I actually never finished playing Borderlands. And by God I tried. I had reached a point in the game where I had ended up with very powerful weapons, more powerful than anything I could buy and 99.999% of those that I found. Gun collecting became boring.
Going on fetch quests and fighting the same few enemies? Boring.
Driving around in a weirdly physic'd car that didn't have at least proper driving sound effects and damage models fighting enemies that weren't even a token match? Boring.
Slaying skags by the thousands? Boring.
etc. etc. etc.
Eventually I just gave up. I had "beaten" the game only insomuch as having leveled up a character to the point that he had achieved virtual godhood in the game. Nigh-impervious to damage, wielding weapons Zeus would have feared, there was no progression anymore, I had beaten the difficulty curve simply by grinding my way ahead of it.
That's where it goes until around New Haven on the second playthrough. THEN it starts getting crazy again. You start feeling vulnerable and excitement picks up.
I'm not saying it's a good thing that you have to trudge through the game 2+ times for it to really shine, but I absolutely HATE grinding and gave up MMO's because of it... and I can't even begin to guess how many hours I have spent grinding this game because it's so damn fun.
That's what I've heard, but I just couldn't see putting the hours into it to find fun days or weeks later...when I could just play something else that was fun now.
Out of curiosity, did you find Diablo especially fun?
I mean I enjoyed Diablo, but not quite as much as some people did. I think whole system of grinding for better gear definitely appeals to a certain audience of gamers.
I also noticed that in the article he nags on Mass Effect 3, stating that the writing was juvenile, yet I really didn't think this article was written with maturity in mind :P.
It's an interesting problem in game design I think. If one of a game's principle mechanics is weapon progression, it's fun only so long as the weapons continue to progress. It's exciting to see what new powers you've just been granted.
It reminds me of tech trees in 4x strategy games. They're fun until you've maxed out the tree.
Some games make you choose a particular path that you have to commit to, making you replay the game to see different parts of the progression tree, but I've always hated those.
A big problem, and this is where Borderlands lost me, was that the enemies simply became too easy/boring. I ended up just driving across the world ignoring the enemies as they weren't challenging to fight and I had no need for loot.
Some games make the opposite mistake, like Oblivion. You level up, but so do your enemies. So there really doesn't "feel" like a reason to level up. You don't really get anything for it.
So the hard part is finding the right balance where your weapons and stats improve, but so do your enemies. But at just the right ratio to make you want to grind for stuff, but to keep it from getting boring.
It's a problem as old a the first Dragon Warrior (which incidentally solved it by having the player enter new parts of the world with harder enemies, leaving the easier enemies in already explored areas).
To answer your question, I thought Diablo's environment and atmospherics were fun. I got bored with it eventually about halfway through the game. I think I found a gold cheat someplace and just loaded up with gear and finished the game off.
I played Borderlands and enjoyed it, but I had to stop playing after first act (when you leave first town to go to desert, I don't know whether it's really first act) - because of my severe case of arachnophobia (and worm-and-bug-looking-thins-phobia) - I literally panicked and mashed escape key to pause game, had talk myself to calming down, shoot six bullets and then panic again when this bug suddenly changed direction or second one appeared.
After half hour of that I was so mentally exhausted, I quit and never looked back.
Interesting, I have a friend who also have arachnophobia, but he loves Borderlands. I'll ask him about that.
Have you thought of maybe using the game as a therapeutic means for trying to alleviate the problem? I've heard of treatment where they try to get the patients used to their phobia, until it goes away. So I'd suppose the game would be a good opportunity to do that virtually. Would that even make sense?
There's something called "Cognitive Behaviour Therapy" which is a carefully controlled exposure to the thing that causes fear, with a lot of thinking and feeling.
Your example (Let's call him Bob, scared of spiders, and Ann, a therapist).
Ann would explain that Bob is in a safe space, and there are no spiders, and that she's not going to bring any out. Then she'd ask him to think about a spider. She'd ask him what his "hot thought" was; what his "emotion" was; and she'd ask how strongly he felt those.
Bob might say Fear, 50%; "I might get bitten".
Ann would then ask him why he thought that. Is it a reasonable thought? There's some discussion about the probability of being bitten, and so what if you are, and etc. She then asks Bob how he feels, and if it's as strong. Hopefully it's not as strong.
This continues each week; next week she draws a scribble (not even a spider) on a piece of paper; then a spider; then a picture of a spider; then a dead spider; then a live spider but in a sealed box; then a live spider in a box with the lid off; eventually building up to Bob being able to touch a live spider.
Note that all the time Bob is in control of how much exposure to spiders he gets, and it's all very gently progressing. CBT is a very effective treatment for phobias.
Compare this to "FACE YOUR FEARS" - Charles hates elevators, but he decides to face his fears. He goes to the mall. His palms start to get sweaty, his breathing gets faster, his heart beats harder. He's having an adrenaline reaction. He walks up to the elevator. He's really stressed now. He pushes the button to call the elevator. He waits. His stress and fear levels are pretty high now. The elevator arrives, and he gets in. It's small, and he's really panicked. The door closes, and the elevator starts moving with that little jerky clunky move they make. It goes up one floor. Charles is on the verge of a full blown panic attack, and is very uncomfortable. The doors open, and charles leaves the elevator.
As he leaves relief -endorphins- flood through him. He sits, head in his hands, so pleased to be out of the elevator.
All Charles has achieved is to strengthen his fear of elevators - now they're more scary because he's had a really unpleasant experience in one, and he was rewarded when he "escaped" the situation.
Your idea of a virtual computer driven way to introduce people to something they fear is excellent, but only if done carefully.
That's the weird (or is it common?) thing - I'm not afraid that they will hurt me or bite me - I realize that they are mostly harmless (at least where I live.).
I just find them... repulsive. I don't know how to put it differently, I just think they're ugly and unpleasant.
That's not weird. Very many people are repulsed by bugs for the same reason - bugs are just horrid.
But, if you wanted to work on it you'd be able to get to point where you wouldn't freak out every time you saw a bug and it would only take a few weeks. There's probably something online to help guide you through it.
There was a really great piece in GQ a month or two ago on the use of CBT to treat PTSD for soldiers coming back from Iraq/Afghanistan. Long, but definitely worth the read.
I actually tried that - maybe you remember Doom 3 - they had this little heads with spiderlegs - I had similar reactions to those, but I managed to overcome this (not completely, as I still paused when it jumped out of nowhere, but for most part I could just play along).
It's weird, because it's different for pretty much every game, and I can't put my finger on what makes me impossible to finish the game, and what in appearance of monsters makes it bearable.
I think it might be that in Doom, those were (more or less) human heads with spiderlegs, and I was able to convince my brain that it's ok, those are just deformed humans I'm fighting.
What might made Borderlands worse, was that those worms and spiders came out of nowhere. Five minutes earlier, I was shooting bandits and wolves (skags, or whatever they were called), then I go to new location, and BANG!, completely different enemies. And they looked totally different than what I fought before, whereas Doom spiders felt like they belong in the same world.
I feel the same way about falling (c.f. Half Life 2, crossing the bridge spans). I don't like heights in the real world, but for some reason it's magnified in virtual worlds. My virtual acrophobia is so extreme that if I zoom in on Google Maps too fast I get dizzy. If I zoom in over the ocean, I absolutely have to close my eyes for a few seconds to recover.
Interesting. My slight megalophobia sometimes gets aggravated in games, but never predictably. I still remember flying through the desert in GTA: San Andreas and having to veer away from approaching the giant radar telescope lest it cover too much of my field of view, or feeling on edge as the flying gryphon took me over the sparkling purple dome of Dalaran in World of Warcraft back when I played. Yet last year's Portal 2, full of massive domes, spheres, and doors, never came close to causing a problem.
"Gamification works - give people things to find / build / collect / modify; then count those things; then allow them to display those things; and display your counts too."
I don't really understand this. I'd rather have a 10h of actual fun game vs. hundreds (or thousands) of hours of meaningless grinding for tokens. I think I am exactly the opposite of what she thinks is the motivation of a game player.
I do like games with "completion mechanics", but not open ended token counters. But the only reason I'd play Borderlands is for the story -- it looks like a horrible game from a mechanics standpoint.
Oh, man. I played Borderlands all the way through (once, anyway), and my reaction to all the things Steve praises was exactly the opposite.
* I had no idea that there was a special benefit to playing the game through a second or third time. That's because the game doesn't tell you that. So the only people who will ever discover this are the hardest of hard-core OCD types.
* Even if it did tell you that, it's ridiculous that it would push the "good stuff" out to the second or third playthrough. Old Man Murray said it best, more than a decade ago (http://www.oldmanmurray.com/longreviews/63.html):
> Here's a note to developers regarding what we hope will become an industry-wide policy: if your game has some good parts, try to put them at the fucking beginning. It takes us ten hours of dismal labor to earn enough money to buy your game, so please commence the entertainment early on. If possible, pack something fun right into the box, for instance a balloon...
> Developers have one goddamn job: entertain us. And we mean now, goddamnit, not in six hours.
* The huge number of randomly generated guns may create a token economy, but it also forces the player to spend way too much time trying to figure out whether Gun # 712,924 is better than Gun # 712,925. Sid Meier is supposed to have said that "a game is a series of interesting choices," and the problem with Borderlands' guns is that choosing between them is usually not interesting, because the differences between most weapons you encounter contemporaneously are so tiny.
This wouldn't be so bad if you could carry an unlimited number of weapons, but you can't, so you're constantly having to compare weapons to decide which ones to discard and which to keep; which means you're constantly being forced to make uninteresting choices. It's the opposite of fun.
And on and on. Don't get me wrong, I liked Borderlands; as a shooter it was OK, and its unique aesthetic was fun. But all the things that Steve is raving about here are things that I experienced as reasons not to like it.
Agreed, this is a very odd piece which hinges on the idea that the number of hours you put into a game is indicative of its quality, but you'll find people ploughing hundreds of hours into very poor games. Every game has its fans.
Borderlands balancing itself to only being interesting after 50 hours (assuming the author is correct) is odd and does not help it sell copies or win mindshare. It sounds like the author actually liked Playthrough 2.5 because it didn't have any of the MMORPG trappings, but was actually a balanced first-person shooter.
I've been researching "retention" mechanics (dark patterns/addiction patterns) in games from the POV of behavioral economics for my PhD thesis for a while now. My intuition (no data yet) is that what people seem to miss is that the tricks work for a while, but then they stop working. I'm reaching a conclusion that the tricks work just long enough to keep people playing until their social network joins, and then they're locked in until the game gets boring, and then they jump to the next game, where it seems the retention patterns work again.
What these patterns don't do is make a game enjoyable. The Borderlands gun mechanic, in particular, is not a very good retention mechanic. It'll work... for a time, until players see the inevitable archetypes of variation, and then it won't. The guns are not really valuable, because Borderlands will always give you another one in five minutes. If the player isn't being given something of value, it's not a very good mechanic. The value in the guns isn't the gun itself, but the surprise from the variation, and when that dries up, I'd expect it stops working.
It seems to me the author just really liked Borderlands, which is fine, but is confusing some of the trappings of Borderlands with why she likes it. I think some deeper introspection through the MMORPG smoke and mirrors will find that she just likes the gameplay.
This is not to say MMORPG stuff doesn't work, just that it tapers off. And I think for most people, it tapered off way before Playthrough 2.5.
I've played these games and worked in the Addictive Game industry. In my experience, every time the addiction is wearing off, you have to 'up the ante' (either by introducing new content, new mechanics, upping the difficulty curve etc). But the problem is that the addiction is mildly stressful on the player, and every time they increase the addiction mechanics, they increase the stress.
This inevitably leads to burnout and it usually happens in one of two ways:
1-they run out of content or master the learning curve, therefore they run out of stuff to be addicted to; this usually causes a general tapering off of play time
2-the stress overcomes the addiction and they flat out quit, even though they are still addicted
It would be interesting to examine the play patters of various games that have different variations on addiction vs stress vs fun.
LoL
-high fun, high stress, low addiction
WoW
-med fun, med stress, med addiction
farmville
-low fun, high stress, high addiction
edit: the stress of a game like LoL is very different from a game like FV. LoL is high because you must play perfectly in order not to be ridiculed by your teammates. FV is high because you are given a dozen new things to do every time you just want to do the basic stuff, but your compelled to do everything, which generally requires you to keep a large mental queue of everything it throws at you every time you log in.
I'd love to talk with you more about this offline :)
I looked at your site and noticed you don't make your email address available (which I am sure is by design), so could you ping me at chris {{{at}}} chris.to ?
Basically, all the points you mentioned also apply to Diablo and its a widely successful franchise.
I don't see the fun in playing Diablo 2 to level 99 as well, but there seems to be a huge group of players that do. There is a lesson for us developers in that :).
But is it really a huge group, though? Diablo is a franchise from a different age, when gaming was only for people who were willing to step up to a certain hardcore threshold. That requirement automatically limited the size of the audience. The explosion of more-casual gaming over the last decade has created franchises whose sales make Diablo's look anemic.
If this list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_g...) is accurate, for instance, Diablo and Diablo 2 sold about 6.5 million copies together, which ain't hay; but The Sims, Sims 2 and Sims 3 together sold 39 million copies, making it a completely different magnitude of hit. (Not even counting all the expansions, either.) And how many hundreds of millions of copies of Angry Birds have been sold?
In absolute numbers, thats true. Still, Borderlands sold 4 million copies and was considered a huge success. So the cost vs. benefit was right, although it catered to an audience that might be small in absolute numbers.
Count in other grinding games that are on facebook (Farmville, etc.) and you will see that the number of players that are entertained by grinding is actually a substantial part of the playing community as a whole. It doesn't matter whether the game is "hardcore" or not.
Seeing the rather extreme case that these many years after release, there are still that many people playing Borderlands (and Diablo) just for the grind is an interesting thing.
I think it's a lesson about the end-game. What do your players do when they've finished your game, and are willing to play it from the start again? What can you offer them?
If you could get your sims characters to craft items with a probalistic quality curve based on their personality, skills, and some luck, and also have an internet-facing display chest, it'd probably give even more legs to the franchise.
Well, there's Pokémon, which sold "quite a lot" and had lots of collecting / grinding.
See also Animal Crossing, which gives people plenty of collecting and display opportunities. There are fossils, furniture, fruit, paintings, songs, haircuts, fish, bugs, etc etc. AC appeals to casual gamers because you can do 10 minutes a day and get enjoyment from it. It also appeals to hardcore collectors because there's so much to collect, and some of it is "rare".
I agree that they should do a better job presenting this. How hard would it be to add some sort of "You can play again with X, Y, and Z being different" after you finish the game?
But it's not that hard to find out about regardless.
Oof. Hard to let that Fallout 3 comment slide. New Vegas was a spiritual successor to Fallouts 1 and 2, and was an amazing sequel. I'd like to know more about how she believes Fallout 3 exceeded New Vegas, as New Vegas was arguably closer to the original vision for Van Buren, and a heck of a lot of fun (and funny) to boot.
That aside, I've beaten Crawmerax probably nearly fifty times by now, so everything she says about addiction, I'll agree with. Multiple pearlescents and armory abuses for the win! :D
Interesting article, but the constant juvenile sexual references count against it. I wanted to send this to a girl I know for the addiction topic, except you can't send junk like this to girls. Grow up.
If you like jumping have a look at Cobalt. Quake had rocket jumps and good grenades and you could hack the physics and was way more fun than quake2, which dumbed them down.
Totally agree on the jumping front. Rocket jumps have gone out of style unfortunately, but they're still my favorite damn thing. Team Fortress 2 scratches that itch, but I always love me some good explosives assisted jumping.
As for the maturity of the article, it's an article about Borderlands. It's kind of to be expected. And expecting someone to read through that who doesn't care for that style of humor is a lot to ask. Cherry pick the info if you want to get straight to the message, but the bulk of the article's entertainment value is not the message, but the delivery.
How he's right! I have one soldier with outmaxed stats (only 2 skillpoints missing), and how was it fun! Then day job and family demanded their share... but still farming, YEAHHH!
And yes, all the rest about addcition, token economies etc... he' right, too! ^
What a read!
P.S.: Nicely written, completely in line with the game, I almost pissed myself Chaz... mina!! :-))))) And typing errors, well who cares!
I never finished Borderlands... Killing tons of skags with an automatic weapon is only fun for about the first 30 minutes for me, but reading this article makes me want to play to the end-game. Then again, the time investment getting to playthrough 2.5 is probably not worth it.
Going on fetch quests and fighting the same few enemies? Boring.
Driving around in a weirdly physic'd car that didn't have at least proper driving sound effects and damage models fighting enemies that weren't even a token match? Boring.
Slaying skags by the thousands? Boring.
etc. etc. etc.
Eventually I just gave up. I had "beaten" the game only insomuch as having leveled up a character to the point that he had achieved virtual godhood in the game. Nigh-impervious to damage, wielding weapons Zeus would have feared, there was no progression anymore, I had beaten the difficulty curve simply by grinding my way ahead of it.