FTL: Faster Than Light; Exploration and Discovery

[Warning Spoilers? on a 5 year old game? maybe?]

FTL: Faster Than Light is potentially my most favourite game, top 3 easily. There are many aspects of this game that I love, but I want to mention the designed natural discovery process that takes place; I know, contradictory.

This is a rouge like, heavy play oriented game, where the only portions of written story are the random events that occur when warping to a new location. "This space station is on fire, select 1 to save them, select 2 to leave, select 3 to use your fireproof alien race crew member" and so on is what you can expect from these events. But then I warped to a specific star system and found a rebel ship yard that contained blueprints for a new unlockable ship. The horizon of potential adventure opens up from here, with multiwarp point quests that can span the entire length of the game world.

[FTL: Faster Than Light]

Discovery through exploration is created so simply here by not tell you when or where events/quests are going to happen. The game world is randomly generated every play through while only giving you 2 pieces of information; where the exit to the next level is, and where you are now (I included an example sector's beacon map as a... well... as an example). Every star system in between is open for potential adventure. The layout of the star systems are non-linear, enforcing an exploration heavy path, and indirectly pushing you towards new discoveries.

There seems to be a conflict in game design about discovery. We have both extremes shown in the Legend of Zelda series, where a secret is literally an arrow pointing towards it (a crack in an outlined section of wall), or a secret is in any given tile that needs to be bombed to open a new door (or a tree tile that needs to be burned down). FTL lands itself in an enjoyable middle location of this spectrum where the player is not directly pushed towards a secret, or forced to press up, down, left, left, etc, to unlock a mystery. The level design and layout allows exploration to happen naturally through play in a way that is not obvious, which in return generates the self satisfying sense of discovery when you are forced to land on a random star system that contains a new quest.

[Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past, The Wind Waker]

FTL is awesome, if I can give the game anything, it is not justice for how fantastic it is. Have yourself an adventure and check it out.