Design Analysis & Dev Diaries

An open world genre study, written from the designer's chair I have spent most of my working and student life building spaces that people walk through, and a good chunk of it watching them refuse to. What follows is not a review round-up. It is what the genre looks like from behind the glass in a playtest room, and from the meeting where someone asks how many square kilometres we are shipping. I want to start with the number, because the number is where the trouble begins. --

Every designer's first instinct when building a reactive world is to add a morality meter. It makes sense on paper. You want the player to feel the weight of their choices. You want those choices to matter. A bar that fills or empties is clean, readable, unambiguous. It tells the player: you are becoming something. I built one for Koel. Then I deleted it. The Problem with Meters Morality meters don't measure morality. They measure optimization. The moment a player sees a met