Tag: pay to win

2213: Paying Not to Play vs. Games That Let You Break Them

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I’m currently grinding my way through to the Platinum trophy on Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 2, and in the process I’ve unlocked a considerable number of the “Plans” in the game’s “Remake” system. For those who haven’t played any of the Re;Birth games, these are essentially a crafting system that allow you to bolt various bits and pieces onto the base game. These bits and pieces range from a boost to the amount of experience points you gain from battle to new items being available to purchase in the shops.

Re;Birth 2 goes further than its predecessor did with the Plans by pretty much allowing you to break the game altogether. Between the Plan which allows you to automatically defeat enemies you outlevel on the dungeon screen without having to actually do the battle and the “Symbol Attack Gains” Plan, which allows you to still get experience, credits and items as if you had done the battle, grinding to the game’s various endings is arguably a little too easy, particularly if combined with boosts to experience and suchlike.

At least, I’d say this was a little too easy were it not for the fact that I’ve played a bunch of Compile Heart games now, and their endgame is always like this: characters continuing to level after the usual cap of 99, stats increasing to ludicrous levels, superpowered equipment boosting them still further. In Neptunia’s case, the exaggerated power levels of the endgame is arguably all part of the satire and parody that the series is based around: RPGs are known for having big numbers in them in their final hours, so here are bigger numbers than you’ve ever seen (outside of the Disgaea series, that is) popping out of enemies as you batter them around the face and neck repeatedly with various sharp implements.

In the case of the Re;Birth games, how much you break the game is entirely up to you. You don’t have to turn any of the plans on if you don’t want to, but if you do so, it makes working your way through the alternative endings considerably easier — and manages to remain fun in the process, since there’s more to the game than just battles. It’s inherently satisfying to see Nepgear closing in on level 400 as I approach the “True” ending on my third playthrough, and I’m fully intending on blasting through the other endings after this too.

Hyperdimension Neptunia U allows you to completely break it, too, particularly in its endgame. As you clear various components of the game, you unlock various cheats which range from having infinite EXE Drive power for super-special moves to not actually taking any damage from enemies, essentially making you invincible. And yet that game managed to remain fun despite the option to completely break it; testament to its overall charm and the fact that it had a metagame structure that I found enjoyable to grind through in the name of a Platinum trophy.

As I play these deliberately broken games, I can’t help but compare them to what a lot of mobile games do. In the case of mobile games — free-to-play ones, anyway — you generally have the option to pay real money to break the game in some way, be it eliminate grinding, get an overpowered new character/item/weapon or somehow otherwise break the usual rules of the game. Some games are more aggressive than others in trying to convince you to part with your cash, with the most egregious technique being the vile “Energy” bar that throttles how much you’re allowed to play in a single session without either waiting or paying up.

In essence, by paying up to get an advantage in mobile games, you’re more often than not paying not to play the game: paying not to have to collect things, or grind experience points, or earn money, or fuse cards to make better cards, or whatever. Most well-designed free-to-play mobile games do have a means of earning the premium currency required to do most of these things, but in many cases this is painfully slow — fast enough to give you a taste, but just slow enough to make you think it can’t possibly hurt to pay 99p for 15 gems or whatever. And once you do that, any sense of achievement is gone, because you know you didn’t really “earn” whatever you got from it: you just bought it.

Contrast with, say, the Plans in Re;Birth 2, which are also providing the opportunity to not play part of the game — battles with enemies much lower level than you — but demand that you earn the right to do that before you’re able to take advantage of it. Or contrast with Neptunia U’s cheats, which unlock by completing aspects of the game: again, you have to earn your right to make the rest of your grind easier.

In the latter cases, it’s still a player-friendly move that helps save them some time while still being able to explore and enjoy everything the game has to offer, but it carries with it a sense of achievement: the feeling of having earned and unlocked something, rather than just reaching for the credit card when things get a bit tough.

I sincerely hope free-to-play games don’t become the norm, simply for this reason. Paying to skip things or acquire things without having to earn them makes the whole thing feel rather meaningless to me. I know not everyone feels this way, but so long as there are still full-price premium games that don’t want to keep charging me to keep playing — or to not play — then I’ll keep buying ’em.

1230: In Pursuit of Score

Jun 01 -- HiscoresThe sole aim in a lot of video games circa the ’80s and early ’90s used to be to attain a high score. But in all but a few genres of gaming, that simple pleasure of watching a number get steadily higher — a number which proved indisputably how much better than your friends you were — has fallen by the wayside. This is kind of a shame because, having been playing a bunch of games recently in which the old-school objective of “score as many points as possible” is their reason for existence, it’s, you know, fun. Lots of fun.

My fondest memories of high-score chasing in recent years came with two different Xbox Live Arcade games: Geometry Wars 2 and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. Both of these games got their hooks into both me and my friends and saw us eschewing bigger, more exciting, more impressive releases that were around at the time in favour of simply pumping in virtual quarter after virtual quarter. Geometry Wars 2 in particular completely monopolised the gaming time of a number of us for a good several weeks, as each of us vied for dominance of the game’s six different leaderboards. It became a sort of hypnotic ritual — fire up the game, start up (say) Pacifist mode, play, die, immediately restart and repeat. Three hours later, I’d look up and see that, well, three hours had passed, and that my hands had locked into a claw shape only suitable for 1) holding a controller or 2) in a pinch, wanking.

Since those two games, however, there haven’t been that many other titles that have drawn the attention of my friends and I quite so consistently. This is a shame, as I greatly enjoyed that feeling of competition, and relished the opportunity to take a snapshot of my latest high score and rub it in the face of a competitor via some form of social media. (This is where the term “Be A Dick Mode,” often stylised as the hashtag “#beadickmode” on Twitter, originated.)

I’ve been thinking about how and why there hasn’t been a simple score-attack game to get everyone’s teeth into for a long time. And the only plausible reason I can think of is the fact that gaming has grown even more broad and diverse since that time. The rise of mobile phone games in particular has all but eliminated the perceived need for “simple” arcade games with a score attack mechanic, which is somewhat sad.

Bejeweled Blitz remains popular, of course, but I now refuse to play that game because it’s become infested with pay-to-win crap. Leaderboards are utterly meaningless if you sell advantages to players, which is what PopCap’s doing. Unfortunately, I appear to be in a minority thinking this, as the “Blitz” puzzle template is immensely popular — in-app purchases and all — with the latest addition to the formula being a rather sorry addition to the Tetris legacy from EA. I’m just not interested; what’s the point in playing if all it takes to top the leaderboards is being more willing to dip your hand into your pockets than your rivals? Bullshit, I say. Bullshit!

Fortunately, there is a degree of respite, albeit one that I’m yet to convince my friends to engage with. The shmup genre — which people on the Internet don’t quite seem able to agree as to whether it’s flourishing or dying — remains a resolutely score-focused genre, and demands a great deal from its players both in terms of simple manual skills and in the learning of often-complex scoring mechanics. Like a good fighting game demands that you spend time exploring its systems and getting to know how everything fits together, a good shmup demands that you study it, figure things out and then try to put all that knowledge into practice while attempting to avoid fiery laser death.

It’s immensely satisfying when you figure out how a particular game “works”, and the first time you see your score skyrocketing into the high millions or even billions. It’s a genre that brings thrills and excitement with minimal effort expended on storytelling or trying to do anything particularly “artistic”, but at the same time the finished result can be oddly beautiful — hypnotic bullet patterns; the “dance” of the player’s ship navigating through these perilous onslaughts; the sheer, unrelenting energy of most of these games. But these games aren’t trying to say something in the same way that an arty indie platformer is trying to say something; no, instead, all they’re trying to say is “c’mon, one more try and you’ll beat that score” or “c’mon! Bet you can’t clear me in one credit.”