>In many ways, we're training a new generation of gamers to have the following beliefs: - Games are not meant to challenge you, but to steadily progress you, no matter how good you are.
Working in f2p games, I've thought about this quite a bit. From my observation, you have causality reversed. There's a new audience that is demanding progress-based games and that new market is pushing a lot of game designs away from skill-based challenges.
Going back to the pac-man era, games had to be extremely challenging because they couldn't have enough content to stay interesting otherwise. That selected for gamers who enjoyed overcoming great challenges and pretty much defined "what games are" for 30+ years. Meanwhile, there has always been an unserved audience that does not like overcoming great challenges and preferes steady progression based on effort rather than mastery.
That huge, newly discovered audience pushes back /hard/ when the games they play swing towards rewarding mastery. They just want to show up, know exactly what routine needs to be performed and know that if they do it, they will progress. For them, it's not about winning the gold at the Olympics. It's about tending a garden/getting fit/going on a hike. Imagine going on a hike and some weird old man stops you to say "No. That guy hiked better than you. You must go back down the mountain and start over from the beginning until you hike better than someone else." You'd never come back.
Meanwhile, the classic, challenge-oriented audience is still there and games are still being made for them. But, a lot of them are discovering that sometimes they just want a nice hike as well. Thus more and more products are responding to that new demand.
Gaming is a bigger world now. After 30+ years, the focus has shifted from being laser-locked on catering to hardcore gamers like you and me. Now there are not just different genres of fun challenges, there are different genres of fun.
Sure! Gaming is definitely a bigger world. I suppose games that are being made for "steady progressionists" also are those with "and here's a cash money way of ensuring the steady progression, so you don't have to work too hard".
That seems to short circuit the reward for playing.
Example: Angry Birds is has their Eagle that beats a map for you. Beating a map unlocks another map. Assuming a steady progression, being able to buy your way past a map removes any requirement that the game designer creates a steadily ramping progression, and instead encourages them to put up as many "little roadblocks" as possible.
> Meanwhile, there has always been an unserved audience that does not like overcoming great challenges and preferes steady progression based on effort rather than mastery.
> They just want to show up, know exactly what routine needs to be performed and know that if they do it, they will progress.
That rather handily explains degree inflation, too.
Disclaimer: I'm really having a hard time being empathetic here.
Why do companies chase this market? They're very fickle, and rarely appreciate any sort of gameplay mechanics. These sorts of games devalue the medium to themed Skinner boxes, essentially. I play games to be competitive, and employ creative problem-solving strategies. Meanwhile, loads of companies seem hellbent on removing all nuances from their games to pursue ever-more-mainstream sensibilities.
While the mobile market is flooded with manipulative crap, both the PC and console markets have plenty of good RPGs available, even and especially when you look outside of big studio stuff like Mass Effect.
Jeff Vogel probably isn't rich, but he seems to make a good and honest living running Spiderweb, charging $10 for the tablet versions of his games with no F2P nonsense. You can make a living doing something less evil than Zynga.
I'm glad there are small publishers making RPGs. It just seems that MMOs have sucked all the air out of the room for PC AAA RPG titles. I can only name a few in the past 5 years (listed further down in the thread by someone else).
Skyrim was releases something like 2 years ago, and you have Fallout series based on the same/similar engine from Oblivion (AFAIR Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas).
Mass Effect is a huge new RPG game series, also Dragon Age did pretty well. Both launched well after WoW went huge and everybody was chasing that market.
There's a small irony here: The enormous success of the Dragon Quest series (currently approaching its 30th anniversary) in Japan was, in no small part, due to the fact that it was designed so that anyone could complete it if they put in enough effort. There is little real strategy or challenge to the main paths of the games (the secret dungeons are another story), you just keep "grinding" for money and EXP until you eventually get strong enough to venture into the next area and move the story along. Even if you die, you don't lose your progress, you just restart at the last town with half the gold you were carrying.
It might sound a bit dull when I put it that way, but the series is enormously popular in Japan amongst all kinds of people that you wouldn't ever consider to be interested in video games. Each game is far lengthier an experience than you would expect out of a "casual" game, but the fact that you can make a little progress every time you play, no matter how frequently you do so or how bad you are at video games, really appeals to people.
I obviously see the difference between that style of play, and paying for progress, but I just wanted to throw out there that games that are more about progress than skill or strategy have existed almost since the beginning, and they're not necessarily a bad idea.
DQ III to this day is my favorite console RPG. I'm also somewhat surprised the battery hasn't died on it yet. I will lose probably 60 hours of progress for my current save when that happens.
Is it really training the gamers? I would say it is taking advantage of the similarity between a difficulty progression and time/spend ladders. Other than some amount of real world benefit from improved hand eye coordination they are just different ways of providing a reward stimulus that is relatively empty of extended value.
(I don't mean that as an invective against fun, I just mean that the rewards from fun are mostly fleeting)
Top of my head: Dark Souls franchise, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, The Witcher. Just in AAA, american style RPGs. J-RPG and indies are coming as strong as ever.
To be clear, I hope we aren't talking about Dragon Age II, which was awful, awful gameplay on what was an intruiging premise. I enjoyed the original, but it clearly had some IAP (I don't mind, but I can see how someone else might).
The character progression and the general pacing are closer to those of JRPGs. It reminds me a bit of Vagrant's Story in terms of gameplay, for instance.
As for AAA with IAP, look at Planetside 2. Free to play, IAP, AAA by any measure.
In many ways, we're training a new generation of gamers to have the following beliefs:
- Games are not meant to challenge you, but to steadily progress you, no matter how good you are. - Anything difficult can be "spent" out of.
While both are working theses, I feel that there are far too many games that will fall away if this becomes permanent.