I must admit, my recent foray into MMORPG-land with EVE Online did have one plus point. It reminded what a great game Frontier: Elite II was, and I fired it up under the Amiga emulator WinUAE for another quick blast.
Several hours later I was still there, genuinely more engrossed in the tedium of space flight than at any point during my EVE experience. It wasn’t so much the game itself that kept me entertained - thirteen years after release, it’s looking a little tired and its many irksome bugs wear thin rather quickly - but the game world.
In 1993, a game world typically wasn’t expressed entirely through the medium of the game as it would be now. For a game with the scope of Frontier, it’s hard to see how that would even be achieved. No, it was expressed through something that used to be commonplace inside boxed games: extra goodies.
The Frontier manual was a thing of beauty, a 100-page brusier detailing every possibility in the game, from mining through to piracy. You didn’t even have to play the game to be able to taste the possibilities, the wanton open-endedness of it all. Mining in Frontier may have sucked in reality, but it certainly didn’t when you read its chapter in the manual.
Having a decent manual certainly wasn’t unique to Frontier, especially back in 1993. Even some modern games - the GTA series springs to mind - uphold the tradition with detailed, lovingly crafted manuals, chock-full of detail from the game world. No, what was almost unique about Frontier’s offerings were the other two booklets.
There was the Gazeteer, featuring profiles of many of the star systems and planets featured in the game, and Stories of Life on the Frontier, a compendium of short stories based in the Elite universe.
It was partly these additions that brought the blocky, largely empty universe of Frontier to life. Even the other day, as I cruised from my pulsating blue circle of a Hyperspace Arrival Cloud Remnant to the rudimentary 3D geometry of an orbital station, I could recall the nuggets of detail I’d read about the game world, and some of the childish sense of wonder - I’m flying through a colonised star system! - came back.
How many games can you say that about, eh?
Just for kicks, compare and contrast this approach with the situation today, where the mechanics of the game world are - generally - delivered 100% in-game. Have a look on Wikipedia for the storyline behind Half-Life 2. It’s clear that an immense amount of thought has gone into it, but how much of that background detail makes it into the final game? How much of that is the player aware of?
I’m not sure whether it’s preferable to make the player experience the game world first-hand, rather than reading about it in a manual. The fact that it’s even remotely possible nowdays is certainly encouraging, but is it the best way? I’m not sure - but I know which approach fired my imagination more.
I know, I know, GameFAQs exists for background. Strategy guides do too. But nothing quite beats the freebies you used to get with those big boxed games.
