Just Give Me Two Good Reasons

One of the dominant features of open-world games such as FarCry 5 is that they are big. Really big. The scale of the map is an often discussed feature of such games, but so too are the myriad activities and overall "playtime" that a game can offer. Presumably more is better, but I find myself getting bogged down if a game is too big. 

FarCry 5 follows a familiar pattern of dividing Hope County up into several regions. Three are the main areas for play, with two much smaller zones acting as introductory and concluding bookends. Each of the main three regions are controlled by one of the Eden's Gate lieutenants, and feature some gently stylized environmental features and challenges. For example, in Faith's region, the hallucinogenic 'bliss' is manufactured out of the fields of lily-like flowers found around the region. The basic mechanic is that the player character ("Rook" or "Deputy"), takes on each lieutenant in turn through a network of loosely connected 'story' and 'side' missions. They can also destroy various assets and liberate outposts in each region. 

All of this accumulates as "Resistance Points" within the given region. There are a few milestones where the game suddenly intervenes with some strong deus ex machina to advance the overarching plot. The final milestone in each region is that the lieutenant will call the player out in some way, triggering the final boss-like showdown and finally liberating the region. 

With all that exposition out of the way, I can talk about how it worked for me. I find that the story missions can really derail my enthusiasm for these games. Too much talking to minor NPCs of tremendously varied quality and interest, sending me on the archetypal errand quests of some sort or another. Even though this really is the crux of any open world game, I find myself hitting a limit pretty fast. 

What suddenly happened in FarCry 5 was that I realized there were dozens of challenges that would award my character upgrade "perks" depending on how I played. So, as I browsed the challenges, which range from killing a certain number of enemies with a particular weapon, to killing a certain number of enemies from a certain distance, I suddenly had two birds I could address with one stone (or flamethrower, dynamite, or whatever). 

These challenges are not particularly inspired nor are they unique to FarCry 5. In fact, this sort of encouragement to play the game differently based on weapons and approach is almost as ubiquitous as the open world design described above. 

I argue that it is common because it is effective. I could turn my attention more to the 'how' rather than the 'what' when I got a little bored of liberating outposts or defending territory. Instead of my usual sniper and stealth approach, I used a flamethrower up close in a wildly different playstyle. I was making two sorts of progress, then, and that was enough to get my over a certain hump in the overall game. 

As the unlocks started to trickle and then flow, I found the game easier, since not only did I have more tools at my disposal, but I also had practiced a few different techniques for dealing with the game's challenges. That helped me progress faster, which was the problem in the first place. 

This layering of incentives is a crucial element to longer games. Personally, I'd like to see this design feature extrapolated outside of videogame design. The area I always think of is education. How can we make the incentives more varied and explicit in the years-long process of getting a degree? Is there a way we can help students not endure but enjoy the various challenges we throw at them?