Make Sure They DON’T See All your Content
June 5th, 2009 by Macguffin
The conventional wisdom in the AAA games industry is that there is a sweet spot to hit with your content creation. You want to create a rich game experience for your players, but at the same time you want to make sure not much of your content remains unseen – unplayed content in your game is tantamount to wasted time.
Personally, I’ve been moving away from that thought in the Heritage game design, and this morning it hit me how to enunciate the exception to this rule. In essence, unseen “stuff” can keep your game fresh to your older players.
For the purposes of this post, I use content and mechanics almost interchangeably. I’m referring to anything that can instill your players with a sense of wonder or surprise, make them want to find out if there is any more over that next hill.
For old gaming hands, many of us don’t finish games anymore. For me at least, that happens most often when I get to a spot where I can see all the boundaries of the game. I find myself looking at the game and realizing that it doesn’t have any secrets left. The rest of the game will be materially the same as what I’ve played before.
The most striking example of that for me is World of Warcraft. Back when I started, I was hit with an absolute sense of glee – 2 hours into the game and leaving the newbie area, I knew I was headed into what would be an amazing world. The whole thing represented unexplored promise. Many, many (so very many) hours played later I quit. By then I knew everything that WoW was going to teach me, and I was pretty much done with it. I hadn’t seen every bit of content, but I had seen enough to know where the boundaries of the game lay – I’d tapped it out for surprises big enough to make me care. The times since then I’ve gone back to WoW have either been because new or expanded gameplay mechanics have been added.
A good example of how you can extend the life of your game comes from Dwarf Fortress. If you’re unfamiliar with DF, it’s a game where you control a small band of dwarves and are tasked with building, in essence, Moria. It is not a game for the faint of heart – the UI is obtuse in the extreme, without mods the graphics are all ASCII, and the thing is impossible to play for new players without the wiki open. For all these things – and perhaps in part because of it – it is one of the games I come back to, time and time again. After I had gotten over the hump of mastering the basic gameplay, the game turned into a constant progression of finding something else to master, doing it, and then realizing that I needed to learn something else new. In one case, I had a great little fortress – a small army of armed dwarves to protect it, steel weapons and armor for them… and then I got my teeth kicked in by giant wild animals. Looking into it, I realized that there were all sorts of tricks I could be doing with my fortress design to get around these problems. So I kicked off a new fortress with these things in mind.
The main caveat here is that this only works if your game is based to some extent on an exploration of mechanics and/or content. An example where I don’t think this would be helpful would be Geometry Wars on Xbox Live Arcade. That’s a game where you have sorted out mechanics within the first 20 seconds of gameplay – the rest of the game is an exercise in getting better at it. Not only will adding new content or mechanics probably add much playing time for your older players, it will probably upset them to see what could be considered a cheap trick in a test of skill.
This tactic also makes a ton more sense for indie games like Heritage and Dwarf Fortress. Bay 12 and Macguffin Games are both trying to offer a good long-term proposition to fans – come be a part of this community, have fun with us over time. We need to keep people engaged over the long term. If you’re doing the old-skool retail model, it doesn’t work – your shelf time is too short and your costs are probably too high to do this sort of stuff.
Dwarf Fortress does it on one level by escalating and changing up the different challenges you will face with your fortress. First you figure out how to dig a fortress. Then you need to have food for when your hauled supplies run out. Some time later you start getting hit by goblin forces. Later those forces get bigger. And so on. When you master one problem in the game, it is then free to throw the next at you.
For Heritage, we plan to get this kind of effect once we can involve the community in creating content for the game. I’ll get more into that in the future dev blog posts – I’m not trying to be coy here, but I have to lay out more about the game before it makes a lot of sense.
I’m very interested in what people think of this. It’s not a thesis I’ve proven out across a title or two – it’s more along the lines of a hunch still.
Tags: Game Development, indie
