Bloodline Detection Mechanism

Whether a game was fun, whether its story was compelling—players had to spend time experiencing it firsthand before they could truly feel those things.

Those were matters beneath the surface. Character designs and map art were different; they were what players saw on the surface, and a single glance was enough to convey their appeal.

Beautifully designed characters might not conquer players immediately, but they would certainly make quite a few people interested in the game.

Then there were the maps. The biggest difference from traditional RPGs was that the Xenoblade Chronicles series featured enormous maps on an Open World scale, along with the sense of world they created.

The main reason traditional RPGs were called traditional was their limitations.

If someone asked what made The Witcher: Wild Hunt fun, players could give examples from many different angles: the adventure of Geralt, the White Wolf, and Ciri; the shifting tides between the southern empire and the Northern Realms; or its distinctive presentation of the world...

But if the subject became a traditional RPG, the answers would almost all boil down to liking a particular character or story.

Their worldbuilding was very weak, and they still followed a typical story-driven model. So even after Nebula Games had ingrained the concept of Open World games into players' minds through Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, traditional RPGs had never attempted an Open World format because their core design did not fit it.

They still told a planned story within a relatively static space, and the places untouched by that story did not matter.

But Xenoblade Chronicles was completely different. Its massive maps encouraged open exploration, yet in the Xenoblade Chronicles series, maps were not part of the main story. Players could clear the game without