Freedom to Play as One Wishes

[Ayavaron]

I've always had a problem with really good unlockable content. It really bothers me that sometimes, developers will hide away some of the best stuff in the game. Most times when they do this, unlocking is a tedious but trivial affair. (Logging in a certain number of versus hours in SSMB:M to unlock certain characters.) Other times, it'll be insanely difficult and nearly impossible. (Playing as Mr. Blonde in Perfect Dark, or the even harder task of unlocking the Marquis of Queenesbury Rules)

Many view unlockable content as innocuous or beneficial to a game but I believe that when you pay money for a game, it should be your prerogative to play it as you wish to. If you buy a CD, they make it easy to listen to the tracks in any order you wish. When you buy a DVD, you can fast-forward, rewind and edit your viewing experience as you wash it if you so choose. You can read a book, page by page, in any order you feel like.

Video games don't work that way. In FFX, you have to play through every single random battle on your way to the town. You have to spend forever walking. You can't skip combat if you want to. You're not allowed to skip boring level 3 so you can get to awesome level 4. As a result of many boring level 3s, I can't get what I paid for out of most of my games.

Is it OK to make a player put in so much effort before they can get to the part of the game they want to play? Alternatively, where would the drive be in a game where all content was unlocked from the start? (I know I'd have played more of the UT2k4 maps if I'd had to unlock each one of them. Of course, there's also the possibility that I'd have gotten stuck after the fifth one and the remaining maps would be lost to me.)

I see this as only the beginning of a larger series of questions.

In a MMORPG, you've paid for the game, in fact, you pay for the privilege to continue playing afterwards. Why is it not your right to go straight into the Leet Forests with the Uber Sword of Rareness? Do you have to earn that right? Do you have to pay for it?

What if you cheat to allow yourself to enter that part of the game and don't do anything to affect the other players? Is that acceptable? Is it acceptable to cheat in a singleplayer game or not?

In one of the Need For Speed games on the Xbox 360, you could pay for unlockable content on the Xbox Live Marketplace or you could unlock it for yourself by playing the game. Is paying for unlockable content acceptable?

Many games which support content in the Xbox Live Marketplace have the purchased content already on the disc. When you pay, you download an encryption key which makes content that is already on your disc playable. You've already bought the disc. Shouldn't it be your right to peruse all of the content therein? If you were to use a third party program to unlock content on the disc you own, would that be right?

Is there a solution to be found?

 

[TomBeraha]

As to level skipping and the like - A lot of games will let you use cheat codes to warp through, (the majority of FPS games and quite a few RTS games.) I'd argue the fun from an RPG comes from the development of a character not from his überness.

Anything that is multi-player should be cheat free. If one individual would prefer to pay more for having content that could be unlocked by skillful playing, I don't see an issue. The moment they let one person get stuff that isn't normally available by any means without an additional payment (but isn't EXTRA, in that it was included on the disc to begin with) they've crossed a line for me. It becomes money grubbing and disgusting at that point for me.

Anything that you do in single-player is completely fine, and regardless of what the EULA's state, that game should be yours to mess with to your hearts content, mod it, change it, extract the source code, edit it, and then recompile it and play it the way you think it should have been made. The only time you make an issue of it is when you infringe on another player's experience.

 

[kr1shnak [deprecated]]

One of my absolute pet hates with games is when I am enjoying a game, and then come across a level I find boring or too hard. If I dont want to play through that level (but want to see the rest of the game), my choices are limited to: hoping there is a level skip cheat code; using someone else saved game (only really an option with the PC).

Personally I think all single player games should have DVD style chapter menus (or level menus). I paid for the whole game - and I'd like to play all of it, how I choose to.

 

[Goofonian]

Personally I'm a big fan of having cheat codes to unlock stuff that could also be gained by doing stuff in the game.
Without the incentive to work toward something, many games get boring and tedious but having a reward at the end (i.e. unlocking something cool) can make all the hard work and practice worthwhile. Then if it really is too hard, you can always resort to the code and gain access to the content that you have paid for. This is sort of where systems like action replay discs come in, in that they add this functionality to games where it otherwise might not have existed.

Where I start to have a problem is with the live marketplace (and equivalent) and paying to unlock stuff. If the content is on the disc you should NEVER have to pay extra to get to it. Im ok with paying for downloadable content after the fact, as long as said content wasn't removed from the disc for the purpose of sale at a later date. Thats just rude.

I can understand games that force you to complete them in a specific order as often the order in which the levels are played is quite critical, but its nice when developers add in the option to replay levels in any order you like, and codes that you can use to skip impossibly difficult or incredibly length and boring levels.

Finally, and I'm pretty sure most people have this opinion, multiplayer games should be completely cheat free and you should not be able to buy advantages over other players. Selling additional multiplayer stuff is fine, as long as you restrict people with the extra stuff to playing with other people that have also made the purchase, like the way blizzard works with its expansions packs.

thats my 2 cents

 

[TomBeraha]

Where I start to have a problem is with the live marketplace (and equivalent) and paying to unlock stuff. If the content is on the disc you should NEVER have to pay extra to get to it. Im ok with paying for downloadable content after the fact, as long as said content wasn't removed from the disc for the purpose of sale at a later date. Thats just rude.

I don't have an issue with the content being unlockable normally, It's only harming to their own game experience, and if they'd rather pay more, thats their problem, codes / trainers / cheats will always exist to unlock such content as well. It would be rather silly to be able to buy a all-new custom spoiler for your vehicle in need for speed from EA but only be able to use it in a race with other people who had the same spoiler downloaded. EA would gain a lot more goodwill by releasing patches with updated content for free, but that won't make money (So good luck convincing them to do so)

 

[Ayavaron]

Regarding the content you pay to unlock from the disc, Let us say you're a game developer. You have put in a lot of effort to make your game but you've finished and your publisher has requested you create some extra content for the Xbox Live Marketplace. You create this separately and after the game, but in order to save a little bit of money and decide to put this on the disc instead of on a server. Is that wrong?

Is the wrong element just putting it on the disc? Is it charging for it at all? There's definitely something that feels wrong with paying for content already on your disc but it doesn't seem like the developers are doing anything really despicable here.

 

[Goofonian]

If the extra content has been placed on the disc, then that means that it has been made, added to the game and tested well before the game has gone gold. Developers can't just decided to add something to the disc at the last minute. It doesn't work that way.

If a developer has made something for a game during the development cycle, I would expect to get that part of the game included in the retail price. My problem isn't that the data for purchasable items is found on the disc, its the fact that data being on the disc means the developers have made a decision to nickel and dime the consumers for the content.

If EA want to charge me for spoilers on a car, then reduce the retail price of the game and give me lots of choices, so that for the same price as a regular game I can have my own customised experience.

It would be rather silly to be able to buy a all-new custom spoiler for your vehicle in need for speed from EA but only be able to use it in a race with other people who had the same spoiler downloaded.

What if the spoiler made your car 3 seconds a lap faster by upping the traction stats?
I'll be damned if I'm going to compete with someone who can do better than me purely because they spent more money.

I'm all for developers making a little bit of extra money, but if they want us to pay for stuff they should at least give us something that actually adds to the game. Removing content from games to be added later, charging for content that should already be in the game and charging for what is effectively a cheat code is not the sort of behaviour we should be encouraging.

 

[Bongo Bill]

Cheating, I think, is the best part of most single-player games.

Anyway, though. The problem with having a "skip level" button or a "become awesome" button is that it can, at times, diminish the quality of the game. Say for example you skip a level you think is tough, but in reality is just trying to serve as a tutorial for a new skill you unlocked at the beginning. Or you skip a part of the story that's told without use of a cutscene. Sometimes the enjoyment of a game is built off of the experience achieved in earlier parts of the game. There are solutions for all of those particular issues, of course, but I think that even with a very robust means of skipping unwanted content, there's still the fundamental problem of assuming that the player knows precisely how much to skip in order to still enjoy it.

I don't mean to suggest, of course, that the player shouldn't be allowed to ruin the game for themselves. I'm just saying it's not wise from a business perspective. How many copies might you miss out on selling if, for example, every review on GameFAQs complains that they skipped level 3, and then they had no idea what was happening in the plot of level 4 so they skipped that as well, and finally ended up skipping half the game, and finally concluding that it was too short and too confusing?

I just think that no publisher wants to be the first one to risk something like that with a linear game.

 

[Blaxton]

I'm fairly confused about this whole post.

The first thing I notice is that we are talking about skipping entire parts of games. Why? If you don't like a game don't play it. If a level is sub par compared to the rest then get through it and move on to the next. It isn't uncommon for level quality to fluctuate in games, but you deal with it because it helps to unfold a story. I might not like the middle of a movie, but if the movie is good as a whole I'm going to watch the whole thing. I personally don't think skipping parts of a story is a good idea. There are also games that have sub par stories and I understand that. The deal is, if the story isn't good enough to drive the game, or the game play isn't good enough to keep you interested in the story then don't play it. Period. There are a lot of games out there that you can rent and try out. If you find one you like then buy it and play it through. There is no reason to force yourself through a game that you don't like.

As far as MMO games are concerned I can tell you this: most of the fun of the game is character development. The nature of the RPG centers around this idea. There is a little game out there, whether you know it or not, called Guild Wars. You can actually start a character at level 20 (max level for GW). The problem is when you do that you start up a game with a top level character looking to tackle high level content in a game you know nothing about. Despite all the other flaws the game provides for you, I thought this to be a good idea. Once I actually got the game and made a character I noticed that I really didn't know what I was doing at all. When you start at a high level you cut yourself off from a whole lot of other experience that helps you learn how to play. In order to counteract this developers would have to spend an unrealistic amount of time making end-game content. I think the solution that would make everyone happy would have to be two entire games smashed into one box. There would have to different tutorial quests for each play type, different leveling mechanics (if any for the high level starter), as well as anything else that I can't think of right now (haha, I can't think of anything but I'm sure other posters will be able to come up with issues). Should we expect such an extensively produced game? I don?t think so.

Paying for unlockable content? Why did I buy a game? To buy more stuff? Not doing that. Unlockable content should be Easter-egg like surprises with little bearing on the plot or core game. When I say unlockable I'm not talking about making enough money to buy a cool car in a game, I'm talking about extras. If a game centers on getting a better car to beat the competition then that?s what the game is about. That IS the game, its not unlockable items, its game progression. If you want a game that gives you everything you want right off the bat then play an arcade racer. Play a game that starts you off with everything and centers around the races and not the car upgrades. I'll say this though, you probably won't find that Ferrari all that impressive if there is no challenge in obtaining it. Games are about achievement. If you remove the sense of achievement from a game, which upgrades are in many racing games, then you remove the game aspect of the software. An illustration of this point is Monopoly. Go ahead and set up the board, cover all the properties with hotels and give yourself all the bank's money and deeds. Now make your friends start the game and roll over and over until you have bankrupted each. Yeah, maybe its fun to be on top, but it won't be more than a few minutes of ridiculous joy. Monopoly is meant to be played as a progression from little money to a lot of money. That IS the game.

All in all I think the way people are talking about next gen consoles, spending all their time on graphics over game play. Would a DVD-like chapter selection be enough? Isn't entirely possible that it will only please a few gamers. Making games as versatile as they would have to be to please everyone is unrealistic. Some people like some games, other people don't. Try to find the games you like and get those. Don't demand that the games you don't like be more like games you like, that will just normalize everything and kill creativity. If you enjoy leveling a character then play an RPG with a strong element of character development. If you enjoy playing with most or all of the cool stuff you want right off, play an action game with no leveling component and little itemization. There are options out there. I think we should try finding games that we like before we ask for changes in all games in order to make every single game more like the game we want to play. Just be more discriminating with the games you buy.

 

[heavyfeul]

I agree with the first post. You should be able to access all content and features if you so choose. Unlockable content has always been a pet peeve of mine. I may not choose to skip ahead, but I was pretty annoyed when I had to unlock all the different theaters and missions in COD2. Just make them available from the start! I had fun unlocking them, because Call of Duty 2 is a fun game, but since it is a non-linear episodic game with no cohesive story arc, I wanted to skip around.

The problem is that designers see this as ways to create a challenge that motivates a player to keep going. In reality it is just an old design philosophy that seems to have taken the form of dogma in game design. Following a story is one thing. A story driven game should force the player to follow a path, much like a novel or movie, but when you play a game that only has a plot to justify its gameplay and environment, I see no reason why the player should not be able to skip ahead if they want to.

 

[Shannon Drake]

I don't mind what I'd call "fluff" unlockables, like when beating the game unlocks character art or design documents or DVD-type extra features, but I do object when critical game modes or plot devices are hidden behind the "unlockable feature" label. My main pet peeve here is the "good ending." I don't object to giving the guy who spent 168 hours racing chocobos some kind of little cookie, but I do object when I play the game and skip some mini-quest or something only to get the lame ending because some NPC I didn't know about in the far-end of the game universe couldn't find their lost puppy or something.

 

[AmmoSponge [deprecated]]

If you would rather play a game like you watch a movie, who am I to stop you? My Fast Time at Ridgemont High DVD allows me to skip right to Phoebe Cates getting out of the swimming pool, so why not let you get to the next level with no problem. I can't agree you should get the same pretty lights someone else would get for actually playing the whole game though.

I disagree with just letting people get easter eggs. The easter egg is there for those that work for it and a reward in that sense. They are rarely intended gameplay, and are never the reason you bought the game unless someone told you about it.

Although I wouldn't do it (mainly because I like to punish myself like that), I am ok with people cheating or buying their way through single player games. However, when you put statistics or social advancement behind it (ala MMOGs), you are really coming close to the line. Your cheating or buying your way up could very well change my ability to be #1 by playing the game as intended. This alone could affect my motivation for playing the game.

By cheating / buying your way to the Super Fortress of Uber Doom, you may have stopped another person from being the first person to get there on a legit basis, and therefore affected their gameplay. It is really hard to gauge what does and doesn't affect another person's game or motivation to play a game. Someone's desire to just be the first may be the whole reason they play.

By the way, the little cookie for that 168 hour guy is the good ending. If you just want a menu of endings, why play at all? It isn't television, it is interactive entertainment. Games are meant to be played, not watched.

 

[Goofonian]

By the way, the little cookie for that 168 hour guy is the good ending. If you just want a menu of endings, why play at all? It isn't television, it is interactive entertainment. Games are meant to be played, not watched.

On the whole I would agree with you, but there are several examples of games where getting the "good" ending is just a pain in the a** almost to the point where it can leave you unfulfilled and ruin the experience. Prince of persia: warrior within for example was widely regarded as having an excellent good ending and an unsatisfying bad ending. But once you'd finished the game the first time you no doubt got the bad ending and then had to go through the game again with a guide sitting next to you so that you could find every last one of the secret life upgrades and finish the game with the good ending. Thats just silly. And whats more annoying is that it doesn't ever tell you how your supposed to get the good ending (you need a guide to find that out too) and it doesn't tell you how many life upgrade there are so you don't know how many you missed.

A much better way to do it would be like in abe's odyssey way back on the PS1. To get the good ending you had to save at least 50% (i think? was a long time ago) of the mudokons. Not only is this a much more achievable goal (getting 100% of anything in any game is almost always tough if not impossible) but once you got the bad ending it told you that there was a good ending, told you how to get it and even told you how much you missed it by. The first time I went through I think I missed the good ending by 2% which was incredibly frustrating, but inspired me to play through again taking a little more care.

 

[Meophist]

"Good ending", huh? Just reminded me of Star Ocean 2. It had two endings… ok, technically, I think it was 80+ endings, but they don't count(they're just a few-seconds sniplets of your characters after the game depending on thier relationship values). In any case, there's the "good ending" and the "bad ending". They both suck, but that's not the point.

How it works is that if you go do some of the optional side-quests near the end of the game, you begin to unravel a hidden plot. This plot point doesn't get resolved even if you beat the game. In order to resolve it, you need to first get to the final save point, then go back to one of the main cities to see an event. Then, an optional dungeon opens up, and you can face a much harder version of last boss to get the "true ending", which is just a couple of lines text difference from the normal ending if you consider the ending to be everything after you beat the last boss.

Interestingly enough, the only hints towards there being a second ending is that not all plot points are resolved in the first one. One can also easily stumble upon it if they take their last save and go back to do some minor exploring.

 

[Ayavaron]

If the extra content has been placed on the disc, then that means that it has been made, added to the game and tested well before the game has gone gold. Developers can't just decided to add something to the disc at the last minute. It doesn't work that way.

If a developer has made something for a game during the development cycle, I would expect to get that part of the game included in the retail price. My problem isn't that the data for purchasable items is found on the disc, its the fact that data being on the disc means the developers have made a decision to nickel and dime the consumers for the content.

Most likely, these extra features you can buy are the result of extra development money put forward by the people who fund the game. It's their right to make money. It's not like they finish a game, start a new one, and a month later, put out some new downloadable map. Sometimes, development of a game will continue past shipping to develop patches and things but probably almost all downloadble content has to be made up front before any of it is released.

And as for your comment about that "not working that way" I really should've known better than to say it like taht. I know there's almost never extra time or anyhing and I know that if it's on the disc, it's probably tested, etc. I shouldn't have put it that way.

 

[TomBeraha]

I guess I'm on the other side of the fence here, I like having tons of stuff thats behind hard but not impossible barriers. I loved every second of beating Grand Theft Auto: VC 100%, At the end of it I had infinite ammo with never reloading rocket launchers, things were great! But if I had just cheated to get them It wouldn't have felt the same for me. Getting everything done bit by bit is what makes something fun for me. The act of pursuing that ultimate goal is the fun for me, not the prize at the end.

- Tom

 

[mrplaid]

And as for your comment about that "not working that way" I really should've known better than to say it like taht. I know there's almost never extra time or anyhing and I know that if it's on the disc, it's probably tested, etc. I shouldn't have put it that way.

That's not necessarily true. What about the hidden sex game in San Andreas? The unfinished dragon boss from Fable? The unused ending in Symphony of the Night? You could go on and on.
I understand that's arguing semantics to a degree, but what if a developer had actually made you pay for the ability to see any of that in a finished state?
Where does the line between assets and content begin when it comes to determining what is actually on a disc? If I have a game that has models and AI for an enemy that doesn't appear in the main game already on the disc, but I have to pay the developer to send me a patch that basically flips a boolean bit in the code somewhere to make them appear in the game, that's obviously not cool.
If Rockstar would have allowed people to pay for the ability to unlock the AO-rated mini-games in San Andreas, do you think people would have bought it? It's already on the disc, but not accessible through any means more readily available than a credit card.

 

[Dom Camus]

Another way to look at the issue of unlockable content is that it's a game design choice. Some people will prefer it, others won't.

First person shooters on the PC, for example, have long since abandoned keyboard control in favour of mouse aim. This is a shame from my perspective since I detest mouse aim and won't play any game which uses it. Does that mean everything in the genre since Doom 2 is bad ? No, it just means these games aren't for me.

But like with any aspect of design, some choices will be less popular than others. The best unlockable content gives a real sense of achievement but doesn't much affect those who don't find it. The worst... well, you all read that post [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/67424-Final-Fantasy-XIIs-Unfair-Astrology] about the Zodiac Spear, right ?

 

[Goofonian]

If I have a game that has models and AI for an enemy that doesn't appear in the main game already on the disc, but I have to pay the developer to send me a patch that basically flips a boolean bit in the code somewhere to make them appear in the game, that's obviously not cool.
If Rockstar would have allowed people to pay for the ability to unlock the AO-rated mini-games in San Andreas, do you think people would have bought it? It's already on the disc, but not accessible through any means more readily available than a credit card.

This is exactly the point I think. There is no difference between the two examples you have given and despite the fact that people would definately have paid to unlock the mini-game, its still not cool.

Where I think the biggest problem would arise is in situations like hot coffee. If the content is already on the disc, people will find ways to get to it. Whether that be through developer implimented cheat codes, action replay style systems or through blatent hacks (ala hot coffee) they will get there. Once developers start charging to unlock this content you start seeing problems. There will no longer be cheat codes and action replay discs will become the focus of stupid pointless lawsuits.

The easiest way to avoid this is simple. Keep doing things the way we always have. Developers should finish the game will all the content and distribute it the same way they always have. Continue to include cheat codes; They serve multiple purposes in that they enable people without the time or talent required to unlock stuff to see the entire game, and they also generate traffic for the websites that host the codes. Lastly, if a developer wants to charge for new content thats fine, create new content and offer it as a download. Something above and beyond what already exists in the game and hopefully adds to the the games longevity. I will be more than happy to pay a few bucks for that sort of stuff.