I've played a number of in-development or early access games
in my day. Most of the time I spent with
MWO was during its long beta phase,
which was something of a honeymoon for its community. Dawngate,
which I still think was the best MOBA that has been developed and presented to
date, never left its tentative Early Access state. My explorations into Wasteland 2 occurred in a framework entirely unrecognizeable to
players investigating the game today.
But all of these games, in their own right, presented end-states that I
could reach, end-states that effectively let me say "Okay, game. I'm done.
We're done. Task completed."
That kind of objective oriented play-construct is crucial to
the structure of video games. Jane
McGonigal defines games partially through the generative inclusion of that
construct into a number of different frameworks: it isn't so much the
"play" element that makes a game a game, so much as it's the
"outcome," the notion that one is being given a goal and asked to
complete it. Even the most open-ended
games present these objectives in some form: they tell you to go somewhere,
they tell you to do something, or speak to someone. Free-form procedurally generated
adventure-rogues, like Don't Starve, even present end-conditions, though those
end-conditions might be buried six or seven layers deep. I guess what I'm saying is: I've never
actually played through an early access title without its end-game in
place. Whatever E-A titles I've engaged
with, I've always been able to recognizeably interact with it as a
"game" construct, with an "a-HA!" moment, serialized
victory movement, and a cute little end button.
Until I played Darkest
Dungeon.
Darkest Dungeon
has a remarkable capacity for helping me develop narrative. It's kind of amazing at it, actually: I'm
interacting with characters in a framework that makes me feel profoundly
connected to them, a framework that pushes them into conflict and forces them
beyond that conflict, changing them procedurally in a way that usually, as a
"player," I'd have license to determine. Losing that license makes play liberating,
and makes the narrative outcome genuinely satisfying: instead of permitting me
to move through a series of generative choices that I can engage with as
"successful" outcomes, or satisfying renderings of scenarios I
understood as implicit narrative emergences following engagement in certain
activities, it lets me inhabit the headspace of characters, and engage with
that most elusive of narrative elements in video games: genuine surprise.
That's quite an accomplishment, but there's a problem with Darkest Dungeon's execution: there's no
end to this story in sight.
That's not to say that Darkest
Dungeon doesn't have goals for me.
There's a long list of shit that my caretaker wants me to do, all of it
oriented around murdering various levels of boss monster in the dungeon. And then there are my "roster goals." I'm being encouraged to forge my rag-tag band
into a dungeon-delving dream team by leveling up one of each class to a
somewhat ridiculous extent. I can also
upgrade my town, so that I can more efficiently train new party members, heal
old ones, and purchase trinkets that, ostensibly, are aimed at keeping them all
alive.
But most of these goals are behind me. I've logged a considerably amount of time
(around 40 hours now) and, along the way, I've crafted my once terrified team
into a well-rounded group of badasses.
They're all kitted out in top of the line gear and the best training I
can afford. Sometimes, I even get them
special charms so they can do things like dodge blows a little better, or hit a
little harder, or starve without taking damage. I haven't maxed out all of my peons yet, but a
good number of them are close, and the ones that are far-off seem to be the
only ones at risk of death anymore: I can push my crusaders through any number
of battles, and my hellions and vestals are utility players who can rotate in
and out of dangerous missions without batting an eyelash. I've assembled a stable of rear-line fighters
who, at will, can step in to fill the "damage dealing/trap disarming
wild-card" role that I find myself constantly flexing to fill. But only the greenest recruits, recruits who
aren't terribly well-suited to delving in the first place, seem to end up on
the wrong end of a blade, and without new exploration or repair related goals
to take on, my path, as a player, seems to be settling into a kind of
lamentable "push, push, lose, regenerate" pattern, where I'm no
longer pursuing goals that push me towards any sort of narrative. Instead, I'm just spinning my wheels, waiting
for the right Jester to stumble into my camp so I can level him up to the point
that he can go on adventures with one of my unbeatable, dungeon-cracking
A-teams.
It's obvious this isn't the developer's intent: Darkest Dungeon is still missing two areas,
seemingly based around the oft-unseen Eldritch enemy type, which I'm guessing
is still in internal testing. And hey, I'm
willing to forgive them the fact that this is an incomplete game. I knew that going in. I'm not upset by Darkest Dungeon's non-ending at all, but it puts me in a strange
new position, one that a game has never actually forced me into before. On the one hand, I love this game, and I've
developed a serious connection to my team.
Even Aungier, that daft cunt, has proven herself again and again, and
I'd hold off on a dozen killing blows for the chance to insure her survival. Darkest
Dungeons has made me, someone who thrives on improvised risk taking, to play
it safe more often than not. But,
without a concrete end-goal, I'm not sure
I'll be able to keep playing. At least,
not for now: Darkest Dungeons has
been tremendously fun, but absent new dungeons to conquer, the potential for
new narratives feels stymied, and the challenges I've met, which were once the
source of taught excitement, have become a kind of pabulum chore for me. I know that a properly assembled team will be
able to beat any challenge I throw them at.
I know that, if I want to level up a newbie, I have to put them through
some pretty desperate starting two-steps so that they can get their dungeon
legs quick. I've learned most of the
lessons that Darkest Dungeon wants to
teach me, and I think, based on what I've seen so far, that I'm actually quite
well prepared for the end-game that Red Hook is still cooking. But if I keep grinding my gears the way I
have to date, immersing myself in the lives of these dungeoneering misfits, I
know that by the time the end-game content that I'm longing for is delivered,
I'll be long sick of playing.
That's a new sensation, one I'm not entirely comfortable
with. I usually play games consumptively
nowadays: I start a project, I complete a project, I move on. It's especially handy with the kind of
narrative checklist games that Ubisoft produces, and with brief narrative
oriented indie titles, like Gone Home. But Darkest
Dungeon has forced me into a corner: I can ruin the game for myself, or
give the developers time to finish what they started, and come back to it
later. Maybe I'll start a new party up
for the occasion. Maybe finish with the
people I've already got on my side.
Maybe I'll yet run in to some unexpected challenges and end up having to
recruit a new crew. Who knows. For now, I'll be waiting patiently,
occasionally checking Darkest Dungeon's
store page to see if updates have come down the pipe. I can't wait to see what the Cove holds, and
that final dungeon...
Perhaps this is a statement, then, about the success of Darkest Dungeon as a game, and the
sometimes ungainly clomping gait that Early Access titles bring to bear. When the content that I'm engaging with its
partially completed, but the "game" element is self-contained, like
in Dawngate or Wasteland 2, it doesn't really impact me much. I can always come back if I want to
experience more polished or developed content, or just hang around and watch it
grow play-by-play. But here, the Early
Access heading has manifested itself as a sort of poor-man's episodic
content. I'm left waiting for new
adventures, without a time-table or a strong sense of what they'll be, or how
they'll unlock. I've got all these toys,
and I can spin my wheels ad-infini as needed, but I can't move forward, no
matter how hard I push. Even the dopest Walking Dead cliffhanger wasn't that
cruel.
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