through, rather than fasttravel to the nearest waypoint, I always plan my track along interesting things, like collectibles or side quest markers. I'll even go longer routes through the same parts of the map to get that collictible on the way than going backtracking straight to the marker
Resident Evil does a lot of backtracking also. Especially in the RE2 remake and in Biohazard. But they do it with the goals of getting new items or opening up new routes, so there is incentive to backtrack and I appreciate that aspect of it.
I think Skyrim (maybe most of the Elder Scrolls games) really is a shining example on how to make a back-track system. Whiterun doesn't feel like a backtrack, -it feels like a home. It's a familiar place where you can sell your loot from your quests, interact with NPCs you've gotten to know, practice smithing, alchemy, and enchanting skills. It springs you off on so many quests and is the place many story-beats are centered around.
One of my favorite things they do while backtracking, is when they fundamentally change an area. Like when Metroid Dread had you revisit areas, but they were frozen over on your second visit. Not nearly enough games do that. It could even be something as simple as a change in the weather or seasons to change the conditions of the area a bit.
That's why I really love super Metroid, Dark Souls and co. In super Metroid the thing I most liked is the point that you have abilities like shinespark or wall jump which you don't need to solve the game, but to 100% it. And you get this knowledge inside of the game world
An example of good backtracking is in the game Left 4 Dead 2 in the “Hard Rain” campaign, where the first two levels are getting from a boat to a gas station to get gas for said boat, then the next two are getting back to the dock with this gas, but after a heavy rainstorm that flooded the area. Because of the flood, the players now have the options of taking altered routes that are higher up to see landmarks easier on their way back.
A game that is awesome in that aspect is The Witness. You can unravel the whole world quickly and linearly if you know the logics behind the puzzles, but you don't. To acquire this knowledge the game will present you puzzles with different difficulty levels in different locations, which make your understanding of the puzzles grow as you explore the same island. There is nothing more satisfying than finding a puzzle that makes no sense, giving it up is moving on, to later come back and solve it because now you understand.
I actually grew up playing DK64 and Banjo Tooie, and I love them. The feeling of exploring and opening up the world I always found enjoyable. I went back and played Banjo Kazooie later, and didn't care for it. Compared to Tooie, Kazooie felt so claustrophobic. The worlds were so small and cramped compared to the larger worlds from Tooie, that gave so much more opportunity for exploration and adventure.
Ooh I wanna guess before I watch: I assume it much of it would have to do with variation. Maybe you go down a hallway, but you get a powerful weapon, so when you back through now you cut through enemies that you struggled with to get there that makes you feel more powerful. Or, maybe you do something that changes that area/level (like you open a lever and then the level floods, etc). Maybe the types of enemies change? Especially making more difficult enemies appear after the player has reached a certain level, killed a certain boss, or gotten a certain item is a good move because otherwise those old enemies won't offer a challenge after making the player more powerful if it has RPG like mechanics or item upgrades. Ooh... another idea is CONTEXT. So maybe going through a zone you are slow and methodical, but then the room starts to fill with lava or the roof starts closing in so now on the way back you have to hurry so you don't die (like the escape sequences in Super Metroid). We could also go the Legend of Zelda route, where whatever new ability you get in an area is useful against the enemies you face, so it gives you an opportunity to use and practice it. Anyway I'm spit balling let's see how I did.
Or there's the Nonary Games duology, where the "backtracking' comes in the form of going back to past story segments, in order to use knowledge gained from other timelines to progress. This was quite tedious in the original 999 DS release, but Virtue's Last Reward added a timeline chart, with explicitly-marked locks and branches, which was backported to 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors in the collection. You can quickly zoom past already-seen dialogue, with it automatically slowing down when new dialogue occurs. Furthermore, making different decisions using this canonical time-jumping can lead to drastically different endings, with each one providing new information or context - in 999, only one alternative ending needs to be seen in order to unlock the true ending (the others being optional extras), but in VLR most of the endings provide information the player character uses in other branches. That's another form of backtracking I like, as it leads to drastically different content.
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Can you maybe do a design doc on Videogame crossovers and What to do and what not to do with them, including the Mario + Rabbids game?
What's the instrument in your intro?
I've seen dozens of Factor ads. You're the first to mention they're the same company as hello fresh in one though.
I always appreciate games adding shortcuts that can be create once you explore the area so that when you backtrack, its way faster to access those areas than the first time you have to get there.
Alternatively, this new ability you got let you access the same place but way easier and faster
Say at first you need to take a side path to access a town because there's a wall in the way of the short path, which takes you through a whole dungeon first, later on you need to go back to the town, but now have the ability to explode walls you got from a later dungeon
What I love even better is shortcuts that were accessible THE WHOLE TIME, but were hidden by perspective or something. And later in the game, you are forced to discover the shortcut. Tunic is great with these!
Even faster way to not play the game is to turn it off. The journo-invented consept of Metroidvania has no bearing on good DESIGN, just self-aggrandizing analysis. It's a forced concept of following platforming models that don't work, so much that you start craving shortcuts AWAY from the gimmick of "interconnected" set pieces.
Just calling it "backtracking" exposes what a massive back-handed compliment it is. I would never MAKE a game about "back" tracking, I would just make an interconnected world two things, elective, and hard as balls. Well, it's less novel because I guess Dark Souls beat me to it, plus plenty of actual souls-like platformers.
You WANT to WANT to waste your time, in the tracking towards the forward direction. That's the meat of the game. A good way to do it would be every trek a transaction of resources and time, resources for what you LOSe in order to survive harvesting others in their stead. And time, in exchange of HAVING FUN hwile doing it. But that's a WASTE of time to many-a Metroidvania fan. If you liked the gameplay, every repeat playthrough WOULD BE your metroidvania as you speedrun conventional platformer games.
I just wished that Tunic somehow marks the hidden passages after you found them once. Hitting the backtracking part of the story was so frustrating for me. I knew that the world was full of shortcuts, I couldn't just remember exactly where they were. I had to walk the long way all around, and then rediscover the shortcuts from the "visible" side. It felt like teasing me with "the shortcut was here all along" just like the captain in TTYD. But every. single. time.
I can agree with this as long as it doesn’t make it too obvious that you are supposed to go that way.
“The framing is meant to be a joke but it doesn’t quite land right.”
I think this is because the player is the butt of the joke. A wild goose chase like that could be funny in tv or a movie (well, somewhat funny at least), but it would probably be presented as a montage, without needing to follow the characters every step of the way, and it would be the characters, not the audience, who’ve been through the pointless search.
also if you want to land a joke about useless backtracking, you shouldn't be guilty of useless backtracking in earlier stages of the game.
If this were an optional quest I think the joke would land. It's not just that you're doing busywork, it's that you're being prevented from continuing the game until you do that busywork. It's a matter of managing expectations-- if you are *forced* to run around talking to NPCs before you continue the game, you feel like the game is just messing with you. If you're already in the headspace that you're doing an optional sidequest -- therefore you're choosing not to continue the main game right now -- then doing something silly is seen less as a waste of time because it was your choice, you were already not continuing the main game.
@@MmeCShadow yeah I totally agree with that, give the player some kind of reward for putting up with the nonesense so they can begrudgingly enjoy being the butt of the joke anyways. Having the roadblock be a necessary waste of time in the main quest always sucks, but if you go out of your way to get pranked by the devs of your own agency that could be funny
yeah I've heard Steph Sterling complain about this a lot. Your joke doesn't land if you are criticizing an unfun or bad game mechanic, and then actually use the bad game mechanic, especially multiple times.
Like if you want to criticize bad escort quests, instead of making the player do a bad escort quest and then mock it, you could subvert expectations. have it start as an escort quest and then as soon as the players leave the town the escort dies/is kidnapped or they say screw this and abandon the escort or mug them. have the escort be part of an ambush that attacks you right as you leave town. heck have you play as a group of mercenaries, they are given an escort quest and they turn it down saying how much they hate escort quests, then accept a job from the opposing faction to attack said escort/caravan. You can criticize a bad game mechanic without then subjecting the player to it and become a hypocrite.
I'll be honest, don't even mind the General White quest in isolation, the problem is it's part of a game that has a running theme of wasting as much of your fucking time as possible.
I swear the old sierra games were built that way so they could sell you the guide. Many of the solutions were so obtuse they were impossible. I love them, but yeah, had to be played with a guide.
We did have a line about calling a 900 number for hints that got cut.
Hmmmmm _maybe_. Part of the adventure in these games is figuring out how to solve the mystery with all the pieces you were given. Yeah, it's totally unfair that you need a pie for some inscrutable option and that all the logical options you can do with it _aren't_ the solution, but I also feel like that was these games' unique style of trolling you that I've come to super appreciate growing up with them. It's... a special kind of hell haha
But oh trust me, I've been frustrated with them as much as I've been in love with them. I wouldn't recommend anyone else picking up their design philosophy ever again. That said, they still hold a special place in my heart for their unique ability to mess you over.
I grew up on classic Sierra games in the day, and can also attest that the solutions to many puzzles/obstacles were nigh impossible without at least a ("sold separately") hint to the solution. Which is probably part of why _Myst_ was such a big deal in its day: its design team made a conscious effort to keep their puzzle solutions intuitive/realistic in the context of the setting/puzzle.
certainly. this isn't even really a "theory" honestly; it's been well-known for decades at this point
I tend to like when these things happen:
-New shortcuts are found (surprise and comfort)
-New enemy encounters or events happen on your way back (surprise)
-New traversal abilities make the trip different (recontextualizing)
-(not actually backtracking, but) Looping back around via a different path (sense of progress/a journey)
-There are optional, harder detours for goodies (risk/reward, options)
So, the older Pokémon games (especially Johto)?
I think the most important aspect of creating _good_ backtracking is ensuring that the player is making _forward_ progress when they’re retracing their steps, rather than it being a situation of stalling or, worse, undoing the player’s work.
It’s a paradoxical thought, but let me explain. The reason why backtracking works well in games like Hollow Knight and Outer Wilds is due the fact that backtracking to previous locations leads directly into the next section of gameplay or the story. When you defeat the Soul Master in the City of Tears and obtain the Desolate Dive, you backtrack into the Forgotten Crossroads via the elevator shortcut (or newly opened Stag Station) that you unlocked while exploring the City and make your way to where you open the pathway to the Crystal Peak, which is a new area with new content for you to see. Similarly, when the player resets or goes back to another planet in Outer Wilds, they’re now equipped with knowledge that allows them to open up access to new parts of that planet that they previously ignored or didn’t know how to interact with, and leading them further into their goal of reaching the explanation behind the game’s core mystery.
In contrast, the fetch quest example is a case where backtracking is essentially a stall for time, because going back to a previous location in order to fulfill the quest does not introduce any new content. You go backwards to get the necessary item(s) to do the quest, then return back to where you’re able to use them and unlock the next new section of the game. This is a *huge* design issue with many historical quests in Old School RuneScape, and is the reason why the vast majority of players rely on wiki guides to do the quests. You’re asked to backtrack from the quest location to the bank or, worse yet, a completely different part of the game world in order to get the item or items that you need constantly. It’s so bad to the point that the developers just outright added a feature to the in-game quest log where you can right-click a quest’s name and select an option that’ll open that quest’s wiki guide page in your bowser. I’m not kidding: nobody should ever do OSRS quests without a guide. I challenged myself to not look up the required items in advance and just play the quests through naturally, and I gave up after just 26 out of 158 total quests that’re in the game. (Most people likely would’ve gave up much earlier than that, too.)
The way I would describe backtracking being used as forward progress is to take out a sheet of paper and a pencil, and start drawing a straight line across the page. The line represents your progress through the game. When you get to the end of the page, you have hit a “backtracking point” in the game. If you’re backtracking in the latter way, you will draw back _over top_ of your existing line and trace the line through a second time. If you’re using the first example, and you’re making backtracking that creates forward progress, you’ll turn the _page_ over and continue drawing through your existing line, but on the other side of the sheet of paper - on new ground, where the player hasn’t been yet.
If you want backtracking in your game, that is what you to have happen. You want to retrace over your existing line, but from a fresh perspective, in a way that the player is always moving _toward_ the end goal - completion of the quest, completion of the area, the story, etc. - never _away_ from it.
That's what I like to call Sidetracking. You know, unlocking new paths when you have new habilities, or TO unlock something. You're not necessarily going the same route, but a parallel one...
Now that I think about it, TLOZ dungeons are famous AND infamous for their backtrack-heavy nature, because the whole design is an interactive labyrinth where anything can affect other rooms in the dungeon.
People love that unique level design, to the point a gripe many have with BotW and TotK is that dungeons no longer have a structure who incentives and interacting more with the envoriment, partially to avoid backtrack that was honestly never that big of an issue except on terribly paced dungeons.
Then you also have the Elden Ring kind of backtracking, where content is so cleverly hidden by terrain that some entrances are only visible while you go in one direction and not the other.
So it rewards players that do the trek back on foot (or on Torrent) with a new perspective on the terrain which leads to new dungeon entrances and sometimes even boss battles hidden away.
@@arenkaiI love exploring Elden Ring for that reason… Stormveil Castle blew my mind! I saw a ledge and it looked interesting so I jumped… I kept going and found a roof path that actually led somewhere, to loot and enemies. I tried a different ledge and crept around and ended up above the front main gate! If you see something that looks interesting, you can probably get there or find a way.. I had so much fun exploring every inch of that castle and then got to Raya Lucaria thinking SV was one of a kind and nope… RL was the same way! Jumping rooftops, ledges, windows, ladders!
I love when games reward exploration and initiative, and have the bravery to just let you skip stuff. I don’t think people realize how insane “OPTIONAL” content is these days… I don’t mean little game modes, but you can literally skip like 70% of Elden Ring and beat the game. That’s super are these days because publishers only care about boosting playtime and advertising how big and full their game is and how open world it is… the idea of potentially letting people skip huge sections of the game, with unique assets is something almost no company would do. If they made the assets they will make damn sure we use them! Elden Ring has the equivalent of entire games that you can just never see or touch. That’s awesome to me because “freedom” only means something when you have a choice and exploration only feels genuine and exciting when you don’t have some marker pop up and you know that multiple quests send you there later. Elden Ring has exploration where it feels like you wouldn’t have ever found this catacomb or castle unless you went looking… the game was never going to push you there or show you the way. You feel like you just discovered it because you did!
Elden Ring makes backtracking and sidetracking work because there is always something to find, or you open shortcuts and everything feels earned and yours… there is feeling of being puppeted or guided, you just naturally find things on your journey because you want to! “Oh what’s that?” or “Ahh! Bear! Hide!” and suddenly you’re in some cool place finding loot.
TLDR; if the game isn’t on a linear path and well-interconnected it doesn’t feel like backtracking.
Exactly, I started my second save of Elden Ring recently, and I thought I explored Limgrave pretty thoroughly my first time through. I made a point to try and find a lot of stuff in each area before moving on to the Legacy dungeon, so I *thought* I would be retreading a lot of the same ground. Nope. I already found a dungeon and an entire beach area in Limgrave that I never found or thought was reachable in my first placythrough.
One example of backtracking in a video game I really like is hotline miami when you have to walk back to the car as it sets the overall tone of the game as the music stops and the focus is the pile of bodies left on the ground which conveys the question "do you like hurting other people"
I'm surprised you didn't mention Zelda Phantom Hourglass' Temple of the Ocean King. It's infamous for its backtracking, but I think there's a lot of merit in its execution (not that many agree). I personally enjoy it
THANK YOU! People complain about the "backtracking" but the way it is executed you traverse old areas in new ways (and in less time) and gain access to deeper levels of the dungeon. So you are not just retreading old ground. In fact I prefer it to the tower of spirits where they addressed the feedback by just having you climb a staircase to reach the new floor directly. IMO that is less fun and not a creative use of the space. Both games are underrated in general but phantom hourglass especially gets a bad rap.
I really like the Temple of the Ocean King, and honestly, tho most people prefer the tower in PH, the fact that it's divided into floors and you can enter each one at any time, makes it not even make sense to be a tower at all. I think Temple of the Ocean King is a great challenge trying to go up faster than before, and discovering the shortcuts with you're new items. Played the game 3 times and didn't bothered me in any of the
I like both approached, imo they're different enough in a good way. The Tower has great and challenging puzzles, plus it's fun to control the Phantoms.
@@fernando98322 honestly my biggest problem wasn't structuly, I just find Phantom Zelda too slow to control, I feel like I'm waiting for her to do her thing most of the time. That being said, not shitting on ST either, it's a pretty good game
Loads of people hate the repetitiveness of that game but I really liked being able to open all the shortcuts and becoming better and faster at doing it each time.
I’m currently working on a metroidvania, so this videos going to be helping out a lot! Thanks for the great videos Design Doc!
That's unfortunate. Let me know when you're making a low poly 3D collectathon.
@@MemeinAndDreaminwhat
@@MemeinAndDreamin#3dplatformersweep
I just subbed. Curious to see what you come up with.
Yoooo same
TTYD also had the side quests where you could only accept one at a time, so that added even more back tracking, where if you could at least accept something like 3 at a time, you might have at least less back tracking.
2D Metroid is usually good with backtracking, because you are going back to an area you have been through before and gave you trouble, but now you have more combat and traversal options that make navigating the old area much easier, plus your new abilities allow you to fetch items you couldn't before and even unlock new passages and shortcuts.
Xenoblade 1 also does backtracking really well, since NONE is required to beat the game. You are constantly moving forward in that game if you're just following the story (you will never be sent back to Colony 9 for story reasons after you leave it, Saihate is just a pitstop before the events of the Eryth Sea and Alcamoth with the first big twist, and you only go back to the Fallen Arm and Colony 6 for story reasons but the Junks is right there to take you to the next area you cannot access otherwise). And yet, the game is full of backtracking for the side quests, which are all optional, meaning you will be backtracking out of choice and not necessity! Having fast travel really helps too, and the fact you can then face stronger enemies you had no chance of dealing with before now that you are 20 levels stronger also give you an incentive to go back to previous areas.
XC1 spoilers ahead:
Going back to Melias Kingdom in Eryth Sea as the game story advances is absurdly cool, how the kingdom reflects to changes in political power during you're time there is immersive, and it's eventual destruction make you feel so bad. Going in there and seeing it completely empty of NPCs, only with Telethias to fight everywhere, and then seeing the ones that survive camping on different locations of the world to survive.
Still can't believe the amount of effort Monolith put into that game even after so many years, it's absurd
@@adv78 The child in front of the moving stairs is still waiting for his father to return even as a Telethia T^T
Dread is good with running you through frozen artaria and burenia to fight the experiment
“Saihate”???
@@aionicthunder Sorry, I play the game in Japanese.
Metroid is normally the poster child for good backtracking with how newly unlocked tools in your kit open up new paths and locations, but even the Metroid Prime series caught some flack for their respective endgame fetch quests, with the first one having the worst. It also had the most backtracking period with forcing you to depart and return to the Phazon Mines no less than 3 times before you could find its boss. Compounding the problem were respawning enemies who didn't get appreciably easier with new weapons like many 2D Metroids; you still can only use Power Beam to deal with Chozo Ghosts even if the X-Ray lets you spot them faster.
If you've got the ammo for it, Power Missiles are a good way to deal with Chozo Ghosts, and most of the time you can just run past them if you're just passing through. And being able to track them with the X-Ray Visor means you don't have the periods of waiting for them to stop being invisible.
It's still not the best backtracking power fantasy, but realising that you can just "nope" out of a bunch of the combat when you're not exploring makes basic backtracking much smoother.
@@rmsgrey And then there's Metroid Prime 2, where the Space Pirate Commandos are basically the Chozo ghosts but a lot more aggravating.
They phase in and out like Chozo ghosts, do a crapload more damage, take either 15 missiles (3 power missiles) or something like 10 Dark Beam Ammo + 1 missile to kill quickly. None of which would be a super huge problem, save for their greatest sin of all: they lock the effing doors while they're alive. So you can either spend a bunch of resources to dispatch them quickly, wait out their timer before they depart on their own (something like a full 2 minutes if I recall correctly), or avoid those rooms entirely, sometimes by taking a much more circuitous route. All of which are lousy options when you're backtracking through areas (sometimes several times) to use new powerups to find new routes, upgrades, keys, etc.
The only thing they have going on for them in comparison to the chozo ghosts is that you get the visor to track them properly at the end the same level you first encounter them in, so at least you don't have to wait until 3/4 of the way through the game like you had to for the xray visor
Prime 2's fetch quest is worse. In Prime 1 you really only need to backtrack for the three(?) in Phendrana Drifts, which require the Plasma Beam but the area is otherwise story complete before you pass through the Orpheon wreck, and the last one, but that one just requires the Phazon Suit you get a few rooms later, so it's just a minor annoyance. In comparison, Prime 2 only lets you get two (the one at the landing site and the one just past where you get the Spider Ball) without the Light Suit.
Ahhh, since you kept showing it, I thought you were gunna talk about it. That re2 remake was pretty good. The backtracking felt good too. Since every time you returned to the RPD it was full of even more zombies and lickers and eventually Mr. X. Also makes playing the 4th survivor even more crazy when you eventually play that and had to run through the sewers and the RPD.
We do talk about the Mr. X encounter specifically in our Impossible Bosses episode.
I'm a bit surprised that it wasn't mentioned at all since Survival Horror games are also a prime candidate to use backtracking as a very effective tool.
Those games revolve heavily around resource management and you have to plan ahead. Travelling back and forth on a limited map helps with this kind of planning and decisions made in the past also won't just disappear. None did it better than the original Resident Evil mansion (and its remake). _Should I save my bullets and just try to slip past these zombies? But then I will also have to run by them again on my way back. I might lose a lot of health. I should check the map, maybe it's better to clear this path if I need it more often._ You get the idea.
But that's not the only thing, backtracking can also help with the Horror part by exploiting the false sense of security that a known place might provide. _Hey I've been through this corridor several times before, it's totally safe!_ ...aaand this time something suddenly comes bursting through the windows. And after getting caught off guard like this once, you start to get paranoid and suspect something looming around every corner. Suddenly it doesn't matter anymore if you visited an area before and you just have this constant feeling of threat which creates a wonderful atmosphere for a horror game.
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Interesting that you showed the backtracking sequence in Skyward Sword, but didn’t comment further on it. If I recall correctly, in the fetch quest for water you showed, when you re-enter the forest temple, it is infested with new enemy types that weren’t there the first time round. Additionally, the water dragon area only opens up to the player after you’ve already been to 2 completely new areas on the map and completed an entire dungeon each from those areas. There’s also the fast travel in Skyward sword which doesn’t expect you to walk all the way to the temple and all the way back again, you can just teleport straight to and out of the temple. I think overall, this was quite a decent implementation of backtracking, that allows the player to revisit an older area without causing too much trouble or boredom for them!
Halfway through Guacamelee 2, reality starts to collapse which basically means black instant--death boxes spawn everywhere. Gaps that you could just jump over before now have a box above them too high to jump over, so you need to use the chicken slide move. Some gaps have boxes that prevent you from jumping _too_ high. It changes the way you navigate the entire world.
One of my favorite backtracking elements in games is from Skyward Sword's sandship. Exploring the ship, having to go back and forth to find keys, and changing what time the ship is in is amazing. It's almost two dungeons in one, as it's either set in the past or present.
At least with the Skyward Sword one, you have to revisit the same worlds with new equipment, but I loathe the fact the game plays too much like a movie game and very linear.
The revisiting in unique ways felt nice even with only three surface worlds to explore.
The best games make the act of movement and exploration fun, so that backtracking essentially means more of that thing you already like. Super Mario 64 involves exploring the same levels 6 or 7 times, but moving Mario around the map is so much fun that it's like being asked if I want more dessert. Of course I do! VVVVVV also gives me this sensation with its gravity-flipping motion mechanic.
In making this point, I also notice how the early levels of Super Mario 64 that feel like lived-in worlds are the most fun to navigate multiple times, whereas the levels that feel like glorified obstacle courses are, in my opinion, the least fun to retrace. Tick Tock Clock is maybe the biggest offender of this--having to climb up the gears and windings over and over again is kind of a pain.
@@daniel_361 Actually, you can get about half of them by turning around right at the start of the level and going straight to the obstacle courses. Still not as fun as, say, Snowman Land, but no magic carpets, at least.
One mechanic I'm working on for a long term project of mine is having changes occur in various environments depending on in-game date and plot progression. I took inspiration from games like Harvest Moon, where seasons would change the environment, and even what you could do during that time of the year. I've also played RPGs where they would have major changes happen in towns you already visited, once you moved forward enough in the game. This way if they place a backtracking required quest in that location, the player returns to something aesthetically different, with a new set of activities they can do that weren't there before. This allowed that game to have a smaller game world, but feel like it was a lot.
In the Xenoblade games back tracking is a huge optional part of the lore and world building, as you progress the stories events and circumstances change for the people in the world and you often get huge rewards, changes to the status of the world, and often something contributing to a larger optional goal. And from the very start of Xenoblade games end game monsters can be encountered in the starting areas showing that there is reason to go back and have another look around later. IMO Xenoblade improves it's back tracking in each game and by 3 I was reading every quest and enjoying visiting all the end-game sub areas.
One of the best things about Trails in the Sky and the Kiseki series more broadly is that, much like Hollow Knight, the world changes as the story progresses. Backtracking isn’t “I can’t believe I have to go here again,” but “I can’t believe I get to see this NPC I haven’t seen in 20 hours and they’re going to respond to all of the latest developments!”
It's worth noting that old Cierra games had a partial excuse for their long winded backtracking. Games were less common back then, as Dan Avidan of game grumps explained it, he played those games for hundreds of hours if need be, he didn't have 100 games to choose from, just 3 or 4. So padding out the content with stuff like that was more forgivable at the time.
The games were also (on average) short compared to modern games. After all, once you know the solution to a given puzzle, that (almost) never changed between different runs.
On the one hand I want to bring up the Lucasarts games of the time that didn't do that to you... buuut I have to catch myself and remember that even though I played Sam and Max when I was like 5, even by then Sam and Max were WAY modern in comparison to King's Quest, so they had KQ to learn from by comparison.
Sierra*
Makes sense
Another, more rare case: when the repeated areas are so familiar that it's cozy, or encourages emotional attachment. Like Kamurocho in Yakuza/Like A Dragon games. An LAD fan has spent hundreds of hours wandering the same few blocks, and starting a new game almost feels like revisiting a place you've lived. Or players can get really attached to the worlds of huge RPGs like Skyrim.
I think that's more of a case of hubworld study than backtracking per se imo
Those "intrinsic metroidvanias" are some of my all-time favorite games. I just really like the way they feel to play. Knowing that the door in front of you isn't simply out of your reach due to an item, but rather a mysterious puzzle to eventually be solved- or, even, not knowing that there is a door in front of you -makes metroidvania-style level design feel very different from your typical metroidvania.
Besides just Tunic and Outer wilds, a couple other games in this "genre" are Fez and Toki Tori 2.
This video gave me a great idea for a level in one of my many game ideas. Kind of like Subspace Emissary levels with a Pizza Tower escape sequence. Thanks for the idea, and congratulations on 300k. This channel has helped me so much with understanding game design better.
The most important question about backtracking is, is it fun to go from point A to point B in the game? The traversal, the combat you’ll face along the way - are those intrinsically fun to do? Or does one of them kind of suck, and it’s the story or new areas or something else that’s been pushing you forward? Because if it’s the latter, you’re screwed.
I do like me some MMO-style backtracking such as in Xenoblade, where you revisit towns/areas frequently to check for new stuff to do or stuff you might have missed, and you become quite acquainted with those areas. I find it's a nice way to build familiarity and comfort, which is something I really value, while keeping me engaged with new stuff to do and side story or worldbuilding developments. In Gormott, I explored fairly thoroughly early on, but I was still finding neat little things here and there dozens of hours later while filling that time with sidequests.
What I want to bring attention to is Ori and the Blind Forest. Nowadays, you have fast travel, and that was certainly a frequently requested feature, but the original game actually did work quite well without fast travel, especially after bash. The game map wasn't excessively large, so it was reasonable to gain intimate familiarity with it while getting to your destination within a couple minutes. In addition, most of the traversal was horizontal, which is where the platforming moveset really shines.
I cannot express how good of an idea bash was as a skill. All those enemies and projectiles that got in your way before now help you move through faster instead, and it can make some areas feel almost brand new. Once you get the feather, you fly visibly even farther horizontally, making some areas more like a little dance to traverse through again. As if this weren't enough, there's a glitch/speedrunning tech called bashgliding. It's super easy to perform consistently: rather than holding the direction you want to go after bashing, you aim and then release the left stick. Doing this lets you keep all your horizontal momentum until you touch ground etc. You can still double and triple jump along the way to fly farther.
With bashgliding in the picture, the feather has a massive impact because it keeps you in the air for much longer. It can be incredibly fun and satisfying to start at a place like the entrance to the Misty Woods and see how far you can travel eastward from one bash. Once you're focused on stuff like this, traversing through old areas becomes more like a fun little challenge to yourself to see how quickly you can get through and enjoy doing it.
bash is basically what makes Ori Ori.
I'm really glad someone talked about Radiant Historia.
While I have personally never completed it, I had fun when I was playing it.
I beat the original but my 3DS broke before I could beat the remake.
Thank you for the back tracking thing. I like those things that give off a deliberate different feeling like Wario Land 4 and Pizza tower or even something that involves your knowledge being improved rather than relying heavily on the extrinsic changes that require manual work.
I sometimes dislike open world games for that reason when there is empty space or repeating events to go through like Breath of the Wild, even if gaining new items and knowledge.
I think the two most important things when it comes to make backtracking fun are having fun entertaining movement and decreasing the time it takes as you progress (with shortcuts, power ups, etc.)
In some games a difference of framing might make something that is technically "backtracking" not feel like it. To bring up stylish action games like Devil May Cry, I can point to the indie MASTERPIECE that is Assault Spy where they did do the "play through the game again, just as a different character" in the Amelia campaign. You unlock it about halfway through the initial Asaru story mode but it gets its own spot in the menu, to frame it as sort of "Option B." But really, in the game as a whole you don't get to fight the final boss in a single run of the game. It's basically the exact same, mechanics-wise, as Devil May Cry 4, but it doesn't feel like something done out of laziness. I mean, yeah that might be because it's an indie game but I don't really think that's the case since there are lower budget games where you CAN feel like the game was padded.
It helps that Assault Spy is a short game but also that the Amelia campaign has its own story with a different cast, its own plotline and a way different tone that has a lot of noticeable differences in the overall plot than just "Asaru's story mode but with Amelia instead." But simply placing it as being the second story campaign instead of half of a full story mode makes it seem like it's not backtracking.
Or to use a bigger budget game that does the same thing, Scarlet Nexus has the Yuito and Kasane routes which use the same environments and enemies and do converge at some points but because it's a more story-driven game with campaigns that are only occasionally converging and the boss fights are mostly different it certainly doesn't feel like it's just padding.
21:41 : "It's like an intrinsic version of a metroidvania."
After I finished Tunic, I've read a few reviews of it, and one of them used a term that I think encapsulates this idea as a whole genre: "knowledgevania", which fits Outer Wilds better than it fits Tunic. Tunic is a mix of the two, since you will need the actual upgrades to reach the end, but the knowledge of how to do some things is also something you need to acquire to finish it.
I'm looking for games that would fit that idea.
Okami has some backtracking throughout the whole game, but pretty much evertytime, the area change because of the story and you have new abilities to get items and stuff. Plus you run pretty fast, and the visuals and music make the trip nice.
Pokemon doesn't have backtracking per se, but you do find your way back to old places. In the old games, back when HM were a thing, you'd make a mental note of certain obstacles (cut trees, smash rocks, climblable path, or even a body of water that could hide something). And you'd WANT to go back there as soon as you could to explore. It's rarely required, but you could get a TM and even if the reward itself is not to your liking, there is a chance to stumble onto a never before seen Pokemon. I think that's why it works, it's not mandatory, it's player motivated and almost always rewarded with a chance for surprise !
Great video! I love the way Skyward Sword does backtracking, they really change the feel and gameplay dynamic for an otherwise familiar area.
Yeah exactly. I NEVER understood why people complained about abcktracking in Skyward Sword, when each time you revisit, you either explore a new aera, or the land is significantly changed.
Yeah but infamously if you do one thing out of order, you can't proceed.
@@BJGvideos For anyone who doesn't know, if you talk to the Goron explorer one too many times while completing the Thunder Dragon's quest, the game will glitch and make you unable to complete the quest. So just don't talk to them until you're done. I think it was fixed in HD, but Skyward Sword isn't really the same on the Switch...
I think the worst instance I've seen was in the Chrono Trigger DS Remake. The mountain bonus level added in that game (I forget its name) did not have an option to skip going up or down it. And sometimes you would get to the top, do one thing, get a cutscene, then be warped back to the base of the mountain and have to go back up it immediately.
Lost Sanctum. That might be the worst backtracking I've ever gone through
Oh boy, Lost Sanctum. The disparity in quality between that and the original game's content is staggering.
Yo-Kai Watch is nothing but back tracking, but it never feels tedious because of how small it is. The game takes place in Springdale, and it has only 5 main areas that are unlocked slowly as you progress. This allows you to not be bogged down by running left and right. Also, the game has a Metroidvania element where you upgrade your watch to see and unlock higher ranked Yo-Kai and doors. That way, you can explore well worn areas and find something new. Thirdly, the game has a day and night cycle that opens and closes certain sections of the game, allowing the designers to repaint old rooms with more gameplay. Finally, there are the Mirapos, who can be found late game to teleport you to anywhere you need as long as you have talked to them first.
In the end, what makes this map great is its small size and ease of traversal to keep the gameplay almost seamless.
I’m considering making a 2D Collectathon Platformer without a hub or fast travel; levels will have transition points that lead to other levels, and you’ll be able to easily open a map that shows how each of the levels connect to one other (IE, you’ll be able to tell there’s a transition to Level 4 at the top of Level 2, or that there’s a transition to Level 7 at the left edge of Level 8) there will be “teleporters” in some levels that lead to far away levels, but you’ll still have to actually get to said teleporter.
The idea is that you’ll have to plan out the best route to get to whichever area you want to go, and there will only be a few times in the game in which you have to go through a specific area.
I’m hoping this will help make the world feel really connected and also result in that thing open world games have where you set a destination for yourself and get distracted by a bunch of stuff as you make your way there.
The main issue I see arising from this system is when players are going for the last few collectables in order to complete the game (a lot of backtracking with no more stuff to get distracted by) so perhaps I will included a fast travel method that you unlock after getting, say, 90% of the collectables.
*Should also mention that most levels would have multiple connections; Level 5 might be connected to levels 2, 4 and 6 for example, and most connections would work both ways.
Any critiques or recommendations to this idea would be greatly appreciated.
That a fantastic idea it really makes the world feel like one big screen now for the collectables I think you can you god of war route some doors will be closed in your actual playthrough going through the game but after finishing the game you'll get abilities that help you unlock the locked doors which will have shortcuts to the transition for the levels for example SPOILER WARNING in ragnarok there's an endgame quest which opens up the crater and the crater also becomes even bigger when you take a left turn that turn by itself opens up that map by like 9%
Another idea that I have is that not all collectables should be locked up some of them will just need skill for this my examples grimvalor you may have heard of it so in act there's this area which combines both traversal mechanics from both acts act 2 and act 3 for the average player it's gonna be really hard not bc they don't have that item bc they just don't have the required understanding of the controls
Yes! None of the collectables will be locked behind unlockable abilities because you will have all the abilities at the start of the game. I plan to make some collectables that require the abilities of a certain character, however, you'll also have all characters unlocked at the start of the game and will be able to switch between them at any checkpoint.
Basically, character-specific collectables will be a test of your understanding of that character's abilities rather than a lock-key situation like Mario 64 DS did. They will also be relatively infrequent, with most collectables being obtainable with any character.@@sourlab
To me this just sounds like a Metroivania without abilities. If the general flow is that you run through levels in order, but only use the shortcuts to travel between them for one-off collectibles, to change things in other levels, or for fun, I think it could work really well. Like imagine Banjo-Tooie connections except it's 2D. An example of Tooie at its best is where a puzzle in say level 5, causes something in level 2 to change and you can shortcut back to it for a collectible (like pouring water from above). It would make the world feel VERY alive compared to a 2D Mario.
To beat the game people should be going "one way" (incrementing levels, ie. level 1, 2, 3, 4 ... ), rather than create a huge branching layout of levels that could lead players to getting lost or having to backtrack. Could be cool for occasional converging branches though (like Mario World / Tropical Freeze secret levels). My reasoning is that players that like 2D platformers tend not to want backtracking. The main experience they're looking for is overcoming challenges rather than puzzles or navigation, with speedruns being focused on great platforming. Puzzles are okay for collectables, but as soon as you put navigation as a challenge, it becomes more of a Metroidvania.
I LOVE RPGs with a comfy main hub town that has frequently updating NPC dialog and changes over the course of the game. You get to know the place, and the town itself feels like just as much of a familiar old friend as any of the people living in it
In defense of Metroid (at least Zero Mission and Fusion anyways), that final lap for item collection is mostly optional for 100% item completion runs.
Regarding changing/recontextualising areas, I feel I have to give a nod to Metroid Fusion's tropical sector. Your first time there, it's crawling (heh, bug pun) with Zoros (Zeros? I honestly can't remember the name...) which are slow and display no real aggressive moves. (Think most 2D Mario enemies.) After a certain progress checkpoint (I want to say getting the bombs, but it's been a hot minute...) they turn into pupae that for all intents and purposes might as well be part of the level geometry, blocking off some passages and providing convenient platforms. After a second point, they hatch, (or whatever it is pupae do...) freeing up those passages but both removing those extra platforms (that by that point aren't really needed) and filling those rooms with the agile, flying menaces known as Kihunters.
I thought you would've had easily over a million subscribers, I never paid attention i guess. You are one of the biggest reasons for me becoming a game developer (you, GMTK, adventure time, dark souls, hollow knight and undertale, game jam videos and obviously just my love for video games were my biggest influences for me becoming a game dev), I always wanted to be but was convinced by negative people that it would be a bad idea, it wasn't until I started watching your videos and also some other great game design content creator's videos that I realised I was passionate about game design. So i bought a pc after I graduated high school and got a job so I could begin making games, also found out i love programming aswell lol. Idk, I just always assumed you had over a million subscribers because of the depth and quality of your videos also I see you as an equal to GMTK so just assumed you had equal subscribers.
Love the content bro, congrats on 300K, keep it up!
When you talked about DMC 4 I immidiately thought about Pokemon Gold/Silver's Kanto region. It's from a different game, but since probably everyone has played them, it's essentially also a backtrack to a known region with a different order in which you tackle the gyms, different trainers and side quests. I think this is a prime example of how to revisit old areas in a game.
Not really? Kanto is just a boring chore, specially in the originals. Issue? You already had beaten lance yet there's not a single good trainer in Kanto except Blue (Red is in Jotho), everyone so underleveled is boring, with the map so sterile. At least they have proper levels in the remakes... except red that now is way overleveled.
A somewhat better example is Goldenrod City in Gold/Silver. Technically, you do new things when you must go there. First you stroll through the city and then battle Whitney, and next time you come back you’re exploring mazes so as to stop Team Rocket. The battling is not fun, but the exploration of these new places, in my opinion, is.
They change enough to make a novel experience. For new players it's a whole new region and for returning players it's a "where are they now" tour. Not exactly backtracking and definitely decent enough for a post -game campaign.
I say this as someone that managed to play Black/White 2 before Black/White. I first experienced the map in reverse, and when I went back and played the previous game there were enough differences to make it feel like I wasn't retreading.
okay, I get it universe. I will play Radiant Historia. I promise will get to it. You don't have to keep reminding me, universe.
The messenger is one of the most amazing uses of backtracking I've ever seen, the game is an old school action platformer in the style of ninja gaiden, no backtracking at all, just old school level by level, then you get to what seems the end and the game suddenly opens up and becomes a metroidvania... I went into the game knowing very little of it, and I was shocked at how much it made me want to explore old areas once it became a metroidvania
Not fully related, but a gimmick I always like was 'revisiting early areas/bosses with end game weapons'
Wind Waker for example, when you're assaulting Ganondorf's Tower you have a bunch of encounters with Darknuts.
You can fight them like normal, or use your shiny new Light Arrows to casually one shot them and keep going. It feels good.
One game that comes to mind for this topic is Fez. I loved the game and the puzzles, but I couldn't bring myself to finish the game because all of the backtracking meant I had to solve the same puzzles over and over again if I wanted to keep exploring, and it became so miserable I just gave up
Here’s a personal silly favorite of mine when it comes to Backtracking:
Pac-Man World/Pac-Man World Re Pac
In this 3D Platformer game you play as Pac-man and do Pac-man things: eat dots, eat ghosts, and of course.. Fruits. You’ll run along locked doors that require a fruit to unlock it, usually by going further into the level before going back to where you last saw the door. Get the fruit, open the door and get your reward: A button to show more dots or progress forward, a letter, and importantly.. Keys to save Pac-Man’s Family. Most find it annoying but I find it a great part of the game. It’s Pac-Man, he navigates through mazes, so arguably the level itself can be considered a maze to run around and bounce around.
The most memorable instance of backtracking for me was in about 40 hours into FFVIII, when I went back to Balamb Garden specifically so I could get revenge on that goddamn T-Rex 😈
Fuck that T-Rex and it's entire species.
Metroidvanias are exactly what I think of for backtracking: good and bad. It's funny how many things you take for granted. Save points, Warp rooms, maps and abilities that make traversal faster (dash, double-jump, flight and stronger attacks).
Also, as a way to avoid backtracking, I love an unlocked gate or shortcut that you get at the end of a level/stage that either allows you to jump back to the beginning or makes it a round trip.
A great form of backtracking is when the player sees a change in the location they are returning to AND when the backtracking makes sense
In Tales of Symphonia, (spoilers below)
You travel from the starting world Sylvarant and go to the other connected world Tethealla. After some events later, you are forced to return to Sylvarant and the world changes quite a bit. From towns previously visited to even some dungeons because of the mana shift.
Not many RPGS utilize world dynamic shifting with backtrack but its great when the games does it right
I don't usually like backtracking. I have huge problems with this done on interconnected map games, is just not my cup of tea. But in the other hand, i like how Wario Land 4 does it, but you already mentioned it on the video, in this case. I like how Sonic Frontiers does something... similar to backtracking? I'm not entirely sure if it works or don't. Since Sonic moves really fast you have easier access to things you're missing, Cyberspace Stages, memory tokens, guardian fights or challenges. I always like to do the challenges so i unlock fast travel and do the story then. But having the gimmick of doing it whenever you feel it's a good moment, feels kinda nice on the islands. It feels linear but at the same time, you have the free option to roam and find more things you're missing to progress. With the new Kocos and the Chain Action challenges, it made me want to revisit some islands to get more new things
Sonics travelsal in frontiers has genuinely became one of my favourites it feels like marvel spiderman swinging or arkham knights gliding it feels really good to just run and it made alot better by the spindash and the jukebox
It's wonderful whenever Radiant Historia is mentioned, considering how low key it seems to be. I've heard much good about the remake as well but have yet to play it.
We need a full version of your intro music! 💚🎶
Technically, characters in Outer Wilds do have different dialogue as you store more info in your ship logs, but it is just a bonus to see their reactions to things you've figured out. And the only character who actually has a clear view of the sun will say different things depending on how far into a cycle you are.
The short answer is to make the environment different the second time around. Sometimes this means changing the environment, but it's more resource-effective to give the player new tools that change how they interact with the environment - or simply have the environment play differently when you do it 'backwards'. Something as simple as a slope that you can't jump up can achieve this, as anyone who's interacted with a ledge in Pokemon knows.
one of my favorite examples of backtracking is in Mega Man Legends 2 where after you find a key you gotta go through the same pathway again but a lot of obstacles that weren't active before are now in action and make it harder and a new fresh experience
The Legend of Heroes: Trails (AKA: Kiseki) is actually (usually) really good with its backtracking because every time the main story updates, (almost) every, single, NPC, in the accessible area gets new dialogue. And it's not just fluff dialogue either, these NPCs are the main characters of their own stories and each of them has their own unique story arc that they're going through while you, the player, is focusing on the player characters. It does get just a little ridiculous when you reach the point in a story arc where you have access to an entire country map, but it's usually worthwhile to keep up with the side stories that you find interesting and if you want to find out what other people have been up to, there's always New Game Plus.
I don't know if it's backtracking but the fact that every mission in mgsv sends you back to mother base really stifled my enjoyment with its pacing. Same with FF16.
Only if you exfiltrate by helicopter! If you exit the mission area on foot, you stay on the area map and don't need to drop in again.
It's not communicated well so that's on the game, but it does give you options.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - I loved how backtracking / travelling trough Magmoor Caverns in Metroid Prime 1 worked.
That area connects two other areas you need to go to about two or three times, but also serves as a location you need to expolore on it's own, with it's own challenges, collectibles and puzzles.
-- spoilers for Prime 1 below --
First time you enter it, you're greeted with both tough monsters and lava pits.
But on your second visit, you already have a weapon that can almost one shot most enemies there, plus you can reach new areas.
Third and fourth time - you have abilities you can use to skip platforming sections you've already done.
And the cherry on top - by the end of the game you have so much health, damage reduction and ability to just run through liquids, which means you can just run through the lava, like it's minor inconvenience lol
In essence, the area gets progressively easier as player becomes stronger, but since it's an area you need to travel through ~3-4 times, it actually works in it's favor. Additionally it creates a feeling like you're literally overpowering a hostile environment.
In the coming days, you will hear talk of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door having bad backtracking. I corroborate this as a superfan, as the game starts with the inoffensive Petal Meadows, then builds until the malicious joke that is General White. Don't even get me started on the Troubles.
However, most will not know the horrors that lie in Paper Mario: Sticker Star. Just because something is an abnormally poor intersection of quest and level design, even for its time, doesn't mean it can't get so much worse.
As a German player, I know a way to make General White worse: Removing the one clue you do have. The German version translated his name as "General Bob-umm" which completely omits the fact that he's colored white. In any other language, the player at least *might* recall there was a single white Bob-Omb at the very beginning of the game and start the chain this way, but the German version takes away even that possibility.
@@rainpooper7088You would still have the hint fortune teller who lists the full area order (because they knew General White was rough), but that is a HUGE disadvantage and you'd need to remember that fortune teller exists.
With Thousand Year Door as well, the backtracking would be improved significantly with just adding in the Spindash + Speedy Spin early game from PM64. Really hoping the remake adds them, as it would make all the annoying and slow sections of TTYD a lot snappier and easier to replay.
Meanwhile with Sticker Star, you would likely have to overhaul the game to fix its issues with annoying backtracks.
I do. Chuggaa is making a "Gameplay" of Sticker Star and everyone who made it to chapter 3 knows that thing is backtracking the videogame, alongside being a walking simulator. He even had a mini-rant about that in chapter 5. BTW, he's not being unfair, chapter 4 was mostly praised because it was actually good.
@@N12015That's how I found out.
Backtracking can be fun if the Path introduces you to new Challenges... (or even the same old Challenges but seen from a different Perspective, for instance: upside down...).
Thank You for another Masterclass Doc 💯👏🏻
This video was great! As someone who dreams of making a detective game based in the same two locations, I find it encouraging to hear that mystery games can work great for that aspect. I’d love a video on detective game design honestly!
GMTK just did one on detective games recently, if you haven't checked that out yet.
18:45 "Some old roads are blocked off".
This specifica area is by far the biggest flaw of Hollow Knight, since it blocks the shortest path between a fast travel station and the town.
A possible intent of Paper Mario TTYD's Chapter 7 backtrack-fiesta fetch quest is to get the player back into prior areas in case they've missed something or haven't been back since gaining new abilities/knowledge. The imagery of those areas are more likely to foster a recall of some unsolved mystery or unreachable thing than some NPC generally hinting at doing so. Of course, this is not an engaging method of doing so for some who are more knowledgeable or thorough players.
6:07 Alright, pie, I'm just gonna make biting motions at the air. If you get eaten, it's your own fault!
One game that wasn't mentioned in this video, that I believe does retreading old levels very nicely, is Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, where you can alter levels in various ways, like doing them at night, changing the water levels, freezing the level, or rotating or flipping the level to name a few examples.
Seirra wasn't even the worst of them when it comes to missable stuff to progress the story. Anyone play Jet Force Gemini for the N64? Amazing game, highly recommend. What the game doesn't tell you though is this: there are bears (called tribals) that you need to collect (or rescue) throughout the game. There are just there and you can kill them, but that isn't an issue, you can just replay the level and collect them again... unless you kill them by blowing them up, and they get decapitated, which doesn't respawn them. And you need to collect 100% or you can't get to the final boss. And the game doesn't tell you this... until you get to just before the final boss... lol
I think Rare just has an unhealthy obsession with backtracking in general.
I love how in tales of symphonia they made you go through the bad guy's main hq multiple times however you always do it in a different ways and different places until you backtrack to an empty base where you have to look for your crew for story reason and move on. There's also a point where you have to figure how to summon a spirit because it went around to buy milk and never came back where you have to check a few marks by talking to a specific set of npc and have to go back to an old dungeon but at that point you unlocked flight which makes world traversal way faster and your party is way stronger + you would have skills to make dungeon traversal less of a pain didnt like that one as much tho
One thing that makes backtracking suck less is when an area is complex enough for you to learn it and you get new traversal abilities that recontextualize minor aspects of its design. It's kiiinda a similar idea to the games you see these days where you hit trees or whatever for ages to get resources and they take forever, so you hire helpers to do the work for you so you don't have to deal with the tedium. It's introducing a known annoyance and then making you feel good when you have to deal with it less and less. For an example I played recently, having to backtrack for a missed sidequest in Sea of Stars is a little more interesting after you get the Graplou, because it can latch onto any climbable surface, so even areas not designed around it get some fun little micro-optimizations that feel good to do.
Great video! Really glad to see Outer Wilds at the end. I always pitch it to my friends as "the best game you can only ever play once" lol, the way it handles backtracking is pretty masterful.
One of my favorite games, rainworld, does almost all of these correctly. You go through areas over and over, but YOU'RE different. In the many characters there's different timelines. You see the rot slowly corrupt more and more. You see ancient structures collapse. Even the few fetch quests are fun and different. One, you go through the same area, but the item you're bringing to someone (I won't say much for spoiler reasons, but its to save someone) gives you the ability to turn gravity down and fly around for short bursts. There's a complex reputation system for each region. New regions for certain characters. It's a great game. and even after atleast 100 hours of gameplay, it keeps its challenge.
One game that has backtracking and fech quests as the main element and executes it fairly well is the Kindergarden series. The whole thing is a timeing puzzle without litteral time pressure, and completing many of the puzzles involves getting a read on the charaters, and what sort of archetypes they fall into. Each time you get an ending in the game is extremely short, 5 or so minutes.
Especially the second entry with many QOL additions, like showing what items you need for what storylines. you nearly always have the information you need to continue, and if not, no biggie. You can reset the day and get back where you were pretty fast, especially in the second game where you can reset to specific times.
My issue with Metroid Prime specifically, having recently done a playthrough of it, is that it feels like they don't give you movement-related stuff fast enough. My friend and I played it together and any time we realized we needed to backtrack somewhere, there was a big groan shared between us as we knew it would be a slog to get back to where we needed to go if it was really far away from us. Especially considering this game has no fast travel system so it's 100% just walking back to where you need to be. Something like the grappling hook which seems like it would speed up getting through the levels ended up being one of the last things we unlocked so it took forever to get anywhere as a result. If there was at least a way to jump back to an area (I think the health + ammo refill areas would have served this purpose very well as "nodes" to fast travel to), it would have been way less of an issue. It was neat putting together what we needed to do but the trip back was usually seen as "well there goes some of our health to chip damage from enemies we run by" or in some cases you just have to take care of the enemies. We've already fought the enemies, it's not a novel experience and nothing really changed about the level itself it's just that we can access a new thing. Even then, the new thing is usually just like, an energy tank or a missile capacity upgrade. Nice, not necessary, but we didn't necessarily always know what it would be going into returning to an area because we got a new ability.
2:04 I feel called out. (finishes his sandwich)
I don’t even have to watch it, I know. Simply make the same enemies harder by varying their moveset, add new enemies, or have the characters be developed since you were last there. I think at least-
Ah, it's another wonderful Design Doc video.
I love how hollow knight is such a masterpiece doc always have an example from it for almost every video, and the videos themselves are great (like this one) keep the good work doc!
I feel so validated now for not being a fan of Devil May Cry 4. I knew something was off, but only just now you've made me realize it was all the backtracking.
Scarlet Nexus has one of the coolest cases of backtracking. The final dungeon being remixed level design from every area you had to go to in the game with loads of tough enemy encounters and wonderful cutscenes giving you story on the main antagonist's background. Probably my favorite case of backtracking in gaming ever at this point.
Halo Combat Evolved does back tracking fantastically by completely changing the enemies you face while making you go through the stage backwards.
while not technically backtracking, Darktide does something interesting with its maps to mix things up while still avoiding procedural level generation. one big complaint people had with vermintide 2 was that even with so many levels added, when you've played it for hundreds of hours as intended it gets repetitive, even with random enemy placement. What they did in their followup Darktide was make much larger maps that have multiple possible objective. when you play on it you don't see the entire map.
Depending on which objective is present on that map, you will have a different starting area and ending area and take a different route. you will pass through some of the same areas, but not all of them and you might even be going in a different direction. one time you start in a certain area and to get to the objective you have to pass a bridge that is up, to lower it you need to grab several power packs and load it up while waves of enemies charge you and you have to defend the person carrying them, and then wait as even more hordes come while it lowers. Thats just halfway through the level. another time you start very close to the opposite side of the bridge and its already down, you just pass over it quickly and then take a different turn and go in a completely different direction and its basically a different map.
The first time I realized I was on the same map, just a different area and I hadn't been paying attention to the map names was when we were crossing a catwalk and I noticed far below was a couple small bridges over a chasm. I remember that area very well, we just didn't visit it in this playthrough, we went over it. this also does a great job at making it feel like a true hive city, its huge and its a mess of a maze you can get lost in. instead of all the cool areas we can see in the distance being just background areas that arent fleshed out, some of them actually are areas you could visit in different versions of the same map. really makes it feel massive and it doesnt' feel as repetitive, and yet the devs don't have to make 30+ maps. they can make half that and make several different versions.
this is the best channel for discussing game design, unmatched quality
This honestly beats GMTK for me
Ghost Song does a brilliant thing where at one point in the game, a corridor you've been through dozens of times suddenly has a boss fight in it. It catches you off-guard in such an unexpected way that you spend the entire rest of the game never feeling like you know *exactly* what's going to happen the next time you run through some random corridor you've been in before. NPCs will also move around the map in significant ways, leading to lots of unexpected random encounters in places you've already been.
4:46 SO glad that the remake adds the fast-travel room (as well as an extra set of pipes that allows you to skip the fourth and fifth required trips through the Twilight Trail). Makes the joke land MUCH better.
Man, every video I see showing a Sierra game makes me so happy I started off with Lucasarts. I had a hard time trying to make it through that one as a five-year old, imagining that but with a lot of perma-death options forcing a restart... torture.
Also I didn't even remember that Zero Mission does that to you at the end? Then again I was someone who went through Shadow Hearts Covenant which to my memory does something JUST like that (JRPG's in general feel like they suffer from this issue) and I am just happy I got more stuff to play with back then. Perhaps my mindset is what backtrack implementers think everyone feels like- just simpleminded gratitude for "more game".
I fibd it quite odd. I personally loved my time in TTYD and was quite surprised when people were complaining about backtracking. I think the game is quirky, charming and the whole running about looking for a character for me felt mostly like the dev's humor of the situation. Never annoyed me as I already liked the locations from the get-go.
The three biggest things I think of when it comes to this:
1. Design a "two-way road." By this, I mean a level sequence where moving through it one direction is significantly *different* of a solve than moving through it the first way. Maybe this means committing part of each level a in unidirectional way that just criss-crosses at some point in the middle. Speaking of:
2. Design an "intersection." Let's say there's a route that's left-to-right primarily by design, but something that looks like one hidden path going down and one hidden path going up. But the bigger metadesign makes one of these hidden paths a 'secret entrance' with one kind of item check, and the second a 'secret exit' to a new road with a different item check after a point where the player has them both. It's a satisfying combination of familiar and "okay, this is neat."
3. Design a "forked road." You have a path where there's a check at the end, and if you make the check you proceed forward, and if you fail the check, you proceed to a loopback point where the loopback gives you a tool that then "solved" the check you went to before. You'll want the loopback to feel substantial enough though, that it's a feature and not a punishment for "failing the check."
I havent watched this video yet, but i gotta comment
Stalker: SOC did backtracking beautifully.
After raiding the lab (labs are equivalent of dungeons/zelda temples in stalker) you gotta return to safe territory.
But you're low on ammo, low on medical supplies and anti radiation kits. You're possibly over cumbered from all the loot you picked up in the lab. You also wont exit at the same place you entered and due to night/day cycle you could exit in the middle of the night (after you entered the lab in daylight ) and encounter all kinds of monsters and anomalies in the dark.
It really makes you feel relieved after you reach the bar or some other safe zone.
Also you probably found some type of document or flash drive that will advance the story forward.
I would like to mention the Trails series, which does a phenomenal job of rewarding backtracking without giving you anything new to do in an area, simply by advancing NPC plots.
Every NPC in Trails has their own arc -- they're living their own lives while you're off doing your own thing. It's definitely not something everyone will care about, but I religiously walk around and talk to everyone just to see what they've been up to. Did the shopkeeper's mother finally manage to find him a girlfriend? Did that awkward young man ever manage to confess to the girl he liked? What about that merchant whose his niece sent you to rescue him? Bet you didn't think he'd show up seven games later!
As far as development resources go, it's extremely cheap (so long as they aren't voiced -- though AI might make that more viable sooner than we expect). The only hard part is making sure the characters actually have interesting stories, which, admittedly, requires a lot of talent (and a fleshed out world). That, and it helps to have most of the characters show up in a sidequest at some point -- coordinating that can be a challenge.
It's obviously not something everyone will enjoy (the later Trails games are among the longest video game scripts ever written, being the same length as the Harry Potter SERIES), but for anyone who likes a living, breathing world, it can't be beat.
yeah exactly. When I plan long tracks in games, and the route is pretty or the traversal interesting enough to walk through, rather than fasttravel to the nearest waypoint, I always plan my track along interesting things, like collectibles or side quest markers. I'll even go longer routes through the same parts of the map to get that collictible on the way than going backtracking straight to the marker
Resident Evil does a lot of backtracking also. Especially in the RE2 remake and in Biohazard. But they do it with the goals of getting new items or opening up new routes, so there is incentive to backtrack and I appreciate that aspect of it.
I think Skyrim (maybe most of the Elder Scrolls games) really is a shining example on how to make a back-track system. Whiterun doesn't feel like a backtrack, -it feels like a home. It's a familiar place where you can sell your loot from your quests, interact with NPCs you've gotten to know, practice smithing, alchemy, and enchanting skills. It springs you off on so many quests and is the place many story-beats are centered around.
One of my favorite things they do while backtracking, is when they fundamentally change an area. Like when Metroid Dread had you revisit areas, but they were frozen over on your second visit. Not nearly enough games do that. It could even be something as simple as a change in the weather or seasons to change the conditions of the area a bit.
That's why I really love super Metroid, Dark Souls and co.
In super Metroid the thing I most liked is the point that you have abilities like shinespark or wall jump which you don't need to solve the game, but to 100% it. And you get this knowledge inside of the game world
An example of good backtracking is in the game Left 4 Dead 2 in the “Hard Rain” campaign, where the first two levels are getting from a boat to a gas station to get gas for said boat, then the next two are getting back to the dock with this gas, but after a heavy rainstorm that flooded the area. Because of the flood, the players now have the options of taking altered routes that are higher up to see landmarks easier on their way back.
A game that is awesome in that aspect is The Witness. You can unravel the whole world quickly and linearly if you know the logics behind the puzzles, but you don't. To acquire this knowledge the game will present you puzzles with different difficulty levels in different locations, which make your understanding of the puzzles grow as you explore the same island.
There is nothing more satisfying than finding a puzzle that makes no sense, giving it up is moving on, to later come back and solve it because now you understand.
I actually grew up playing DK64 and Banjo Tooie, and I love them. The feeling of exploring and opening up the world I always found enjoyable. I went back and played Banjo Kazooie later, and didn't care for it. Compared to Tooie, Kazooie felt so claustrophobic. The worlds were so small and cramped compared to the larger worlds from Tooie, that gave so much more opportunity for exploration and adventure.
Ooh I wanna guess before I watch: I assume it much of it would have to do with variation. Maybe you go down a hallway, but you get a powerful weapon, so when you back through now you cut through enemies that you struggled with to get there that makes you feel more powerful. Or, maybe you do something that changes that area/level (like you open a lever and then the level floods, etc). Maybe the types of enemies change? Especially making more difficult enemies appear after the player has reached a certain level, killed a certain boss, or gotten a certain item is a good move because otherwise those old enemies won't offer a challenge after making the player more powerful if it has RPG like mechanics or item upgrades. Ooh... another idea is CONTEXT. So maybe going through a zone you are slow and methodical, but then the room starts to fill with lava or the roof starts closing in so now on the way back you have to hurry so you don't die (like the escape sequences in Super Metroid). We could also go the Legend of Zelda route, where whatever new ability you get in an area is useful against the enemies you face, so it gives you an opportunity to use and practice it. Anyway I'm spit balling let's see how I did.
Or there's the Nonary Games duology, where the "backtracking' comes in the form of going back to past story segments, in order to use knowledge gained from other timelines to progress.
This was quite tedious in the original 999 DS release, but Virtue's Last Reward added a timeline chart, with explicitly-marked locks and branches, which was backported to 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors in the collection. You can quickly zoom past already-seen dialogue, with it automatically slowing down when new dialogue occurs.
Furthermore, making different decisions using this canonical time-jumping can lead to drastically different endings, with each one providing new information or context - in 999, only one alternative ending needs to be seen in order to unlock the true ending (the others being optional extras), but in VLR most of the endings provide information the player character uses in other branches.
That's another form of backtracking I like, as it leads to drastically different content.