The Long Game
Progress reports on the games we just can’t quit, featuring future sport-turned-afterthought RIGS
This is a game that initially seemed destined for glory. RIGS drops the player into a future sport complete with league tables, named teams, and – of course – heavily armed mechs. One game mode is the inevitable team deathmatch. Another sees players charge their mechs up with orbs and kills until they can use themselves as improbably heavy basketballs. The third and final mode is essentially a version of American football, where the players are even more heavily armoured than usual (if you can imagine that).
There’s no such thing as a PSVR game with a bustling online community at every hour of the day, especially two years after release. The small-by-default online RIGS community has only become smaller over time, we suspect largely due to hardcore players battering the more casual ones, who are then dissuaded from venturing online again. It certainly didn’t help that RIGS was released and promoted while PSVR was at its most expensive. Many people will have downloaded their copy as part of last September’s PlayStation Plus instant game collection; with no associated financial investment, why dedicate time and effort to an unforgiving online experience when you could be playing something far more welcoming?
How different things might have been. Guerrilla Cambridge had grand plans for esports, for which RIGS is perfectly suited. A stream of free DLC was promised, too, which would have dangled a new carrot in front of the community every so often to keep them moving. Perhaps it may even have introduced a live and flowing meta. Yet none of this was to be, since the studio was shuttered by Sony in January 2017.
Still, RIGS feels like a real sport – one where you can learn and improve yourself – and so remains compelling. There’s enough meat on the offline bones to birth legions of couchbound athletes, though there’s no denying that the now-anaemic online scene is where the best times are to be had. However, native matchmaking is far from a well-oiled machine. With no lobby system there’s no way to know if there’s anybody at all online, and even when the system finds an opponent, the process is slow and opaque. Better to turn to PSN Communities: the largest one dedicated to
RIGS boasts some 1,200 members. People post on the community wall on an almost daily basis, matches are scheduled, and membership allows you to see if anybody’s online before you even boot up the game. If the necessity of circumventing the game’s systems indicates a failure of design, the fact that so many people continue to endure it two years after release tells that this often clumsy behemoth still packs an alluring punch.