Introduction

Every gamer has experienced these moments of admiration, being taken aback by the genius of a layout, the mightiness of a building, the detail of an environment, or the look of a beautiful landscape. With nowadays competition at best graphics or most immersive experiences, it is important for a level to feature such mind-blowing moments to leave a mark on the player. This essay aims at encyclopedically describing the multiple "hooks" that a level or game can use to achieve this.

One of the most important factors in game design, especially from the point of having the game fly off the shelves, is to have a hook. A hook is some unique or must-have feature that will attract players simply because they haven't experienced anything quite like it in a game before. Levels with good hooks are almost always the experiences that players will remember fondly or describe as the moments that defined the game for them.

[Wow-factor] is an intangible unit of measurement that refers to the biggest point of impact of your level [that] simply has to leave an impression on the player. Ideally, a level should have a few of these moments--they define a level to the player, and often to the community of gamers who play the title.

- Ed Byrne in his book Game Level Design

I have divided the content into 3 parts: Immersion, Impression and Emotion. It would be valid to argue about the exact meaning of these terms but for the length of this article, we'll give them these definitions:

Immersion

refers to the reaction of the player to the world in which he navigates. This is determined by the setting, the mood, the credibility, the variety of decors, etc. This is the first aspect that will get noticed.

Impression

is composed of most memorable points of the level, the ones that trigger admiration (also called "Wow-Factor"). These events or places happen/are visited at specific moments in the game.

Emotion

encompasses the hooks resulting from narrative, twists, confusion, mystery, etc. These will usually be experienced late in a game as they require building-up to be effective.

 

Spoiler alert!

In this article, I mention critical moments and features of famous games, namely: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Half-Life 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood, Crysis, Gran Theft Auto 4, Fallout 3, Mass Effect and Resident Evil 5. I'll try not to divulge major scenes and twists, but will sometimes have to to illustrate the point at hand, so if you intend to play these games, you might want to postpone reading it.

Please note that I'm referring to singleplayer games in this essay, but while factors such as meaninful choices or story twists are rare in multiplayer games, about half of the following advices still apply.

Immersion

Setting

From the very start, the choice of setting of a level can make it interesting. If you've ever visited an abandoned asylum, you might have realized that it doesn't need fog, blood stains or sounds echoing along the corridors to be damn creepy. If you've ever been to China, you might have been amazed by their architectural style. If you've ever been on a boat during a storm or at the top of a volcano, you might have caught a glimpse of the strength of the elements at play that made you realize how weak and small you are in comparison.

There are places and events that have the capacity to move you. These scenes, and similarly, places that don't exist but would definitely trigger these reactions (such as an alien species' hive, or an underwater city) usually make for the most enjoyable game settings.

Originality plays its part in the process: we've seen the inside of spaceships too often to be really amazed anymore, and even D-Day recreations don't impress that much since most World War II games had their own crack at it. But more than in setting, the originality in execution is critical. Two levels based off the same setting can still look and feel completely different, depending on the aim of the level, the style of the game, the mood, etc.

Atmosphere

Seconding the choice of setting, the choice of mood and lighting influences a level's aspect tremendously. In a game like Silent Hill 2, environments are purposedly gritty and worn out, or occluded by the fog. In Just Cause, the over-the-top colorful environments and sunlight give it a unique cartoony but beautiful look.

Originality is still important in designing the atmosphere of the level. It's what gives it its own unique touch, no matter how many times we've seen the same setting before. In Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, you visit a handful of western towns, but when you eventually reach the ghost village, with its moody fog, dead trees and palpable stillness, you don't feel like you've seen it before. Similarly, many games feature jungles and tropical settings, but the incredible realism of these decors in Crysis gives them an altogether new dimension. Through mood and lighting, something as boring as a road can be made to look great.

Again, inspiration can come from real-life situations (a sunrise that spreads its pink/blue colors all across my hometown can turn it from a boring little village to a visually striking, inspirational environment), uncommon ones (sunset on the planet Mars) or imaginary ones (like glowing alien plants in a cave).

Detail & Complexity

Even with a common setting and unoriginal mood, a level can still impress through detail. The feeling that the game world is too wide to explore, that searching every nook and cranny is going to take time and effort: that feeling is part of a level's appeal.

In this case, consider Detail as strictly visual, like a house made of rusty poles and metal plates attached together, or pebbles scattered on the floor. Complexity however is to be understood as the quality of layouts that make for interesting and challenging navigation, like a multi-level scaffolding linking numerous buildings, or tunnels forming a maze. Adding detail can be viewed as replacing a simple wall into a rusty metal fence made of pieces of garbage; complexity is about adding corners, rooms or floors to an environment so navigating it is trickier. However, if a layout becomes too complex, the player will more easily get lost, so it's got to be done reasonably, and used in pair with guiding techiques or other navigational tools.

In Stalker, most of the environments aren't intrinsically original (industry ruins and power plants) but their complexity and the attention to detail makes up for it. When reaching the ruins of Pripyat, the number of buildings and rooms explorable for loot or side quests is seriously overwhelming.

I mean, if detail can make a brick wall look good, it's no wonder how much a level can benefit from it.

Complexity isn't necessarily limited to visuals and layouts: games like Mass Effect or Fallout 3 feature an impressive amount of branching dialogues and characters, and impress through the sheer volume of work that went into them, and the number of possibilities available.

Credibility

From detail and complexity I'll switch to credibility, as they are tightly linked concepts. Credibility is critical to immersion, as it allows the player to forget he's playing a game. It can be achieved through many means, and usually more than one is required.

Adding detail doesn't necessarily mean increasing the credibility of a level, but it should be the goal to aim for, that's why props should always be placed intelligently, fitting their surroundings, with a reason for their presence other than to simply fill an empty area.

An environment that seems alive like the city of the Yakuza series, or Crysis' jungle, is credible. A well fleshed mechanism that looks able to accomplish its function is credible. A puzzle whose result is logical and believable is credible. An ecosystem in which wildlife's position, reaction and evolution feel natural is credible. An office in which every cupboard and drawers can be opened is credible.

Credibility also means giving the illusion that the game world is larger and more complex than it actually is. A good skybox hints at distant structures and details so that the playable zone doesn't feel like it's the only thing that matters, but rather like it's a small part of a whole universe.

Variety

Walking down the street in the middle of the day is never really completely boring: it can be entertaining to simply watch people go about their day, their looks, their clothes, their actions, their conversations. Variety is necessary for an environment to be credible. Even though we're still far from reaching that same depth in games, efforts in that direction don't go unnoticed.

Gran Theft Auto 4 and its peers like Yakuza 3 push the boundaries of credibility by creating a world full of life and possibilities, where characters seem to have a life beyond their purpose and a wide range of actions and appearances.

Variety in gameplay is also necessary for a game to stay interesting. There's a level in Resident Evil 5 in which one character has to hold a flashlight while the other fights enemies. This new aspect of cooperative gameplay does a great job at deepening the game universe and developing the game experience. Even if it lasts only 5 minutes, it breaks the monotony of the game mechanics.

Variety in levels is also required within a game, or it would tend to loose its credibility as a whole or simply become boring. In the following example, you can witness how varied Gears of War 2 levels are.

Smart mechanics & Integration

However rare it may be, witnessing a game mechanic cleverly integrated in its surroundings, or being used in new original situations, makes for "Wow, clever!" moments and tremedously helps increase the immersiveness of a level.

This is the case in Gears of War 2, whose gameplay basically relies on shooting from cover to cover. When the player visits the caves' level, where not much garbage is available to hide behind, he has to use massive worms as cover instead, but they move around slowly so it adds a new dimension to the gameplay. The developers managed to merge a game mechanic with a credible feature and the game world only feels deeper for it.

But it's not even necessary to turn a gameplay element around to impress the player: the game mechanics can be genius from the start. Zelda: Ocarina of Time had the player travel back and forth between two time periods, changing past events to affect the future. Mario Galaxy presents an original use of gravity and spherical levels that challenge your navigation skills. Half-Life 2' gravity gun offers many new possibilities for a player to interact with its surroundings. Trine's levels are clever puzzles in which you use physics and the skills of 3 different characers to get to the exit. World of Goo has you creating complex structures with goo balls of different properties.

Evolution

Finally, on the same line as reusing gameplay elements in new clever ways, an environment that is visited multiple times and which purpose and features change every time is bound to give that feeling of genius.

In Batman: Arkham Asylum, the number of areas to visit could be considered limited, but the game has you traveling through all of them multiple times and updates them regularly. For instance, catwalks on each side of a lobby will first be used to surprise foes and take them down, but later on, plants take over the island and this lobby's floor gets filled with poisonous spores. The player has to use the catwalks again, this time to be able to cross the room, and he has to jump from side to side to go around all the roots that climbed out of the ground.

In Fallout 3: The Pitt, you infiltrate an industry coumpound as a slave, and can only access the ground floor while the slavers walk around on scaffoldings and platforms that link every building of town. Later on, you prove your worth and gain access to these paths, and end up traveling the same familiar levels in new ways, find more loot and characters, explore new areas, etc.

Evolution is impressive because it shows cleverness in how a single area can be used in different ways. Such a level has to be properly planned out from the start because of how versatile it must be, and there's less room for randomness (like props placed around to fill the area) since most objects will have a purpose at some point, and players can appreciate that.

Another instance of this phenomenon is when adding a new weapon, power or tool suddenly opens new possibilities, usually in places already visited for more impact. This happens very often in Batman: Arkham Asylum and in the Zelda series, in which gaining new items allow you to access previously locked or unreachable areas, and forces you to reassess your skills to determine what you can explore now. In Trine, when it gets a bit repetitive to solve puzzles, your characters get new aptitudes and powers that permit finding new solutions and reaching new bonuses.