Balancing hard-core and soft-core games for the next gen

Are you a hard-core gamer? Can you afford to spend 100+ hours unlocking the secrets of Final Legendary Dragon Masters of the Enchanted Mystical Mana XXVII? If you’ve got that kind of patience, we salute you! Not everyone, however, has your special powers, and that is a rather important question that game developers will have to answer in the future.

Both hard-core and soft-core gamers want to have that experience of being inside another world and playing a rich narrative adventure. Hard-core gamers have the time to finish a role-playing game in the mythical 40-hour time limit, but soft-core gamers don’t have that luxury. Also, while hard-core gamers (who are usually in their teens and often have less real-world distractions) can easily remove distractions from their mind and focus on the game in front of them, soft-core gamers (who are often older and have to juggle work, family, and gaming) are besieged with other things, such as the problems of taking care of kids or paying the rent.

The trouble now, as this Wired News feature states, is finding a way of supporting the fancies of both sets of gamers without cheapening the experience for either side. Clive Thompson writes, “If they develop a game aimed at the hard-core crowd, a wuss like me will almost certainly never finish it. If they do the opposite, the power cartel will blow through the game in (an) afternoon and feel justifiably ripped off.”

Game designers are starting to hit the midpoint, with episodic installments to the Half Life series and the pick-up-and-play nature of Halo. These are only FPS games though, and with newer games for the next-gen being somewhat higher-priced than what we’re used to (especially for Sony‘s console), both hard-core and soft-core gamers alike will have to hope that the newest set of games will really have something for everyone.

(Photo from www.virtualpilots.fi, taken July 1, 1999 in Lieksa, Finland. Thanks to Olli Korhonen. )

Are you a hard-core gamer? Can you afford to spend 100+ hours unlocking the secrets of Final Legendary Dragon Masters of the Enchanted Mystical Mana XXVII? If you’ve got that kind of patience, we salute you! Not everyone, however, has your special powers, and that is a rather important question that game developers will have to answer in the future.

Both hard-core and soft-core gamers want to have that experience of being inside another world and playing a rich narrative adventure. Hard-core gamers have the time to finish a role-playing game in the mythical 40-hour time limit, but soft-core gamers don’t have that luxury. Also, while hard-core gamers (who are usually in their teens and often have less real-world distractions) can easily remove distractions from their mind and focus on the game in front of them, soft-core gamers (who are often older and have to juggle work, family, and gaming) are besieged with other things, such as the problems of taking care of kids or paying the rent.

The trouble now, as this Wired News feature states, is finding a way of supporting the fancies of both sets of gamers without cheapening the experience for either side. Clive Thompson writes, “If they develop a game aimed at the hard-core crowd, a wuss like me will almost certainly never finish it. If they do the opposite, the power cartel will blow through the game in (an) afternoon and feel justifiably ripped off.”

Game designers are starting to hit the midpoint, with episodic installments to the Half Life series and the pick-up-and-play nature of Halo. These are only FPS games though, and with newer games for the next-gen being somewhat higher-priced than what we’re used to (especially for Sony‘s console), both hard-core and soft-core gamers alike will have to hope that the newest set of games will really have something for everyone.

(Photo from www.virtualpilots.fi, taken July 1, 1999 in Lieksa, Finland. Thanks to Olli Korhonen. )