Tag: downloadable content

#oneaday Day 784: Playing a dead game

People in Steam reviews like to declare a game "dead" when the author of said game hasn't updated it for more than about two weeks, but we all know that's just entitled little shits who don't understand that sometimes a creative work is actually finished. However, there absolutely are "dead" games out there, by varying definitions — some are impossible to play any more (I weep for Darkspore, which I bought on sale once, never got around to playing, and it was made completely unplayable before I even had a chance to try it at all) while some are just delisted from digital storefronts. It's the latter I want to talk about today — specifically, the first Forza Horizon.

My first — and, prior to last night, last — encounter with Forza Horizon was with Forza Horizon 4, which I had extremely mixed feelings about. Sure, it was cool to have an open-world driving game set somewhere that looked and felt a bit like the UK, but the way it was structured to have all the hard edges completely smoothed off, lest some player somewhere felt any "friction", made the whole thing feel utterly meaningless. We're talking about a game where you can come last in every event you enter and still make progress. Not what I'm looking for in a driving game, so after getting frustrated with that, I pretty much swore off the subsequent entries in the series.

However, I was aware that earlier entries in the series were very well-regarded, and in the absence of owning an Xbox One or Series Whateverthefuck, the only one accessible to me was the first one for Xbox 360. This has apparently been delisted from everywhere for some time now, but you can still get second-hand physical copies, and indeed, that's what I did on a trip to CEX some time ago.

I booted it up last night for the first time and found it quite enjoyable. However, one thing became increasingly apparent the longer I played: the fact it, plus all its DLC and microtransactions, had been delisted from sale made it well and truly "dead" — to such a degree that there are certain functions in the game you just flat-out can't access any more, despite the menu options still being there.

This is apparent right from the game's title screen, where you have the option to play "Horizon Rally"… except you don't, because you need the Horizon Rally DLC for that, and you can't get that any more, leaving you with a completely useless menu option, plus a number of loading screen tips informing you that you can buy it from the Xbox Marketplace… which, as previously noted, you cannot.

I thought I was going to have a real problem when I opened the map screen and there were button prompts for "Treasure Map" and "Fast Travel Anywhere". Now, you see a button prompt in a game, and it's reasonable to think that it's a built-in function of the game, right? You press the button indicated, and the thing happens. That's how it usually works, right? Not in Forza Horizon land. Pressing either of these buttons gives you a pop-up informing you that you can buy those two pieces of functionality — which, respectively, allow you to immediately teleport anywhere on the map, and reveal the location of hidden items on the map — using "Tokens", which you can, of course, get from the Xbox Marketplace. Except you can't do that because everything about Forza Horizon has been delisted.

I was concerned in the former case that this meant the entire fast travel feature would be unusable because you couldn't buy a fucking microtransaction any more, but thankfully progressing a little further revealed that there is still a built-in fast travel facility — it's just a bit more inconvenient, since you can only fast travel to specific landmarks that you've previously visited and not, like, the various race events that appear across the map. I wasn't so concerned about the treasure map, meanwhile, since all it is, basically, is a cheat code that you have to pay for.

Little remnants of Forza Horizon really, really wanting you to pay up for microtransactions that no longer exist are riddled throughout the entire game. At least one load screen tip for every loading break will have some sort of exhortation to buy something. Those broken Fast Travel Anywhere and Treasure Map buttons don't go away. If you want to buy a new car in the game, you can do so with the credits you earn through gameplay or "Tokens" that you can no longer purchase with real money.

I guess I should be thankful that Forza Horizon is, at least, still playable, even with all its online functionality and purchasable bullshit inaccessible. If anything, I prefer the fact that there's now no means of simply paying money to not play the game, which is what at least some of these options amounted to. You'd just think they'd, you know, turn all that shit off in a patch if they knew it was no longer going to be available. I mean, presumably they added in the "Horizon Rally" option at some point when it was actually available — why not just remove it again in a final update when the servers and DLC went offline?

We're going to start running into this more and more as time goes on, and it's not always going to be optional DLC and microtransactions that are affected. Thankfully, we have not yet reached a point where patch servers are no longer available for console games that require them, but at some point we are going to have to reckon with the fact that a lot of today's physical releases ship either broken or incomplete, and I'm not sure the work has been adequately done to prepare for that time when the "official" patch servers are no longer available.

This, of course, is a big part of what the whole "Stop Killing Games" movement is about — and I know that certain parts of the gaming history and preservation communities are at least starting to have a think about the best way of handling all this. I'm just concerned that it's going to be too late by the time we find a solution; how many more games out there are technically functional, like Forza Horizon, but have elements that are now completely inaccessible?

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#oneaday Day 55: DLC is only two letters from "DICK"

Nostalgia and rose-tinted spectacles are rife in all walks of life, but there are few places where it happens more so than in the video games industry. This is perhaps due to the fact that it's such a fast-moving industry that you can be in your twenties and still feel nostalgic for "the good old days" and how much better they supposedly were.

Nine times out of ten, of course, nostalgia is proven wrong when you actually go back and play the things you were so nostalgic about. Things move on for a reason.

But I'm firmly of the opinion that the previous console generation is always going to be looked back on as a "golden age" that is going to be very difficult to top, however good the games might be, and however beautiful the HD graphics of today's games might be.

The reason for this, to me, that games from then were finished. Now we have the blight that is DLC. Now, the arguments in favour of downloadable add-ons for games are many—extra content adds life to a game and keeps it relevant long after release. It gives developers the opportunity to show that they're still "supporting" a product. And it allows for other, smaller developers to use an existing base as the means for some creative risk-taking—see Bioshock 2's "Minerva's Den" as an example.

But at its worst, DLC is a cynical money-making exercise designed to get people to pay for their games twice—once to buy the thing in the first place and once again to purchase all the "premium content" that should have been included with the game. Premium content, let's not forget, that very often is actually on the game disc and is simply "unlocked" by purchasing an access code.

This isn't the only negative side to DLC, either. Narrative games suffer considerably from this whole "oh, let's add a bit here, add a bit there" structure. There was a time when you would start playing a game, go through its story, beat it and be satisfied. Now, it seems, there always has to be "a little bit more". There always has to be an "exclusive epilogue chapter", or some "side missions" or "the shock return of a beloved character!"

Rather than seeing this as a good opportunity to get more of the games I love, I see this as reason to not pick up a copy of a hotly-anticipated game on its original release, because it's almost inevitable that there will be some "extra bits" sold separately down the road, and that these will be bundled into a "Game of the Year Edition" or similar even further down the road.

This is what was supposed to happen with the PS3 version of Mass Effect 2. I was quite keen to wait for this rather than picking up any of the DLC for the Xbox version, so that I could play the "definitive version". Sure enough, the PS3 version was announced as having "all" the DLC included with it. Nice. Except now they've announced some more, because Mass Effect 2 is big business and people will keep funnelling money into it.

ARGH. What this means in practice is that when you buy a game these days you're essentially purchasing an unfinished product. With the speed at which some of this DLC magically appears, it's clear it's been worked on alongside the "main" game and so it would have been very easy for it to simply be included in the price of admission. And with some publishers like EA already withholding content from those who have purchased a game pre-owned, the whole situation just strikes me as more than a little objectionable. Games are too expensive anyway, and to start charging even more for them is just… well, wrong.

Unfortunately, there are too many people out there invested in the DLC debacle to mean we can ever go back. Are you happy with that?