[COLUMN] I’m Still a Sucker for a Good View | by Marty Sliva

If you’ve ever spent any chunk of time watching us stream a game here at Second Wind, there’s a good chance you heard us make a goof at some point about a vista. That moment where you turn a corner or crest a hill, only to be met with a meticulously framed view of the landscape in front of you. Whether it’s Zelda’s Hyrule, Avatar’s Pandora, or Metroid’s Phendrana Drifts, it’s become a recurring gag for us to call them out and linger a moment to soak in the beauty.

But all goofs aside, I absolutely love these moments in games. Some folks play games for the challenge or mechanical mastery. Others want a compelling story that they have some part in crafting. And while those are all well and good, I’ve reached a point in my life where the thing I’m searching for most in my free time is a game with a vibe to it, and one of the quickest ways for me to find that nebulous state is by stumbling upon a sick-ass view.

This happened several times to me this past week, all over the course of three new releases. The first was Assassin’s Creed Shadows. While the story, mission structure, and moment-to-moment gameplay feel incredibly familiar, the thing that’s been helping me along is the promise that every few minutes, I’m going to hit a moment where I can look out at Ubisoft’s gorgeous recreation of Japan and just take it all in. Whether it’s a quiet shrine framed by torii gates or the vast wilderness stretching far beyond Osaka, these moments of serenity have stuck with me more than any of the story beats or silent infiltrations have so far.

Since its inception, the Assassin’s Creed franchise has had built-in moments like this that allow the player to let the environment wash over them. These usually come when you climb to the top of sync point, and the camera does its familiar 360 degree sweep of the surrounding area, peppering your map with various points of interest. Yes, this and Far Cry 3 started the trend of unlocking the world by climbing a million silly towers, but even this cliche can’t take away from the feeling of experiencing a pure dose of beauty and scale in the digital worlds I choose to inhabit.

Some other bespoke vista moments I’ve had recently came while jamming through Split Fiction with Yahtzee last week. While a vast majority of the game is spent ping-ponging between wildly different mechanics and ideas while the screen is split in half, there are a handful of moments where you stumble upon a bench overlooking a landscape. While I imagine most players will probably run right past these and continue on with their adventure, we made it a point to stop at each one, have a nice sit, and take a momentary breather.

I loved these because when we’d both choose to sit down, our cameras would merge into one for a brief moment. The characters would reflect on their journey and share a warm moment together, but beyond that, we were doing the same. These peaceful rest stops were nods to the team’s original game, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, as well as a long lineage of introspective benches in games tracing back to Ico in 2001.

These moments especially stood out to me because they were paired with other digital benches of reflection that I constantly sat at in Wanderstop. While running my liminal space tea shop and coming to terms with my own limits as a human being, I’d occasionally make myself a cup, mosey on over to one of the forest clearing’s many benches, and just enjoy the moment of zen that came with the tea. In keeping with the theme of this piece, the camera would swirl around behind my character, sharing their perfectly-framed view of the tea shop with me as they slowly emptied their cup, their mind wandering to a specific memory that the ritual happened to dredge up. It’s vista as therapy, and I loved it.

This isn’t the only time in games where a view is more than just a view. There’s perhaps no greater way to illustrate a call to adventure than by allowing us to step into a space where the true breadth of our journey lays out in front of us. The most iconic of these moments is probably right near the start of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, as Link leaves the Shrine of Resurrection and is introduced to the vast stretch of the Great Plateau in front of him. Not to be outdone, Elden Ring has its own unforgettable view that seems to be in conversation with this one, shortly after defeating Godrick the Grafted, when you lay your eyes on Liurnia of the Lakes for the first time.

I think the thing that makes these two moments stand out among their peers is in just how meticulously crafted both worlds are, to the point where the shape of the horizon tells us an entire story about what this place is, and what kinds of things we have in store for us as we press forward.

I love it when a view acts as a kind of signifier to our current goal at any given moment. Thatgamecompany drops these often in Journey, as the mountain top we’re constantly moving towards slowly grows larger and larger in view. Same thing for both of The Last of Us games – Naughty Dog loves to ground players in the world by giving us a glimpse of our goal across the mess of a city that seems impossible to traverse. This makes our eventual success upon arriving there feel all the sweeter.

These views can also press upon us just how small we are in the face of such vast and overwhelming odds. Cloud looking up at the towering Shinra Building in Final Fantasy VII, or your arrivals in both Rapture and Columbia across the BioShock franchise all do a great job of making us feel the weight of the odds stacked against us in some really potent ways.

Maybe that’s the reason why these vistas in games resonate with me so strongly. In experiences largely filled with violence, supercharged powers, and a sense that we’re the most important person in the world, none of those matter in these brief interludes. The countless views in Red Dead Redemption 2 remind us that at the end of the day, we’re just a tiny human blip in the endless stretch of the world. While this can oftentimes lean into the reflective melancholy of existence, there’s impossible beauty to be found here as well.

Perhaps no game captures this better than Outer Wilds, where you’re stuck in a loop that sees the sun going supernova every 22 minutes, ceasing the existence of everything as far as the eye can see. You can’t outrun this inevitably, so whenever I’d make it to the end of a cycle without prematurely meeting my demise by any of the many, many ways you can die in the game, I’d find a nice cozy spot on whichever given celestial body I was on, look up at the sky, and greet the arrival of inevitability as an equal.

The best part of all of this is that these kinds of views in games just keep coming along. The next few months are going to deliver the pastel landscapes of Wheel World, another trip to Japan in Ghost of Yotei, and the sequel to what might be the king of vistas in Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. No matter what happens in these games narratively or mechanically, you can bet that I’ll be there day one, climbing to the highest point I can see, and just soaking in that vista moment.