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Why Outer Wilds is the Greatest Game Ever Made
Player agency is a tricky problem. Games have always had an advantage over other media since the viewer is able to take part in the story in a way not possible in books or movies. But writing a story isn’t free. For every choice a player can make new dialogue or content may need to be made. How do we make a player feel like they are in charge while keeping the development costs manageable?
There are tricks to avoid needing to do lots of extra work to make your world feel “real”. The “side quest” is a common way of allowing the player to choose when or if they will play some part of the game, with the assumption that sooner or later most players will indeed play most of the side quests. As a player, you are encouraged to feel “yes, now is the time my character chooses to ignore the time critical main story and helps an old woman find her pan“. Similarly, regular but small decisions are another way to keep content requirements light while making the player not feel railroaded. Bonus points if you can weave these interactions into others and have callbacks to them, which Undertale did wonderfully. On the flip side, one of the worst things you can do is load all the weight of the story into a single, momentous decision which usually detracts from any agency the player may have felt and replaces it with an empty multiple choice question. What you’re trying to achieve is that players feel their choices:
- Align with how they want to play the game
- Are impactful
Smart players want to be able to make smart choices which require smart writers. Chaotic players want chaotic choices which requires wild possibilities and outcomes. Both these cases require lots of work. A great study of player agency is in The Stanley Parable which makes clear that if you as a dev want real agency, it’s going to cost you. (spoilers) The core storyline is almost comically short, but due to its construction the game practically begs you to replay it and experience all the hard work the devs put in.
Up until recently I didn’t think this was really a solvable problem. That’s still true, for most games there will always be a tradeoff and no studio is going to quintuple their budget just so the box can say “Real Agency!” even though it isn’t real, it’s just five times as many story-pathways. Maybe generative ai can make it real. But I digress.
Some genres are easier than others. RPGs naturally lend themselves to it but MMOs can easily have player driven narratives that really do create agency (and make for great reads) However, involving real humans has the nasty side effect of not-everyone-can-have-fun-in-real-stories. Other games have shown that with deep enough mechanical systems (simulations and game mechanics) compelling narratives can form spontaneously and these naturally have player agency, since those mechanics are core to the gameplay. But again, this is rare enough that one wouldn’t call these story-driven games.
Outer wilds is a story driven game. I’m not going to go much further without giving the strongest spoiler warning for any media I’ve ever given. In fact, I shall protect it behind this impenetrable wall that only people who have played the game are able to click.
Unclickable to non players DO NOT CLICK IT WONT WORK !1!!1
One of the things I say when people try Outer Wilds is “You can technically finish this game in 20 minutes”. This isnt some speedrun number, those are faster.
Instead it’s to try and show “hey, you’ve got everything you need to finish the game right here in 20 minutes and the only question is how”. And that’s the game, find out how. This is why Outer Wilds fans are so tight-lipped about it, exploration and discovery is the heart and soul of the game.
Ok, sure, how’s this different from some other detective-point-and-click-whatever where I can choose what order to look at clues in? Even in the most well designed such games, something usually needs to be taken, solved, or otherwise “progressed” before something else can be done, to lock down the progression under some sort of control. Otherwise, it’s quite a challenge to hide things in plain sight. Too obvious and its a bit of a spoiler. Too hard and no one notices it. So, usually it’s limited to an easter egg or forshadowing or a callback. Imagine needing to get that balance right for an entire game. In that respect, Outer Wilds isn’t actually perfect. There are those who will find it frustrating but for the purposes of being hyperbolic I’m going to ignore that.
So you set out on your adventure and you’re met with text. Wow. Lore. Don’t need that! Except, it’s this text that intends to guide you and so your first act, as a finally free agent in a video game, is to try and unlearn what you know about video games. You can try and ignore it, sure, but good luck bouncing around the solar system hoping to stumble on things. That’ll only work for half the game Bucko (Bucko is me, I’m Bucko).
The ability of outer wilds to make it feel special when you find a clue is where it really shines. The solar system feels dense with so much to see and yet what you found still fits into this grand puzzle. It’s also often not just the place you chose to visit but the time you happened to visit. It ends up feeling like a microcosm of reality, where you are at the right place at the right time. Coincidental enough that it feels special but not so rare that it feels frustrating. You are driven only by your curiosity as a player, and it just so happens that the player character is exactly the same. There’s no maiden we are told we feel sorry for or world we don’t live in that is in jeopardy. The player character is out to listen to some space-tunes in their space-ship and you, just like them, take part in a universe defining story that nothing but your curiosity got you into. You’re one and the same and it’s perfect.
I don’t like it when games tell me what to do. Outer Wilds didn’t tell me to do anything and I love it for that. If you haven’t played it yet, now really is the time.