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.
* 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.