Portal 2 and DLC

The talk of the week is Portal 2. It launched on Tuesday, and it's fantastic. Just like its predecessor, it is filled to the brim with brilliant dialogue, clever puzzles, and some of the best sound design in the industry. It's only April, and it is already a contender for Game of the Year.

It also launched with an in-game store, and the internet is ablaze with rage. User reviews on Metacritic are decrying Valve as the worst developers ever, and upset gamers are swearing that they'll never buy a Valve game again.

It's easy to see why the Portal 2 store is divisive. Everything on it is horribly overpriced - skins and animations for the co-op characters are several dollars apiece. The bundle containing everything costs 60-70% of the price of the game itself. Even the most devout of Valve fanatics (myself included) have to admit that it's a shameless cash-grab.

But it's not the worst thing ever created. It's not even the worst DLC (downloadable content) ever created.
Nothing on the store affects gameplay; it's either quirky gestures to amuse your co-op partner, or skins to make your robot look slightly different. If you ignore the store entirely, you don't miss a thing. The game doesn't stop having great writing or enjoyable puzzles just because you didn't buy the ability to make your robot dance.

"Day One DLC" comes much worse than this. EA loves to charge you extra for content that's already on the disc you bought. Activision has no qualms about charging $15 for five maps, three of which were on the previous game which you still own.

Yes, the Portal 2 store is dumb. But it's inoffensive, inconsequential, and insignificant. And really, as far as DLC that isn't story-related goes, that's all I can ask for.

Complexity vs Depth

One of the biggest confusions in game design is the difference between complexity and depth. If a game has depth, it allows for many different playstyles, strategies, and possibilities. A game with depth will always have something else to discover. Complexity, on the other hand, merely throws extra layers between the player and progress, and it doesn’t add anything.

As an example, chess is not particularly complex, but it has incredible depth. Anyone can pick up the basics of chess in an hour, but experts can practice for lifetimes and still find new strategies and avenues to explore.

Strategy games thrive on a balance between complexity and depth. The interactions between various unit types lays out the general strategy the player will follow, but there are enough variables that no two games will go exactly the same way.

Kingdom Hearts makes a good example of both complexity and depth. The combat system has a considerable amount of depth. While it’s possible to simply button-mash your way through, you miss out on a great deal of the intricacies of the system. Some enemies are weak to certain types of spells. Enemies telegraph their attacks, allowing for effective use of the dodge and guard abilities to prevent taking damage. Combining abilities with your party members allows for team-up attacks. It’s possible to play through the entire game multiple times and learn something new.

The Gummi Ship is nothing but complexity. In order to obtain parts for the ship, you need to collect crafting components and convert them into ship pieces. These components do nothing otherwise and there’s no other cost to crafting them, so they could just as easily have been replaced with the final pieces. Once you have the pieces, you have to fight with a clunky interface to assemble the ship. And at the end, it doesn’t matter, because the base ship model is competent enough to clear all the Gummi Ship sections anyway. The entire system adds nothing of value to the game.

My favorite rant subject on this topic is Baten Kaitos, a neglected RPG for the Gamecube. Baten Kaitos used a card battle system (which already adds a considerable amount of complexity). Every card had an element, and opposing elements canceled each other out. This meant that playing a fire card and then a water card would completely nullify everything the fire card accomplished. Because the cards you drew were picked randomly, this meant that pure chance could destroy any attempt at strategy you made. All it added to the game was frustration.

Properly executed depth allows the player to experiment with the game’s systems and rewards the player for that experimentation. When done right, depth adds considerably to a game’s lifespan, turning a good game to be played once into a game that lasts for ages.