I often bemoan the fact that marketing or circumstances surrounding a game have a disproportionate amount of sway on the perception of quality in video games. “Bad” games can be successful and “good” games can be review bombed to hell. With this post I would like to look at why the situation surrounding a game is as important to its perception than its actual quality. I don’t think marketing brain washes people into liking games, but rather, it buys benefit of the doubt.
Recently, Highguard released to the dreaded “overwhelmingly negative” review tag on Steam, meaning most people had left a negative review. What interested me was that many of these reviews, even discarding the obvious review bombing ones, were written after fewer than 2 hours. I think this is a big sign that the game did not get benefit of the doubt. The terrible perception of the game from it’s failed marketing hadn’t afforded it that. So after 2 hours of not having a good time, the game was deemed bad and negative reviews were written.
I had a different approach to Highguard than many of these reviewers. I was actually rooting for it, I like a lot of the previous work of the developers. After 2 hours of play, there were a few things I didn’t like at all about the game, but instead of thinking they were bad, I was wondering why these elements were included. There had to be a reason, right? I had to play more to find out. I wasn’t necessarily enjoying the game more than most, but by granting the developers the extra benefit of the doubt, I didn’t leave a negative review (nor a positive one), and came back the next day to play more. This seems to be a trend as if you only take into account reviews with 2+ hours of play time, Highguard’s opinions are “mixed” rather than “overwhelmingly negative”.
This is something I’ve noticed throughout my journey in video games. If I’m invested in a game before I even play it, there’s a much greater chance I’ll like it. That’s exactly the job of marketing and franchises, getting you invested before you even play.
The first time I noticed this was in my early teens, when I pirated a lot of games. I noticed that I tended to like games I bought more than the ones I pirated. The monetary investment pushed me to try harder to like them, while dropping a game that cost me nothing was pretty easy.
This goes in pair with another of my big complaints in video games: tutorials are terrible. On average, the first hour of a video game is sub par. It does take some determination to get through these early parts to get to the good stuff. Without some benefit of the doubt, many good games would be dropped and deemed bad. Wanting to like a game is a really important factor.
I kind of get where you’re coming from but your dismissive framing means it comes across as out of touch, ‘old man yells at clouds’ type stuff.
The shift has far less to do with patience and more to do with designers getting better at integrating tutorials into the games themselves. Games now are designed to teach you how to play through playing, so reading a manual became unnecessary. That’s not a flaw, that’s an improvement.
The only reasons this wasn’t done earlier was because the field of UX was still developing, and because cartridges limited how much text could be crammed into the games themselves.
That said, there are still well-received games that rely on manuals, but it’s now an explicit design or aesthetic choice rather than something everyone has to do to make up for limited tutorialisation. Check out Tunic, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, or TIS-100 as examples.
I’d rather games only include a manual because they wanted to, rather than because they had no choice.
A lot of good older games had gameplay explained through play, but it wasn’t as common as it is now for the reasons you stated. Other people had to catch on and then learn how to implement the better design.
And there are still plenty of games that do a terrible job of explaining how they work or have complex mechanics with no apparent way of conveying it to players.