Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag can easily see you through to the new year with its heaving open-world of missions and quests. You could put hours into Arkham Origins over the winter weeks, too, hunting for all the snowbound secrets and swooping down on rampaging thugs. Then there’s Grand Theft Auto V, with its generous urban sprawl and endless opportunities for exploration (and mischief). What’s more, you can satisfy your appetite for months for a one-off, upfront fee of roughly £40. People often compare videogames to film, and as two audio-visual based mediums that’s fair enough, but in terms of the current value proposition games offer they’re far closer to albums: media bought once that lasts for a virtual eternity.
When you press pause and think about it, that’s astonishing. We’re in a golden age of value for money that could vanish in a couple of years, if not sooner. We might nitpick certain creative decisions and directions. We might complain about the over-familiarity of certain yearly iterations. We might balk at locked, on-disc DLC and extras. But I say we should take Christmas 2013 as a time to take stock and to count our blessings. Currently, we can buy entire worlds – carefully curated and meticulously crafted worlds – that allow us to engineer our own stories and make our own improvised entertainment and set-pieces without friends, from the comfort of our home.
We have NPC playgrounds that take vast teams of technicians, engineers and artists years to create and fine-tune, and they often even go the extra mile to maintain and update these ecosystems over time. When you catch a movie at the cinema and enjoy it, you have to wait to shell out the same amount of money again to own it. With a game, presently, you buy it, you keep it and you revisit it as often as you wish. If cinema is a non-refund restaurant, videogames are Star Trek’s food replicator.
The days of paying £40 upfront to explore vast open-worlds like Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag may be numbered.
It’s taken a long time for games to reach this epochal moment of value for hard-earned money. When arcade titles like Virtua Fighter and Ridge Racer became available on the Sega Saturn and PSOne respectively, it was a shockwave through my existence. I could own games that I’d otherwise spend hundreds of pounds on over a long hot summer or winter, hoping the neon buzz would heat my shaking hands. The social element of the arcade might have been removed – or simply relocated to the living-room – but the maths were simply irresistible: we could own our favourite games and play them forever. Or at least until our CRT’s popped and burned out. Then titles like Panzer Dragoon Saga, Mario 64 and Body Harvest took it a step further, hinting at where the open-world, home console-only model might go, offering games you’d revisit for the sense of place and secrets alone: games that didn’t feel or react the same on any two playthroughs.
If there was a message able to fight itself above the next-gen noise of E3 2013, it was that the days of this model are numbered. And I can understand why. Games like Anachronox, Body Harvest, ACIV, take years to get right and then, when they’re finally released to the public, the amount of factors that can affect a title’s crucial early success and longevity are daunting – from first-run marketing and PR budgets to an astute understanding of the landscape a game’s being hurled into and, not least, the quality of press coverage. Why take that gamble? It makes much more sense to offer a carrot on a stick to players. Get a reading of their appetite for what you’re offering with a first episode or pay-wall and take it from there. Use early generated profits to fund additional content. Or head to Kickstarter to see if people even care enough in the first place.
A subscription or pay-as-you go model makes even more sense for the sports genre. It’s becoming progressively more difficult to see the value proposition of a game marginally tweaked and remixed then rolled out to consumers with the same price-tag attached from a year ago, all the while watching the trade-in value of last year’s model plummet. And as our action games become progressively more sportsman-like – revolving around scheduled communal events, the virtual ancestor of the traditional ‘hunt’ – it’s going to make more and more sense to skew distribution towards a pay-as-you go model or implement a sort of Netflix-style subscription service.
Bungie’s Destiny could represent the next step forward in open-world game design – and monetisation.
I see Watch Dogs as the last bastion of the old way of doing things and Destiny as the first real attempt to move towards a more subversive development and distribution model (at least for a home console market that hasn’t a World Of Warcraft yet). Ubisoft has invested heavily in an NPC-populated open-world with a single, upfront fee giving you ownership of its gorgeously gritty and grimy streets. Destiny, on the other hand, is sure to be asking us to participate in its decade long adventure with a few extra payments (a game being supported for that long surely needs – and warrants – a more elaborate payment plan than ‘£40 all-in’). I see these two titles marking the end of the old age and the dawning of the new. I can’t see both of these models living side-by-side and it’s Bungie’s game that would conceivably make a perfect partner for a subscription service like PlayStation Plus.
For me, it’s obvious: persistent, social worlds are the new frontier. It’s amazing we’ve even made it this far without a paradigm shift occurring sooner in the way it arguably already has in western PC gaming with the advent of the MMOG. A conspiracy theorist would point to what happened to the physical retail presence of PC games on the high street since the MMOG and Steam began to rule as bandwidths increased. They might even suggest that physical sales are far more important to actual corporations than consumers or developers, and that they’re just getting in the way now… but that’s another story.
This Christmas, then, I simply recommend feeling good about that one-off purchase as you hand over your hard-earned cash. After all, that upfront premium for a game with 30-40 hours’ worth of content might never happen again. We might look back at this year as more than the start of a new hardware era: it might also be the end of the open-world game as we once knew it, too.
The post After Arkham, Black Flag and GTAV, is this the end of an open-world gaming golden age? appeared first on Edge Online.
Source http://www.edge-online.com/features/after-arkham-black-flag-and-gtav-is-this-the-end-of-an-open-world-gaming-golden-age/
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