We’re calling the wrong games “forever games.”
Over the course of the past decade, a trend has emerged in triple-A video games that found publishers in hot pursuit of the kind of game that players would come back to forever. The idea of a game that could be updated with new content indefinitely wasn’t new. Blizzard has been regularly updatingWorld of Warcraftsince 2004, and it wasn’t even the first big MMO. But the success ofDestiny, which combined the MMO-style drip feed of content and precious loot with FPS approachability, convinced a lot of games industry business people that attempting to turn every big game into an MMO was the surest route to success.
RELATED:Retrospective: Skyrim Has Remained Beautiful And Broken
Nine years after Destiny launched, we’ve seen most of its imitators crash and burn. Sometimes they launched rough (Fallout 76), sometimes they had a great launch but didn’t have enough content to sustain the long tail (The Division 2), and sometimes it was a combination of both (Anthem).
Even companies that traditionally made single-player games began developing games as a service. Crystal Dynamics, the team behind theTomb Raidergames, developedMarvel’s Avengers. WB Montreal, known for Batman: Arkham Origins, developedGotham Knights. Arkane, known for immersive sims likePreyandDishonored, went multiplayer withRedfall. And Rocksteady, the team behind theBatman: Arkhamtrilogy, will soon follow those games up withSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, a looter shooter. Fallout 76 is a success now, but it took a long time to get there. Kill the Justice League could turn out well, but Rocksteady’s decision to delay the game out a year from its planned 2023 launch after a negative reaction to its gameplay debut doesn’t bode well.
Worse, these games did the opposite of what they were supposed to do — be played forever. Marvel’s Avengers and Anthem aren’t online anymore, but players can go back to Tomb Raider and the Mass Effect trilogy any time they like. At this point, it seems clear that GaaS isn’t the way forward in most cases. Players only have time for so many games in their lives and, when they find one they and their friends like, they tend to stick with it. It’s a crowded marketplace, and Destiny 2, Final Fantasy 14, Fortnite, Apex Legends, and many others are vying for attention.
Players tend to approach single-player games differently. Because they require a finite amount of time to complete instead of an ongoing commitment, players can pick up a single-player game, finish the campaign, then move on — all without cutting into their regular multiplayer sessions long term. And, the kind of single-player game that tends to have a long shelf life are the ones that reward messing around.
I’m talking about games that allow for rich systemic interactions and/or have hidden depths that players won’t be aware of during their first playthrough. This kind of game gets “Players Just Discovered X In X Game” articles written about them for years after their initial launch. These are games likeSkyrimandBreath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, but also games likeCrusader Kings 3andDwarf Fortress. Games with robust systems that can ‘yes, and…’ the player and create chaos in the process.
This year’s biggest hits are, by and large, this kind of game. On Twitter,videos showcasing Starfield’s impressive ability to simulate thousands of objects’ physics at a timehave gone viral on multiple occasions in the weeks since it launched.Baldur’s Gate 3generates articles frequently about the kinky entanglements made possible through its romantic options, likea fiveway sex scene, and more mundanely, by allowing you to do things you would expect to be able to do, like stacking a ton of crates on top of each other so you can leap to an otherwise out of bounds ledge.Tears of the Kingdomplayers builtridiculous aircraft that could launch drones to eliminate bokoblins with extreme prejudiceand also discovered that the game’scrystal spikes could be used to play music.
These games let people tell stories to their friends about events that, much of the time, they won’t have seen in their playthrough. Their systems generate word of mouth and continue to do so for years after they launch. That might not be as obvious a money maker as a season pass or an in-game store, but it’s a proven method to give a game longevity. Gamers will still be playing Skyrim long after most live-service games are dead and gone.
