Consider the first 2 hours of Elden Ring using the FromSoftware method:
Starting with a few bewildering cut scenes that will remain largely bewildering until the end of the game, drop your clueless player into a hostile environment and ensure they are slaughtered instantly before transporting them to the tutorial area. Make sure to hide the tutorial in the tutorial area and instead lead the player to view a beautiful open world vista. It is important that everything in said open world is trying to actively hurt the player including sheep and birds. To somewhat orientate the player at this stage you might introduce an NPC but it is paramount that they do not shed any light on the players current situation but instead direct them towards an early boss battle they will be too underleveled to complete and which will induce cyclical trembling rage in the player. If the player is A) still playing after 2 hours and B) has not broken their controller we shall consider them successfully onboarded!
As well as your wonderful newsletter I also subscribe to the GameDiscoverCo newsletter which had a recent entry about the Meta Quest store and how it is experimenting with being a heavily curated store. Link below:
It seems to be working out for them and developers, do you think this could lead to other bigger stores adopting a similar curated approach or do you think that ship has sailed and un-curated stores are here to stay forever, even when faced with evidence such as the Meta Quest store?
Another great piece Nathan - thank you for continuing to grapple with the nuances of these issues!
As Elden Ring was my first FromSoft game, I would have bounced right off from a 2-hour trial. If I hadn't spent £50 on it, I'm not sure I would have persevered and reached the 10 or so hour point when the game finally started to click for me.
For those first sessions, I feared I had made a terrible, costly mistake. Having made an economic commitment forced me to give the game a far bigger chance to convert me (and to justify the purchase to myself...). My Netflix 'Continue Watching' list is crammed with films I gave 10 minutes to out of curiosity, but I've never walked out of a film screening at the cinema, not even Rush Hour 3 or 2016's Suicide Squad.
Even so - I do love a demo and have been disappointed by the lack of them on PS5. I would much rather try before I buy where possible and demos are the best way to get me to take a chance on games I would perhaps write off as 'not-for-me' on first glance, or turn something vaguely interesting into a must-buy. Most recently the Inscryption demo was an excellent little taster that pushed the game right to the top of my wishlist.
It will be interesting to see if PlayStation games' opening hours do get a bit more vertical-slicey. Will it make more games do the trick of starting in medias res with a fully powered character before zapping players back to an earlier, weaker character, a la Bayonetta, giving a taste of riches to come? Will developers instead speed up progression in those early hours or cram it full of exciting set pieces, and if so, will that lead to pacing issues and games being too front-loaded?
Will any demo or trial live up to PS2's Jet Li: Rise to Honor or John Woo's Stranglehold which I played again and again and again until I had saved up the pocket money to buy the full (slightly disappointing) releases?
Great edition as always Nathan! Had no idea about the time the industry was obsessed with ‘keeping the disc in the tray’, keep in mind I was very young at the time. Sounds like an interesting issue to talk about.
Consider the first 2 hours of Elden Ring using the FromSoftware method:
Starting with a few bewildering cut scenes that will remain largely bewildering until the end of the game, drop your clueless player into a hostile environment and ensure they are slaughtered instantly before transporting them to the tutorial area. Make sure to hide the tutorial in the tutorial area and instead lead the player to view a beautiful open world vista. It is important that everything in said open world is trying to actively hurt the player including sheep and birds. To somewhat orientate the player at this stage you might introduce an NPC but it is paramount that they do not shed any light on the players current situation but instead direct them towards an early boss battle they will be too underleveled to complete and which will induce cyclical trembling rage in the player. If the player is A) still playing after 2 hours and B) has not broken their controller we shall consider them successfully onboarded!
Hi Nathan
As well as your wonderful newsletter I also subscribe to the GameDiscoverCo newsletter which had a recent entry about the Meta Quest store and how it is experimenting with being a heavily curated store. Link below:
https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/a-heavily-curated-store-meta-quest?s=r
It seems to be working out for them and developers, do you think this could lead to other bigger stores adopting a similar curated approach or do you think that ship has sailed and un-curated stores are here to stay forever, even when faced with evidence such as the Meta Quest store?
Another great piece Nathan - thank you for continuing to grapple with the nuances of these issues!
As Elden Ring was my first FromSoft game, I would have bounced right off from a 2-hour trial. If I hadn't spent £50 on it, I'm not sure I would have persevered and reached the 10 or so hour point when the game finally started to click for me.
For those first sessions, I feared I had made a terrible, costly mistake. Having made an economic commitment forced me to give the game a far bigger chance to convert me (and to justify the purchase to myself...). My Netflix 'Continue Watching' list is crammed with films I gave 10 minutes to out of curiosity, but I've never walked out of a film screening at the cinema, not even Rush Hour 3 or 2016's Suicide Squad.
Even so - I do love a demo and have been disappointed by the lack of them on PS5. I would much rather try before I buy where possible and demos are the best way to get me to take a chance on games I would perhaps write off as 'not-for-me' on first glance, or turn something vaguely interesting into a must-buy. Most recently the Inscryption demo was an excellent little taster that pushed the game right to the top of my wishlist.
It will be interesting to see if PlayStation games' opening hours do get a bit more vertical-slicey. Will it make more games do the trick of starting in medias res with a fully powered character before zapping players back to an earlier, weaker character, a la Bayonetta, giving a taste of riches to come? Will developers instead speed up progression in those early hours or cram it full of exciting set pieces, and if so, will that lead to pacing issues and games being too front-loaded?
Will any demo or trial live up to PS2's Jet Li: Rise to Honor or John Woo's Stranglehold which I played again and again and again until I had saved up the pocket money to buy the full (slightly disappointing) releases?
Great edition as always Nathan! Had no idea about the time the industry was obsessed with ‘keeping the disc in the tray’, keep in mind I was very young at the time. Sounds like an interesting issue to talk about.