This is an IGN opinion piece from Mat Jones, who thinks everyone’s made too big a deal out of experience-altering mods, and wouldn’t replay a video game ever, even if he were forced to do so by vampires holding his family hostage.
I’ve spent the weeks since The Blood of Dawnwalker’s release nodding at headlines about how the time-pressured quest to rescue lead character Coen’s family – which is on a controversial 30-day timer – is the heart of the design, and that anyone looking to extend that clock with a mod wouldn’t be having the intended experience.
But, after reading that the developers themselves aren’t so bothered about the timer that they’d definitely want to add it in again – that a Dawnwalker sequel could strip out this mechanic and still inexorably be a Dawnwalker game – I’ve interrogated my own assumptions. I wonder if we’ve been giving anyone who’d roll back a couple of 0s on the odometer too hard a ride. Is the example of the “irresponsible modder”, someone incapable of understanding that developer intent should supersede any possible alteration, a fantasy?
The threat of a ticking clock is one of the first things you learn in screen writing classes: that a scene is more tense if there’s an outside force driving it forward, that a conversation which would otherwise just be two people in a room is twice as interesting if one of them really needs to get out of there. In a movie it’s contrivance; obviously the timer can’t end until it’s dramatically interesting. A game, meanwhile, has to account for your character learning they’re about to explode and then just doing their idle animation for their remaining twenty minutes of life. The idea of a long-tail timer achieves the same aim as the movie version, though. Every decision matters if you can only make so many of them, and everything has more weight if there’s a cost.
It’s unlikely that Dawnwalker’s modders, or any modders who’d take the time limit out of any game, are unaware of this. I’m cynical about trends, I’m not cynical about individual people. I can imagine someone who has reckoned with this decision has thought about why these systems are implemented, but eventually accepts their “vandalism” of the art as a small price to pay to overcome problems inherent to this scale of game design.
Many games don’t benefit from a second playthrough. I’ve been playing games almost daily for over thirty years. I’m more than aware of how much gristle and sinew there is among the meat. I’ve chosen not to go back to a lot of things that I’ve loved in the past because I haven’t wanted to do the same stuff over and over. For every great bit of combat design in the best open world games, for every narrative twist and turn, there’s a lot of looking around in cupboards for bullets or pissing around in menus trying on new shoelaces that give you an extra 3% poison damage. Dawnwalker is no different; the equipment variety that will help in the quest to defeat the story’s vampiric villain, Brencis, is as incremental in scale as any other game. I’m fine doing this sort of stuff the first go through, but when I’ve absorbed the majority of the experience, it’s a challenge to get myself to care again.
For every great bit of design in the best open world games, there’s a lot of looking around in cupboards for bullets or pissing around in menus.
If there’s, say, enough unique stuff in Dawnwalker for a player to only see 70 or 80% of everything in a playthrough, maybe just enough to miss a chunk if you were busy making other choices, but not enough to have a radically different experience the second time around, then playing it twice would just be pushing through a lot of the same things you’ve already done. Micro changes in context, but macro similarities in activity. If someone wants to see everything in there and they still want the goodie gumdrops school prefect ending, they’re being more generous to their own time and patience than they’re limiting their appreciation of art.
I respect people’s intelligence enough to believe they can be placed in a scene where the cost will be having to spend a lot of time they don’t want to spare, and empathise how much that would weigh on a person who doesn’t have it, without themselves actually having to carry that burden in their own game.
Personally, I don’t have any desire to mod the game to give Coen’s family a bit more breathing room, because I’m happy to accept whatever narrative conclusion I’m given as the result of my actions. I like the idea that my one playthrough would be informed wholly from my decisions, good or bad, and presumably expertly paced around the amount of time the devs think a person can play the game without it overstaying its welcome. Anything I miss, well, it wasn’t meant to be.
I am, however, willing to admit that my stance here comes with some baggage: I don’t really care that much about finishing games at all, at least when I’m not playing for review. I’ll often get very close to the end of a game and decide that I’ve seen enough of it. Star Wars: Zero Company has a very interesting take on the tactics genre and a few excellent surprises; I still can’t help but feel like I’ve experienced every possible combination of abilities it has available and I’m not really driven to repeat them. I’m a mechanics guy, not a story guy. If there were 100 possible endings, I’m never going to see 100 of them. Given that I will pay upwards of £60 for one weekend of a game I’ll get over without completing, I think anyone who would care to mod their ability to achieve a particular endings, or see more of a game’s story, inherently cares more about the experience than I do, rather than less.
This is beside my point, but it’s fun to think about: Why is narrative intent considered more sacred than aesthetic design? I’ll regularly watch clips of people playing Deadlock where characters have been modded to look like Lebron James in the Space Jam sequel. I couldn’t imagine anyone writing an op-ed to deride anyone doing it as straying outside of the game designer’s artistic necessity.
I’ve entertained the argument for being against modding difficulty, that games in the Souls series are easier than they get credit for and they’re more about the determination to continue, which you’d be robbing yourself of by not giving it your all. Dawnwalker initially feels like we’re having the same conversation, but the alteration made by modders isn’t necessarily making the game easier so much as it’s making the game less restrictive.
The time limit might be the point of the game, but really the point of the game, like all the rest of them, is to have something to do while your mates are out of town and your partner is at a work thing. I just don’t think it’s that deep, and if it were that deep, I think it’s as deep as doing a YouTube search for an ending you didn’t get, but you get to play a few extra hours of a video game you really like first.
