The immortal game as a service

The end is never the end is never the end.

Do you remember how, when the credits rolled, games used to end? Me neither. That's because we live in the age of 'games as a service', wherein the end is never the end. I recall being suckered in by this promise back in the days of Destiny and the, now infamous, ten-year plan. Everyone I knew was thinking the same thing; "Wow, a ten year game? Constantly updated with regular new content? That's a game we could play forever!" Of course, then the release came and we realized that we had been duped. Instead of giving us all a full game and growing it into something special over a decade, they gave us a bare bones, pretty, mess and expected us to stick around as they made it into something that vaguely resembled a finished product. Before they even managed that, they gave up and announced 'Destiny 2', whilst simultaneously backtracking on the whole 'Ten-year plan'. (Bungie claimed that was referring to a licensing deal but they went independent earlier this year so I guess that was a lie too.) That is 'games as a service' in a nutshell.

Back when it used to be a feature on Steam dubbed 'Early access', everyone gawked at the idea of paying for an unfinished game that was often never completed. These days, that seems to be every other AAA release, and we eat it up. Creators and publishers have learnt the power of promises and have utilized it to great effect in recent years. Look at recent heavy hitters and you'll spot how they all come attached with a roadmap: a list of vague promises for features that may or may not pan out. Sure, sometimes the roadmap works out, but sometimes it just ends up becoming a shield against all those who point out how unfinished the 'release' product is. "Oh, of course we haven't added this basic feature, that's not due until summer according to the roadmap." This way, gaming companies get to keep exploiting their player base as beta testers for games so incomplete they some even start life as barely functional messes. Just look at Bethesda's Fallout 76.

Last year saw the release of Fallout 76 to lukewarm anticipation. Many were dubious about Bethesda's first online outing and saw the whole endeavour as a recipe for disaster. Even I, optimist that I was, had some doubts when Todd Howard stood up and paraded that fact that Fallout 76 would have no human characters save for those manned by other players. I had already seen the Fallout franchise veer away from establishing great, memorable characters and this seemed like a pretty definitive nail in the coffin. But I bit my lip and decided to wait and see, Bethesda knew what they were doing right? (Cue the sad trombone.)

On November 14th, players were greeted to a buggy wasteland that was barren for all the wrong reasons. The combat was laggy, the visuals were bugged (and dated), the servers went down more then a whack-a-mole; everything screamed of rushed-to-market. It is well known how no developer ever really feel like their game has ever 'gone gold', but Fallout 76 didn't even feel like it left beta. Things were so bad that 'Bethesda.net' as a whole suffered huge blackout periods for the next few months. The entire infrastructure was falling apart because no one at Bethesda got the opportunity to appropriately stress test before the public were launched at the product.

Nearly a year later, the game is in a much better place. Most of the bugs have been patched, the servers have a little bit more staying power and the product is almost starting to resemble a finished game. But, somehow, we're still not there yet. For their part, Bethesda have mostly committed themselves to fixing the problems of the game but things should never have been this bad to start with. Surely, it would be easier to fix the game without players on the servers 24/7. (Then again, I'm no technician. Maybe it's easy to fix the plumbing while the whole apartment is bathing.) Everyone still wants to know: what happened. Luckily for us, we have some idea.

Gamespot conducted an Interview with Todd Howard wherein he explained things from his end. He told the story of how they approached the launch and how the game looked shoddy but decided to release anyway. They had no idea of how bad things would be, but remained committed in their plans to fix it in medias res. (Cue the clip of Bill O'Reilly. "I'll do it live!") One thing that Todd Howard said really stuck in my mind and the minds of many of his critics. "It's not about how a game launches, it's what it becomes." Now, I understand what he is trying to convey here: The fact that they won't give on the game is a testament worth commending, but even he has to see how poorly he worded that. It sounds utterly dismissive to mess they charged £60 for. Just so long as they slap down a roadmap and follow it through, things will work out at the end of the day. It is the embodiment of the 'Games as a service' culture. And just because it seems to be working out for Fallout 76 does not mean it works out for everybody.

Once upon a time I used to cherish Bioware. Everyone did. They were the paragons (ignore the pun) of well-written narratives and epic drama. Their two darling franchises: Mass Effect and Dragon Age were legendary, but even their licensed works like Baldur's Gate and 'Knights of The Old Republic' garnered mass praise and acclaim. Then 'Mass Effect: Andromeda' happened, and everyone starting seeing the chinks in Bioware's armour. That is likely why most people had approached with raised eyebrows when they heard about Bioware's new online-only RPG: Anthem. It didn't help that all we heard on the game was vague pretentious remarks on how this was "A type of game you've never seen before", or how this would be the "Bob Dylan of Video Games." (Whatever the heck that means.) So it's safe to say no one was really over the moon for this project when it released in February this year, but even we couldn't have expected what we received.

Anthem was some how even more rough then Fallout 76. Yes, the game certainly launched in a compromised state, with bugs and crashes absolutely everywhere; but the real problem was the fact that some of the core gameplay and story elements didn't even seem fully thought through. The main story was short and unimpressive. The endgame was practically non-existent. One mission literally time-gated players (Like a mobile game) in order to inflate the story's length. The story was disjointed and sometimes literally made no sense. Loot had randomly rolled stats with no weapon specific identifiers, that means you could find yourself with an assault rifle that would boost the attack damage of your shotgun; Or a flamethrower that multiplied your damage by 0%. (That one actually calculates, by the by, meaning that weapon literally outputs zero damage.) Then there were the constant minute-long loading screens. Player would have to sit through 2 to get from the hub to the openworld. 3 if you also wanted to do a world quest. All Anthem had going for it was the promise of a roadmap, but even that fell apart.

After Anthem missed a few roadmap deadlines it became clear that Bioware weren't going to make the game changing content they promised. Soon they had to push a lot of the promising features back, including their impressive sounding 'Cataclysm' event. People had become several stages past antsy and began to rally against Bioware with every change they made. Every time Bioware messed with drop rates, or released a £30 skin or delayed another launch, people just up and left the community. Things came to ahead when Bioware finally revealed details about the 'Cataclysm', only to reveal is was a new, small, tropical area with a bluish filter applied and a time attack mode chucked in. The bubble burst. For the first time people who stuck with the game through all of it faults saw, plain as day, that Bioware had nothing for this game. No secret comeback plan. Nothing. And they were sorely disappointed.

Yet again we have context for what happened with this game. Apparently, Bioware had little to no direction for the game throughout most of it's 7 year development cycle. They didn't even have a name until just before the E3 reveal, having referred to it as 'Project Dylan' during the planning stages. Most of the brain power was going towards visualizing 'Project Joplin' (The soon-to-be-cancelled Dragon Age 4) and no one had any clue what this game would even look like when they finally got around to making it. Eventually, EA got sick of paying for a game they hadn't received yet and demanded results. A few months of scrounging later and we got the pretty facade that Bioware showed off at E3 2018. Before then, most of the crew didn't even know that the game would be a looter shooter, having been sold on the idea of an exploration based game behind closed doors. The next seven months were dedicated to building a game from the ground up, on a crappy engine, to somewhat resemble the pretty little lie that corporate had tried, and failed, to sell the gaming world on during EA's conference. With that in mind, it is impressive that Bioware put together a product with a functional executable. (Although there was that issue about the game allegedly bricking PS4's. So if that's true, then they didn't even manage the exe.) Yet again consumers were handed an unfinished 'game-as-a-service' and told it would be finished later. Although some studios don't even give players that much; point in case, Treyarch with Black Ops 4.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 caused a lot of upset when it first announced with no single player. Especially after starting the presentation with a highlight reel of all the memorable story beats from previous campaigns. (Not sure what they were going for there.) Gamers couldn't help but sigh and go "Haven't we been through this before?" "Didn't Ea already spout all of that 'single player games are dead' rhetoric which lead the out pour of dissent from gamers. Even leading to Bethesda initiating their #saveplayerone slogan." (Although, Bethesda then released Fallout 76 the next year so I guess no one's words have weight anymore.) Activision seemed determined to tell us all exactly what we want, and it wasn't a single player campaign, it was a battle royale mode called Blackout. Cue the groans.

All Treyarch had to offer fans were multiplayer modes and another zombie level. No promises down the line of something special, just the absolute bare minimum of a Call of Duty game. Many shook their heads in the knowledge that the casual crowd would still likely carry this game to success, their only consolation would be another darn battle royale mode. At least it was decent. When Blackout first landed, people were surprised to find that it seemed to work surprisingly well. The map was a hodgepodge mess but the gunplay was good and the mechanics seemed solid. It was an adult battle royale mode that was a heck of a lot more polished than PUBG. It would be a long time before any talented studio could make a decent competitor that would even come close to- Oh, then Respawn came and dropped Apex Legends. A game that was superior to Blackout in every way and free. People forgot about Blackout pretty fast.

Why did the Black Ops 4 team think that the game would have the typical year-long staying power with such a meager offering? Well the reason is two-fold; first, the Call of Duty name recognition; and Secondly, Other 'games-as-a-service' could get with it, why not them? Okay, there's a little more to it then that. There was originally supposed to be a campaign but an Activision schedule update cut down Treyarch's development time substantially and as a result, the team failed to establish a solid idea for the game in time. (They had this one really awful idea about a competitive multiplayer campaign, so you can see that they weren't exactly at their A-game.) But in the end it was braggadocios bravado, alongside a little bit of 'keeping up appearances', that fueled Activison to decide not to delay a game that obviously needed it.

So here we ended up with a game lacking a campaign, vanguarded by a tacked on battle royale that became obsolete before the summer. Black Ops 4 still had it's aggressive microtransaction strategy to fall back on but without the crowds to lap it all up it just wasn't the same. The game did well enough to outperform it's 2015 predecessor but not well enough to prevent Activison from laying off 8% of it's workforce. (Wait what? Activison have said that they expected significant growth from this entry that proved elusive but sacking 700 people seems a bit harsh.) Maybe things might have been different if they had launched a completed game, it's hard to say. Just as it's hard to predict what might have been with any of these 'games as a service' products.

Ever since the term first crept into games marketer's lexicons, it seems to have become the calling card for botched releases. Several times now we have seen games that should have been great, that should have blown everyone away, end up butchered with the promise that it will be fixed later. It was the same case with games back when 'Steam early access' first became popular, only this time the big names are the ones taking the risk. AAA companies seem hellbent on devaluing their own product with these disasters with no forethought on what might be the consequence. Then they act surprised when they are told how they have no more goodwill left with the gaming community. I feel like a bit of a curmudgeon for implying that games should go back to the way they used to be, but on this matter I think I have a point. 'Games as a service' has proved to be at best a failure and at worst a scam, and it's about time we buried this practice before it becomes synonymous with games themselves.