Empty Room Psych: Difference between revisions

[[File:00000 2384.jpg|frame|{{color|white|Move along, nothing to see here. No, really, we mean it. Move along!}}]]

 

 

Over decades of play, gamers have been conditioned with the notion that there is no such thing as an "empty" room -- [[The Law of Conservation of Detail]] demands that if a room is placed in a game, it must do ''something'' of value, be it a scripted plot event or NPC, [[Dungeon Shop]], [[Level Grinding|monsters to slay]], [[Inexplicable Treasure Chests]] containing [[Healing Potion|healing items]] or weapons/ammo, [[Plot Coupon]]s to pick up, etc etc. After all, programmers and writers have limited time and money to do this, so they won't needlessly create a majestic cathedral and fill it with ... empty white space to distract the player from [[Notice This|more important stuff]]. Plus, why torture those players out for a [[100% Completion]] by adding loads of [[Copy and Paste Environments|copy-pasted rooms]] with [[Missing Secret|nothing in them]]?

An [[Empty Room Until the Trap]] is a common cause of this. If not, you may be looking at a [[Sidetrack Bonus]], lucky you.

 

 

{{examples}}

 

* Perhaps the oldest example of this is the Atari 2600 game ''[[Adventure (1979 video game)|Adventure]]''. There is a dead-end section of three rooms where no items appear.

** Possibly subverted in that almost any room can contain items in Game variation 3 (where all objects are placed randomly), and two of rooms that appear in Game 2 and 3 as dead-ends instead appear as important locations in Game 1 (where the layout of the kingdom is smaller and simpler). It's only in Game 2 that those rooms are entirely unimportant.

* Subverted in ''[[Avalon Code]]''. ''every'' room has at least three unique points of interest in them. Even in the cookie-cutter dungeon cells, the points of interest are ''all different''.

** A seemingly empty room in the fourth dungeon of the Dark World turns out to be important later. After bombing the cracked floor in the room above it, making light shine down into it, and bringing a girl you rescued into it, and having her stand in the light, she {{spoiler|freaks out and reveals herself to be the boss}}.

*** There's also the hallway at the top of the Kakariko windmill that you need the Longshot to get into. When you get up there and climb to the top you'll find....a chicken. And nothing else. This is presumably to make sure that Kakariko Village doesn't lose its signature sound of clucking, but it's still a strange place to put it.

* This is the reason one spends hours upon hours of exploring every nook and cranny in ''Super [[Metroid]]''. Even though the game tries to throw you off with several apparently meaningless rooms complete with the 'dead end' background music. Sometimes there really is nothing there, but the player remains unconvinced.

** When you get the X-Ray Scanner, you can finally be sure—a quick sweep with the scanning beam will reveal any false or breakable walls and any hidden items.

*** The MSX version does have a level with [[Magical Mystery Doors]].

* ''[[The Goonies (video game)|The Goonies]] II'' has many useless rooms (most with various people giving useless advice, like an old lady who's lost her glasses, or someone saying that it's fun to play the game) and one completely empty room. Lampshaded at one point by an Eskimo in the ice cave. "I'm Eskimo. There's nothing here." The empty-room dilemma manages to combine with another one—the hidden-object/passageway dilemma—to make the game a ''nightmare'' for first-time players who are completionists. Mikey has three tools he can use during the "3D" portions (fist, hammer and glasses) to either make items appear or to make a doorway in a wall/floor/ceiling. Also, in the side-scrolling portions, Mikey has very short-range bombs he can use to locate doorways. All of these factors come together into making quite possibly the most frustrating Metroidvania ever.

* ''[[Shadow of the Colossus]]'' averts this [[Trope]] to legendary degree by filling one of the largest open space virtual worlds ever with almost nothing but [[Scenery Porn]]. There are only 16 enemies in the entire game and unless you get horribly lost, you will only visit half the map getting to them. The remaining half is miles of gorgeous open fields, dark valleys, caves, ruins, cliffs, lakes, deserts, and mountains, all fully explorable and stuffed to the brim with absolutely nothing. However, there are several minor and mostly pointless features scattered around the map.

** Eating white lizard tails increases your strength and eating fruit increases your maximum health. They are in fixed locations but will continually respawn so it doesn't qualify as a [[Treasure Hunt]] sidequest. Lizards are usually (but not exclusively) located at the shrines where you can save your game. [[Captain Obvious|The fruit grows on trees.]]

** If you increase your stamina enough you can make it to the secret garden on top of the temple. There you will find an extra special fruit that will affect your maximum health much more dramatically than regular fruit. Unfortunately, in the negative direction.

*** While making your way to the Garden you will pass the very, very long bridge Wander first used to access the temple. If you muster the <s>boredom</s> patience it takes to traverse it you will come to the one and only entrance/exit to the sealed land. A tremendous wind prevents you from walking through. As time wasters go it's a pretty respectable one.

** There is wildlife to be found. Hawks will buzz you as you ride your horse. If they fly close enough you can grab them for a short glide. The same goes for the [[Disturbed Doves|doves]] hanging out back at Mono's place. If you happen to see any fish they can also be grabbed for a ride. Normal lizards everywhere can be killed and eaten to regain health but your health regenerates anyway so why bother? Here and there an invincible turtle.

** In the 5C section of the map you will find the only genuine [[Easter Egg]] in the entire game. Near the shine there is a path down the cliff. Follow it and you will find the beach where Yorda and the horned boy washed up at the end of ''[[Ico]]''.

* ''[[Ys]] Book I and II'' has a meaningless alcove at the entrance to the Shrine, and an empty room behind the boss room in the Abandoned Mine. The Cavern of Rasteenie and Solomon Shrine in Book II also have many useless dead-end rooms.

* ''[[Enter the Matrix]]'' had an Empty Level Psych. One level in the vampire mansion consisted of walking from one door to another in the same room, then loading the next level. Considering how dodgy the game was, chances are it was just oversight on someone's part.

* The "Adventure Fields" in ''[[Sonic Adventure]]'' were absolutely rife with these; one particularly strange example is aboard the crashed [[Airship|Egg Carrier]] as Knuckles, it's possible to gain access to an area often referred to as "Eggman's Fun Room", a strange room of bright colors, a bed, and what appeared to be toys. The place served no purpose and wasn't even accessible to most characters, and was quite perplexing to some players.

 

* Empty rooms are found painfully frequently in amateur [[Interactive Fiction]]. Many authors implement houses with bare-bones bedrooms, bathrooms, closets, and so on; smarter authors either make these locations more interesting, or omit them with a [[Hand Wave|hand-wave]] along the lines of "There's nothing you need in there."

* There is a 400-story skyscraper in ''[[Zork]] Zero,'' comprising nearly ''2,000 rooms,'' of which only three contain anything at all—and one of those three is an [[Easter Egg]]. The puzzle is working out which rooms you need to visit. (The clues are in the [[Feelies]]).

* ''7 Days A Skeptic'' from the ''[[Chzo Mythos]]''. has a recreation room in the ship, with arcade games, books and an air hockey table and is pretty much the only room that has no relevence to the story besides decoration. [[Ben Croshaw|Yahtzee's]] commentary on the special edition mockingly points this out.

* In ''[[Myst]]'', the temple in Channelwood is completely irrelevant to solving the game. It's just for decoration, and horror, what with the scary masks, the sacrificial altar, and the hologram of Achenar trying to speak the tree-dweller's language.

* ''Inherit the Earth''. Dear god, ''Inherit the Earth''. You spend the better part of the game wandering through a town and finding out in which two houses there is actually something relevant.

* Played to the hilt in ''[[Yume Nikki]]''. This being a game loaded with [[Nightmare Sequence]]s, you can guess [[Nothing Is Scarier|what they're intended to do to the player]].

* ''[[The Secret of Monkey Island]]'' has the church on Melee Island - one of the first places you see...which is utterly empty for most of the game. Its only use is in the very final part where you are taken there automatically {{spoiler|1=to stop LeChuck and Elaine's wedding.}} You can therefore play through the game without choosing to go into it at all.

 

* ''[[Star Wars Galaxies]]'' has quite a few of these in every city in the game, including a theatre, the entire palace from Episode 1, a decorated beachfront with umbrellas, and a futuristic city-scape built on mountain tops with an impressive view. These do have a purpose in an MMORPG, as potential areas for chat, exploration, or deeper in-character roleplaying than normal games. Such empty rooms are expected and indirectly given a use as places that players can take their characters to get away from others or to immerse themselves further. ''[[EverQuest]]'', ''[[City of Heroes]]'', and ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' also do this.

* ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' initially suffered from this. The earlier games in the 'verse had established the existence of certain places, but the developers simply didn't have time to flesh out the entire world. Placeholders, [[Insurmountable Waist High Fence]]s or other obstacles were added to (unsuccessfully) keep players away. Many of these locations were fleshed out in subsequent patches or expansions. Notable examples include Silithus, Searing Gorge, Maraudon, Dire Maul, Naxxramas, Karazhan, Zul'Gurub, Ahn'Qiraj, Mount Hyjal, Forlorn Ridge, Outland, Northrend, Black Temple, Icecrown Citadel, Ulduar, Uldum, the Emerald Dream, Grim Batol, Quel'Thalas, Zul'Aman, Gilneas, Blackwing Lair, the Caverns of Time, Undermine, Kul Tiras, and Old Ironforge.

* In ''[[Gaia Online]]''' ''Zomg!'' game, there are a number of areas that are empty or have NPCs that just stand there and don't say or do anything. Usually, this is because of the fact that ''Zomg!'' is still in its beta testing stage and the gameplay (especially the earlier levels) are still being redone and altered. For example, the Barton Greens stage once had a golfing minigame, but that was scrapped and resulted in a screen with a Scottish NPC that doesn't say or do anything.

 

* There is exactly one intentionally empty dead-end in ''[[I Wanna Be the Guy]]''. It's called the Game Over Room, from the decoration that matches the message you get upon [[Everything Trying to Kill You|everything succeeding at killing you]]. It's the safest room in the game—in the Game Over Room, the only thing that can kill you is the suicide button. It even says so right there. {{spoiler|Except it's not actually empty in the full game. It has one of the secret items needed for [[100% Completion]].}}

** The {{spoiler|Ryu Hayabusa room}} has a fake error message box that falls and kills you.

* ''[[Banjo-Kazooie]]'' contains an inverted example of this, as the [[Game Shark]] 'moon jump' code revealed a large, empty room hidden under one of the toxic waste pits in Rusty Bucket Bay. Though this doesn't actually have a purpose in the final game, hackers have found leftover Stop 'n' Swop data that may hint to a former purpose of this room.

 

* ''Avencast: Rise of the Mage'' has an area in the academy of magic with three seminar rooms you can walk into... and one, apparently unremarkable, that you can't. Some players nearly drove themselves mad trying to get into that room.

* ''[[Baldur's Gate]] II'' averts this by allowing you to press a key when you're in a room. Surprise! All removable items are now [[Notice This|lit up in a nice shade of cyan]]. This is only possible with ''Throne of Bhaal'' installed, though.

* An all-too-common failing with beginning ''Neverwinter Nights'' mod designers. Sometimes you can even run across entire ''levels'' with not even the weeniest bit of flavor text.

 

* ''Pokémon'' Players have been searching the answer to the following question, ever since ''[[Pokémon Red and Blue]]'' versions came out: "What-the-hell IS in the inaccessible grass next to Pallet Town?!" The wildest theories have found their way to the internet, from wild Celebies (a Pokemon that didn't even exist in that game) over rare items to near invincible Pokemon on level 100...however, if you use a hacking device to cross the barrier in front of the grass, you'll find that inside there is just one thing: An Instant-Game-Over. Once you set foot in the grass your game crashes.

** It is possible to get into the grass if you go all the way north to Viridian City, where the patches end, then use the walk-through-walls code to enter the patch of grass from the north, onto a panel of grass one tile beyond the east or west edge of the grass. Walking in it will encounter Route 1 Pokémon on Route 1, and (I think) nothing in Pallet. Walking far enough from Pallet will find...[[Wrap Around|a glitchy version of Pallet Town]]. Kick in the face or what?

** ''[[Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire]]'': There's a similar, tiny cave right next to Fortree City in Ruby and Sapphire called the "Scorched Slab" that only exists to house a single TM. Hatching Pokémon in it will list it as a separate birth location, à la the above cathedral. While even the tiniest bodies of water elsewhere will contain Pokémon who attack when surfing or fishing, you cannot catch ANYTHING in the relatively large body of water you enter this cave in. It was widely believed that this cave would gain significance in ''Pokémon Emerald'', but it remained as useless as ever.

*** Rumour has it that the Scorched Slab is a homage to the tale of Amaterasu, and that cave represents the one the goddess hid herself in the myth. And that would be the reason for having TM11 (Sunny Day) there.

** A rom hack of the Generation 3 games had a similar truck, which would reference the original rumor if examined. There was also a patch of grass in ''Gold and Silver'', similar to the one near Pallet, only accessible by wallhacking; there ''were'' actually Celebi in there.

** There were many [[Urban Legend of Zelda|weird theories]] about Dark Caves and what happens if you walk through them without using Flash. As with many similar [[Image Board]] [[creepypasta]]s, they were made up from start to finish.

* ''[[Sailor Moon: Another Story]]'' does this massively, and often in no-encounter settings. The hospital, elementary school and university in Tokyo have many repeated identical rooms with nothing but background objects. Later in the game you come across towns and ruins with whole buildings that contain nothing. Even worse, there are many barrels and similarly-inviting background objects, and only three of these in the whole game have items (necessary for [[100% Completion]] of course).

 

* This is one of the biggest complaints about ''[[Quest 64]]''. Don't expect most rooms to have anything, lest you be driven to madness; the ''whole gameworld'' is mostly empty. {{spoiler|Just don't get frustrated and ignore the conspicuously large patch of desert in the Barrens...}}

* Dungeons in ''[[Ys]]'' games tend to have many blank dead-end rooms that seem to have no other purpose than to make backtracking more of a pain.

 

* The Ramses Hed Docking Port level of ''[[Dark Forces Saga]]'' has a smuggler's ship docked with the space port. The goal is to find your way into the ship to plant a homing beacon, but when you enter it you have two choices of direction to follow. If you go left, you will navigate a seemingly endless series of corridors and rooms, blasting stormtroopers and aliens, until you arrive at ... an empty room. It's supposed to be the bridge on the front of the ship, but here's the rub: you're supposed to plant the homing beacon on the ''aft'' end of the ship. If you don't remember this tidbit, you're liable to spend hours searching for the switch, door, etc. that will end the level.

** There's also two ''incredibly'' hard to access rooms that don't give you anything (possibly something was intended to be there; [[Dummied Out]]?) First, there's the prison level. You're given a code that will open the door of the guy you're trying to rescue. However, there's a cell that opens with a code that isn't written ''anywhere.'' Should you stumble onto it by trying different combinations, the door will open, giving you... nothing! Later, on Jabba's ship, there's a chute you drop through with a switch on the wall. With inhuman split-second timing, you can trigger a door to open... in the lower area you end up in if you fall into a hole in a certain part of the room (it's filled Gamorrean guards, the pig guys from ''[[Return of the Jedi]].'' In this game, they're big-time [[Demonic Spiders]] material, very durable and their axes taking a lot of damage. Close quarters with a zillion of them? YOU WILL DIE.) Fight your way through what was intended to be ''certain death'' for the player, and you can get to a room... that has nothing.

* ''[[First Encounter Assault Recon|F.E.A.R.]]'' pulls this off with aplomb when you first enter the Armacham office building. You survive an intense firefight on the roof, and then... spend around ten minutes walking through a dimly-lit office building with ''nothing happening'' and you very likely jumping at every little shadow or slight noise. Worse is that there are signs of a struggle everywhere: broken windows, blood, the occasional corpse... but no indication as to what caused any of it. It's almost a relief when the enemies start showing up again half a level later.

 

* ''[[Silent Hill]]'' may be the one series entirely ''built'' around this trope, because the games ([[Genre Shift|at least the early ones]]) involve psychological horror rather than full-fledged Gorn. Despite the fact that [[Nothing Is Scarier]], an empty room is probably vastly, vastly preferable to a room with [[Eldritch Abomination|something in it]].

** In ''[[Silent Hill 1]]'' there are several empty rooms in the game. No items, no monsters - nothing. Dissapointed, you turn to leave, when suddenly - [[Scare Chord|breaking glass]].

* ''[[Fatal Frame]]'' does this a lot. Granted, most of the rooms in the games will ''eventually'' have something in them, but it is often the case that the first time you go through them they will be totally empty. The games also make a point of having you backtrack through previously explored areas which will frequently be empty. [[Nothing Is Scarier|It is really, really creepy.]]

 

* Parodied by ''[[Homestar Runner]]'''s "Thy Dungeonman 3" game, where there really is a room that has nothing in it. It says so.

* Parodied in [[Infocom]]'s ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (video game)|The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy]]'' text game. When you enter the engine room, the game tells you there's nothing there. When you use the look command it says, "I mean it, there's nothing to see!" Look a few more times and it finally relents: "Okay, maybe there are a FEW things to see..." And by few they mean about ''five''.

* Played incredibly straight in ''[[Glowgrass]]'' where a room is pretty much described as empty. {{spoiler|The cupboards are concealed by touch panels.}}

 

* ''[[Grand Theft Auto]] IV'' has several empty apartment blocks with rooms you can enter. Some of them are occupied during missions, but there are plenty that aren't. Can be especially unsettling if the building has a lot of floors (like the plus shaped tower blocks) - you get the feeling you are being followed or that something is around the corner. Luckily you can escape at the top of most buildings.

* ''[[Minecraft]]'' has caves that branch out into several paths which, most of the time, can lead deeper underground where diamonds and redstone ores can be found, lead to the surface, or even lead to underground structures like dungeons and mine shafts. However, some of the cave branches simply lead to a dead end with nothing in them other than the usual stone and dirt. Caves may also have an unnaturally large and circular-like room, but they serve no purpose.

* ''[[Skyrim]]'' suffers from this as much as any sandbox game would be expected to, but most notable is the Headless Horseman, a ghost NPC who randomly appears and patrols an area during the night. He has little dialogue that he only says in specific circumstances, cannot be harmed by the player, does not lead to anywhere specific (except a few undead monsters) and is not linked to any quest.

 

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[[Category:Video Game Tropes]]

[[Category:Chekhov's Gun]]

[[Category:Self-Demonstrating Article]]