Fan service sometimes takes on a grotesque countenance,
especially when it's imposed on to existing structures. "Fan favorites" from a single
player campaign might become playable characters in multiplayer, upsetting balance
or disrupting existing patterns of gameplay for the worse. Games, good ones at least, are polished,
tested design objects, and creating them around the whims of a fan base,
instead of the dictums of craftsmanship, can have disastrous implications. Consider Heroes
of the Swarm, Blizzard's simultaneous attempt at a MOBA and Smash Brothers conceptual clone. HotS
is ramping up to be a commercial success, and it claimed my money, at least in
part because the friend of mine who has
to approve every MOBA I play socially decided that this was the new MOBA for
our friend-group, but as a MOBA framework it's an absolute mess: none of the
things that make MOBAs a rich framework for digital competition are present, at
least in part because balance takes a back-seat to fan-service. A character in HotS plays the way a Blizzard fan might expect that character to
play, instead of in a fashion that necessarily compliments other heroes. Compared to, say, Dawngate, which generated its fiction after the fact, and crafted
the play of each hero first, often in a way that consciously complimented
existing heroes, the design of each hero in HotS
is secondary to its presence in Blizzard lore.
As a result, you end up with a framework that often presents only a
single viable build for heroes, and sometimes even presents heroes that don't
have even a single viable build to their name, especially in more competitive
frames. A handful of heroes consistently
manifest in HotS' multiplayer frame,
and while patches do disrupt that trend from time to time limited player input
and shallow gameplay prevents any real disruption of Blizzard's creative
framework: if you're not a Blizzard fan, there isn't a whole lot to keep you
tapped in to HotS, aside from its
highly-addictive daily quest framework.
I was talking to a friend about this phenomenon, and she had
a theory that I tend to agree with: decisions that are made solely because fans
will love them are often universally bad decisions. Design by committee is rarely a good way to
design, and designing by fan-committee is really only viable if you're
conceptualizing porn parodies: fans are masturbatory creatures who, on the
surface, want their expectations of a product or brand to be fulfilled. But therein lies the rub: good game design is
often highly disruptive. The feedback
loop present in most games turns on the presence of "ah-ha!" moments,
whether that feedback loop is as long-term as A Wolf Among Us', taking hours to play out, or as shallow as Halo's, taking only a few seconds to
reset. Part of those "ah-ha!"
moments derives from expectations being upset, or fulfilled in interesting
ways: while it's satisfying to see Master Chief kill Covenant, it can actually
get boring. The moments where that
pattern is upset, for better or worse, are actually the moments that define
gameplay, but those moments often have less of an effect of making players see
their character as an unstoppable badass, and more the effect of making it
clear that the game framework is a space where their creative inputs can have
some amazing impact. These moments can
be as sublime as nailing a headshot on a distant enemy running for a
scout-fighter, or as infuriating as getting snagged by a plasma mortar that
twists in just the wrong way. Either
way, those moments are definitional for your game experience, coloring
everything that surrounds them.
MOBAs are especially noteworthy in this regard. DotA's
gameplay has historically shifted back and forth depending on how players
"broke" a variety of heroes after certain changes emerged for those
heroes. That was possible, at least in
part, because DotA didn't attempt to
maintain any sense of intellectual purity, and didn't really ask its fans to
engage with its heroes as anything more than mechanical elements. That means that they were willing to try some
crazy shit, like building a giant strength-based demon as a caster, things that
Blizzard prevents by both limiting player choices (by presenting some pretty
strict build-trees for their heroes) and designing their heroes to fulfill fan
expectations, instead of gameplay roles.
Even certain mechanics, like stealth for example, feel less like they're
intended to give the gameplay a particular feel, and more like they're just
there to facilitate your expectations of how a hero will behave.
The sad thing is that it's not necessary for fan service to
go this way. In fact, fan input can be
incredibly helpful for developers. Mechwarrior Online is currently
showcasing this in their renewed effort to actually engage with their fan base
by finally generating an effective redesign of their UI that incorporates
qualities that their fans have been asking about for a long time. These qualities are admittedly pretty basic, with
things like "the same loadout modification functionality as
web-applications" on the docket, but the changes, and the meticulous
manner in which they've been tested and are presently about to potentially be
rolled out, are pretty impressive.
They've also done something truly remarkable by taking their most maligned
map (the infamous River City) and dramatically redesigning it, incorporating
feedback from their very-vocal fan community, but also exactingly playtesting
the shit out of their work pre-release.
By making fan-service more about communication and collaborating than
fulfilling an expectation, MWO has
essentially stumbled on a winning formula: they simultaneously engage their
fans, making them feel listened to and like they had some level of creative
input in shaping the game they play without sacrificing the integrity of their
own design process (which, to be fair, has been historically hit or miss for
PGI). It doesn't necessarily defy fan
expectations, so the initial "ah-ha!" moment is a bit mollified, but
the overarching philosophy of providing many frequent future "ah-ha!"
moments is implicit in the design philosophy, and it could pay dividends in a
game that asks its players to play in the same environs time and time again as
much as MWO does.
There are relatively few examples of fan service that both
comes out of nowhere and satisfies existent fan taste while contributing
positively to game flow. PAYDAY 2 has built a business model out
of releasing that sort of content, and then occasionally charging for other similar
content packs, but PAYDAY 2's efforts
on that front are very hit-or-miss. For
every dope Hoxton mission, there's an infuriating reskin of another map, or a
Pro-Only map with a punishing difficulty curve and little patience for your
bullshit wants and needs. The example of
spontaneous and remarkable fan-service content that springs most readily to
mind for me is actually Dragon Age:
Inqusition's most recent "Dragon Slayer" package, which made
multiplayer a little more epic while adding some neat new heroes to the mix,
including Isabella, who, between her cleavage, her dialogue, and her dynamic
play style, has long been a fan favorite.
DAI's most recent multiplayer
expansion has that are soussant of fan-fulfillment and design twists and
tweaks, introducing linear internal combo oriented gameplay for some of their
new classes, and bringing dragons into DAI's
multiplayer, something that wasn't necessarily missing, but definitely won't go
amiss in the future.
It's worth noting that all of the examples I mentioned,
while successful in their own right, likely won't be nearly as successful as HotS.
I'm not sure if that serves as commentary on the nature of fan service,
or the raw unbridled brand recognition that Blizzard has enjoyed and will
always enjoy, but it seems silly to speculate at this point, before HotS has even launched. I will say that the sort of fan service that
I see from studios whose design habits and choices seem painstakingly oriented
towards satisfying their fans in the way they think their fans need to be
satisfied, instead of the way their fans might ask to be satisfied, and the
sort of fan service that emerges through transparent and communicative design
processes excites me more than the kind of naked fan-service that HotS presents. Of course, I'm still playing it. But I think that has less to do with my love
of any particular character set, and more to do with my OCD-oriented
relationship with grind. The real test
of HotS staying power, and the
success of their fan-oriented design strategy, will come after the grind is
done, when all that's left is the game in its purest competitive frame.
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