You Say You Wanted More
I managed to push past some kind of game-playing wall recently, and so I’ve been consuming games like potato chips. Current flavor of Pringles: Dynasty Warriors 6.
I put this game on my GameFly list about a year ago, having heard that it was like Ninety-Nine Nights. I really liked N3, so I figured I’d give this game a try. This is a particularly backwards approach, apparently, since the conventional wisdom is that N3 is a half-assed version of DW, and the people who played N3 were all just looking for a mass-combat fix between DW games.
DW is a good game. I think N3 is better for its purity of purpose: N3 sets you loose and tells you to kill everything that moves with ever more absurd attacks. There is a moment in N3 where you’re defending a bridge, and you rack up hundreds of kills before the set-piece is over. Bodies are piled high all around you, and your thumb hurts because you haven’t stopped attacking for the last ten minutes. So far, I haven’t had a comparable moment in DW6.
But this isn’t about N3, or (to be perfectly truthful) DW6. I’m enjoying it, but what really strikes me about it is a particular stroke of brilliance: multiple entry points.
Setting aside the totally opaque beginning to the game, the complete lack of a tutorial, and the sub-standard explanations for the arcane things that are happening every single second in a chaotic frenzy as you play, DW is the most accessible game I’ve played in a long time.
By ‘accessible’ I don’t mean ‘your mom can play this game’, because I think that’s sleight-of-hand that has replaced the entire concept of accessibility with the obvious dictum that designers ought to know their target audiences. Assuming you’re in the target audience — and all you have to do is look at the packaging of the game to know if that’s the case, for DW — accessibility doesn’t have anything to do with how easy it would be to get your mom involved.
What I mean instead is that when I sit down to play DW6, there are literally dozens of things I want to do, and all of those things are available the moment I put the game in the console, before I’ve even swung a weapon once.
From the title screen, here are the things I want to do:
- Play the ‘Story Mode’ with any of nine different characters in three different armies
- Play the ‘Free Play Mode’ with any of those characters, in three different possible battlegrounds
After playing the game for 30 minutes, I’ve got some new goals:
- Level up the protagonist of the story mode arc I’m currently clearing, by playing in free mode battles
- Play any of the new free mode battles that have unlocked by making progress in story mode
- Level up any of the free-mode-only characters I’ve unlocked
- Play through battles to get better weapons for any of the characters I’m interested in playing
- Play through battles to get new horses to add to my shared horse stable
- Level up said horses to unlock their special abilities and increase their stats
- Try to accomplish optional goals in any of the available battles (free or story mode)
This is, as you can see, a game with a lot of possibilities. Each time I finish some task, I’m buried under an avalanche of new tasks. I finish a mission in story mode? I probably just got a new horse, a new unlocked character, and I’ve also unlocked that mission for free play mode. My character has new skills, his stats have gone up, and he may have a new weapon with a new ability that demands some practice to learn how to use it.
Having completed one character’s plot arc in story mode in its entirety, I’ve now got a newly-unlocked story mode character, half a dozen free mode characters, and I’ve more than tripled the number of available free mode battles. I’m eager to go home and play, even though I have no idea what I’ll be doing when I sit down at the console.
There’s a very important lesson here, and it’s even more relevant to MMOs than it is to single player games:
At all times, the player should have more gameplay options than he can possibly consume in a single session.
We need meaningful choices in character creation, so that the new player is excited by the possibility of only playing his first character for a few levels because he wants to back out and try all those other character options.
We need multiple quest lines that pull you off in different directions when you first start playing, so that you’re interested in coming back to see what the other quest line was all about.
We need environments where you explore in one direction, knowing that there are other paths you could have chosen, and that someday you’ll come back and choose them to see what’s down them. And we need those forking paths to show up constantly: do I press on towards the next area, or stop to explore these ruins? Do I see what’s in that tower, or continue towards the town? Do I explore the cave, or the nearby castle?
We need character development where choices are exclusive but not permanent. I can be a sword fighter or I can be a spear fighter; if I choose spear, I want to be able to come back later and try sword instead, but for now I want to be exclusively a spear fighter.
In every case, we need all the available paths to be compelling on their own. Players should never feel like one of the paths is the right path and one is the wrong path, and we’re asking them to ‘win’ a mini-game called ‘choose the right path’. Swords must be as interesting as spears. The cave should be as rewarding as the castle. The knight should be as fun to play as the wizard.
This isn’t even an issue of replayability. A ‘New Game Plus’ mechanic isn’t really that compelling. Knowing that I can play the game again, follow the same path again, but have a slightly different experience isn’t going to draw me back in, even though I always claim I’m going to really dig in this time (Mass Effect, I’m looking at you).
I want that sense of endless possibilities from the very beginning. I want to feel overwhelmed by the available choices from the first minute of gameplay. I want a game to convince me that it contains more than I could ever experience in one lifetime.