Oldschool Hard

Mass Effect 2: Obliterate your free time, in spaaaaaace!

This post at Kotaku piqued my interest, covering some issues similar to what I usually look at in this blog.

Taking a point from said post, Mass Effect 2 has been released, and it seems like the topic du jour in gaming circles. Am I playing it? Of course not. I’m still stuck (for want of a better word; it’s not a chore) in Dragon Age, and it sets my tightarse sense tingling when it comes to paying full price for a game more than once every 3 or 4 months. What was Bioware thinking, releasing these games so close together? And the tight release schedule doesn’t stop – there’s more Dragon Age DLC coming in March. It’s insane. I like RPGs but fuck, there’s a million-ish decent games coming out in any given year and adults have jobs and kids and families and shit like that. Of course, I have none of those, and I barely consider myself an adult with my lack of responsibility and all-round juvenile sense of humour, but it’s the principle, dammit.

As I’ve written about before, as a kid you get what you’re given on Christmas and your birthday, so an RPG is brilliant, if you’re into them – more bang for the buck. It’s one thing to play a game over and over until you can do it with your eyes closed, but to have the same amount of game time with fresh content the whole way? Brilliant! The love story didn’t last – I fell out of love with JRPGs a while back, when I realised they were just treading the same ground again and again. I’m not so disillusioned that I won’t play any JRPGs at all, I just won’t waste my time and money searching for obscure spin-offs involving Thug no. 3 from Shadow Hearts‘ (no doubt) riveting backstory.

This also gives me the positive side-effect of having more time to spend playing other games that aren’t quite so demanding on my time, although those are getting less and less. Yes, I realise the irony of a WoW player saying this, but games are often just too damn long. Generally it used to be that it was either RPGs or ‘sandbox’ games that would suck up your time like a Hoover, but it seems to be creeping into all sorts of genres. I understand that the current revenue model involves bleeding you dry: full-priced games, or better yet, the ‘collector’s edition’ (hint: anything ever labelled as a ‘collectable’ when released is unlikely to ever be so) with some plastic chintz at maximum price, with the supposed ‘value’ in the 20+ hours of gameplay you get in exchange.

To me, value is in the intensity and enjoyment of the experience. I didn’t feel ripped off by the 6-7 hours of Shadow Complex I played, nor in roughly the same amount of time in the first Modern Warfare single-player game, although that one was at a discount. The experience was finely-tuned and there was rarely a lack of action. So I propose a new game model, to replace the game lengths and prices that are steadily creeping upwards.

Value is not in a 25 hour game with hours of cutscenes. Instead, provide a 5-15 hour experience, tuned for maximum action/enjoyment, at roughly half the price games are available at now. Make multiplayer a seperate entity at a price that means the single player experience + the multiplayer experience are available at a price on par, or better yet, slightly below, what full games cost now. Have some single-player modules, essentially just like current DLC, available at launch. That way, people who really like the single-player game world can have more of it without having to pay for a multiplayer experience they won’t use, those who don’t have time to play through a massive game can get a tight experience at a good price, and multiplayer-only gamers can avoid paying for superfluous single-player content they’re just not particularly interested in. Everyone gets the parts of the game they want, the incentive to buy secondhand is lessened (and thus developers and publishers lose less money to the secondhand market) because games are cheaper, and with more time and money on their hands, people may actually buy more games. A pipe dream, I know, but one I hope to see, especially with the rise and rise of digital distribution. Perhaps it’s a case of ‘check back in 5 years’?

Picture from Platform Nation.

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Just pass 700 more of these challenges, and then we’ll let you drive a Camry.

I like the idea of a decent learning curve and gathering more things as a game goes on to face greater challenges. Pretty much everyone’s aware of the ‘gather boomerang, gather hookshot, get more life-hearts’ Zelda-type of progression, and I don’t have a problem with that. Being able to get uber-gear straight off (like you can in, for instance, Oblivion, if you know what you’re doing) doesn’t make the game present much of a challenge, and while it’s fun to absolutely destroy everything in your path, the novelty grows old pretty quickly.

Note, however, the concept of a ‘decent learning curve.’ If a game ramps up the difficulty level exponentially, and then won’t let you get any further unless you do what it wants, that’s not fun. Ridiculously hard side-challenges like Ruby and Emerald weapon in Final Fantasy VII, I have no problem with – they don’t affect the main game at all. But something like the Guitar Hero games – “Yeah, play through these songs you don’t like to get to songs you do. Jump through some hoops to get what you paid for”? Fuck that.

It’s especially awful in games like the Gran Turismo series: I can’t speak for everyone’s motivations, but what I buy those games for is to drive fast cars that I’ll never be able to afford to actually buy. Having to pass ridiculous licence challenges in boring cars to get to the good bits strikes me as being against the spirit of being a game. Boring, arbitrary challenges that you have to do to get to do other things are usually known as a job, and you at least get paid for those.

Don’t get me wrong, some people like these ‘challenges’ and see them as fun. A good friend of mine refused to buy Gran Turismo 4 until he had completed 100% of Gran Turismo 3. He talks proudly about how it took him 2 years before he could complete a lap in Grand Prix Legends, at a decent speed, without crashing. However, for the rest of us without an acquired brain injury or autism spectrum disorder, this sort of stuff is generally regarded as bullshit.

At least unlockable content doesn’t cost you any money beyond what you’ve already paid for a game. I’m not really against downloadable content if it adds to a game, but paying for stuff that’s almost essential strikes me as a special kind of stupid. For instance, I’m enjoying the few hours of Dragon Age: Origins I’ve played so far, and as the Bioware sucker that I am, I bought the ‘deluxe’ (aside: notice how almost everything is or has a version that’s ‘deluxe’ or ‘premium’, these days? To paraphrase The Incredibles: “When everything’s special, nothing is”) edition, which came with all the DLC included. I bet the people who bought the regular edition of the game weren’t especially pleased to find that the fix to a widely acknowledged inventory problem could only be downloaded as part of the Warden’s Keep DLC pack. Sure, you got extra content, but anything that’s a systems-fix needs to be available free.

That wasn’t DA:O‘s only DLC sin, either. The idea of leaving hooks in the game (“Will you help me free my dronkey? To help me, thou needst to [PAY EA SOME MONEY]“) that slap you in the face with your ‘missing’ paid DLC is against the whole idea of stepping into a game world, and especially of playing a role in an RPG. Then there’s content like the extra multiplayer maps in games like Halo 3 and Gears of War 2, not technically ‘essential’, but without them it can be very difficult to find a multiplayer game. I haven’t even touched the concept of ‘day-1′ DLC, like the ‘classic’ map pack in GoW 2, the pack-in extras in (again) DA:O, and the Saboteur ‘titty code’.

What I find perhaps most ridiculous, keeping in mind that at this stage it’s just a rumour, is the rumour of Modern Warfare 2 having ‘DLC’ locked on the retail disc. It’s one thing to jump through in-game hoops to access what you’ve paid for, another thing entirely to pay more money for things that were on the disc YOU ALREADY PAID FOR.

But, you negative nancy who never has anything nice to say, my dear voices inside my head ask, what games do DLC right?

Burnout: Paradise is a great example – not only does it have a good unlockable learning curve and basically no ‘essential’ unlockables, Criterion keeps releasing new DLC for the game, with a mixture of free content, reasonably priced content, and vanity items that you can buy if you love the game, but have no effect on the gameplay if you don’t. Team Fortress 2 is another, always getting updated and added-to, for free. It can be done, the developers and publishers just have to have the will to do it.

Image from IGN.com

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