Ah demos. I used to play them when they were free on disc for magazines and before that on floppy disc for PCs.
Then I sort of gave up on them because my 360 wasn't wireless and had no hard drive. I played the scant few demos for DS and a few for 3DS because they were wireless. Now I have Wii U and have been all the demos on up on the service.
So I played a couple of demos recentely for what are guaranteed good games - games that have already been reviewed as good and the demos do nothing but put me off them. Hello developers, instructions! Walk me through it. Tell me what I am supossed to be doing!
Instead of walking me through the controls and game systems in a simple and logical manner, they just slice off a section of their game and drop you in cold. You have no idea what button does what, you have no idea what you are doing or how the game systems and environment interact with you. You see icons and markers that you have no idea what they do. It's completely befuddling and pointless. Sure if you bought the full game and whacked down a huge amount of money for a full retail version you would perserve and put the time in to make things work. But in a demo you expect it to just work not for it to BE work.
So they include virtual instruction manuals. These are somewhat useless and this goes for full retail games too. In the days of printed manuals you could have the manual in your lap and read the controls and whatnot and just press the button and see how things work at the same time. Now with these virtual manuals you have to either remember everything in one go or dip and out of menus constantly which is annoying at best, confusing at worst.
You would think with Wii U they would just put the manual on the touch screen and let you still tinker about with the game on the main screen - instead it puts the manual up on both screens which is a lot of good.
Mostly this is a developer problem, stop dumping random bits of your game down as demos and actually build a proper tutorial into it. Like a Zelda game teaches you to aim by taking you to a section where you would shoot some pesky birds or something. Don't developers understand that demos can actually kill a purchase as easily as it can confirm one?
Demos have been pretty bad this generation. I used to be able to play demos over and over again, but that only ever works with sports games these days. The chosen sections are always terrible, but I suppose most modern game design is not based around being enjoyable on multiple playthroughs, so there's less focus on each section being engaging, with the focus on the whole thing being engaging as a whole. Which makes putting together a demo rather hard because each section of the game relies on the pacing of the other sections.
Last time I played demos was the PS1 era when they came on discs. I remember having this one super demo disc that had TR3, MGS, Spyro and a bunch of other good games on it. The demo was what convinced me to get those games.
Going forward I just found less and less a use for them with the internet age and I more or less know what I will and won't like nowadays.
Best demo I think I ever played was the Final Fantasy VII one. It was basically the first 20 minutes/first mission of the game. It gave a clear and simple example of what the rest of the game would be like. Worked for me.
I think the douche-anus-fuckers of Ubisoft did a fine job with the Rayman Legends demo too.
I think the biggest problem is that demos clash with the design methodology of today. Nobody wants to just play a tutorial level, but that's what the start of the game is. And the start is the only thing that really makes much sense to demo. Fix up tutorial-based design and demos should start getting better.
Demos of games where its big setpiece after setpiece doesnt work cause you are usually going to get a crappy section and its probably boring. Action games work great if you include multiple difficulty levels and a nice sample or your moves, like the DmC demo, you could play that a bunch of times. I sunk a ton of time into the RE6 demo, it was over an hour long and it had so many ways to go about the action.
Same here. I might have spent fifteen hours with that demo.
Only once has a demo compelled me to buy a game.
Usually they have dissuaded me from buying games that I find out later (from the discount bin) I actually would have enjoyed.
So I don't do demos any more. I either don;t care about a game or know I will buy it regardless of any demo.
There was a recent study that showed that the more people played demos the less games they bought, so I guess I am not the only one.