[Title Needs 3,000 Gold Coins to be Unlocked]
Why, on God’s green earth should I have to unlock features within a game? I mean really, I’m shelling out £30-£40 for a game (for Americans, ‘£’ is a pound sign (British currency), ‘#’ that is a hash) and when I unwrap it to play with all those lovely cars/weapons/levels, I have to sit down and damn well earn them. To hell with earning them, I did the earning part to buy the game, if I want to shoot people with incredibly large guns, if I want to hurtle dangerously around (read: into) corners in stupidly fast cars and I shelled out my money to do just that, why the hell should I have to put in hours to “unlock” them.
For instance, Project Gotham Racing is a fine game, if not a little steep on the old difficulty curve, however, the top car, the FX50 requires 200,000 kudos points to unlock, I mean, that’s a task that no man or beast should have to undertake. I’ve had the game for a little over a year and a half, and playing on and off has accrued me a total of 8000, only 122,000 to go! That should only take me 23 years at my current rate. What a joke.
I’m not against providing a reward to the player for achieving a goal, it is a valid play mechanic and one which when implemented correctly, can be a boon in extending the longevity of a game. But when a game is castrated and demands intense playing just to unlock what you got the game for anyway, the reward system stops being rewarding. On the complete other end of the scale is Soul Calibur II, a game which, like Project Gotham, is light on features when you tear off that polythene and breathe in that new game smell. But given a cursory play (perhaps an hour so), and suddenly most all of the unlockable characters are unlocked, I suddenly have a slew of weaponry, game modes and battle arenas to play in. Of course, the mechanic for Soul Calibur II is far more finely tuned, and the truly awesome weapons are not unlocked so easilly. But still, given such a volume of rewards for so little play, why not just make them selectable from the start and work from there.
This sort of work that needs to be put into a game to make it worthwhile is a true bane of the modern video game. I’m not a busy person at the moment, but I can envisage myself in a position where my free time is limited to the arse-end of each day and the weekend. So with a video game that requires so much input to make playing it worthwhile, is it worth me buying it when I’m not sure the quality is really there to warrant my time? RPGs are a big investment for me purely in time, and this has caused me to stick to time honoured RPGs rather than other more esoteric ones. I know when I buy a final fantasy game (when they release them, you know, not like a year after the Japanese release) that I’m getting a quality game. I know when I buy a BioWare RPG that I’m getting a quality storyline.
Of course, I am not the market which games are targetted to, even though my age bracket is the primary contributor. Games such as Project Gotham are made for people with disposable time and energy, teenagers who are still at school (and maybe university students doing a business studies degree). In the end, the work-ethic for games is symptomatic of a capitalist outlook on games which I have lamented far too often, rather than a creative one. My time is precious, perhaps not yet to other people, but to me, and I want to know that my time is not going to be wasted endlessly racing and accumulating meaningless digital points just to “unlock that special feature”.
