Art of Surprise: Is it a thing anymore??
Let’s take a step back into the past real quick. Remember back in the day when you had to lowkey beg your parents to get a certain game for you or if you was ballin’ since you was a youngin’ you got it yourself? Now, remember playing the game, let’s say it was Super Smash Bros. Melee (that amazing game) for the Nintendo GameCube and you’re playing the game and playing the single player mode, you beat it and all of a sudden the credits roll like they always do and you see a blue screen with a black shadow and the screen has words on it that says “A new foe has appeared!”, what’s the first thing you did?? You got super hype because you’re like “Oh snap! This person is in the game?!....AWESOME!” And it would be like that every time too because a new character would come and you’d want to beat the game with them and then another new character is available to be unlocked and so on and so forth. But to me the best surprise when you are just playing versus matches with your friends or against the computer and you played so many matches that one day you finish playing a match and you get that same screen with that saying on it, I know when that happened to me I LOST MY MIND lol. I was so shocked that the game had this in there and it was like with not only just characters but certain stages and certain modes as well and the best part about that is, is that it was all a surprise! See back in the day, the gaming company didn’t tell you who was going to be in the game or what was going to be in the game, it might’ve told you the base or what it was about but when you played it and earned everything like the characters and the stages you felt like “oh I didn’t even know this person or this stage was in here” and the game felt that much more to you.
Now let’s fast forward it back to now, most of the time when a new game is on the market or a news site has the inside scoop on a new game usually the company wants people to know what exactly is going to be in the game and sometimes I get why they do that because they want more people to buy it because it’s going to have this character or that stage or you can unlock this and that and then most of the time when you get the game that’s all you can do in the game and then go online and play with your friends. Now while that is fun and all I still like that little element of surprise with my games where they don’t tell me everything that is in the game and I can just have that same kiddie face I had when I was younger when I earned somebody and not know they was in the game to begin with. It’s those little things that can make a gaming experience so much better. While most games these games though make you pay for most characters or stages now (which is a whole different conversation) or you have to get certain DLC that can put it into the game for you that maybe free or hidden behind a pay wall, I think that took a lot of fun out the game because it now doesn’t add that competition anymore and it’s just like you can now get this stage if you have enough money for it or have some extra space on your hard drive and it eliminates that extra time you put on the game in order to unlock something and that little achievement of you unlocked this person or this place and you feel like you might get more bang for your buck. And I say that because now to unlock all these things you have to continuously play this game for a long time and it becomes more fun to just sit back and play it and have no idea that you might in the process of earning something new.
Now I am not saying that developers or companies shouldn’t tell us that certain things aren’t going to be in their games but I am saying that you don’t have to give EVERYTHING away either because if you just say the base and what it’s about people are going to purchase it if they are interested and once they see all the hidden things in the game or certain slots with question marks in it that person will then more than likely be like “......Wooooorrrdd!” lol meaning like ok we got some gaming to do here and they end up playing more of the game and end up having more fun than they originally planned because of those little or big surprises that they initially didn’t know the game had.