All right. So, technically, the actual title for today's topic should be:
Free-to-Play mechanics actually work brilliantly as mini-games
so long as you don't actually have to spend the money
and the games "microtransactions" are paid for
with currency you earn by playing the game.
But that sure ain't fittin' on a thumbnail, so: here we are.
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And, yes: by 'free-to-play mechanics' I am talking about
those horrible pay-to-win mechanics that have
become a blight on the free-to-play model.
So, what am I getting at when I say that
they function great as mini-games?
Well, take Gwent as an example case.
Gwent was a fantastic card mini-game in The Witcher 3.
One that people loved so much,
they demanded that CD Project RED turned it into a full game.
But if you think about it
Gwent follows all the basic design patterns of a pay-to-win game.
There's a fair amount of strategy, but fundamentally,
if you haven't got a deck of cards with high enough numbers,
you just aren't going to win.
And of course the way to get cards with higher numbers
is to invest time and money into Gwent.
But this is actually genius,
because your money investment is all in-game money:
money that the Witcher earns by doing Witcher-y things
like slaying monsters and selling loot.
And the time investment is mostly time spent,
running around this big, beautiful world,
getting sidetracked by the million other things to do.
This all turns out to be great because, fundamentally,
what they've done is put another RPG style treadmill
into their game, but one that's way better than
the classic 'grind for experience' system.
Because, when pay-to-win is all done with fake currency,
that's what it becomes:
another kind of RPG treadmill.
Better still, because this type of treadmill
is highly self-guided and a small, completely
non-integral part of a much larger experience,
it doesn't turn into the same Skinner Box trap
that so many RPG treadmilling systems do.
On top of that it also serves as a sink for in-game resources
(which is something every RPG generally ends up needing)
and it's a way for the player to get a massive
difference-in-kind whenever they're looking for one.
AND it allows the designers to do
two powerful things with their mini-game.
First, it lets them create an opportunity for players to play
with the strategy that these sort of pay to win games provide.
Often any strategy or enjoyment there is to be found in these games
gets lost in the fact that you've got to spend $1,000
to even meaningfully play them.
But as mini-game, it lets players enjoy searching
for the best way to acquire things
and continuously get to rethink the best way to apply
whatever limited resources they have every time they
unlock a new piece of that mini-games content.
It actually creates interesting design possibilities
that we don't often get to see fully realized in
games without the free-to-play model.
But it also means that designers get to put
something very important back into their mini-game:
persistence.
A lot of mini-games end up feeling shallow
and like a waste of time, because,
once you finish the mini-game, that's it. You're done.
You've unlocked that lock,
or gotten that bonus,
or played that song,
and now it's time to move on.
But much of the history of video game design
is actually the history of us adding persistence
where there was none.
Whether it be adding level up mechanics to multiplayer games
or adding player armories to shooters:
Designers have found that people
like to feel like they got something for their time.
Even if it's something they might never use
and will, eventually, abandon.
Players like to feel that
because they fought hard and got that win
that next time around they will be better,
or, at the very least,
cooler looking than they were last time.
Tragically our main go-to approach for this
has been just adding experience bars to everything.
But the collection and acquisition mechanics
taught to us by free-to-play games
offer an interesting alternative.
Those of you who played a lot of Final Fantasy 10:
what mini-game do you remember most?
I bet it's Blitzball.
But, depending on how you count it,
there were, like, 5 other mini-games to play in Final Fantasy 10.
Do you even remember any of them?
I mean, other than those miserable
side quests for the ultimate weapons?
(Screw those things.)
My point is: an element of a game
that you don't even remember (or worse: despise)
isn't worth your time,
and isn't worth the time it took to create.
And, sure, you can argue that Blitzball
had all sorts of flaws with it. It did.
But I think it shows us the power of persistence
even for mini-games.
And serves as a serviceable example,
because it integrated some of these aspects
way before we really even thought of them
as associated with a free-to-play world.
It shows us where we might go with our mini-games.
And Gwent shows us that, in the modern world,
such mini games might eventually even
turn into something profitable to create;
a good testbed for smaller game ideas.
It'll be interesting to see how Gwent does
outside of the world of Witcher 3.
I'm very curious to see what changes they have to make
to keep it from falling into the pay-to-win trap
of so many other games of this nature.
But, if nothing else, it's shown us
the value of persistence, even in our mini-games.
Without it, so many of them just become
the most forgettable differences-in-kind.
Because the problem with pay-to-win games are threefold:
one: there's always somebody with more money out there,
two: there's always better things to spend your money on,
and three: getting money is often not that fun in the first place.
But in a single-player experience,
where the money is earned by playing the game,
all of those difficulties disappear.
And, suddenly, all the mechanics we use for pay-to-win
can actually be rewarding and different.
So, let's hope that we can take all the
interesting design that we found was possible
within the horrible pay-to-win games,
and to relocate that to the single-player world,
where it can be enjoyed and used positively.
And, hey! Maybe we'll even manage to sate
all consumer desire for those games,
and tank the current free-to-play market,
so that we can get back to doing free-to-play right!
Unlikely, I know, but it's a lovely dream.
See you all next week.
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