How RPGs have been abused into making money with bad shooters.

A discussion article on the ever growing trend of including RPG Elements into the First Person Shooter genre, what is wrong with it in the current trend. Not actually an article about how they totally took our gimmick and should give it back. Disclaimer: Post yet another post containing words that display the vulgarity and disgrace of the wretched and the wicked.  Read at your own discretion. This article assumes you know something of how modern First Person shooters function and is much more oriented in that space than about RPGs, so I will try to explain some components as I go though what with this being an RPG site and not Shooting Dudes In Faces For Awesome Victory SHAZBOT.com or the like.

There has been a growing trend in many action games of late to included a levelling system taken straight from our favourite grindy little genre, level up, gain experience for killing guys or killing guys in special ways, get new gear, be more powerful and have more options. Some have praised this as a way to improve the longevity of a game and that it empowers the player with a reward cycle. I will be arguing something fairly different in here.

The core games that I am going to be criticizing here are the latest few iterations of the Call of Duty series, but it applies to many other games that have come out (to a much lesser extent). First of all we have to examine some core decisions to this level up system. As you level up you gain access to newer guns and perks that let you more effectively deal with your enemies, fairly standard RPG levelling up system. For an example of the kinds of things it unlocks you can refer to this page for perks or this page for weapons You can see many things are unlocked by playing as well as just experience. So the better you are the more you will unlock, seems fair enough, rewarding good play and so on. The problem here however is that they are consistent positive feedback loops, the more you win the better stuff you get, the easier it makes to win, your victories aren’t necessarily because of a skill gap, but are in part artificially created gap based on unlocked equipment. It is a cycle that feeds on itself sucking the player in. A great little series on Escapist Magazine touches on this far more succinctly and well than I feel I can here in an article from November 2010 on The Skinner Box and it is one I highly recommend viewing.

That all seems fairly innocuous if a bit tedious and favours experienced players, but it gets worse the more you know about Call of Duty’s main gameplay. Call of Duty has a game method that rewards the victor disproportionately to the loser. The more you win the easier it becomes to keep winning, this would be Kill Streaks for every kill beyond your third in a row through to the eleventh you will get progressively more powerful extra weapons to use, which will make the next kill even easier. For 15 kills you get to turn off all the enemy electronic devices with an EMP (leaving yours still active) meaning anyone else performing as well loses their advantages, putting you at a complete and total advantage for 60 seconds. From there it is 10 more kills away from an instant win. Plenty of games give the player winning and advantage in competitive FPS, the classical example being Counter Strike which avoids the normal benefit of not losing orientation on respawn by having distinct rounds, it gives the victor more money than the loser to buy weapons next round and the winning team is less likely to have to invest in more weapons. It is a clear advantage to the victor, early wins are a big advantage, but it is not one that is entirely insurmountable, after 3 or so rounds the victors will have enough bankroll to keep going through multiple losses on even footing, but the losers will also be on even footing. There is a fixed threshold on how big the disadvantage can be because of the in game economy. When we are looking at the advantages in Call of Duty however the scale of the advantages here are of a completely different magnitude. Being able to buy a budget Assault rifle or a better assault rifle earlier in the game against instant win button, especially considering the person getting the instant win button is more likely to be starting the game with a better weapon.

To be fair to the games, they do give you benefits that you can get if you die a lot these would be Death Streaks, if you are going to click any link I provide I recommend it be this one, because there you can note that you don’t get access to these until you are level 4, 6, 27 and 39. So well after you have sunk many hours into the game, then you can start to fight back a little better against experienced players. Yet another barrier against entry as a new gamer, but like all the other components the more you play it the more likely you are to get it and even more frustratingly, the harder it makes for people beneath you to actually capitalise on a successful kill.

Now when you combine these two things together it starts to paint a portrait of what I find so deplorable in these games, they are innately stacked against the newer player. This makes the game harder to play competitively, to be on even footing you need to sink an inordinate number of hours into the game with a shakey footing start and that is just in the online community. To even play this game at LANs where the top tier of competitive gaming takes place they have to have specifically modified versions of the game to fix the balance. All of this puts the kerfuffle about dedicated servers in the PC gaming community into a different light if you are not used to looking at the games from this angle. The inability to have a dedicated server makes it harder to balance the game for competitive play, makes it harder to control the conditions of the server and leaves you at the whims of the matchmaking system. Worst of all? The host will have a massive advantage on ping if you are playing on the internet. There is always some disparity there based on distance to server, but you are normally talking in a magnitude of 50ms of lag, for the host? They are running with 0ms lag, you need to have everyone with very good connections and be playing locally to cut everyone’s ping down to 50ms. That or have better net code than I have ever seen in a game.

You could however disregard the game as a piece of competitive multiplayer entertainment and just treat it as just a game to play. Ignore the stacking of advantages and disadvantages and fair play because hey, there is clearly a market for such games with people playing MMORPGs for PVP components with all the delightful farce that surrounds those outside of the top tier of play. This still makes for an inherently flawed game with some serious downsides. What might those be? These imbalances naturally poison the community. You make it nearly impossible for new players to come into the game as everyone else has such a huge head start, I am sure you still get new players, but the incoming numbers after a few months plummet compared to what you can get with a game that has a flat entry level. Without new players gaming communities just die out and move on to other games.

So we have a game that is unbalanced in favour of early starters and self defeating as a piece of community building. How do concepts like this make it into a AAA title that is worth millions? Easily. They are there by design. We are looking at the same kind of design we are seeing in modern many kinds of modern technologies, built in obsolescence. The game isn’t meant to last any longer than the 12 or 18 months it takes to churn out the next component of the franchise to start the same whole vicious cycle again. Tear it all down and rebuild it all over again reselling the same core product again at full price of entry all over again. Engaging in the same self fulfilling cycle of reward and parasitic community creation all over again. This is great for publishers but terrible for gamers themselves, instead of breeding inclusive communities it breeds short lived hierarchy based communities that thrive for short periods of time and then devour themselves as they run out of new easy kill fodder. This is on top of the obvious negative side to gamers where previously a strong community based multiplayer game could be an absolutely amazing value for money investment, they instead become sucked into your regular purchase cycles like we see with mobile phones and other gadgetry. This isn’t to say it will kill the industry, far from it, people trapped in these cycles will keep buying and playing fairly obviously, but what it does curb is innovation. You get by the numbers shooters that feed into these habits and as long as the market for this kind of gameplay is large it will continue to thrive. There is always the threat that MMORPGs have though in that they will hit the threshold for the market and possibly even stifle all competition, but we aren’t quite there yet.

Now I have hated on the one series enough, you can shrug it off as well it is just one company doing it, Activision and no one likes them anyway right with all their mass firings and raping Guitar Heroes and whatnot? Well no, last I looked Call of Duty was being hailed as one of the best selling games of all time (taking sales from 3 platforms added together) and the proof in the pudding? The huge sales were at release. A fairly fun page to look at is this http://store.steampowered.com/stats/ You can compare what people are playing. I won’t really do any statistics analysis here, but just want to highlight the fact that if you look, remember to compare peak playerships as well as current and not that Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source are 12 and just over 6 years old respectively. That is community longevity. Consider the number of players you see there for the original game and remember that when Counter-Strike was taking off you could pick up a copy of Halflife for $15 and Counter-Strike was free. Value for money at almost the best ratio you will find in gaming. That is a strong win for a consumer. Now with that horrible segue into talking about Steam I really want to note just how big this phenomenon is becoming, currently as of writing this, Crysis 2 just came up for Preorder, one of the benefits for the Preorder is a free 5 levels in Multiplayer at release. So regardless of any setbacks on release date or quality of the game, before you have had any chance to find out anything at all about the game other than the marketting prerelease hype, they want you to pony up your money a month before release just so you don’t get screwed over and caught in the tail end of this cycle. You thought it was bad when Gamestop and EB were asking you to preorder or you might not be able to get a game? How about when it was preorder or missing out on content? Well, they successfully found a new spin on it that hurts gamers even more. You have to preorder to not be at a statistical disadvantage in a competitive game. Very nicely done from a marketing perspective, but horrible for gamers. I hope all your friends are going to buy the game too and didn’t choose to preorder Brink instead or are just going to stick with Bulletstorm or something else, because otherwise you are shit out of luck.

Now why do I take so much umbrage to it and note it here on an RPG site? Well these get bandied around as RPG elements, but they aren’t really the core components of what makes an RPG, they are a common execution of the genre, but far from the heart and soul of the genre and there have been other games out there that have successfully taken those same RPG elements without taking the grind with it (For people following on the forum, this is my obligatory Deus Ex hype here), you can integrate things like this wonderfully in Shooters and they are fairly easily adapted to other genres as well, but is this really the elements we as gamers want taken from them? Not really for myself personally, such things have their place and in competitive play they should be kept far away. Leave this kind of thing to the singleplayer environment or to non-competitive gaming modes. It sure is fairly fun in Co-operative gameplay modes that have such things. Hell in Real Time Strategy this very thing has developed its own little genre, which is again a thing for another time.

Just as a closer I feel like I should direct people towards Extra Credits which is a fantastic series on Escapist Magazine that covers topics far more broadly than I do, more succinctly, better researched and far more optimistically than I do. Check them out.