My PAX Prime 2015 was particularly nutty thanks to my only being there for Saturday and Sunday, and trying to squeeze in as many meetings as I could without dying running around the byzantine labyrinth that is the Washington State Convention Center. But thanks to a scheduling quirk, I had a couple of meetings back-to-back to check out a couple of hack ‘n slash action-RPGs in Blade: Sword of Elysion and Chronoblade, and it really brought to light just how much the free-to-play formula is causing these games to become not bad, but just way too similar.
Blade: Sword of Elysion isn’t a bad game at all, in fact it’s pretty darn solid. The combat has a timing-based counter system that gives advanced play a good feel to it. It has the standard array of cooldown moves, and even auto-battling, if you decide you just want to make the grinding as effortless as possible. And there’s the randomized loot, levels with 3-star systems, and admittedly a fun PvP mode where you go into one-on-one duels with other players.
The problem is not that these games aren’t fun or travesties to video game, it’s that these games are so difficult to tell apart sometimes. Like, I got to see Chronoblade, another hack ‘n slash game, right after Blade. The obvious difference is one of camera perspective, as Chronoblade uses a side-scrolling perspective more similar to old-school beat ’em ups and the like. But all the details I kept hearing sounded very similar to every other game on the market, and so many familiar details came across. Plus, it has a similar pedigree where Stieg Hedlund, designer on Diablo and Diablo II is involved. Granted, this is a familiar trick: Blade has someone who used to work on Dynasty Warriors on their game, and DomiNations (Free) has a Civilization 2 pedigree. While emphasizing the talent of these gaming veterans certainly speaks to the idea that quality of the experience is key, so much of these games are practically identical.
And that’s the problem here: these hack ‘n slash games are quickly becoming homogenized in the same way that match-3 games became back in 2010. I joked constantly on my stream of the games about Star Wars Uprising being so similar to Spirit Lords (Free), but that’s just par for the course. And I really can’t tell you that unless you really love the genres, that the differences between one game to another is more subtle than anything else. It’s the match-3 problem: any one game is totally fine on its own. But the problem is that there’s hundreds of these games, and the difference is in tiny-but-important details. And I don’t want to condemn either game, they’re both totally fine. But the crazy thing is that free-to-play is so chaotic right now that maybe Chronoblade or Blade: Redemption is the next big billion dollar game based on one little thing that one game does better than another. Or either game could wind up lost in the crowd of an infinite number of other, similar games.
Is there a solution? It might be some crazy risk-taking. Maybe Galak-Z: Variant Mobile needs to be free-to-play and doing some risky things for the business model. But then again, maybe there’s a reason why there’s a formula for these games: because plenty of smart people know what does and does not work for these games to retain and monetize players, and there’s mountains of research to support designing these games a certain way. But great games are made when they break formula, not when they adhere to them. And I fear that all these games? They’re going to only be as good as the too-refined formula allows them to be.
