What are game developers thinking? Seriously, could someone answer that question for me? I ask because I've been playing a lot of game demos lately, and, as a result, I have to say that I don't think many game developers have a clue what the purpose of a game demo is. I'm writing this little essay in the hope that either (1) somebody can explain to me how I've missed the point, or (2) game developers will learn something about their buying public.
To get right to the point, a game demo has one and only one purpose: to make people want to buy the game for what it is. It's all fine and dandy to make your publisher happy by releasing a demo; it's similarly peachy to be able to burst with pride at seeing your demo overloading the FilePlanet servers, though that's admittedly not all that difficult. But none of this matters. What matters is whether or not the effort that went into producing the demo results in people saying "Oh my God, I've got to buy this game!!!" after playing it. Developers, please make a note of this.
That might seem so completely obvious that it doesn't need to be mentioned, but after playing several demos I'm convinced it needs to be stated (and loudly) for reasons I shall now explain. Many of the demos I have played are either completely ridiculous in what they want to do to your system, provide an inscrutable interface without any documentation, assume that you must have played the game to which the demo is a sequel, etc. In short, they make it far too difficult to experience the game they're intended to demonstrate. Now, if you're a game developer you might want to respond (foolishly) at this point, saying something to the effect that any decent game is going to take some investment of effort, and the same will be true of any good demo. While I will grant the truth of the former, the latter is clearly false for several reasons.
First, I repeat: the purpose of a game demo is to make people want to buy the game for what it is. The game and the world it realizes are entirely familiar to you, Mr. Game Developer, but they are probably alien to the rest of us. I'm sure it's obvious to you, for example, that special unit x must cast amazingly-beautiful spell s to have a prayer of surviving battle, but trust me when I say this is not a piece of general knowledge. You need to hold the consumer's hand through the demo. At the very least, you should be giving tips about what to do, if not completely walking the player through the first few steps.
Second, let's be practical about this for a moment. Do you have any idea how many game demos are vying for my attention right now? I'm a relatively busy guy, and I like to spend my entertainment dollars wisely. As such, I have to make pretty careful choices about which games I buy. That's why I subscribe to PC Gamer magazine, and it's why I try always to at least play a demo before I buy a game. Taking a little care has prevented me from buying a single "lemon" of a game since roughly 1990, though Black & White comes pretty close to being one in my view.
What that means to you, Mr. Game Developer, is that your demo has about five minutes of my attention. Or to be more precise, if your demo isn't entertaining me within the first five minutes, it will be removed from my hard drive, which usually means you just lost a sale. Worse, since I have several buddies with whom I play regularly, you've likely lost more than one sale, as my friends will often buy games on my recommendation.
In light of these truths, a game demo needs to install quickly, run smoothly, be absolutely transparent to the player in terms of how it is supposed to work, show the player some of the highlights of the full game, and generally wow the player in every way possible. Game developers seem simply to be missing this point. Having made such a claim, let me back it up with some examples. I don't wish to be unfair to any particular group of developers, but, in the interests of brevity, I'm going to stick with only a few of the demos I have recently played. As such, it might seem like I'm playing favorites, when I really don't want to do that. Suffice it to say that the game demos I'm about to blame/praise were simply those demos that I finally got around to playing this last week.
The Freedom Force demo is a good one for several reasons. First, it installs simply and quickly, without wanting to eat huge chunks of my hard drives. This may seem kind of trivial, but, as I'll note with another demo, this isn't always the case.
Second, and far more importantly, it provides one of the most helpful walkthroughs of the game functionality I've ever seen. It literally provides big flashing arrows that point to informational icons, which provide data on the interface, as well as the other objects in the game that are worth using. Simply by following the yellow arrows and listening to the narrator, the player easily climbs the learning curve, as it's rendered a near-effortless and fun set of tasks to complete. This is exactly how a demo should introduce the player to a game, namely, in a fun way.
Third, the demo doesn't stupidly force the player to repeat steps if he already knows them. This is a pet peeve of mine with a number of demos as well as some shipping games. Black & White forces the player to undergo a truly annoying tutorial in its first land. Worse, the only way the player can skip this tutorial is if he's already played through the first land once, which will never be the case if you're a tidy user who likes to uninstall games, rather than leave them lying around. In contrast, the Freedom Force demo lets the player follow the red arrows, rather than the yellow, if he wants to get immediately to the main objectives.
Fourth, and better still, the Freedom Force demo provides exactly the right balance. It gives the player a good feel for the game, while hinting at the far greater treats that the full game will provide. The character-creation tools alone, which the demo was careful to highlight, are practically worth the price of entry themselves. The ability to hand-generate a character with such care and attention to detail is wonderful. Clearly, the Freedom Force demo is a winner, and I can virtually guarantee you I'll be buying a copy of the game on the strength of the demo alone. Overall, it provided a very fun, 15 - 20 minute, representative "taste", and that's exactly how it is supposed to make me want to buy the full game.
The Arcanum demo has some things going for it, but my overall experience with it is a bad one for several reasons. First, it gets off to a bad start because it is a serious pig when it comes to installing for a couple of reasons. First, when I started the installer, I thought it had locked up, as it sat there with the preparing-to-install message for almost two full minutes before anything else happened. That wouldn't be such a surprise except for the fact that my system is pretty beefy (an Athlon 1700+ CPU, 512 MB of physical RAM, a GeForce3 Ti200 video card, etc.) as present standards go. That's a long time to sit there preparing to install. Second, and worse, after such a lengthy preparatory period, the rather largish demo refused to install on my machine at all. The reason? It wanted a mere 504 MB on my Windows drive and 300 MB on my installation drive.
I've learned over the years to keep Windows installed on a partition of its own. That way, when it crashes and craps all over the FAT table, partition table, or other vital disk structures, it kills nothing but itself. If you haven't yet experienced this, trust me you will. As such, I normally leave a paltry few hundred MB of free space on my Windows partition, and that wasn't enough for Arcanum even to install. How lame is that? There is simply no way you are going to convince me that the demo really needs a total of 804 MB of drive space. That's just sloppy planning on the part of the developers. Because I had heard good things about the game, however, I whipped out Partition Magic, which I recommend highly, and quickly reapportioned a gig of space to my Windows drive. That allowed the install to proceed, at least, albeit slowly in all respects.
Finally I launched the demo, and I was intrigued immediately by the options presented. The world of Arcanum is clearly a deep and interesting one. All of the different character choices, equipment choices, spells, technological skills and so forth open up a plethora of possibilities. I was impressed with these things, so I tried to create a character of my own, rather than using one of the predefined characters. Within a few minutes, I had put together a character, whom I intended to be primarily an archer with some later specialization in magic. I equipped him with a bow and as many arrows as he could purchase and began the adventure.
I quickly met the first NPC and accepted a quest after which I began to explore, looting all the dead bodies in the wreckage—if you've played the demo or the game, you'll know what I mean. Unfortunately, a nearby wolf, whose reaction to me was listed curiously enough as neutral, immediately attacked me. That's an odd way of construing 'neutral' to my way of thinking. At any rate, I figured this wouldn't be much of a problem, as my character reacted automatically to the combat, firing off his arrows in rapid succession. Unfortunately, he missed the wolf with virtually every shot. He did manage, however, to kill the helpful NPC, Virgil, with his wayward arrows. He also managed to expend his entire inventory of projectiles uselessly. Needless to say, the wolf killed my character mere moments later and the demo ended.
I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. If your game is so open ended and broad that creating a new character is so obviously open to failure, then you shouldn't allow it in the demo. Instead, you should force the player to choose one of the well-balanced, pre-created characters. The only alternative is to provide far more hand-holding so that the player doesn't develop a useless character, as I clearly must have done despite my attempts to the contrary. As it stands, I'm still somewhat intrigued by Arcanum, but I don't know whether I'll even bother trying the demo again or not. The overall "taste" I've had thus far is unpleasant. And because so many other demos are vying for my attention, Arcanum might just have lost a sale.
The original Disciples was a game I really wanted to like. It got pretty good reviews, and I'm one of those gamers, amongst a dwindling few it seems, who still enjoys turn-based games. One of my all-time favorite games, for example, is the original X-COM: UFO Defense, and while Disciples is a very different animal, the turn-based similarity is strong. I never bought Disciples, however, for a pretty simple reason: I couldn't figure out how to make the demo work. The artwork looked pretty neat, the sounds seemed good, and so forth, but the interface was so inscrutable that I couldn't figure out what I needed to do to make things work. When I saw that a sequel had been released, which seemed even more impressive still, I had hope that I could get a good feel for the sequel by playing its demo.
Alas, my hope was dashed rather quickly. After downloading and installing the demo, I tried to play it. There was no help to tell me which features of the game were even active, so I had to poke around the menus for a while until I figured out that "New Quest" was my only option. Once I began this new quest, I had to fuss around further to determine that playing as the undead hordes was my only choice of race. Once I figured that out, and finally launched the whole thing, I was presented with the game's interface and precisely zero help on using it. Maybe it's obvious to others how a unit should be selected and moved. Maybe it's obvious to others how to research things, build stuff, and so forth. Maybe it's obvious to others which features of the graphically impressive terrain should be investigated and which shouldn't be. None of these things were obvious to me. Worse, the game continued to offer zero help.
Eventually I discovered that I had to click a destination and click "continue move" to send my unit where I wanted it to go. Given that he hadn't moved yet, one wonders how telling him to continue moving makes any sense, but I digress. Unfortunately, my unit must have run into some bad guys along the way, which I didn't see on the map, as combat ensued. My lone unit stood against three formidable foes, and after only a single round he was near death. I tried to retreat, but he was cut down from behind. I then spent the next few minutes trying to figure out if there was any way to try again, to raise my undead unit, to activate any of the other units that I presumably had around the city, to replace the unit that had just died, etc. After a total of about ten to fifteen minutes, however, I simply gave up. The full game may well be very entertaining, but I'll never know, and I'll never buy it with a demo like that one.
There are two things very fundamentally wrong with the Disciples II demo. The first, and most obvious, is that it fails completely at demonstrating its features to the player. Note well, Mr. Game Developer, that your interface is bizarrely unlike any other game I've played, and I've played a lot as my reviews page demonstrates. Because of this, you need to introduce the player to your way of doing things. You simply cannot expect a player to know what all the little buttons do, what all the little hard-to-notice icons on the terrain indicate, and so forth. In short, demos need to demonstrate, not obfuscate.
The second and less obvious thing wrong with the Disciples II demo is that it is woefully small. I realize there is a fine line to walk between giving the player too much of the game and not giving them enough, but Disciples II doesn't even come close. You give the player a whopping single mission with only one of what seems to be about four races in the game. Perhaps if I could have made the mission work I would have found a wealth of detail in the things to be researched, buildings to be built, units to be made, and so forth. But even if I had been able to play the demo, I suspect I wouldn't have been any closer to a positive decision to buy the game, as I doubt I would have had enough information to make a good choice. At least, that's how it seems to me after being immediately stymied by the game's non-obvious mechanics.
If you're going to take the time to make a game demo, then it needs to demonstrate your game, and do so well. It needs to let the player enter the game's world as effortlessly as possible. If that means an explicit tutorial is necessary, then build one. If that means that a little hand-holding will suffice, well, that's fine too. Once you've held the player's hand up the slope of the learning curve, then you can pull out all the stops to wow him into thinking that life itself will be incomplete without the purchase of the full game.
If my comments miss the mark, or if I'm approaching game demos the wrong way, I would really appreciate it if somebody would explain to me why I'm wrong, as I would like to make better use of my time. If I'm not wrong, however, then I hope game developers will wake up and start paying attention to the most central reason that game demos exist: to make people want to buy the game for what it is. I've played enough bad ones, and I can't help but think I'm missing out on some genuinely good games, simply because a bad demo gave me the wrong impression.
05/21/2002