Well, I'm just getting to the second part of last week's post now because I fell disgustingly, cripplingly ill this weekend and there were more important things to deal with (snot, mucus, fever) than adding another molehill-based mountain to the topography of Blogland.
Also, I'm capitalizing correctly now. I hope that's okay with everyone. I'm all growed up!
So. This should be briefer than the previous piece, but I wanted to ruminate a bit more on the whole alpha buy-in phenomenon; more specifically, how that phenomenon functions (successfully and not) in particular game genres.
As I see it, buying into an alpha- or beta-stage game and then playing the game as it is developed (as I've done with Minecraft, Desktop Dungeons, Mysterious Castles, and a few more games that I'm totally blanking on right now) has its advantages, for sure. But it also compounds a problem that currently seems to be sweeping the gaming world in a variety of guises at the moment: nobody knows where a particular game starts or (more importantly) where it ends anymore. Whether it's a game like Minecraft that had no "end", per se, in the first place (until popular outcry led to one being slapped on, against the game's sandbox ethos), multiple recent AAA games whose "stories" are extended ad nauseum thanks to excessive, expensive DLC, games that are released over 3-4 different platforms with significant differences (or "bonuses") in each edition that require, in theory, the player to own all versions in order to get the "full" experience, or games like the recent Mass Effect 3, which more-or-less requires the player to play multiple types of games across multiple platforms in order to get the "correct" ending at the conclusion of the "main" game...games just don't end like they used to. I mean, imagine beating Bowser in World 8-4 in the original Super Mario Bros. and seeing "Sorry Mario, but our Princess is in another castle...and you'll have to pay $20 more to access the final level to save her!" Pretty disheartening. Really, though, SMB is a bad example: it's primarily a ludus-driven game; if you paid the twenty bucks in my hypothetical scenario, odds are you'd be playing it primarily to unlock more levels, to play more, not to find out the conclusion to the enthralling Super Mario Bros. saga. So another, perhaps better example: Sephiroth kills Aeris right in front of you, and you chase him across the world in search of revenge. After finally tracking him to the frozen north, you defeat his first form, leading to that quintessential jRPG moment: "NOW I SHALL UNLEASH MY TRUE FOOOOOOORM!!!" Then the game politely informs you that to face the "final" version of Sephiroth, you first have to purchase, download, and complete Final Fantasy 7: Tetris Attack!, the new puzzle-based, block-stacking game for your PSP.
Okay, that example's a little farfetched. But you get the idea. It used to be that you bought a game, pulled a physical cartridge or disc out of a package, played the self-contained game inside, and when you reached the end, it was the end. Digital distribution and always-online gaming has brought its share of positives, for sure (and a lot of other negatives that there's no room for here), but it's really begun to muddy what "the end" really is, even in games that have discreet ends. Take, for example, The Binding of Isaac, a game I've really enjoyed playing since it came out and have blogged about previously. It has a discreet end: you fight your way through all the levels, and you beat the final boss, and you're done. However, twice now, the developer has created updates to the game (free updates, mind you) that add more levels to the game, thus making the game a different experience than it once was, and rendering the completion of the original game void in a way. If you finished the "old" version of the game, you sort of missed out, compared to how the game is now. So if you want the "full" experience, you have to go back and play again. And then again, when the next update comes out.
You've probably picked this up at some point, but I'm pretty busy. I work a lot, and I don't have a lot of time to play games (unless that playing is, too, for work). So while I liked The Binding of Isaac, once I'd finished it a few times and got a good sense of how it was to play through the game with a few different Isaacs, I stopped and moved on to one of the other games on my ten-mile-long list of games I still need to play. When the update came out, I went back and played to the end again. It was fun, but I felt a bit harried, having already thought I'd experienced all the game had to offer. When the next update came out, the game had not only gotten twice as long as it had been originally by that point, the last two levels were brutally difficult. I tried to get through them a few times, found that I really couldn't do it very easily, and decided that getting good enough to finish the new version of the game wasn't worth my time. So I didn't play anymore...and now, in my mind, Isaac has gone from being a really fun game I picked up and enjoyed for a few weekends to a game that takes too long to play, gets too difficult at the end, and that I've never finished: an ultimately unsatisfying experience. Weird, huh? But that's how my brain works.
Things get even more complex when there's a "story" involved. When players not only enjoy the game mechanics but identify with one of the characters or get wrapped up in those characters' struggle to succeed (as happens in games like Mass Effect, for example), they not only have an entertainment-value investment in the game, but an emotional one. It's important, I think, to either give gamers who've made these connections a sense of closure at some reasonably-easily-attained point. Giving someone a few extra levels of Super Mario Bros. is not the same as showing them the "conclusion" of a massive, multi-part space opera that they have a personal stake in due to the dozens of hours they've invested playing a character that they've designed and then a month later saying "Just kidding! You want to find out what happened next?!" This is novel to a degree, but at some point it just gets exhausting. It's the video game equivalent of that TV show you used to love, but which ran about four seasons too long and now you've stopped watching. Video games have developed the ability to run their franchises into the ground, I guess.
Anyway, my original point got a bit away from me, and I have to go, but...genres. I think adding new content to a game like Minecraft or Terraria indefinitely is totally reasonable. It's a sandbox: adding more tools is always going to be fun. Players don't come for the conclusion, they come to play. Doing the same thing with a game that's primary draw is the story-within-a-story of the player's character(s) struggling through whatever it is that they're struggling through (as seen in Final Fantasy 7, Mass Effect, etc.) is different. Some games function on this meta-narrative level and some don't. Designers have to know which kind of game that they're developing, and I feel like if you fall into the former camp, that demands some awareness of how you're allowing your players to engage with that meta-narrative...and doling it out to them in chunks is just awkward and dispiriting, whether you're doing it to make five more bucks on DLC or if you're just upgrading as you go.
I feel like I lost my thread a bit there...oh well. Good time to start diss writing!
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