I’ve been a fan of Ken Levine’s games since the very beginning. With the exception of Tribes: Vengeance, his repertoire reads as the list of some of my favorite games that it is. Eurogamer ran an article today that discussed his upcoming game, Judas. A game whose reveal trailer at the 2022 The Game Awards show garnered significant buzz.
Levine, a game designer who numbers amongst the list of PC Game’s New Game Gods from 2000, is working on a new game called Judas which will be a single-player adventure game. The focus of the game will be on telling a story and creating a traditional gaming experience rather than online or multiplayer features. The game is expected to have a classic feel similar to older video games. Levin’e specific quote from the article was “You buy the game and you get the whole thing. There’s no online component. There’s no live service, because everything we do is in service of telling the story and transporting the player somewhere.”
I like Levine’s words. Games that are made in the service of the art rather than those made in the service of commerciality…we need more of that these days. But I also know why this interview and the article were run and why it will get much praise. And that causality sticks in my craw. The root of the message’s popularity is that gamers feel like microtransactions shouldn’t exist. And they frequently revolt against them. Helldivers II. Anytime they show up in a paid game. Anytime the cost of skins or a pack is deemed egregious. This in games that are built entirely on microtransactions. Such as Call of Duty, one of the repeat offenders; a paid game. Because the people playing the paid multiplayer have the same store put in their windshield as the FTP Warzone people.
Microtransactions do not bother me. People complained about MTX being in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. And they called Helldivers II, a PvE game, “pay to win”. I’m sorry…what PvE mode are there enemy human players who are victims of pay-to-win in Helldivers II? They don’t bother me because I can be an adult and not participate. Destiny and CoD players scream loudly when a Skin pack is too expensive. My response to that is “So don’t buy it”.
So it eats at me a little bit when articles like this come out and people are driven to doing victory laps for the game. It’s even more a shame when, while they laud it for no MTX, they will send an entirely different market signal by balking at paying $70 for the game. But the big kicker is, there shouldn’t be victory laps over this sentiment because we should all be able to resist participating. And if and when we do, and the MTX-ridden game goes on to be successful anyway, we should be equally adult enough to understand that we are not the market and the market has signaled its demand.
“…grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
The even larger concern I have is that gamers complain about things like this, but will not complain about things that should be addressed and fixed and that there is little reason for companies not to. Windows should be the premiere place to play games on PC. But it’s not. SteamOS is out-performing it in benchmarks. Windows 11 asks me the same three questions after rebooting to take a systems update like its Rick Grimes vetting a potential new Survivor. And we are doing dolphin flips over Microsoft taking the XBox App UI, a poor app that the vast majority of PC gamers do not like to use, and making ease of navigation out of their own operating system.
We still have the same XMB UI design we have had on PlayStation since the PlayStation 2. No innovation, incremental updates, plenty of glitz and chrome. Barely any movement of the ball forward.
Games on an annual release cycle can release new builds every year for more than a decade with the same bug that has been present in the game since the first year.
Microtransactions aren’t the enemy; we are. Stop celebrating the bare minimum in game and platform design. Stop celebrating companies fixing their own f/ups as if they’ve won some championship. We rage at skins, but accept broken systems. Victory laps over no MTX? Please. There are real battles that gamers ignore.
And games do not choose their battles well. We would all benefit from a more unified voice about the things we can change, and less about the things we cannot.
Rounding Off Infinity 