One thing about a down economy and less stable employment is that those affected tend to buy less entertainment, including games.  One of the effects that I have personally noticed, in regards to that, is a renewed reticence to buy games on a whim.  In better times, with more discretionary income to throw around, I was somewhat more comfortable making a $50 gamble every so often, relying on reviews and trailers in the hopes that the game would deliver on its money.  No more is this the case – along with eschewing theaters and buying far less music than I used to, I have less money available for games, which leads me to take a more detailed look before I take the plunge and purchase the full version.  With the possible exception of gog.com and other $10 or less gaming options, I only buy games once I’ve had a chance to try them on for size, and make as educated a guess as possible as to whether they will be worth their cost.

When it comes to blockbuster titles, at the premium price range, I’ve probably been the most strict, buying only after extensive time spent with the demo, which has led to very few purchases in the past few months (feeling the need for a racing game Burnout Paradise is the single exception so far beyond DoW II, and I should have a review of that up relatively soon – I hesitate to mention Call of Duty: World at War, which I only picked up during a half-price sale, figuring it was worth it at that price).  That being said, I’ve been looking much more closely at the more budget-priced offerings these days, many from independent developers who I feel better about supporting anyways, and one of the games that I was keenly interested in was Zeno Clash.

For the uninitiated, Zeno Clash is a first-person punch-people-in-the-face game set in a bizarre but highly creative world populated by a truly strange collection of creatures (all of which, of course, you generally get to punch in the head at some point or other).  The trailers looked very interesting, and the reviews were good, so I decided to try my hand at the demo.  After all, one of my favorite games of all time, Oni, was in the beat-’em-up-with-guns genre, and so Zeno Clash looked like it might fit the bill.

Alas, as you can probably already guess, it was not to be.  Admittedly, the demo started off interestingly, with an okay dream-sequence tutorial setup that taught you what you needed to know as the game progressed.  However, upon actually engaging in the battles, I learned a hard truth about the game – even at the easiest setting, the combat is punishingly difficult.  I managed to scrape through the first battle okay, but the second one, with guns, took quite a number of tries to get through (and honestly, for a melee combat game, it’s rather disconcerting that the best way to win any time you have a gun is to run away and shoot people instead – I know, bringing a gun to a fistfight, but it still doesn’t make a lot of sense in a game like this).  And when the first heavy boss battle came around, well…  I’d explain how it went, but honestly, it was pretty much exactly like the dodge-the-behemoth-and-fail battle that I talked about in a previous post about Gears of War.  Not quite instakill, but fighting the same futile battle over and over again is hardly my idea of fun.  

The result?  Despite quite a lot of effort, the demo managed to stymie me less than an hour in, and as a result, I quit in disgust, took the demo off my machine, and despite a promising premise and game ambience, the developers of Zeno Clash won’t be seeing my twenty bucks anytime soon.

I specifically want to emphasize this point, because we’re not talking about some monolithic game corporation here – we’re taking about a small development team, for which every sale counts.  And it’s important to note that when you’re trying to sell a game, amidst a market saturated with options and a sky-high piracy rate, encouraging the maximum amount of paying customers is important.  When your game manages to shut out someone who had initially been a relatively eager customer, someone who would have paid full retail to get a copy of your game, that’s a problem.  And when you make your game sufficiently difficult enough to dissuade everyone but hardcore players, you drastically limit the amount that your game can bring in.  I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again – having a full range of difficulty options available, to satisfy everyone from the very casual to the very hardcore player, is going to garner a lot more interest than a game which quickly proves difficult to people unwilling to invest countless hours mastering your game.

This, I suppose, brings me to another demo, and one that I haven’t yet removed, but one that hasn’t quite pushed me to buy it, either – the unusual platform puzzler Braid.  Although puzzle games often drive me mad, Braid does bring one important thing to the table – it’s a platformer where you can’t die, and you can’t lose.  On the other hand, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can win, either, and so far, I honestly prefer Portal’s physics-based puzzles to Braid’s time-based ones.  A t the same time, though, I keep Braid’s demo around, and still consider it occasionally, simply because it does what it does well – it’s beautiful, interesting, pressure-free, and eminently accessible.  Even if it does prove fiendish to master overall, it allows anyone, at any level, to jump in and play around with it, and for that reason alone, it’s eminently more playable and less frustrating than a game like Zeno Clash, which is quick to shut you down if your skills don’t measure up to its expectations.

So, my point is this:  If I can’t even make it through your demo, the chances that I’ll buy the full version of your game are slim to none.  What this means is that when you’re designing your game, keep in mind that there are plenty of people who are eager to play, but who probably won’t shell out if they can only play 10% of your game due to its difficulty.  

(In fairness, of course, it is true that one could take the Derek Smart attitude of specifically catering to the niche market of truly hardcore players, and essentially giving the finger to any player who doesn’t live up to your demanding standards.  However, while this may be somewhat profitable, even a casual perusal of Mr. Smart’s general reputation on the web should indicate that there are significant drawbacks to this sort of engagement with the gaming community.  And, as an advocate of allowing everyone to enjoy a wide variety of gaming experiences, I would argue that for all but the most technical and specialized games, which will always require a complex skill set to master, adding in variable difficulty is a small price to pay for a wider player – and purchaser – base.)

No Comments
Articles