Yesterday I sat down and, for the first time in almost two
decades, I booted up Dungeon Keeper. I'd just bought a copy on Good Old Games for
around two bucks, around half a beer. Dungeon Keeper was the first game I ever
bought, a game I obsessively, if unsuccessfully, tried to beat time and time
again, and remains a sort of white whale in my gaming psyche. But what struck
me most, more than the godawful controls (who inverts a mouse axis and won't
let players reconfigure it?!) and the unforgiving march of time on Dungeon
Keeper's once impressive graphics (GoG really could've/should've figured out
how to let players shift resolution), was how singular the gameplay was. This relic of gaming was pretty much exactly
how I remembered it since I first played it half a lifetime ago.
This might seem quite normal, but in the context of the
freemium titles that have been occupying a lot of my time of late, it waxes
odd. Dungeon
Keeper is, in many ways, a relic of its time and, in every sense, an
artistic gesture that plays the same way today (on a different platform, run
through DOSbox, channeled into a giant, unforgiving monitor) that it did when I
was 13. But each time I boot up Mechwarrior Online, I can expect massive
gameplay overhauls to be present: not just elements like new chassis and maps,
but bigger changes, like updated mechanics that fundamentally remake the game's
landscape. The biggest, most recent
mechanical shift involved the gauss rifle mechanic being completely rewritten
so that the weapon, formerly a mainstay of the game with some pretty serious
tradeoffs, now required a button to be held down so that it could fired. Mechanically, the weapon performed just as it
always had, with the same unforgiving penalties for component destruction, but
the addition of this charge almost totally eliminated the weapon from play, and
almost totally addressed the rash of Gauss Snipers that made MWO such a troubled multiplayer
environment for so long.
The Ghost Heat changes have similarly reworked the armaments
of most mech pilots, with PPC sniping largely a relic: now PPCs generate
staggering amounts of heat even without the ghost heat penalties, and firing
more than two in rapid succession balloons that effect so severely that,
particularly on smaller mechs, it can throw a mech into overload after only one
or two fire cycles. Before Ghost Heat, MWO rewrote the rules on ECM, allowing
BAP to burn through it, ending the reign of the Raven-3L on the
battlefield. Streak SRMs enjoyed a
retooling that randomized their component target selection, dramatically
reducing their effectiveness as a weapon.
Before that, SRM damage in general was dramatically decreased to prevent
Catapults loaded entirely with SRM6s from dominating the battlefield.
Each of these changes has totally rewritten the game, and
the mechanics of MWO, right down to
the evasive measures I have to take in combat to last long enough to get my
licks in, are totally divergent from the game I started playing just a few
months ago.
Star Wars: The Old
Republic has gone through a similar shift: not only has content delivery
changed, but the mechanics of talents and powers in the game were so
dramatically rewritten that, after a month long "Star Wars vacation"
I logged back in and found that I had to re-assign all the talent points for
every single character I'd ever made.
Paired with a barrage of new content and exploration mechanics, the game
is almost unrecognizable, particularly its end-game content which, for the most
part, seems to be continuously evolving.
New PvP maps, special binoculars, punishing puzzle rooms and new
companions are all on hand, and that's without even scratching the surface of
the for-sale content that Bioware is willing to let me into for a few dollars
more.
These games are compelling, were compelling, will likely
continue to be compelling, which is why I've come back to them and enjoyed playing
them for so long. And they're certainly
not alone in their willingness to frequently and dramatically rewrite
mechanics: the original DotA game did
so quite dramatically, altering "OP" heroes, removing some entirely
and, at one point, adding a mode that totally rewrote the mechanics of the game
so that new players might have an easier time losing. I'm writing this not to critique these games,
but to point out a phenomena that seems isolated to the free-to-play market:
the phenomena of fundamental mechanical shifts, ever winding, ever altering the
tide and pace of play. The DotA clones have taken this even
further: League of Legends adds new
game types, DotA 2 has added a
tutorial, Heroes of Newerth
enthusiastically cycles in new heroes and tweaks its game-selection mechanics.
The trend is leaking into other premium titles too: EA and
Activision's urge to add DLC to every major release means the game I start
playing will almost certainly be a totally different game a year in. But there's something special about the way
freemium games evolve, something distinct that makes me compare them to works
of genius like Dungeon Keeper. Because while they might not be the same game
I start playing, there's something about their energy, their enthusiasm and
their constant attention to detail, ever shifting and refocusing, that makes me
love them, that makes their changes more than marketing grabs, that makes that
shift part of the work of art, the game.
No comments:
Post a Comment