Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
There’s a question video game fans have had to ask themselves with increasing frequency over the last decade or so of big releases, as various money-making schemes have become inextricably linked to the games we love: How much absolute bullshit are you willing to put up with in order to get to the actual game?
I found myself thinking about this topic this week on account of two games I’ve been playing that are, on the surface, pretty radically different: AFK Journey, a new (and frankly unholy) blend of mobile-style gacha game and auto-battling strategy, and this year’s much derided Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. Looking at one (a glossy, frothy blend of many of gaming’s most addiction-friendly trends) and then the other (an unlikely, gun-heavy continuation of developer Rocksteady’s beloved Batman: Arkham games), they couldn’t seem more different. But both share a single, somewhat depressing commonality: They’re genuinely good video games, once you get through the various money-seeking deterrents that have been inelegantly bolted to their frames.
Of the two, AFK Journey is more obviously comfortable with what it is. Gacha games—the name comes from Japanese capsule machines, with their random selections of loot and toys—come with a lot of gambling hooks built directly into them; when you’re building up a roster of “Hero” units that get randomly pulled from a big bag of shinies, it’s easy to slip in mechanics that encourage players to spend money to get just one more pull. Because AFK Journey also derives some of its mechanics from the world of idle games—i.e., titles that literally exist to present players with a big, artificial hill to slowly climb up—the opportunities to extract cash to speed up the ascent become basically limitless.
To AFK Journey’s credit, it hasn’t—at least, in the week I’ve been playing it—been absolutely hideous about this stuff. I still make progress every time I play without spending, and while I’ve felt that little itch from time to time (wouldn’t it be nice to power up Cecia, my undead murder bride, just a bit more before tackling that next boss stage?), it’s been fairly easy to fend the impulse off and just enjoy the game. Which is genuinely fun, once you scrape off all that extra material (and largely ignore the fantasy-standard plot). There’s a lot of strategy to figuring out how each of your units contributes to the team, and finding synergies between different tanks, healers, and attackers makes for a brain-bending challenge. (Including in its PVP-based Honor Duel mode, which forces you to draft a brand new team and pit them against other players’ formations, no spending required.) But engaging with the game does involve that increasingly standard gaming requirement of squinting, and trying to ignore every time the sight of a real-world dollar sign intrudes into the fantasy world.
Suicide Squad, meanwhile, is a far less elegant hybrid, a beast squirming beneath the various compromises that have been bloodily stapled to its flesh. Its mere existence as a co-op shooter, from a studio best known for capturing the essence of a character who fights solo with his fists and brains, speaks to the same market pressures that led a studio like Dishonored and Deathloop stealth masterminds Arkane to create the hideously compromised Redfall last year. Even once you get past the basic concept, though—and an opening chapter that shows that Rocksteady is still extremely good at writing superpowered characters, despite it all, sending your villainous reprobates through a cheesy museum “memorializing” the events of the Arkham games—the game assaults you with a post-prologue explosion of battle passes, monetized cosmetics, and leveled loot designed to relentlessly ping the part of the human brain that gets an idiot dose of happiness every time a number goes up.
Whereas AFK Journey exists in harmony with its nakedly mercenary structure, Suicide Squad struggles against it, desperately trying to find ways to justify daily quests and other symptoms of the prevailing gaming zeitgeist within its (actually pretty interesting) story of B-list supervillains forced to go against the planet’s A-list heavy hitters. Playing it this week (after skipping it at launch due to a combination of bad press, and other games making more pressing demands on my time), I keep finding myself having a good time, despite both my, and its, best efforts. The shooting is smooth enough, if not necessarily inspired. But Rocksteady is very, very good at making moving across a city with superpowers feel good, and the fact that each of Kill The Justice League’s four lead villains has their own unique traversal system only deepens the experience. (Harley Quinn’s grappling hook gymnastics are the obvious standouts, although leaping across the city as King Shark is also pretty damn fun.) And I can’t deny that I still have genuine affection for this universe, especially when I hear the late Kevin Conroy’s voice emerging from the mouth of the game’s alien-corrupted version of Batman. There’s a good game in Suicide Squad, and a great bit of superhero storytelling. You just have to get through, well, the bullshit, to get to it.
It’s not exactly a compliment to note that AFK Journey is the more elegant money-extraction machine, of course. (To some extent, there’s a weird dignity to the ways Suicide Squad is at odds with its own monetization; you can smell a lot of past fights in tense meeting rooms wafting off of each weirdly compromised choice.) And it’s not like I’m over here offering solutions; in a world where even a true oddball like Dragon’s Dogma 2 is forced to accommodate the whims of the marketing department, this trend is basically inevitable. But it is a question we’re going to have to ask ourselves, as more and more games find themselves with their core elements buried beneath increasingly elaborate monetization schemes: How dedicated of a bullshit archeologist are we willing to become?