Exploration & Cookery Game

One thing that I find disappointing about Skyrim is how cooking serves no purpose. There’s a paltry Xbox achievement for cooking, mining and chopping wood once. The health benefits you get from cooking are nothing compared to the most inexperienced alchemy, the ingredients of which are cheaper and abundant. Besides which, pre-made potions are two a penny – much more common than cooking spits.

Then there’s the fact that you mainly find food items in towns, where you least need health items. The weight values of vegetables versus their healing properties make them not worth carrying around. Finally, if you calculate it, you notice that selling the individual food items raw fetches more gold than cooking them together. Not that any of them are worth anything like as much as any other piece of junk you can pick up out in the field.

It makes food in Skyrim a gimmick, one that you’ll get bored of quickly – just like chopping wood, which is the least time-efficient way of making money. If you never stole a single item in the whole game, you’d still make plenty of money just going out questing. If you don’t go out and quest, there’s no point playing Skyrim in the first place, which is an exploration RPG, not a life sim. In other words, cooking is pointless.

Holiday in the wastelands

When you aren’t dying instantly, these post-apocalyptic worlds are quite cushy.

Survival games are a genre of which there are not a great many console games. They largely appear to be mini-games on Steam, or ancient PC games for people who love a challenge. Albeit one that involves sitting safely behind a keyboard with a cup of something brown and tasty. By far the most famous survival game is Fallout 3 and there’s a very good reason for this; Fallout 3 is very, very easy, where most survival games – including the Fallout series before Bethesda got hold of it – are exceptionally tough.

As the name suggests, survival games are about not dying. You try to find food, while trying not to be food yourself. It’s incredibly easy to poison yourself, drown, fall down a ditch, walk into a trap or a sharp set of teeth. In times when video games are adjusted to be less punishing and more optionally challenging, Fallout 3 was the first survival game (that I know of) to have the survival elements there, but the risk of death reasonably low.

Double-agent open world

Or to be more accurate, the Hitman-stealth-sandbox-war-double-agent-survival-exploration game.

In writing a post on moral choice systems, two contrary things occurred to me. First: “The moral choice system is absurd! It limits freedom and stunts gameplay.” Second: “Yet… If the concept of ‘moral choice’ was less of an arbitrary one-dimensional-gauge and more of a play style, it could be the funnest thing ever.” In the process of having a go at Fallout 3 for making it too easy to be “good” whether you wanted to be or not, I started imagining what it would look like if it was easy to be bad.

I came up with a exploration-survival sandbox game that most resembles Hitman in concept, or other stealth / double agent type games. There aren’t enough free-roam double-agent games, whereby players wander around manipulating every possible side of a conflict unpredictably for personal gain. Which is odd, because that tends to be the way people naturally play moral choice games; we may pick a side to start with, but get bored of our loyalties and screw someone over.