Is Molyneux Right?
The fabled game demo of your favourite game is set to change according to Peter Molyneux, the CEO and founder of Guilford based games developer Lionhead Studios. In an announcement made in early june, Molyneux announced that for the eagerly awaited Fable III there would in fact be no demo level on offer; instead Molyneux has opted for an episodic approach, meaning that those who are curious about Fable III can play the first part of the game for free and then purchase the rest and carry on. His reasoning behind this, that demos are too costly to produce and don’t adequately represent the full potential of the game. This approach could however backfire on Molyneux if the first part of Fable III is incredibly dull and shows off little of the gameplay mechanics, or instead get lumped with a tutorial to finish. What Molyneuxs announcement does pose to developers now is what is to be done with the demo?
Recently many demos have been flooding the likes of Playstation Network, Steam and Xbox Live Marketplace, from your mundane yearly releases and triple A titles to the underrated sleeper hits and indie developed masterpieces, but how many of these accurately portray the sense and feel of the game that a consumer will pick up off the shelf? Demo levels are usually fall into two or three camps, highly polished sections that are in fact better than the finished game, shocking examples of gameplay that fail to capture the essence found in the full title or finally are completely accurate displays of what you can expect from the full game (these demos are extremely rare to come by). Typically demos seem to play out using a scant selection from the finished product or are new levels developed to show off the game at its best; it seems that both of these available options can mislead the player, which could be detrimental to the performance of the game or instead drive sales for something poorly made through the roof.
Looks and plays brilliantly. Shame the demo doesn't.
One such game that comes to mind is Blackrock Studios’ Split/Second Velocity, the demo for this game was by far the worst showing of what a game can offer in a long time, having recently now acquired the full game it’s a brilliant game full of intelligent level design, blistering speed and nail biting edge of your seat racing action! Now for anybody who actually knows me after playing the demo of Split/Second Velocity I couldn’t stop talking about how incredibly terrible the game was, the car on offer was incredibly sluggish, the AI was dull, I was promised explosions a plenty and there were very few, it was just a dull walk in the park to play; a prime example of a demo gone wrong, although this was probably not helped by also participating in the Blur multiplayer beta at the same time, a game where it felt frantic and fast and contained so much potential unfortunately turned out to be somewhat of an expensive flop with underdeveloped single player and some multiplayer functionality missing (anybody actually use the built in twitter app?).
So maybe Molyneux is right, maybe developers need a new way to display their masterpiece to the public and maybe Molyneux has the right idea with the first section of a game being free, similarly to the latest Sam & Max game (the Penal Zone); or maybe nobody is right and the demo is the best way available to reach the public, even if it costs a small fortune to develop a great demo that represents the game how it should be seen. How will developers manage to address the problems of 3D gaming when considering demo releases? So overall is the demo dead, or is Molyneux just exaggerating the issue?
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