Feature Creep in The Escapist
Sometimes you read something and when you finish it, you just think “thank you for putting into words just what I was thinking”. This article discussing feature creep (of the non-software engineering variety) from the consistently excellent The Escapist left me in just that frame of mind.
The Splinter Cell example was something I could closely empathise with. I got a lot of mileage out of Pandora Tomorrow’s multiplayer demo, though exams got in the way of me purchasing the game. When Chaos Theory’s demos started doing the rounds, I thought it’d be a great opportunity to catch up on what I missed. But where was the fun in spending dozens of rounds - hours and hours - trying in vain to learn the maps by repeated failure? For all that hardcore gamers complain about the luck factor in successful multiplayer games, it’s easy to see how important that factor is in that success. It makes play tolerable while you’re still a learner.
Oh and don’t get me started on the singleplayer demo … I downloaded it, installed it, watched about 20 minutes of tutorial videos (if you include them in a demo download, you are telling a player they need to watch them, right?) … and by the time I’d sat through all those, my enthusiasm for playing the game was totally drained and I never touched it again. (Note to self: always integrate tutorial into gameplay and cut it up into bite-sized pieces.)
I wasn’t totally sold on some of Tynes’ arguments though. Simplicity and accessibility aren’t the same thing. Clearly an easy route to the latter is through the former and hence people often cry for simplicity when what they really want is accessibility. I felt that he slipped a bit into this territory in places. That said, I did think his ‘prequel’ idea was thoroughly fascinating and I’d love to see it happen.
I’m also not entirely convinced that you could continue straight down the line of “new levels and no new features” (his emphasis). When people are picking up a new title, it’s not enough to say that new content is enough. This is an interactive medium. It’s not content you just ‘consume’. The experience is created by both the content and a player’s interaction with that content. Sooner or later, the stasis of interaction methods would render any new content stale. Perhaps not for everyone, but for more than just “gamers and game reviewers”.
More important to me is a yardstick for measuring features against: Can this feature be integrated in a way that doesn’t harm the game’s accessibility? Does the feature add to the game in a way that is meaningful? Will the feature complement the existing features?
