BioWare revealed a while back that there will be a small amount of purchasing interactivity between their upcoming RPGs DragonAge and Mass Effect 2; to wit, if you purchase the game brand new, you’ll receive a code (one use only apparently) that will allow you to download a sort of armor that can be equipped in both games. This is an interesting way to do add value to the game as a new purchase as opposed to used. As far as ways to get people to buy the game new and avoid the purportedly developer-destroying used game market, I like seeing them add more value to the new version as opposed to somehow crippling the used version, but that’s completely not what I want to talk about here.
I admit that I am not necessarily the most rational person when it comes to things like achievements and completion meters, and this offer is scratching that achievement itch in a terrifying and primal way. People who share this obsession with me probably know the sensation; the only way I can honestly evaluate it is as a sort of insane misperception of the purpose of software. Normal healthy people get a little achievement ding, or see their percentage meter increment, or come across a WoW non-combat pet and think, “Oh, neat. I guess it’s good that happened”, but they don’t particularly try to engineer the situation to try and make these things happen; they proceed to the end of the game and either enjoy it enough to maybe play again, or sell it to someone and get a new game. People with serious hardcore achievement-itis discover that these functions are present in the game and say something like: “This is one of the functions of the game. I own the game; I want to trigger all of its functions.” For we poor souls, the experience is incomplete, the pulp not yet completely drained of its juice, until we have seen and done absolutely everything that exists in the code on the disc. Until we do this, it is as though the creators of the content have defeated us and mock us from our game shelf.
The kindest thing I can say about completionism is that it usually only requires me to buy a single game; indeed, somewhere in this gaming neurosis there lives a Depression-era hunger to wring the absolute most out of each gaming purchase before relucantly casting it onto the “played” pile. In my diseased brain, what Bioware has done here is announce that two previously separate games have been combined into a single $130 behemoth of leveraged synergy. To me, they are incomplete without one another. Why? For minor pieces of equipment, likely to be replaced early in the game.
And they know it. I am their prey, and the web has been spun.
-ssr
I’d like to take a few moments to discuss “The Tester”, this new reality show being put out by Sony and the good folks behind Flavor of Love. By way of establishing my bona fides to comment on this issue, I’ll reveal that I’ve been working in software quality assurance (i.e. testing), mostly for video games, since May of 2005. I’ve worked at publishers and developers both in America and abroad, and I’ve worked with literally hundreds of game testers. I think I can speak with some authority when I say that holding a talent contest to select a game tester is meaningless, deceptive, and foolish on a level that’s usually reserved for political talk show commentaries.