On Momentum

In recent times there's been much discussion in the blogosphere and elsewhere around the benefits and drawbacks of releasing games into Early Acess. There are obviously lots of pros and cons but I'm only interested in one today: momentum.

It occured to me yesterday, when I was deciding what I wanted to do with my morning, that the decision is often taken out of my hands by momentum. Unless something actively stops me, I'm more likely to carry on playing the game I'm already playing than move to another. 

When I shift across it's usually either from a sense of duty or a craving for novelty. Novelty doesn't require much in the way of momentum. It has an energy all its own. New games come to me on a whim but I occasionally feel something more like an obligation to log into a game I haven't played for a while.

Mostly I resist. Obligation lacks the momentum to overcome inertia when the object is something as trivial as a video game.  Even if I feel the drag sufficiently to make the effort, there are so many snags to catch on and bring me to a stop. 

I'll get as far as clicking on the icon on the desktop but then I have to remember my login details. I might give up right there but I'll usually at least try to find them. If it takes longer than a few seconds, that's another out. 

Say I get past that hurdle. I might even get as far as letting the patcher update the game. If that goes quickly and smoothly, there's a better than even chance I'll log in. Or it could be Lord of the Rings Online, which has been patching on my machine now for well over an hour and is still nowhere near done. I've already lost what slight interest I had for that today.

If I get as far as the game itself, and if there's not too much in the way of a flood of new information and if my bags are reasonably clear and if I can remember what I was doing last time I was there, I might spend an hour pottering around, doing some quests, getting some xp. If everything goes absolutely perfectly, I might even come back the next day, the day after that.

Best case scenario? I'll play for couple of weeks. At the very outside a month. Then I'm gone again.

The history of this blog is proof. Pick a game from the long tail of tags and follow my progress backwards. There are so many posts where I talk about revisiting some game or other, enthusing about how much I'm enjoying it, claiming I'll likely be there for a while. 

Often a flurry of posts will follow, as I get all excited about the game as if it was something new. Then the posts stop and I never mention the game again. until the next time, when the whole dumb cycle begins all over again.

That's how it goes with old games. It's how it's always gone, as long as this blog's been running. 

What used also to happen, though, was there'd be another game, sometimes a couple of them, that I just kept playing and writing about week in, week out. Some of the games for months at a stretch, a few for years.

For much of the life of the blog you could rely on regular posts about Guild Wars 2. I played that one almost every day for the best part of a decade. Since I stopped, though, nothing's really taken its place. These days the only possible contender for that role is EverQuest II and I haven't played or posted about that one for almost a month. It's more of a slow-burning back-up plan than a compulsion.

Occasionally I make noises here about having cooled on off on playing video games as a hobby. I say things that suggest I don't do it nearly as much as I used to, which is true but only because I used to do it so damn much. Realistically, I still play video games almost every day of my life, usually for at least a couple of hours, which I think definitely qualifies as an obsession, even if it's no longer a pathology.

What I don't seem to be doing much any more is playing the same video game for extended periods of time. And by "extended" I guess I mean months or even years. Instead, what I mostly do is hop around between games until a new one comes along, then play that one like there's no other until either I stop finding it fun or run out of new things to do there. If those are even two different things.

When I've thought about this at all, I've been putting it down to changes in me. I'm older. I have more free time. Beryl needs many walks. All kinds of circumstances are different. Also, I've been playing online games for almost a quarter of a century now. Everything stales eventually, doesn't it?

Well, maybe. But I'm starting to wonder if the main reason I don't get stuck into - or perhaps I should say stuck on - games the way I once did has more to do with the way they're being made and managed than how I might have changed. It seems much harder to build that steady, year-long momentum now. Game momentum comes in shorter bursts, just a weeks, maybe even only a few days. I'm not at all sure the shift is down to me.

A new game used to be very much an experience. An event. There used to be a long run-up to launch, sometimes years, during which the developer would ceaselessly attempt to build interest and anticipation through press releases, competitions and conversations.

Nearer release there'd often be a chance to try the game out, briefly, in a beta or a pre-launch event, like those weekends that were so popular once. Unless you were fortnate enough to get an invite to the year-long closed beta, though, which most did not, whatever you were able to see of the game in action wouldn't be enough to give more than a taste of what lay ahead for you at launch. 

When the game finally went live, there'd be a huge flurry of interest and excitement, followed by a much longer, slower release of pleasure as you worked your way through the plethora of content contained in the game at release. It would take everyone a good while to get through all of that but I took even longer. Far from burning through the whole thing in a matter of days or weeks, I'd generally find myself left behind the bubble of players rising towards the endgame. I'd meander along slowly, immersed in the richness of the game but taking it all at my own pace.

In most cases I never caught up with the pack. New content would enter the game well before I was done with the old. The whole business model relied on keeping players occupied if not entertained. By the time I finally decided to move on I'd have been there long enough to feel like it was I who needed to take a break, not that there was nothing left for me to do.

That tended to apply even to games that weren't all that well-baked to begin with, theose that had clearly come out of the development oven a little too soon. There might be a lot of buggy content  - for the first year or so GW2 was stuffed to bursting with Dynamic Events that got stuck or bugged out or just plain didn't work at all - but you couldn't say the content wasn't there. 

It might seem counter-intuitive, but broken and buggy content now can be better than perfect content later. Waiting for fixes can be sticky, too. When the game is live and the updates are rolling in week by week, the focus is on when stuff is going to get fixed, not if, and that leaves playersd invested in the outcome. It might be negative investment but it's investment all the same.

Early Access turns all of that on its head. The game gets sold to you on an as-is basis. It comes with big warnings that it's not finished, lots of it is missing, bits of it might not work very well. If you can't cope with that, it's your problem, not the developer's. Nothing really needs to work properly right away. Chances are it's going to change more than once before it's done, anyway. Everything feels temporary, as-hoc, cobbled together, even your characters. Any commitment you might make feels less significant, less important, less permanent.

That doesn't mitigate against the intensity with which you play; not at all. The impermanence and mutabilty can even make it all feel more intense, like a live performance or a limited-time event. 

And if there's only so much content, you might just be able to consume it all. Completion could be achievable. There's certainly no reason to pace yourself. It's not like there's going to be an endgame or not the endgame. When it's over, it's over. You feel done. You may even feel satisfied.

I started thinking about all of this because I was looking at my Steam library and I realised I still hadn't done anything about the new quests in Nightingale. I hadn't even gone to look for the quest-givers.

I posted about it a couple of weeks ago and until yesterday I think that may have been the last time I thought about the game. I concluded that post with an observation: "The curse of Early Access: you get to the end of what there is so far and you feel like it's all there's going to be and maybe all there needs to be." Then, trying not to draw conclusions from a single instance, I said "Or maybe I just wasn't in the mood." 

Now I've had time to consider, I realize it wasn't my mood. It was lack of momentum. I stopped playing Nightingale and now it's hard to start again.

It didn't used to be like that. While I was playing, I couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen next. I bulled through the main quest and piled right into what passed for an endgame before I finally straightened up, looked around and decided to take a break. 

And that was that. Momentum lost. Game over.

Now, it feels like just too much of an effort to pick it up again. There's too much inertia. I look at the Play button on Steam and imagine having to sort myself out, work out which realm the new quests are in, find the right portal or make a new one, roam across the map to find the NPCs. Even though all of that would likely only take a few minutes, it still feels like too much,. So I go play something else instead.

And what do I play? Whatever game I'm already playing, naturally. That's where the momentum lies so it's easy. The ball is already rolling.

At the moment the game with the most momentum happens to be Wuthering Waves. It begs the question how did that momentum build from nowhere and so quickly, too?

That's easy. Starting a new game is all down hill. Gravity carries you along. All you do is have to let it. Starting a new game is the easiest of all options (Well, it is for me. I've heard others tell it differently.). The game wants you to build momentum or it does if it's anything like well-designed. It gets behind you and pushes. If you let it, a game will do most of the work, even if it's not that great a game.

It doesn't have to be a full game, either. Even a demo can do it and surely any Early Access game that's more than a shameless cash grab can too. They just can't keep it up for long.

The hook is always baited. While there may not be a whole game, there'll always be plenty to get started on. The problem comes later, when you hit the empty regions, the parts the developer warned you weren't ready. The parts that might not be ready for a year or two. Or ever.

As a quick hit it's fine but more than that is asking is more than many players are going to be able to give, even if they want to. By the time the whole game's ready, almost everyone who cared will long since have moved on. New games roll off the production line every day. Who's going to wait? Or come back for a second go round?

All of which might make it sound like I'm going sour on Early Access. I'm not. It works for me. I think it's the developers who need to reconsider, at least if they're making MMORPGs or long-term Live Service games. These days, EA amounts to launch in many players' eyes. Even if it goes well, how will that EA windfall stack up against the players who pay a reduced fee now then don't come back? 

Then again, as we were discussing a while back, every game seems to lose 95% of its audience in a few weeks these days, no matter how it comes to market. Games can gain momentum too - just look at Albion Online - but there's no simple blueprint to follow that tells developers how to build it.

As a player, though, I'm sanguine. It all loops back to the scenario I laid out at the beginning. I may have bought and played a few games for months at a stretch in the past, a handful even for years, but the vast majority I really spent no longer with than I have with these new-fangled EAs.

I bought those games - or in the age of Free To Play just downloaded and installed them - mostly because I was excited to try something new. Most of them didn't stick. I never built up the necessary momentum to keep playing past the initial thrill of the new. I left long before I got to the level cap let alone the endgame. Those old school launches may have come with a ton more content than you'd get in an Early Access title but I still bailed long before I got to see much of it. 

It may be that Early Access, like the F2P payment model before it, works quite well for me because I'm not looking for that elusive One Game any more. I'm learning to appreciate not having a fixed commitment to one title. I'm enjoying being able to look forward to the next game I'm going to play without having to ask myself whether I'm ready to give up on the one I'm playing now.

As to which game I play at any given moment, it really comes down to that forward momentum. While it's there, I don't want to play anything else. When it falters, I fall off the ride.

MMORPGs used be designed so that players would build up so huge momentum almost without noticing. Working their way through all the content that was there from launch, climbing up those vertical progression ladders, made it so much harder to stop, even when other factors like interest and enthusiasm began to wane. There was a time when quitting was seen as a really big deal. 

Not so much any more. Outside of social ties, any stigma that used to adhere to game-hopping seems long-gone. Why commit when there's so much choice? And Early Access doubles down on that lack of commitment by telling you the game isn't even ready yet. 

MMORPG developers were always in a race to add content faster than players could use it up but at least by starting with a full game already in place they were giving themselves a head start. By putting up a big warning sign saying "Game Not Finished", EA gives players an easy out. Any momentum an EA title is able to build is dissipated when players hit that content vacuum.

And maybe that's a good thing. It's not like the old ways were the healthy option, after all. A quick blast of fun then on to the next game. Where's the problem in that?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go play Wuthering Waves for a while. It feels like I have enough momentum there right now to carry me through 'til August. 

Probably means I'll be done with the game by next week.