Today I was led to a little browser game on Armor Games called Upgrade Complete, which is a pretty explicit parody of meaningless reward systems in games. In case any shred of doubt as to its purpose might remain by the time you complete it, the endgame screen even explains its message: games should be judged by how much fun they are to play, not how complicated their upgrade systems are.
Though the core of its message is something most of us should be able to get behind, there are some flaws in the delivery. First of all, the actual gameplay (a small shmup-style thing) may be neither challenging nor complex, but the facts that there’s no penalty for failing a level, that levels are fairly short, and that you get to keep any money you pick up makes the game itself take a backseat to the upgrade system. The game is uninteresting, but it’s not bad, and it doesn’t get in the way.
Secondly, the upgrades actually really mean something in this context: the more you upgrade, the more ’splodes appear on the screen, and you get the basic satisfaction of blowing up loads of things at the same time. It’s highly doubtful that the game would’ve worked at all if it had started out the way it ends up fully upgraded and then never changed, but since the upgrade system has been made to literally make the game more fun, you get the joy of seeing the game improve as you progress through it. Perhaps what the creator was trying is to show that rather than games starting out fun and becoming even more fun as you progress, they start out poor and only achieve the level of fun they should have been from the start once you’ve upgraded fully – this has certainly been true for some games, but I would say that’s less a problem with upgrade systems as such than the result of poor execution.
Most importantly, the point of Upgrade Complete is to upgrade everything by the time you finish – in fact even once you complete the final stage, you haven’t completed the game until you’ve upgraded everything you can upgrade. That works for Upgrade Complete because it’s a game explicitly about upgrading everything, but in any other game it would be a poor design decision in my humble opinion: the point of an upgrade system should be to make the player choose between different options for character advancement or equipment loadout – by unlocking more upgrades, skills, or equipment as the players progress, you ensure that their options at the beginning of the game aren’t too overwhelming; then you open a steady trickle of new options so the players can slowly familiarise themselves with their options for customising their experience. You should never let the player buy every upgrade in the game, because it ultimately eliminates the element of choice and personalisation.
Since Upgrade Complete is a really rewarding game, what it inadvertently ends up demonstrating is that games can be fun without solid core gameplay as long as they give you a great sense of accomplishment and progress. That probably wasn’t the point. No matter how weak the satire is, however, Upgrade Complete is certainly worth playing for its wit and its humour. Give it a shot, it’s free, it’s short, and it’s hilarious.
I think I once played a similar game from the same makers, “achievement unlocked” I think it was called.
Hilariously fun and short.
Yeah the article that led me to it was about these parody games that have appeared recently, the Achievement Unlocked one was mentioned, as was You Have To Burn The Rope, Progress Quest, and Linear RPG. It’s actually a nice article, tying all these games together:
http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/07/creating-the-illusion-of-accomplishment/
Heheh, and I played all of them except “Progress Quest” . Obviously, I’m playing that right now
“You should never let the player buy every upgrade in the game, because it ultimately eliminates the element of choice and personalisation.” This statement applies only if every upgrade purchased cannot be toggled on or off. Otherwise, I would argue that you can’t perform the ultimate personalization of your character / ship / game / etc without having _everything_ at your disposal to pick and choose from, though the progress from beginning to end should give you enough time and opportunities to experiment and discover what your preferred combinations are….
You mean that it’s fine to let the player buy everything if the player can’t “equip” – or whatever – everything at once? If so, I would agree with that. The point is that there needs to be some sort of choice, and if you can acquire and activate every single upgrade in the game, the only real choice is which order to get the upgrades in – you’ll always end up with the same configuration.
I do think it’s more meaningful if you have to choose which abilities to get or equip some time in advance of the point where you need to use them. Guild Wars is a good example: you can have lots and lots of abilities, but you can only equip a very limited amount of them before you head out to fight, and you can’t just switch out those abilities in the middle of a fight if you find that you made a tactical mistake in your choices. That way, the consequences of your choices are more long-term, and you’re forced to think more about your load-out.
Another useful comparison might be Half-Life versus Halo. The former lets you carry every weapon at once, so the choice is moment-to-moment: which weapon to wield against this particular enemy. In Halo, you can only carry two weapons at once, so the choice is more long-term: which weapon to bring into this general area. Now compare this to an RPG like Mass Effect where using a weapon efficiently requires that you upgrade the relevant skill; you’ll generally be sticking to the weapon you’re most skilled with, which rewards you for making that weapon choice early and penalises you for changing your mind mid-game. Your character in Mass Effect may fight significantly differently than mine because we’re stuck with different loadouts tied to our skills. That’s very serious character customisation because respeccing isn’t as easy as picking up another weapon : )