Games Need Content Overload, Not Mechanic Overload

I touched on this in a previous post, but let’s talk about mechanic overload. Anyone who has played a modern “sandbox” game knows what I am talking about. Many games attempt to recreate GTA’s success by, in lieu of polishing their core mechanics, overloading the game with a cornucopia of unrelated mechanics. Let’s dive into why games like this hold my attention about as long as one of those dated magazines in a dentist’s office. Being reared on PC games, I have never actually played a GTA game for more than a few hours, so let’s talk about one of its many clones, Saints Row 2.

Saint’s Row 2 has Donald Trump crazy character customization. It took me over half an hour to create my character, compulsively looking through most options, and yet the game world is still littered with clothing stores that each offer similarly ludicrous options. This adds practically nothing to the game other than some padding. I did not get more enjoyment from this, although I am certain some people did. Opposite this, much of the tutorial mission has to do with the game’s third person shooting, average at best with some dodgy vehicle driving near the end. By juggling all the different games packed into Saint’s Row 2, none of them got the treatment required to make each one truly engaging. I followed the story missions until I got bored, then went hunting across the sandbox, blah blah blah, and ended up going on murder sprees until even that lost its appeal.

Even the truly wonderful sandboxes of recent memory suffer due to their attempts at widespread appeal. Fallout: New Vegas has a card game called caravan in it, and despite having played through the game at least 1.5 times, I have never once touched it. There are also casinos in the titular New Vegas that I took one look around in and never touched again. Imagine if they had taken all the money and time that these vestigial features took and used it to expand in the games already fleshy conversation system, or added a few new quests.

My unfounded explanation for the addition of said features is immersion. Of course in the real world you can duck into a clothing store and play dress up if you wanted, but I never once found myself playing a game, take VVVVVV, wishing I could change the skin of the player character to look different, or get a little pixel logo on his chest of my favorite sports team. It’s not even the case that these mechanics enhance immersion, transition with me to The Witcher 3. Gwent, TW3s card game, is fun. I actually enjoy going from town to town looking for new cards and challenging Tom, Dick, and Harry to duel, but if this fictional world were the real world, could you see people playing cards with some bloke who just rode into town? Or whipping them out on a muddy road during a thunderstorm? Reaching for immersion through realism is a lost cause, see The Uncanny Valley.

XCOM 2012s addition of customizable soldiers added nothing mechanically to the game, and therefore I rarely touched it. I don’t, however, have a problem with its inclusion in the game, because XCOM 2012 has a polished core mechanic around which all else revolves. I guess this whole post is a dancing around one major issue, focus. If a game has focus on what it is, then builds around that, even the least significant additions don’t seem so vestigial. The addition of collecting card in TW3 doesn’t feel out of place because you can always just ignore it and focus on the next quest (and the quests are awesome). XCOM 2012s customization can be eclipsed by trying to save wingeing anime schoolgirls from berserkers (don’t sue me Yahtzee). Saints Row 2 suffered because I spent a solid 4 hours doing shoot-em-up missions just to get forced into a driving mission as forgiving as Johnny Gat.

Games like this need to get their whole dev team into a room before a single dollar is spent and decide on their core mechanic. Who would want to drive competitively in GTA when Viper Racing exists? But if someone asks me for great turn based squad tactics game, I will invariably recommend XCOM. Manners maketh man, but mechanics maketh game.