How Hub Worlds Shape Video Game Design
Whether players come to chat, organize activities, buy and sell items, or just to log out, hubs have a language all their own.Monster Hunter Rise came out in March. Like its predecessor, Monster Hunter: World, Rise tries to make the game a bit more friendly to newbies. But as the series increasingly embraces the adventure side of the action-adventure genre, its hub worldâ€"the place where you craft weapons and armor, snag and stow items, and eat food and chat with NPCsâ€"feels off.
Rise’s hub is like the Monster Hunter villages that came before it, but in Rise the characters have been fleshed out a bit. Even Kamara Village, the hub in Rise, has its own history of sorts. But the NPC characterization feels more like a series of archetypes than a collection of fully realized people. And history’s place within the village is only there for convenience, to encourage a new mode of gameplay. The end result feels like something has been cut, like something’s missing that was once there. But to figure out what, we need to look at hub worlds in general, and why they exist in the first place.
Considered to be one of the first stealth games (by Guinness World Records of all things), the 1981 arcade game 005 would also lay the foundation for what a hub is. Unlike overworlds that a character traverses between dungeons or missions, or a world that flows from start to finish like a single level or experience, hub worlds are generally one level that players often return to, and that then leads to other levels.
However, 005’s map was not considered a “hub†the way we think of them now. At the time, it was called a “RasterScan Convert-a-Game.†As Bill Kurtz says in his Encyclopedia of Arcade Video Games, “this 1981 video game was designed so that it could be easily changed into another game in minutes … 005 is a RasterScan Covert-a-Game, which can be later converted to a brand-new top-earning game at a substantial savings.†However, its impact was well felt.
Super Mario 64, one of Mario’s first 3D platforming games, is also many gamer’s go-to for explaining what a hub world is. More than just a level selector, Princess Peach’s castle gives the player details and clues as to what happened before your arrival. But more than that, it gives the player a sense of mood for the levels outside of the hub. That midi-synthesized violin as you run along the bright, saturated reds and blues of the castle decor? It’s more than just a way to make loading easier and for levels to process faster. It’s also used to get the players into the right mindset and suspension of disbelief for the game. Martin Hollis, one of the developers at Rare who worked on the Nintendo 64 classic GoldenEye, says the hub world in Mario 64 influenced their thinking on GoldenEye. Writing on a blog that can only be obtained through the Wayback Machine, Hollis says “the idea for the huge variety of missions within a level came from Super Mario 64.â€
In their paper “Procedural Level Design for Platform Games,†programmers and researchers Kate Compton and Michael Mateas of the Georgia Institute of Technology used cell structures to describe how to implement nonlinear level design. One such design, as described in figure 2, refers to a “hub†design, where a central space then leads off to multiple other spaces that players can enter.
When referring to this cell design, they write, “The player chooses not only between the two paths, but the two possible destinations, which might lead a player to choose a harder-looking path with the expectation of a greater reward at the end.â€
So a game hub is essentially a home. If the dungeons, levels, and quests are massive and deadly tasks that players take on, hubs are the sighs of relief. They’re the spaces that you feel safe in, where you can practice your skills, chat with other people, or find out new things about the game world. If platforming, dungeon crawling, or role-playing are active mechanics, then the hub is a place for passive actions.
This is one way to describe Orgrimmar and Stormwind from Blizzard’s now 16-year-old massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft. The cities serve as starting areas, and while they’re not where your character first appears in the world, they’re the first in-game space you’ll find populated with other players and NPCs alike. The cities branch out, offering players the ability to communicate, sell items to one another, plan events, and store and craft items, and in general they are spaces that players return to after their activities elsewhere in the game world. While not hubs from a level design perspective, they carry with them the spirit of a hub.
Aside from adventure games, platformers, and multiplayer games, hubs have been crucial to another genre: the dungeon crawler. Released last year, Hades is a great example. The game earned high praise for the way it handles player death and its replayability, but also for its characters. Based on Greek mythology, Hades uses its hub world to tell and develop the characters’ stories. But to do so, the characters’ story and dialog are mostly removed from the main game mechanics. Their story arcs and personalities are front and center for the player to experience, rather than shown through gameplay.
But while single-player hubs tend to be more story oriented, multiplayer games used to use their hubs as an armory of sorts. And when it comes to “hubs equal armories,†Destiny and Warframe live in both fame and infamy for their designs. While Warframe has created some open-world areas recently, there won’t be anything quite like the sleek and minimal hub level area that is the Orbiter. Unlike Hades’ almost expansive, lore-heavy hub, the Orbiter, the ship of the player characters, is almost like an interface in itself. It’s where the Tenno stock their weapons and equipment, travel through levels, and even train their canine companions. It’s also where players are able to purchase other warframes and weapons, making them not only areas to pause and calm down after gameplay, but also a marketplace of sorts. This is understandable, given that Warframe considers itself a free-to-play sort of economy. But what about Destiny 2?
Destiny 2 has gained some notoriety and controversy in that, while it’s a game being sold at retail price, there were still micro-transactions being carried out within the supposed “tower,†one of the hubs of the game. The tower within Destiny 2 works much like Orgrimmar and Stormwind City. However, the hub is closed off, having players jump from there to other levels within the game. But aside from the social aspect of the tower, there’s also a couple of vendors that require the player to purchase micro-transactions before they can sell wares. This brings an interesting distinction between single-player and multiplayer hubs.
Where one tries to expand the mechanic as a means to tell a story and develop a world around it, another seems more interested in the function of a hub level. Both Warframe and Destiny 2 design their hubs as a means for players to pause from the action, yes. But they also are marketplaces and shops for them to purchase gear and other items. And as multiplayer and single-player seem to stray further from each other, it seems like hubs will be implemented as a general design, rather than a specific mechanic, adding a division between a maximalist and a minimalist approach to said design.
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