Looting Consumers: One Sucker At A Time
Looting Consumers: One Sucker At A Time by that fellow they call Ric!
Ric faces the terror that has gripped gamers at large, one soul at a time ... Looting!
So a few months back, my cousin asked me for my opinion on Lord of the Rings: War in the North, and I told him, “It’s just another hack-and-slash with co-op, nothing to really get excited for.” The next day, he told me that he played it and was sucked in. When I asked him what was so special about the game, he replied that it was the anticipation of looting and leveling. At that point, I sort of took a step back and realized that most of the mediocre titles that manage to sell decently contain those aspects. Bland combat, bland story, but throw in some loot, level-ups, upgrades, and achievements—and BAM—the consumer will be hooked. Hey, I can’t really complain about that, because it’s proven to work—just ask the millions of people playing World of Warcraft, and I’m sure they’d be glad to tell you about their oranges, and I don’t mean the fruit.
The concept of looting has actually been a part of gaming since—well—forever, really. Without looting, you wouldn’t have boomerangs in Zelda or BFGs in Doom. I can’t help but feel, though, that looting has become a developer’s ace-in-the-hole to motivate players to play their games lately. The former games I mentioned had loot as the cherry-on-top, whereas games like Borderlands, Dungeon Defenders, and Terraria (in my opinion) essentially revolve around loot as a reason to play. I should emphasize that being loot-heavy doesn’t necessarily make a game bad, since I, like many, enjoy looting; there’s something psychologically satisfying about finding items that improve your game-play. I’m just saying that it feels cheap when games place loot as the support-columns of a title, when that role should be reserved for game-play and story.
For instance, let’s check out Jagged Alliance: Back In Action, the recent ‘re-quel’ (my new word for sequels disguised as remakes) to Jagged Alliance 2. I’m not going to go into details about JA:BIA, because I’m actually preparing a review for that in the near future. The original JA2 was a phenomenal game in every sense of the word, as a turn-based strategy with RPG elements; I would even go so far as to say it is the best turn-based strategy. Again, without detailing the original (My retrospective of it is here, http://thegamerstudio.com/index.php/pc/jagged-alliance-2.html, in case you’re interested), JA2 was loot-heavy. However, the loot was not only the cherry-on-top of the challenging game-play, but it was made painless by the innovative sector-inventory system. The system allowed players to loot everything from an area in one screen rather than having to painstakingly check every corpse. Fast forward to JA:BIA, and you have buggy game-play, with God-awful AI, and you now have to painstakingly check every corpse for loot rather than utilizing sector-inventory, although the game’s developers are saying they’ll attempt to import the sector-inventory in a patch. Now, even if they add the sector-inventory system, JA:BIA would still be lacking the fantastic game-play of the original to compliment its loot—the bottom line is, I’m actually playing JA:BIA because I want to loot big guns, not because the game has any sort of genuine gratification.
And that’s where developers designing their loot-heavy games need to take a step back and consider the more important aspects. People like to loot, yes, but people also like to have fun while they loot. The FPS-genre has been guilty of looting in a different category—that of upgrades and unlocks, as seen in the latest Call of Duty and Battlefield games. I consider upgrades and levels as the same category as loot, because it’s the motivator to keep playing. What happened to the days of Unreal Tournament, Counter-Strike, and Battlefield 1942 when it was fun to just blow the shit out of each other all-day long without needing to be motivated by a level-up / upgrade system? I actually lose motivation to play the FPS’s that rely on upgrade-systems, because I don’t want to be a bitch versus a dude decked out in upgrades for several weeks. When I fire up an FPS to multi-player it up, I just want to be in an equal-playing field, and, lately, I can’t do that because I have to build up my avatar until I, too, can fight fire with fire.
I just mentioned the idea of ‘motivators’ in these games, and I’d like to take a moment to elaborate more. For lack of better constructive wording, why the @#$% do we need something that motivates us to play a game? I know friends who will not stop playing a game, even if they’re sick of it, simply to finish unlocking achievements and maxing out upgrades; it’s as if these things were designed to program the player. I’m sorry, but these ‘motivators’ are insulting to gamers, because game-companies seem to believe that players lack the will to do anything unless you dangle level-ups and achievements in front of them like a carrot in front of a mule. Trust me, I played Counter-Strike back in the day for six months straight, and that may not sound like much to an FPS-gamer, but for me, it is. I can’t even play a modern FPS for more than a week. The sheer enjoyment that came out of logging into CS and immediately kicking ass was all I wanted from the game. It didn’t need time-consuming upgrade-ables and levels as motivators. You know what the motivator in CS was? Having fun.
Unfortunately, the reality is that we’re stuck with loot as a game-seller now, until developers decide to give a middle finger to the concept as a whole, which is unlikely, given how mainstream gaming has become since 2005. Having loot as your motivator to play a game is like receiving a bagel with too much cream-cheese; it overloads the potential taste of the bagel (no, I’m not a food-critic). You know what I can’t wait for? A Super Mario Bros. game where hitting a ‘?’ block looks like this:
What do you think of looting and achievements in video games? Leave a comment below!
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