The Problem With Demos…

By Plagiarize

This week saw the release of the new Serious Sam 2 demo. As someone who has long loved the series right back to the very first ‘test demo’ of the first game, this was a moment of great excitement for me. The charm of the series has always been it’s shameless in being a video game. There’s no pretence here. Stuff happens in Sam because it’s fun. They aren’t being serious at all, despite the name of the game. It’s about having hundreds of enemies attack you at once in vast open spaces, and ludicrously wacky enemies, weapons and secrets. Enemies spawn out of nowhere. It’s never been a secret or a problem because the game has a highscore, a ship’s cannon as a weapon, and headless guys with bombs for hands that scream as they run at you. Headless guys that scream.

Now, regardless of the fact that I loved the demo, a large number of people don’t. It’s way too short, certainly when compared to the last two demos. The Second Encounter demo had a good couple of hours of gameplay in it. One to finish it and then another to play it through on co op. It is considered by some to be the best demo ever. The level in the demo contains stuff that wasn’t in the full game and some people consider it to be better than any level in the full game. Anyway, as a result of the demo for Sam 2, a lot of people cancelled their pre-orders for the game. When people said ‘but it’s just a demo you can’t judge the full game on a demo’ they said ‘isn’t that what a demo is for?’. And it is… but you still can’t judge a full game on a demo.

Nonsense? Not really. In an ideal world, every demo would be based on the final build of the game, and showcase a cross section of the whole title, but this is obviously pretty impossible. The best games feature diversity from start to finish, and a demo is really rather too short to show diversity. A game that’s story driven, obviously can’t do the story justice, not without negating your desire to buy the final game.

The recent F.E.A.R. demo is an example of a great demo. It takes a level from the game, rejigs it, removes a lot of the story elements so as not to give anything away, and throws in a few scares that by all reports are different to how they are in that section of the full game. You get a sampling of the two main types of atmosphere, you get a more challenging version of the combat than an early level of the game would allow, and you walk away unspoiled. Half Life Uplink was another demo that did that rather well, some would say better than the full game.

All of the previous Serious Sam demos were remixes. The first was just a proof of concept that had models and art that were all redone before the game came out. The most recent Sam demo is reportedly half a level from the game. The complaints levied at it range from interface problems, to it lacking the true ‘Sam’ atmosphere.

Interface problems are an unfair thing to then hold against the full version of the game. The Operation Flashpoint demo had one of the worst interface bugs I ever saw. If you inverted your mouse, it inverted it in the menus too. Naturally the full game didn’t ship with that problem, but it still very much lodged in my mind. If the demo is this buggy what will the full game be like! I never bought Operation Flashpoint or played the full version to give it a fair chance, and now, years later, I regret it.

The Sam demo didn’t have any of the huge enemies or wide open spaces that the games are famous for. It also featured a lot of invisible walls that were admittedly too hand holding. They stopped you walking off deathly drops, or at times walking around a corner with no visible blockage. Hopefully the complainst about this will see the full version fix this issue, but of all the problems people have with the demo it’s arguably the most valid one to hold against the full game. If the levels have been designed to require invisible walls, which they never needed before, surely this will be an issue in the full game.

However, anyone glancing at a handful of screenshots for the game would see hundreds of monsters in wide open spaces, and giant hulking bosses lurching around. They chose to show off an area in the game that was unlike any area in the previous titles. Presumably so that people wouldn’t just say ‘oh it’s just Second Encounter with better graphics’. The level design in Sam 2 looks to be much more varied than before, and it’s amusing how quickly people have forgotten levels in the first two games that took place indoors in much tighter areas than you saw on most levels.

How can a demo for a puzzle game show the full games true depth? How can a demo for an adventure game do anything more than show off it’s gameplay mechanics and interface when the story is really the key thing? How can a demo for a rhythm action game give you an idea of how fun the full range of songs are? How can a demo for a 40 hour RPG come close to letting you know the merits of the full game?

So yes, while a demo is supposed to let you know whether or not the full game is worth buying, many great games had terrible demos, and occasionally demos make games look better than they really are. How can a demo show you that the game ultimately becomes overly repetitive or that the story turns to crap after the first few hours? Obviously it can’t. Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy demos really really strongly, but ultimately the full version is deflated by the story.

What should we take from demos then? Well if the game runs really well, we know our PCs are up to it, and that the full version will run well. If the demo is replayable we’ll know that the gameplay probably won’t become overly repetitive. The shorter the demo, the less you can say from it, and there isn’t really much you can accurately draw from a demo. We all know what a demo should tell you, but there’s far too many examples of demos that failed to do just that to take them as any kind of a benchmark. If you love the demo it’s a promising sign for the full game. If you hate the demo there’s still a chance you’ll love the full game even if it’s less likely.

The truth is, theres no good way of knowing whether or not you’ll like the full game until it’s finished. A demo from a finished version of the game says a lot more about it’s stability and glitchyness than one from a beta version. That Sam 2 may lose sales because of a poor choice of level and a glitch in it’s menus for the demo version is unfortunate, because all the previews based on hands on time with the full version of the game say it’s vintage Sam. Demos are important and can be a great tool for getting people excited about a game, but they certainly don’t carry the weight that so many people give them.