On Pacing: Open World Games & Live Service Content Pacing
Some half-baked complaints.
Had an idea for a post on pacing in games, specifically open world games, but I’d already started an idea for a draft a few months back on pacing in live service games so I’m going to bundle these together. If it seems like I’m doing this a lot well…
I finally got around to playing Hogwarts Legacy and…it’s great! For about the first 20 hours or so it’s a surprising 10/10, for the period at the start where you’re let loose on the school. Then the game starts expecting you to be spending time in the surprisingly vast open world around the school and things get really boring really fast.
I’m probably the world’s most casual Harry Potter fan. I haven’t read the books, I’ve seen the movies maybe once each, except the most recent spinoff one since it’d jumped the shark just a little too hard #TeamDepp. The premise of its world is pretty attractive even inasmuch as it’s nonsensical and requires tons of deus ex machina to sustain the idea that such a level of raw, versatile power is both ubiquitous and secret. But still, it’s inescapably cool, the idea that there’s a secret world of creative magic that you could become a part of by chance. So, I may be a bit biased when it comes to the subject of the game, but I honestly didn’t go into it expecting to be impressed. And yet!
The intro is a little lame and sets up your player character’s plot-relevant uniqueness but it’s mercifully short before the game gets to the fun exploration meat. The game is probably more beautiful than it needs to be and runs surprisingly well without AI upscaling. It doesn’t do an especially good job of living up to the going-to-Hogwarts fantasy. There’s a period for maybe an hour or two when you’re first let loose in the school where this is the case, when going to classes are briefly still part of the main story quest and the game is at its peak, but the game very rapidly drops classes as anything but pretext for drip-feeding you new spells. The school has a number of diverse locations that are enjoyable to explore and tons of little puzzles to solve, but also there’s so much gated by locks and the game drags its feet in teaching you the spell that unlocks them. The school is delightfully crowded during the day and suitably empty at night, but there’s never any consequence for being outside at night aside from quests that explicitly require you to sneak around. Worse still, one of the side activities that’s required to unlock better versions of the unlocking spell requires you to explore at night and forego the much livelier daytime.
The combat’s fine, I’d describe it as kind of a ranged Arkham-style—unsurprising for a WB game, the publisher for the Arkham and Shadow of Mordor games and the owner of all three if these IPs. You have a basic attack and then a variety of spells, but they all fit into one of three categories that all sort end up being the same within-category, which are simply prompt responses to various kinds of enemy defenses. Dodge or parry when you see the attack indicator, match the color of the spell to the enemy’s shield, easy peasy, but acceptably flashy.
The open-ness of the game’s world helps contribute to its sense of scale and wonder, but the game eventually ends up being kind of boring palpably because of its open-world-ness1. Do I think this is a problem you can solve? You probably could just by severely shortening the game, but I think that would unnecessarily cheapen the experience, is it doable without that?
I think these sorts of games should at least experiment with not having a main story quest in this traditional style. I think Hogwarts Legacy specifically could have benefitted from a main story that leaned way more into the school setting. You wouldn’t have to strictly time gate it or punish the player for missing classes, but tie the story to the daily rhythm of regularly attending classes and drip in character moments and overarching subplots slightly more piecemeal like that. You could maybe lean in to having a different plot for each House and have a shorter overall run time or otherwise divide it up, expecting players to repeat the game for each to see unique groups of characters and quests. The game’s achievements already expect you to be finishing the first act for each House.
I think likewise the game probably would have been fine with a quarter to a third of the open world it has. It’s impressive that they went so much of an extra mile but the surrounding countryside is both kind of samey all around and wholly unnecessary in a game (that should have been more) focused on Hogwarts the school.
Hogwarts Legacy is borrowing from a tradition of open-world-yet-story-focused games that go all the way back to granddaddy Grand Theft Auto III, and so I’m not sure if you can do one of these kinds of games and not do it along a narrative string—it’s been lindy for so long. Thing is, if you did you’d probably have something that looks more like Minecraft or other open world survival games.
Could you do Minecraft without the crafting? Maybe, you’d have to lean into focused encounter design sort of like the Terrarias and Valheims of the open world survival…world. Without crafting progression you might have to lean into character-centric progression, which is something that might mesh well with theming your game around school. We can borrow from yet another unfinished draft, and suggest including elements of time management and incremental progress that are found in idle games2.
This is maybe a me problem, because I don’t see many others making this kind of complaint. There’s maybe a longer future post trying to make the case for abandoning main story quests in games in the spirit of Story vs Gameplay.
The original draft I’m stapling this on to was about live service game content pacing, but I’m not entirely sure what the point I was trying to make was and maybe I don’t have all that much to say which is why the draft was in limbo, let’s bang it out and see.
In this particular case, the game I had in mind was the Outlast Trials. The Outlast Trials is another game I would highly recommend. You’ll get the most mileage out of it playing it with friends, less-but-still-respectable mileage out of playing it with strangers via the matchmaking, and in any case if you want a closer-to-its-predecessors horror experience you can actually get pretty close to that by playing it solo3.
I did something with the Outlast Trials that I don’t do too often, especially for live-service-y games: bought it while it was still in early access. For the most part, it was a complete game that merely could have used more meat, and clearly there was going to be more maps and adversaries on the way.
The Outlast Trials has a battle pass now, because of course it does. The problem here is that, like most battle passes, it’s designed to be a long grind, partly to incentivize paying to shorten it and partly to encourage players to stick with the game longer. The problem is, there being a battle pass is not a reason to stick with the game if you already don’t want to, especially if the new content it’s being packaged with doesn’t match the length of the grind that you’re now being tasked with. My experience bears this out: if I have a game that I’m willing to go back to in order to see new or seasonal content, there’s never been enough new seasonal or updated content to outlast4 the associated battle pass without extra grinding beyond the life of whatever new content was added. This is the chief problem I had with Diablo 4 too in the previous season. Strangely, D4 switched to Helldivers-style battle-pass-as-groups-of-rewards5, and that just ain’t it chief either.
The other funny thing about battle passes is that they’ve drifted towards being mostly cosmetics, in order to dodge accusations of being pay-to-win, but cosmetics both need to be worth grinding for and have diminishing returns if they’re not consistently high quality—why grind for multiple outfits if I already have one that I’m happy with. Cosmetics as collectibles are already a problematic idea when you’re deliberately vaulting them after a season ends too.
And that hits all the bullet points from the draft outline, not too bad I guess.
Also, no quidditch?? Come on…
The best single example of this that I’m familiar with is Melvor Idle. Runners up include Magic Research and its sequel (topical!) and Unnamed Space Idle.
At least in my experience, the game has vastly different vibes when playing it solo versus with others.
Teehee.
Need to find a better name for this.