Deserts in Gaming Kinda Suck
And what I'd do to fix that.
For the last six months, I’ve been working on a video game in my free time. It’s a survival game about thriving in the face of adversity. From the beginning, I chose a desert as my game environment because it represents an environment in which life has blossomed despite harsh conditions. It fits the theme of my game quite well. Naturally, this got me to research what kind of desert environments are out there. What surprised me is just how varied deserts can be. And, being an avid gamer myself, this has me thinking about how this potential isn’t really explored in many games that feature deserts today.
I want to look at some examples from popular games and what they get wrong—and right. Let me just preface this by saying that I love all the games on this list. None of them are dragged down by their lackluster desert environments and have lots of other worthwhile content on offer. I merely want to show that desert environments in games aren’t utilized to their full potential. So without further ado, let’s take a look at some popular games and how they approach deserts.
Minecraft - At Least It’s Good for Farming Sand
Let’s start with the best-selling video game of all time, Minecraft1. As someone who got into gaming and programming thanks to this game, it pains me to bring it up in a negative light here. But alas, Minecraft’s deserts are empty, barren wastelands, except for the occasional village and pyramid. Funnily enough, while researching deserts on the Minecraft wiki, I came across this tutorial about surviving in a desert-only world. Essentially, it all boils down to finding villages, as many essential resources aren’t obtainable in desert biomes, like Cobblestone. That’s telling of how lacking this particular biome is.
Now you might argue that not every biome needs to be abundant in resources, and I agree. But it should at least offer something of interest. If barren, empty biomes were without issue, then the Nether wouldn’t have gotten a substantial revamp with the Nether Update. If people were fine with the wasteland that is The End currently, they wouldn’t be begging Mojang to release an End Update. My point is, the desert biome deserves a better fate than simply being a large sand mine. Sure, keep it mostly empty. But at least give people more of an incentive to visit it every now and then. Don’t just have them groaning in frustration when they start their new world in a desert. Mojang, release the Desert Update. Please.
From the Minecraft Wiki: compared to the Jungle biome, the Desert biome really doesn’t offer much.
Stardew Valley - Good On Three Days
Moving on to a very different game, Stardew Valley features a desert area called Calico Desert. It’s an area you can only visit after completing certain tasks, so a fair share of players have probably never even set foot in Calico Desert. As for what’s there: three shops, more ‘dangerous’ mines, and most likely a bunch of coconuts. The highlight has to be the desert festival that lasts three in-game days. I’ve never been, but the wiki makes it sound rather extensive.
There’s certainly more on offer compared to Minecraft’s deserts, but here’s an interesting tidbit: the desert festival was only added in the 1.6 version of the game - eight years after the game’s release. One of the shops, the desert trader, was added in version 1.4, released roughly three and a half years after the game’s launch. The desert has been in the game since the beginning, but it used to be a lot more barren than it is now.
As for the mines located in the desert, they certainly offer the most content, but they could’ve really been put anywhere. They just so happen to be located in the desert, so I don’t really consider them “desert content.” Most of the monsters and floors aren’t exactly desert-themed, anyway. Overall, Calico Desert isn’t bad by a long shot, but it also isn’t Stardew at its best, in my opinion.
Stardew Valley’s Calico Desert: it’s fine for what it is.
Breath of the Wild - There Was an Attempt
Lastly, let’s discuss a game I’m currently playing through - The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. A wonderful, mostly tranquil open-world game and the reimagining of a formula that was getting stale. Along with said re-imagining is reinventing the desert areas of Hyrule, mainly Gerudo Desert. In-game, it’s a mostly flat plane of sand, surrounded by tall, imposing mountains. The desert features Gerudo Town, a bazaar, and some minor areas like abandoned ruins and fossils. There are also a few shrines, the game’s “mini dungeons,” strewn about, usually close to points of interest. It also serves as the location for one of the game’s main quests and several side quests, so there is certainly content to be explored.
One of the best features is grabbing hold of a sand seal and using it to surf the dunes. It’s great fun and offers a pain-free way of traversing the desert without constantly draining your stamina wheel. Lastly, the desert also makes good use of the game’s temperature system, shifting between blazing hot days and freezingly cold nights, requiring the player to dress Link appropriately depending on the time of day. No other location in the game acts like this, and it mimics how temperatures behave in real-life deserts. I personally love this mechanic.
With all that said, most of the content I’ve been mentioning either takes place around the few points of interest or, in the case of shrines, is completely disconnected from the desert itself. Once you venture beyond Gerudo Town, there really isn’t all that much to see. There are some ruins, a fossil that you need to find without your map (which is kinda interesting!), and some Voltfruit here and there. Compared to other biomes in the game, I didn’t find myself spending much time there.
Breath of the Wild’s Gerudo Desert: Certainly the best showcase on this list, but there’s still room to improve.
We Can Do Better
Now that I’ve spent all this time complaining about how underutilized deserts are in these games, let me offer some thoughts on how I would change that.
Firstly, I’d say the issue with same-y desert environments partially stems from what we’ve come to associate with deserts. Below you can see the results for a Google image search of the word “desert.” Most of these pictures feature endless sand dunes, stretching to the horizon. A romantic view to be sure, but most of the desert regions on this planet do not look like this. In fact, while deserts can certainly be hot, a desert is defined by a lack of rain in that area, not heat. So the two largest deserts on this planet (by area) are the Antarctic and Artist Deserts2, neither of which show up in Google’s results at all. Furthermore, besides the popular arid deserts, there are also semi-arid and coastal deserts.
The top image results on Google when searching for “desert”: endless sand dunes and camels (and Minecraft).
A virtual desert environment can be so much more than endless dunes of sand with a few cacti strewn about. Despite the harsh living conditions that deserts provide, a large variety of flora and fauna still exist in these regions. Deserts make up roughly one fifth of the landmasses on Earth3, so there is a lot of inspiration to draw from. Why not include jackals, seals, moles, spiders, and hyenas alongside the camels? You can include more than one or two types of cacti and add various types of bushes and shrubs into the mix. And that’s just what I came up with in a few seconds by reading the article I linked in this paragraph.
The game I’m currently working on aims to include various flora and fauna from deserts around the world. Its fate is still unclear at this point, so I’ll hold off on sharing anything about it right now. If I ever decide to release a demo, prepare to see articles about it on here.
That’s it from me for today. I really wanted to get this article out earlier but only got around to finishing it today. I hope you enjoyed what I had to say. Feel free to share your thoughts below!