You can’t keep up? Well, get off the treadmill and start moving forward!
Online multiplayer is not what it was back in the day. Sure it still has the elements we all love – socializing, player versus player combat, leaderboards or overcoming difficult challenges together with friends; but then again that is all fed to you along with a plethora of daily quests, seasonal achievements, cosmetics, limited time content or hero rotations. Your favorite game’s content is constantly changing at an ever increasing rate and for you that means having to invest the time into collecting all the bits and pieces, jumping through all the hoops and experiencing all of what the game has to offer. But there are certainly few among us with the completionist attitude, capable of doing so; not for a single game, but for multiple ones, all seeking your attention and rewarding you with even more shiny baubles in order to persuade you in choosing them among many of their competitors. It is very noticeable how the idea of lootboxes and chests has crawled its way up from the nether that is the free to play development scene onto games that even ask for a sum of money akin to the usual AAA release.
Blizzard Entertainment’s Overwatch is a prime example, much like every other Blizzard game out there. You are not meant to simply be a World of Warcraft or a StarCraft player – you are meant to be a Blizzard player. This is reinforced by the regular events that crossover content from one game to another. For instance, playing a few games of Heroes of the Storm will reward you with content for Overwatch in the form of exclusive portraits or limited edition skins. Then again, you are also offered a new seasonal reward in Diablo 3, while the leaderboard in Hearthstone has just reset for the month and there are two new card backs to be ground for, while there is the new StarCraft 2 battlechest is being released, that offers you even more exclusive content that requires your attention and it’s all going away at the end of the month.
It is reasonable to think that most people who work or go to school cannot afford to spend another 40 or so hours a week across multiple titles, in order to eventually get all those items, cosmetics and loot. In the end you are left missing out. And the amount of missed content gets bigger each and every week, month or year you decide to not partake.
I realize that having a constant feed of new content stimulates the playerbase to remain invested into their favorite game – in the end it’s not a bad thing at all. More content is always better for the players. But then again, do you really need that card back? Do you really need all 100+ Overwatch skins, voice lines and sprays? Is it worth grinding to level 70 in Diablo 3 every month or so for another portrait frame and another weird pet to collect coins for you?
At some point online multiplayer games stopped being about actual experiences, about grand new expansions, and about playing with friends to overcome challenges despite the odds, but a Skinner box, where you are drip-fed the same content and are rewarded with massive amounts of JPEGs with slight variations in order to pad the drought that occurs in between major patches – meaning it could be months in between this and the next fresh batch of content. Online games have become burdened by playing for the next biggest reward, rather than for play itself. It’s liberating to just skip a month – to miss out. To wait for something that actually has substance, rather than settling for anything they put on your table. Getting a new cosmetic won’t make you a better player, because you’ve gone through the same hoops again and again, enough so that they’ve become rudimentary repetitive tasks that you follow on a set schedule. Nothing is stopping you from not pressing the button, because there is no electric grid, like in a usual Skinner box. But maybe instead of offering the same treats for pressing the same button over and over again, you may find it better to provide different methods of acquiring new, more varied items by pressing different buttons or adding even more switches and knobs to turn. It’s frankly difficult to be original all of the time. In fact, it is easier to setup a system that is proven to work with no questions asked. You are always given the ability to speak with your money, if you are not willing to part with your time. But is that really an excuse for game design that relies on monotony, on repetitive tasks and meaningless hours spent playing something that is more akin to work than to proper leisure time, just for the sake of making a little more money on top?
Having an original idea will grant you more money that any of these systems will, but taking the path of least resistance won’t, and may very well turn your playerbase off, rather than keeping it online.
