Breaking the Social Contract with Gamers (Returnal)
Contributed by DJMMT
I have a very interesting relationship with Returnal. This was actually the first PS5 game I ever tried. My brother-in-law got a PS5 considerably earlier than I did. One of the first games he bought was Returnal, as it was a PS5 launch title that got a lot of press attention. One day, I happened to visit his place with my wife, and he had the PS5 set-up with Returnal already installed. So, I decided to try it. Note that I had very little interest in the game at this point. Not only am I not a huge fan of roguelikes, though I have played a number of them, but I’m also not really into shooters. So the prospect of a roguelike shooter was extremely off-putting for me. However, I will try pretty much any game once.
Playing Returnal for the first time was an interesting experience, because I live in Taiwan. My brother-in-law has his console set to Mandarin, which is not surprising considering that he is a native-born Taiwanese person currently living in Taiwan. I have encountered this situation countless times. When I go to events like Taipei Game Show, the games are usually running in Mandarin. Obviously, this makes testing more technical games a bit difficult, but I’ve grown used to the process. I would never request someone to change the language settings of a system to accommodate me trying it out for 30 minutes. That’s a ridiculous, self-serving request that should pretty much never be accommodated, save for very specific extenuating circumstances. So, I tested my brother-in-law’s copy of Returnal in Mandarin.
With that short demo experience, where I never even made it to the first boss, I was sold. When I eventually got a PS5, I would put Returnal in my backlog. Thankfully, by the time I did get a PS5, Returnal was included in the PS+ collection. This meant that I would get to play this game that I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to beat, but was really interested in trying to beat, without having to spend extra money. Win or fail, the only thing Returnal would cost me is time. Which in gaming is the best trade-off you can hope for.
I’ve now had my PS5 for almost a year. In that time, I had never taken Returnal seriously until very recently. Usually, I would play Returnal casually while chatting with friends not playing the same game. I did try to get two different friends to co-op the game with me, but neither was interested after a single session. While I do really want to beat it, I’ve always been too scared to take it seriously. Probably because I wasn’t sure I could actually beat it. I’m not particularly good at hardcore shooters. However, when I play Returnal, the gameplay makes me feel like I can be good enough to get through it with enough effort. Since I was only playing it occasionally and extremely casually, I never managed to make it past the first boss until recently. Now, everything is a bit different.
A couple weeks ago, I was talking to a friend in chat and playing Returnal casually, as I had several times before. However, this time I was doing really well. For whatever reason, everything in the first biome seemed to be lining up. I got good weapons, good parasites, good drops, and managed to collect enough obolites to get several upgrades and artifacts that were actually useful. Eventually my friend logged off, so I said I’d play till I died before quitting for the day. I managed to go into the boss fight with the best build I’d ever gotten in a run, full health, and had a full heal consumable at the ready. Finally, I beat the first boss.
Defeating that first boss felt amazing. Not only did I get that post-boss fight adrenaline rush, but I also felt like I might actually be able to finish the game at some point for the first time. I ended up taking a break from the game for several hours and then going back in and completing the entire second biome in one session. Beat the second boss on the first try. That’s when a roguelike gets really stressful. Now I had a great build, the confidence to believe that I was good enough to make it to the end, and a crippling fear of dying and having to start from the beginning. I ended up not playing again until the next weekend. I literally would not allow myself to play Returnal outside of ideal conditions. During the week, I played other games. On the weekend, I went back in and continued my run. Though it was tough, and I had to use both a respawn and revive item, I managed to beat the third boss on the second try. By this point, my prospects of beating Returnal were real. Not only did I feel like I could beat the game, but I felt like I could beat it on this specific run. Then the game did the absolute worst thing a roguelike can do to the player.
By the time I finished the third biome, my build was great. For me, at least. Given my lack of confidence in my ability to beat the game, I played very conservatively and methodically all the way through. Every parasite, item, and artifact was carefully selected and managed to work to my advantage. Even the malfunction I had was a calculated risk that worked for my playstyle. When I went into the fourth biome, I was amped and confident that I could keep pushing forward, and hopefully make my way to the end of the game in this same run. Then Housemarque, the development studio, shit all over my dreams and hard work.
For those who haven’t made it past the third boss in Returnal, the game wipes your entire build when you start the fourth biome. You don’t die. It’s part of the story. You go through this whole epic cutscene where you think you might have finished the game, and then you’re dropped into the fourth biome with all your stuff just gone. I was so angry when this happened. I had 233% max integrity and 10/15 artifacts. I had the best weapon I’d ever gotten in the game, up to that point, and I was ready to kick ass in the fourth biome. I literally couldn’t believe that a roguelike took all my stuff as part of the story. This isn’t God of War where you get unlimited continues with a checkpoint two feet from where you died. Dying that far into the run would mean having to redo three entire biomes of rooms. While the bosses don’t respawn, that doesn’t change the fact that dying would still be a huge hassle this late in the game. The only way I can describe my feelings when this happened is that I felt betrayed by the developers.
The terms of the contract going into a roguelike aren’t great to begin with, but I agreed to them. And I respected them. Housemarque did not. While yes wiping my build was/is part of the story, that’s not a proper justification for why they decided to do this in this genre. And the thing that’s most angering about it is that it in no way adds to the experience. It’s just something they did to subvert my expectations. The problem, which so many devs don’t seem to get these days, is that subverting expectations for the sake of subverting expectations isn’t good game design. It’s just annoying game design. It wasn’t cool, inspiring, or even narratively necessary. It was just something that happened that impacted me enough to make me write an angry blog post.
I don’t need developers to try to surprise me. I need them to make fundamentally good gaming experiences. And I do consider Returnal a fundamentally good gaming experience, outside of this specific occurrence. At least from what I’ve experienced so far. But I am extremely unhappy that they decided it was OK to wipe the best build I’d ever managed to achieve for no reason other than to frustrate me and possibly stall my progress. They could have at least let me keep my weapon. Going back from a long-range auto-rifle to a pistol sucked. This may sound whiny, but it’s just not fair. Wiping your build without you dying in a roguelike is bad design, because it betrays the entire point of how the genre works. It should not happen. It should never have been allowed to happen.
To clarify, as I write this post, I’m still in the same run. Again, I only play Returnal on weekends in ideal conditions. I don’t play past 9PM, and I only play when I have at least an hour of free time. I’m still in the fourth biome, and I hope I can make it to the end of the game. But my build is junk now, because it’s basically non-existent. I’ve already almost died once in the fourth biome, because I don’t have anything. My 10 artifact buffs are gone. Thankfully, I was able to replace my weapon with a better one, but I don’t have any parasites, proficiency bonuses, or any of the other things I earned while getting that far into the game. I’m going to keep playing, and even if I do die, I’ll continue playing; but this isn’t right. Developers need to stop trying to break the formula just for the sake of doing so at the expense of the overall gameplay experience.
