I got “MarioKart” for my Wii and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.
To start with, you have 4 “Cups” (a set of 4 different tracks) you can race in; there are 4 other Cups that are initially locked.
The other day I raced one of the Cups against the computerized characters and got first place. The game then told me: “Congratulations! You have unlocked the Leaf Cup!”
After a quick “Woo-Hoo!” moment, I got to thinking: Wait a minute. This is my game. I paid for it. But the game is telling me what tracks I can and can’t race on?
I’m not a hard-core gamer. I play once in a while, for fun. What if I were to never get “good enough” to beat the game and unlock the hidden Cups? That doesn’t mean I don’t still want to play my game. But it does mean that I can’t use half of my game that I own. Something seems wrong with this picture.
I realize that locked screens are nothing new, and I get the flip-side of it too; It gives you something to shoot for, and it’s a bit of a thrill to finally master a level and get a chance to master the next one.
But still.
I’m interested to hear what other people think about this.
So you want to play the advanced levels when you can’t beat the easy levels?
Advancement and rewards for good gameplay have been a staple of games since practically the beginning. It’s only the technology available today that this would even become an option.
If a game maker wants to set it up so everything is open, I wouldn’t complain, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a game maker who sets it up like Mario Kart Wii either.
Of course, but it’s aggravating to have to finish the easy stuff before you can try your hands at the hard levels. Especially in sequels.
I’ve been playing Rock Band for a year, and I’m pretty good at it. I just got Rock Band 2 (
n/. finally out in France .
n/), and the first thing I wanted to do was sing Master Exploder. Can’t. Locked. Oh, well, then can I do Alanis’ You Oughta Know ? I’ve been singing that one since high school ! NO. Locked. Shred along to Aqualung ? Yeeaaah, nope. Gotta play that Eye Of The Tiger bore first. Cause playing the same quarter note for 5 minutes is just swell…
In some games (particularly racing games like Forza 2) it feels like a natural progression to move from small Toyotas and Hondas up to fire-breathing Ferraris and Lambos. Then again, they use money (i.e. winnings from races) as the limiting factor, as well as winning races. If you haven’t won enough money to buy that Aston Martin to enter the race, go back and race your Tercel a few more times. It’s not ideal, but it seems to be one of the best implementations of unlockables.
One of the worst (well, in my mind) has always been the Grand Theft Auto Series. When you start out, you are limited to one small area of the map. You must complete missions and at some point a new area will open up. You can now explore the new area and do missions to unlock another area. They usually have the map divided up into 4 or 5 areas and it will take you most of the game to get them all unlocked.
Not bad in theory, but the game bills itself as an open-world game. Do whatever you want! Drive anywhere! Ummm…yeah - on this little island only.
Saint’s Row 2 figured this out and the entire world is open to you from the beginning. Thank you!
Oh, and I agree about the Rock Band and Guitar Hero unlock nonsense. Having a Rock Band party? You better spend hours with the game unlocking everything before your guests arrive so they can play what they want rather than everyone singing Eye of the Tiger a million times. Yeah, there are cheat codes to get around this but I shouldn’t have to cheat to play the songs I paid for.
This isn’t really a progressive game, though. They’re just diffferent tracks.
My wife plays sometimes too, and to put it bluntly – she stinks. She comes in last just about every time. But, she laughs like crazy the whole time. So, yeah. I do want to play on all of the tracks, even if they’re more challenging, even if I don’t do well. 'Cause it’s FUN. That’s why I’m playing in the first place.
The locked songs in the Rock Band series are the one big beef I have with the game.
The worst thing about it, IMHO, was that when you got Rock Band 2 and uploaded all the RB1 songs and had all your previous songs, you already had loads of songs harder than the songs you still had left to unlock. I wonder what the thinking was there. “Hmmm…so these players finished Green Grass and High Tides* on expert. But we better not let them try E-Pro**, that might be way too hard for them.”
*Actually, I never did finish GGaHT on expert guitar.
**First song tygre and I both scored 100% on. And it was locked to start!
I think that’s it, its one of those things that you either get or don’t.
I like the effect in Zelda, Metroid, GTA etc. You walk about for a bit, see something you’d like to get a hold of, then realise after a short while that it’s not something you can access. You beat a boss, pick up a new weapon/tool, then suddenly you have access to a whole new part of the game.
Sort of like getting all your presents as soon as you see them in a catalogue, instead of waiting till Christmas.
This was Yahtzee’s biggest complaint about Super Smash Brothers Brawl. It’s supposed to be a party game, but you can’t just buy it and have your friends come over immediately to start having fun with it, especially if they’d heard Sonic was in the game and wanted to play him or one of the other unlockables. No, if you want your friends to be able to play whoever they want, you have to spend hours first unlocking all the characters and maps, and by the time you’re done you’ve learned how to play the game, so your skill level is going to be significantly higher than your friends’, making it difficult to just have fun with the game.
I know people who don’t consider the game worth playing any more once they’ve unlocked everything.
While I don’t ‘get’ the mentality - either the game’s fun or it’s not - I can sort of understand it - unlockables are prizes. Once they’re all unlocked, where’s the tangible proof that you’ve won?
I like unlockables, though, once I’ve unlocked everything, I still enjoy the game.
Depending on how long it takes to get all of them, sometimes you’re just plain tired of the game by the time you’re done. Other games just aren’t that much fun to begin with, and the secret content is the only reason you really have for playing.
This is often done in PC games too. Heck, it’s near universal. You don’t get to play the final level of Zelda right of the bat, or the last level of Mario, or the last dungeon in Baldur’s Gate.
On the PC though it’s usually easy to open up everything gievn the open nature of the platform.
For example, in the Total War games, you usually only start with a handful of factions as options for the campaign. once you beat one of the campaigns, several new factions open up.
Alternatively, you can simply move the factions from locked to unlocked by opening a text file in the game directory
Depends on what you can unlock. I have zero interest in playing through Manhunt multiple times just to unlock character concept art and unused videos. It was worth playing through Silent Hill 2 a couple times to get different endings. Unlocking new exercises in Wii Fit was really a non-issue because it didn’t take long at all to have everything unlocked and the nature of the “game” is that your playing all this stuff over and over anyway.
Oh God, I had forgotten about Total War.
Dunno how it worked in Medieval 2 because in that one I unlocked all factions from the get go by editing the files, but when I started playing Rome I had absolutely zero modding experience, and the unlock was the WORST idea.
From a clean install, you could only choose to play the campaign as one of the 3 Roman factions. That’s it. Of the 15+ civilizations in the game, you get only 3, all essentialy the same (only difference between the 3 Roman families are their temple lines, a single unit out of ~30 that’s rarely used if at all anyway, and the part of the world you’re assigned to conquer by the Senate).
Want to play a barbarian, or greek, or persian or egyptian faction ? You have to wipe it out during the campaign. Then win the campaign. If someone else beats that faction before you do, tough luck. If the Senate orders you to the other side of the world, tough luck. Did I mention a full campaign can take weeks to complete ?
Yeah, great game design, right there :rolleyes:
Yes, this means that games in your past have had endings that you’ve never seen because you never beat them on the hardest difficulty level. Thems the breaks.
Signed,
Someone that got Mario Kart Wii on release day and has (almost) got a star (at least) in each cup race on every difficulty.
Again, wah. So you have to unlock people and things. Big deal. You get better at the game because you actually played it to unlock people. Again, big deal. Yahtzee makes a huge mountain out of a molehill in this regard.
I think it all depends on how things are unlocked. The Zelda/Metroid type of thing, where you need to do this to get this to get that to get there, is very fun and natural in my opinion. But in a Rock Band/SSBB type situation, I think it’s kind of ridiculous that you can’t play everything at the start. I do like, though, the trophy system in SSBB. That way, competitive players have something to work for, but the casual players don’t care.
I can see the frustration to folks who are just getting into gaming or don’t want to have any “grind” whatsoever to their newly purchased game. For my money, though, I want something that will tangibly reward me a little each time I play, until I’ve unlocked everything and gotten used to the controls enough to play in the long term.
I mean, even frickin Wii Fit shows you little tokens going into a bank to unlock the more difficult exercises and games. Even casuals want to take the game a bit at a time, sometimes.
That said, there are some games where it doesn’t really make sense, such as party games like Rock Band or SSBB. But I’m sure everyone’s aware that the RB/GH games at least almost always have unlock codes, right?
Not to mention that at least in Rock Band 1, you can play every song right from the start. What you can’t do is play all the songs with the new band you just created, but if all you want is Green Grass and High Tides (and who wouldn’t? I love that song!), you can get it in Quick Play. A little out of the way, to be sure, but hardly Fort Knox.
There are a variety of different reasons to make content unlockable:
It matches the challenge to the skillset. If you’re a beginner and you try something really hard you may get so frustrated you walk away and never come back. Locking some of the content away until you’re ready for it prevents this.
Some players really like being rewarded. Not everyone is like this. Some players just enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay experience and don’t care about getting patted on the head. But if you like getting a pat, an unlock is a nice reward.
It encourages players to do boring things. Seriously. Making every single moment of a game insanely fun is hard. Most games have a few dull bits – poorly designed areas, filler etc. If players only play the best bits the game may be too short or feel repetitive. Forcing them to unlock things encourages them to play through more of the content.
The thing is, because unlockable content is so standard a lot of designers just automatically include it without considering whether it’s appropriate for a particular game or not.
