Big Picture Mode

Industry issues given the widescreen treatment

Nathan Brown ponders the endgame of the GaaS endgame

Some months back I wrote about the problem with videogame intros: that, as games get bigger and developers and publishers obsess over how to keep us engaged in hour 100, they are overlooking the importance of hour one. Ever since I wrote that, something’s been niggling at me. There’s a problem with that argument: developers aren’t exactly nailing their endgames, either.

This was really rammed home to me this month by Destiny 2’ s new non-expansion, Black Armory, which turned out to be even more annoying than its spelling. Bungie’s trying something new here, doing away with the sort of mini-expansions it has put out over the course of previous years in between the big September content drops. Previously you’d get a few new story missions, strikes and adventures, and some kind of new endgame activity. Now, as part of its attempt to ‘put the hobby back’ into Destiny, Bungie is releasing smaller, cheaper updates that raise the level cap and extend the endgame.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, the only people still playing Destiny at this time of year are people who are happy going through the same weekly rituals to make a number go up. You can’t dispute the logic of making the target number higher, and adding tough new ways to reach it, and sodding off all the other stuff. Why spend time and money creating campaign missions that take months to make and 20 minutes to complete, never to be touched again, while your most committed players complain there’s nothing else to do but raid three times a week?

Unfortunately, Bungie seems to have assumed that you can simply do away with that kind of thing and not put anything in its place. And so I log on to Destiny, keen to find out what new stuff awaits, and find that there is none, because I’m not of a high enough level to access it yet. I watch a cutscene and am shown a new part of the main social hub, then am sent out to grind away at existing mission types on existing locations before I’m powered up enough for the new stuff. The same stuff I was doing in the game a couple of months ago.

This has been a long journey for Bungie; the Destiny experiment is four years old now, and the studio continues to tinker away in the lab, in search of some magic formula that can attract new players while continuing to enthral existing ones. It’s an elusive goal, and one I’m not sure will ever be reached. The root cause of many of Destiny’s problems over the years is World Of Warcraft, a game that reached a dizzying peak from which down was the only way. Players burn out and leave; when a new expansion arrives, only a proportion of them come back, sprint through the new content and burn out again, the loop continuing until no one is left.

Destiny 1 did well after a lousy start, but the idea is to grow the game from that baseline, not watch it slowly shrink.

And so Destiny has oscillated over the years between being too hardcore, too casual, too stingy and too generous, as Bungie continues its quest to solve the ultimate problem of the game as a service; the endgame of the endgame, if you will. It has got away with its mis-steps because Destiny’s beating heart is not the Skinner box of its loot system, as its many detractors claim. Rather it is in a rock-solid action game whose appeal keeps its players playing through the worst of content droughts. Even as I was grumpily learning how little Black Armory had to offer me at launch the other night, I was enjoying myself. You could have the most perfectly structured endgame in the world, but if the game around it doesn’t feel good in the hands, there’s no point.

I’m fascinated by endgames. I love farming, and even grinding sometimes; I love it when I have a game I can play every day, and that rewards me for doing so, but doesn’t punish me if I don’t. This is probably just as well, since at this rate approximately 98 per cent of all new game releases will be built like this in five years’ time. There’s a broader conversation to be had about being respectful of the player’s time – much has been made of big-name games selling poorly, and I think the heart of that is that every one of them is 100 hours long and has to be played every day if you don’t want to fall off the pace – but when it works, there’s nothing like it. When we fall in love with a game, we want to play it forever. So long as the Bungies, Blizzards and BioWares of this world keep up the search for that perfect formula, I’m happy to keep on playing their games.

I love it when I have a game I can play every day, and that rewards me for doing so, but doesn’t punish me if I don’t