I think a lot of us remember being a kid and splashing around in puddles. Who didn’t love doing that? You probably also liked pools, or maybe the ocean, if you swam in either. Maybe you liked one more than the other, but both were fun. Video games are pretty similar, when you think about it. There are games that are shallow and games that are deep, and both are fun.

But what are the effects of increasing the scale of a game? What kind of experience do you find?

Sometime in the recent past, games focused on scale rather than responsiveness. By that, I mean that games have more places to go, but that you can see where things don’t quite connect. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a great example of this. Skyrim is gigantic in terms of land, dungeons, caves, and exploration. There are hundreds of NPCs to interact with, quests to take, and chests to open. You can spend hundreds of hours in the game without even touching the main quest.

The world  of Skyrim is huge,. You can travel everywhere you can see, but does it react to you? Does it care about what you do and how you play? — The world of *Skyrim* is huge,. You can travel everywhere you can see, but does it react to you? Does it care about what you do and how you play?

After a while, however, you might notice that a lot of the caves seem to repeat themselves, and that most of the quests are little more than fetch quests. The ocean you thought you were swimming now looks more like a kiddie pool. You can head to the College of Winterhold, the magical center of the region, earn the Robes of the Archmage, and NPCs will still say to you, "You know, if you have the aptitude, you should join the mages' college in Winterhold." You’re literally a legendary and mythical hero but nobody in the game reacts to what you do. None of this is to say that Skyrim is not enjoyable or anything of the sort, but I think it’s clear to see how the world is less responsive when scale is increased. Of course, not every RPG runs focuses on scale.

Hope you like looking at these three kinds of dungeons, because that's what you'll be seeing for your exploration time in Skyrim.

Dragon Age II is a game that attracted a lot of flak when it came out. Many people thought it stripped too much from the first game in the series (Dragon Age: Origins) and reused too many locations.

A followup to the hit Dragon Age: Origins:, Dragon Age II had a much tighter focus in terms of explorable space and character interaction. — A followup to the hit *Dragon Age: Origins:, Dragon Age II* had a much tighter focus in terms of explorable space and character interaction.

DA II shined when it came to responsiveness. You had a core group of characters that you saw grow and react to your choices and you got to see how your choices changed the world around you. As you became Champion of Kirkwall, the city where much of the game takes place, people reacted to you differently and the kind of quests you found changed. You went from just another refugee to the most important citizen of Kirkwall and advisor to the Viscount. The intense focus on characters also made you feel as if your choices had impact, because they affected how your companions viewed you and how their combat skills grew. DA II lacks scale, however. It may have been intentional, or it may have been due to a lack of time, but you don’t go many places in DA II. The places you do go you see again and again. Eventually you start to ask why pirates, apostate mages, and darkspawn all hang out in the same cave at different times. There is also a huge reuse of objects in the game, and it does start to wear on you. The intense focus on responsiveness makes you really realize how small the game world is.

You will see this warehouse over a dozen times, with different enemies, quests, and treasure inside.

At this point, you might think that responsiveness and scale can’t exist together. There really aren’t many games which managed to blend the two, but Fallout 2: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game manages to. Fallout 2 is a much beloved game and some people consider it to be the last true game in the Fallout series because of the large changes the Bethesda made in the later games.

In Fallout 2, you took the place of a descendant of the main character of Fallout 1, and you ventured out into the wasteland to find the Garden of Eden Creation Kit (or G.E.C.K) to save your dying village. As you head through the game, you gained a reputation according to your choices. For instance, you can join a Mafia family and stores give you discounts, you can become a champion boxer and doors, usually open to only the most charismatic, will open, and you can defend the innocent and all the evil characters in the world will be suspicious when talking to you. The world and people around you reacted to you in a way that makes sense, even though the in-game world of Fallout 2 is huge and filled with characters, settlements, and quests comparable to Skyrim. The combination of responsiveness and scale help Fallout 2 stand out in a crowd populated by some of the best games ever made.

IT’s hard to make a large world that reacts to player choices, but it can be done. There aren’t many games that accomplish it, but it adds something very special to those that do. It’s easy to imagine how hard it would be to great something huge with great detail, but maybe it says something about what makes a truly talented developer, that they’re somebody who can get fire and ice to work together.