I've been spending a fair bit of my free time (or at least, small slivers of free time between other activities) playing Nintendo's latest mobile offering, Fire Emblem: Heroes. It's a perfectly serviceable title, offering bite-sized tactics gameplay in a simplified package. I've been thinking two things in my time with the game: One, I should probably try to finally beat Fire Emblem: Awakening. Two, free-to-play games sure rely on waiting a lot, huh?
The game has your typical F2P mechanic of a stamina meter. Instead of allowing you to play for as long as you'd like, every fight you undertake will cost a variable amount of stamina from your stamina meter. Capping out at 50 points, your stamina meter will refill at a rate of 1 point every 5 minutes, or a little over 4 hours to go from empty to full. Needless to say, this puts a hamper on prolonged play sessions, but the game isn't too hampered by this. The battles in the game are incredibly quick, swapping out the occasionally over half-hour long battles with huge maps and armies in typical titles and replacing them with 4 on (typically) 4 short-form skirmishes. It's been incredibly easy to simply hop in during a short bit of down time, play a quick fight, then put the game away for a bit while you do something else. In all my time playing over the last couple of days I've only been unable to continue due to lack of stamina once. Where I can see it becoming a problem is with trying to train up new units, preventing you from playing multiple fights to get experience. It's annoying, but hardly gamebreaking.
The whole thing has made me think of how waiting gets used in other titles. For example, I've also been playing a lot of the MMORPG, Final Fantasy XIV. If you encounter interactive spots during quests, activating them will cause a short bar to appear, which needs to fill before you can continue. I'm not entirely certain why these appear (I assume they are either to allow time for the game to communicate with the servers or to ensure you're not being attacked by monsters), but the short little waits can add up to a bit of annoyance if you're in a rush. On the longer side, you need to wait for a party to be formed every time you join the Duty Finder, the "Looking For Group" feature in FFXIV which matches you with other players for dungeons, boss fights, and raids. The game leans heavily on the typical MMO class trinity of DPS (damage-dealer), Tank (damage-taker), and Healer, and parties found through the Duty Finder must have a particular makeup of classes. If you’re playing a Tank, a type of class which tend to be less common, the wait for a party to be formed is often instantaneous. If you play the more common DPS class...well, I typically sit around for 5-10 minutes before getting into a dungeon if I play when a lot of people are online, and I’ve sat around for as long as 30 minutes.
I try not to hold this against the developer. The shorter waits are typically only around a second long, even if I'm not entirely certain of their purpose. The longer waits are a necessary evil, given how FFXIV is structured and the nature of the classes: Everyone's playing DPS, so it's harder to find a group that needs one. But if you're catching up on old content, or just happen to be playing the game a lot, those short 1-second long add up to a pretty big annoyance. Meanwhile, those longer waits are a drag in any case, but they're especially bad if you're trying to run through dungeons multiple times in a row for special currencies or items.
These waits, difficult to avoid as they may be, end up dragging down what is otherwise a fun and relatively fast-paced MMO. But I've seen long waits like this work in other games. In fact, I'd argue it's one of the few things that worked in last year's No Man's Sky.
No Man's Sky is a space exploration and survival game, tasking players with making their way to the center of a massive galaxy. The game takes great pride in it's realistically sized planets and galaxies, even taking into account how long travel between planets would be. Depending on how far you need to go, it was often a couple of minutes from one planet to the next. A couple of minutes of nothing but a cockpit view of space, hurtling towards a planet that will probably have very little of note on it.
I remember when the game first came out, I played it on livestream so my friends could watch. One of them was absolutely astonished that so much nothing could be in the game. They were adamant that a game with this much time 'wasted' was no good. They were right about the game being no good, but in my opinion this time spent waiting was actually pretty cool. The developers, Hello Games, were going for a realistic view of space travel, and "a lot of nothing for a long time" is probably pretty accurate to what it would be like to actually travel throughout the galaxy and over entire planets. It made me feel more like I was really sitting there in my spaceship, hopping from planet to planet hoping to find what I needed to keep heading towards the center.
My most vivid memory of the game was when I spent a long while, something like 2 or 3 hours, on a single shitty planet with nothing on it. The whole thing was hotter than hell, around 80 or 90 degrees Celsius, hot enough to make prolonged time out of my ship dangerous. Worse, it had frequent dust storms that would cause massive heat spikes, upwards of 300 degrees Celsius. At times like this, my only respite was to hop into my ship, which I guess had the universe’s greatest air conditioning, and wait it out.
It was boring, and time consuming, but I felt immersed in those moments. Me sitting on my couch, turning on a podcast to pass the time, was not all that dissimilar to my character in the game, feet up on the dashboard, listening to something to pass the time while a storm rages outside. It was waiting, sure; I was doing nothing in this game I paid 60 dollars for, yeah; and considering the inexplicably long amount of time I was on this shithole of a planet I didn't end up with much to show but a couple of inventory slots and a new ship, both of which I could have gotten on any other planet. I honestly, truly don't have a good explanation for why I stuck around. But it felt really cool, y'know? Like I was a real explorer, dealing with the bullshit of a terrible place that I had to put up with for a bit. That little shitty planet made me feel more like a proper space adventurer than anything else I've played before. It was the only time playing No Man's Sky where I felt like the game had achieved anything close to its lofty goals.
When it’s done like this, I can defend waiting for the “real game” to continue. When a game isn’t forcing me to wait to try and encourage more purchases, or because there aren’t enough people running a dungeon, it’s possible for waiting to be hugely beneficial. I won’t deny it takes a certain frame of mind: if I wasn’t still on the game-just-came-out high with No Man’s Sky, I might not have had the patience. But those moments of peace, of taking in the view while I waited out a storm or flew across the galaxy, were my favorite part of the game. Not every game will benefit from forced waiting. But for putting you in a space, and taking in the sights, there’s easily potential for it to be well worth the wait.
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