Stop Pre-Ordering Games

I've mentioned before, in passing, my deep loathing — shared by many — for day-one DLC and pre-order bonuses.

I'm not going to pretend that the downloadable content of today is fundamentally different from the expansion packs of old; in theory, they're very similar. Expansion packs would either add content to an existing game, or act as a continuation of the game in the form of additional levels, but they were typically not as "big" (or as expensive) as the game itself. DLC almost always follows this example, albeit with a different delivery method and, thus, fewer constraints. With no discs and no shipping, selling everything in smaller pieces is no inconvenience to the publisher, which is why we're seeing ever smaller DLC "expansions" with (ideally) smaller prices than those of traditional expansion packs.

But there's another difference. While the traditional expansion pack was typically released some time after the base game, DLC is often available immediately. No doubt the industry believes this is a great thing, but not everyone agrees.

When DLC is released concurrently with the base game, people inevitably jump to the conclusion that this "extra" content belongs in the game itself, but that it was removed, and sold separately, for the sake of squeezing more money out of customers... like a car salesman selling you everything but the steering wheel and then demanding extra cash for the "extra" part. Of course, "day-one DLC" doesn't really mean that the publisher took a finished game from the developer and broke it up to be sold in pieces. It's likely that most games with DLC additions were meant to be sold this way from the very beginning, and were developed with this in mind. However, developing a game with DLC in mind still means to many that the base game will be inherently incomplete. I think we can all admit that this isn't necessarily true — a lot of these games still feel "complete" even without all the (mostly useless) add-ons — but appearances and first impressions, whether or not they're accurate, are pretty important.

Personally, I don't mind if a developer or publisher wants to sell a game in pieces. I usually ignore DLC unless I'm absolutely in love with a game and feel a compulsive need to experience every bit of it. Furthermore, most DLC consists of strictly non-essential content. Sometimes, this means purely cosmetic changes to a game, such as the character packs in Killing Floor, and I think this is a pretty harmless way for the developer to earn a few extra bucks from anyone actually willing to throw away their money for such a frivolous thing. I certainly don't feel compelled to buy this stuff, so I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.

However, the same can't be said of DLC that would, for example, add extra weapons to a first-person shooter, or extra levels to the campaign mode of a story-driven game. I suspect a lot of players — completionists especially — feel that, when they buy a game, they need to own the whole game, and this drives them to pay for half a dozen little expansions that can add up to a lot of cash.

Ultimately, each of us is responsible for how we spend our own money; nobody is shoving extra content down our throats and forcing us to buy it. But when this so-called "DLC" is available on release day — and sometimes even included on the game disc, just awaiting authorization — it's typically seen as a part of the game for which we thought we already paid, not as an optional expansion to it, and uninformed customers tend to get pretty upset when they find out. While this is the source of a lot of controversy, I think it's also exactly what the publishers want. The idea that an integral part of the original game has been taken away to be sold separately is what makes us hate day-one DLC... but it's also what makes us buy it. It's a shame that the average consumer doesn't have the willpower to boycott a product.

While it wouldn't be completely crazy for me to say that DLC itself is downright evil, I don't think that's a very constructive thing to do. First of all, DLC itself isn't the problem. We're the problem. If the game industry is doing something wrong, it's partly because we reinforced that behavior with our purchases. Second of all, it's not DLC that we should hate, but rather the host of generally evil business practices that come along with it. For example, so-called day-one DLC is often used as an incentive for pre-ordering a game, or even for pre-ordering the game from a specific retail outlet. And instead of buying a game, and then buying an expansion if we really liked the game, we're encouraged to buy a game and all of its additional content at once — before the game is even released.

Welcome to the wonderful world of pre-orders and pre-order bonuses. No, don't think, just hand over your wallets.

Some DLC was just announced for Assassin's Creed III — a game which, by the way, hasn't yet been released — and all five of the upcoming DLC packs can be purchased with a $30 season pass. Add that to the usual price tag of $60 for the base game, and you've got quite a large purchase. Yes, the Gold Edition of the game (which includes this season pass) is a whopping $90. Of course, there's a benefit to buying this season pass; it's significantly cheaper than buying each DLC pack separately, for a total of $40. But I'd much rather wait until a year after release — when the game and its DLC are cheaper, and when I know whether the game is worth playing — before I spend any money.

You've probably guessed that I think pre-ordering is a horrible idea and that anyone who pre-orders anything is a mindless sheep. You guessed right. Naturally, the whole concept of a "season pass" for DLC is, to me, a bit absurd. It's essentially a pre-order for DLC which, like the game itself, might not even be good. The fact that the game is a sequel makes it all slightly less crazy — fans of the series have a pretty good idea of what the game will be like — but it doesn't seem like a great investment either way. When you pre-order not only a $60 game but also $30 worth of DLC on top of it, you're betting a whole lot of money that the game won't suck. Why not wait until after it's released so you can read some reviews and get maybe a better price? What's the benefit of pre-ordering?

In the old days, the only reason for pre-ordering was to reserve a copy of a highly anticipated game for which supply was expected to fall short of demand. It guaranteed that you'd get your game on release day instead of waiting for the next shipment while all your friends played the game without you. But the industry likes pre-ordering for another reason. It makes their sales figures look better. They get to say they sold a hundred thousand copies of their game on the first day. They get to say their game went gold before it was even released.

In the context of modern PC gaming, the word "supply" is meaningless. Just about every PC game can be downloaded; there are no shipments, and copies of a game are unlimited. So why should anyone pre-order a downloadable game? I think the industry asked itself this question and came up with an answer: pre-order bonuses. Not only do they make the absurdity of pre-purchasing a downloadable game seem a bit less absurd; they also make the foolish act of pre-ordering physical copies even more tempting.

The fact that developers would spend their time making DLC exclusively for those who pre-purchase the game — content which the rest of their fans may or may not be able to access at a later date — says a lot about the industry, namely how much value they place in those pre-orders. Could it really be all about inflating those first-day sales figures? Or could it be that they desperately want us to buy their games before anyone gets to find out if those games are worth playing? Why anyone would pay $60 for a game that hasn't even been reviewed yet is beyond me, but the industry has put a lot of effort into convincing people to do it.

Meanwhile, very few demos are being released these days, and I can't help but wonder if this is because developers are afraid that fewer people will spend money if they see what their games are like first-hand. Clearly, at the very least, they don't believe that releasing a demo has any benefit anymore, since they've already figured out how to convince millions of consumers to buy their product without even waiting for the critics to have their say.

What I'm really getting at, here, is that people who pre-purchase games are irresponsible and reckless. They're also harming the industry, and the industry is helping them do it. As consumers, we communicate with developers and publishers primarily through our purchases. No doubt the people who make video games occasionally hear our opinions, if we're loud enough, but what they really care about is where our money goes. If you hate a game after you buy it, they still have your money, and your opinion isn't going to hurt them unless you convince others not to buy the game.

So stop pre-ordering games you've never played. Stop telling developers "yes, this game is great" before you know it to be true.

I'd like to tell you all to stop buying new games entirely, since paying $60 for a new game is just a waste of money if it's going to be 75% off on Steam or Amazon less than a year after its release. Of course, there's always the argument that multiplayer games are most fun during the height of their popularity (i.e., before the community moves on to better things) and that waiting too long to play them means missing out on the fun. But if an online community dies so fast that you need to buy the game on day one to get in on the action, the game is probably terrible anyway.

Maybe if we all think a little more carefully about our purchases, developers will focus more on making games enjoyable and worthwhile, instead of coming up with a thousand other ways to get our money more quickly and more often.

What Makes Video Games Fun?

A lot of "hardcore gamers" (regardless of whether they identify themselves as such) will tell you that the video game industry is in sad shape. It's not just because of the past decade's unfortunate shift toward increasingly more intrusive digital rights management, or the recent trend of releasing "extra" downloadable content on day one to encourage thoughtless and irresponsible pre-orders, or the deliberate efforts to use both DRM and DLC to destroy the used game market. Rather, it's because they think that too many of the games being released today are crap.

And they're not just talking about shovelware that nobody buys. This is popular crap. So what's up with all the hate? Well, it should be no surprise that the games which tend to attract the most violently negative attention are always the popular ones. After all, if you want to complain about a genre, a feature, a console, or a developer, you pick a popular game as an example, and then you claim that the chosen game means the downfall of gaming as we know it. This has been happening for a long time. But in the past few years, I've been reluctant to shrug it off as the usual fanboyism, hipsterism, and attention-seeking antics of a vocal minority. It's more likely indicative of something else.

As I see it, this backlash is due to recent changes in the industry which aren't entirely imaginary. The industry is, in fact, changing, and not just in response to the emergence of nearly ubiquitous high-speed internet service, which facilitates digital distribution and piracy alike. Video games have changed also because of their growing audience. Thanks to cell phones, social networking sites, and a few other things which should never have games on them, games have crossed farther into the mainstream than ever before. Meanwhile, those who played video games back when it was an obscure hobby reserved only for children and computer geeks have grown up, and some of them are still playing. It's only understandable that some of these old-schoolers would be a bit shocked by the current state of things.

So, what is the current state of things?

It's complicated, and there are a lot of little topics I'd like to bring up — e.g., how girls went from "eww, you play video games, you're such a nerd" to "hey, I can be a gamer too" and "tee hee, I'm such a nerd" — but most of these things are too far off-topic and will have to wait for some other week. Simply put, if I can allow myself to get to the point, casual games and social networking have taken over. It's not hard to see that this is an expected (and perhaps necessary) consequence of video games getting a slice of that mainstream pie.

Games directed at casual players get a lot of hate, particularly from the more "hardcore" gamers, many of whom grew up when video games were considerably less forgiving than the ones made today. For these players, the whole point of a game is to provide a challenge. Winning should be a struggle; that's what makes it so satisfying. This is why they fail to understand the casual audience. More importantly, this is why they're angered not only by strictly casual games but also by the perceived "casualization" of modern games as a whole.

Are the majority of today's video games a lot easier than the ones of my childhood? You bet. But is this really a terrible thing? Not necessarily. Difficult games still exist, and we should keep in mind that a lot of older games were only hard because of their lack of a save feature. (Wouldn't a lot of modern games be damn near impossible to beat if saving weren't an option?) Other old games were stupidly hard because of poor design, and still others were intentionally made difficult because they were short and would have been beaten too quickly if they weren't frustratingly hard to finish. (Truly master Super Mario Bros. and you can beat it in less than five minutes; without using warp zones, it can still be done in less than half an hour.) Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, playtime can be extended in ways that don't involve dying repeatedly, and games can be entertaining for reasons other than sheer difficulty.

So now we get to ask an interesting question. What actually makes video games fun? Some say it's the challenge, while others will say it's the story/characters/immersion (for single-player games) or the social experience (for multiplayer games). Still others, I suspect, would say they just like to blow things up. In reality, for most people, it's a combination of all of the above.

How much, in particular, should difficulty matter? From the developer's point of view, a game should be difficult enough to entertain the experienced players — to let them know that winning takes effort so that winning feels good — but easy enough to avoid alienating the casual players who might not even bother to finish a game if it frustrates them at all. Personally, I think most developers have done a pretty good job of accomplishing this. Say what you will about the harm caused by pandering to the casual audience, but most games worth playing have multiple difficulty levels, the easiest of which is usually tame enough for "casuals" and the hardest of which is usually a challenge for anyone who never played the game before. Nobody should be disappointed unless a developer makes a serious miscalculation.

This is why I was surprised to see such a negative reaction to this article on Kotaku a little more than a week ago, in which Luke Plunkett gives a fairly reasonable rebuttal to Assassin's Creed III lead designer Alex Hutchinson's (rather preposterous) claim that "easy mode often ruins games." (It's kind of funny because Assassin's Creed, a game with only one difficulty, isn't that hard, and the same is true of all the sequels I've played.) I'm not a big fan of Kotaku, nor am I a fan of Luke Plunkett, but I have to agree with him here. At least, I agree with his headline. A game can't be ruined by a difficulty setting.

I'm willing to say that the "easy mode" of a game can often be the worst version of that game, as Hutchinson claims, but the inclusion of an easy mode surely doesn't spoil the whole game unless it's the only mode available. Don't like easy mode? Play on hard. If the harder settings are still too easy, or if they do nothing but make the game more tedious, you've picked a bad game. If the harder settings are locked until the easier ones are completed, you better hope the easier settings are hard enough to keep you entertained for a single playthrough; otherwise, you've picked a bad game. Bad game design happens, but if you're blaming it solely on the inclusion of an "easy" mode, you're probably overlooking a deeper problem.

Still, I won't say I agree with Plunkett completely, since he has entirely different reasons for disagreeing with Hutchinson's argument. Specifically, he makes it abundantly clear that he doesn't care about difficulty at all, and that he plays story-driven games only for the story. He probably wouldn't mind if a game like Assassin's Creed III consisted of no interaction besides "press X to continue." And if you're like this, you probably should ask yourself why you're playing games at all, rather than watching movies or reading books. If, on the other hand, you can appreciate the unique things that games have to offer, instead of just complaining that everything is too hard, then your idea of "fun" is just as valid as that of the hardcore gamer dude who plays everything on the hardest setting and skips all the cutscenes.

So where do I stand?

Let's just say I was more than a little annoyed by the fact that it's literally impossible to lose in the 2008 version of Prince of Persia. I won't go so far as to say that the protagonist of a game needs to be able to die, and "losing" is hardly a setback in any game with a save option (assuming you use it often enough), but being automatically revived after every fall in PoP 2008 seemed like a step down from the rewind system in The Sands of Time, which actually required some minimal skill and had limits. If there's no consequence for falling off a cliff, the sense of danger and suspense is gone and the game becomes only tedious where it might otherwise have been exciting.

On the other hand, you know I'm a sucker for story-driven games, and the need for a genuine challenge can be subverted by decision-making and role-playing elements. Since Choose Your Own Adventure books were terrible and there's no equivalent in the movie world, I think it's pretty safe to say that the existing technology used for video games is the ideal medium for straight-up interactive fiction. I see no reason not to take advantage of this. The problem is that what might be described most accurately as interactive fiction, and not as a traditional video game, will nevertheless remain stuck under the category of video games. This tends to generate all the wrong expectations. Story-driven titles are often criticized for having too much "story" and not enough "game" (even if the developer's primary objective, admittedly, was to tell a story).

Regardless of how far a developer decides to take the storytelling aspect of a product, and regardless of what you call it, the fact is that difficulty (and, indeed, gameplay itself) often matters less when story matters more, and if you're looking for a serious challenge, you should probably stay away from plot-driven games, even ones like Assassin's Creed. They make it difficult enough that any given mission might take two or three attempts, but they know they're not serving the hardcore crowd exclusively. Sometimes, though, I think the hardcore crowd still hasn't caught on.