Sean,
The very first games I remember locking significant amounts of content were during the PS1/N64 era. Gran Turismo and F-Zero X didn’t have all the cars and tracks available right away. Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, and Turok: Rage Wars didn’t have all the maps, skins and modes available right away. There’s actually a lot of discussion and debate in the development community about how much unlocking is a good thing, and at what point it’s a bad thing.
Basically, everyone’s figured out that if a player is no more than 10 or 15 minutes from a reward, he is more likely to keep playing (players like your reader, who get angry and quit because they didn’t even play for the 15 minutes necessary to unlock the sniper rifle, are the exception rather than the rule–there are far more players who will quit because they get bored when they’re not constantly earning rewards). You can complain that this is “artificial,” but the fact is it’s addicting, so it’s not going away.
Another reason a developer told me is they’ve found that if you just present people with a hundred choices right away, a lot of them will spend all their time fiddling with the choices and get frustrated because they feel like they can’t figure out the “right” combination. If you say, “Here are 60 guns, with six attachments for each gun, three lethal grenades, four alt grenades, a dozen perks, six pieces of equipment, twenty killstreaks, and ten game modes–choose your favorite combination!” a lot of players will say, “I don’t know what to do!” and turn the game off. Tell them, “Here are two guns. Choose one and go play Team Deathmatch,” and it doesn’t scare them off. And when ten minutes later, you give them another gun, they try out the new gun. Yeah, some people get mad and quit because they don’t want to unlock anything, but far more people will quit because they find too many choices intimidating.
But they’ve also figured out (with the exception of Nintendo) that players *hate* being forced to play single-player modes to unlock multiplayer content. They did this a lot last gen, but have stopped almost entirely this gen. They’ve also figured out that unlocks need to be lateral moves. For example, in Medal of Honor (2010), there are lots of big maps with long sight lines, where you are dead if you don’t have a scope. Except it takes forever to unlock scopes for the guns. Meaning if you are new, you just die constantly from people you can’t see. In Killzone 3, core functions of the classes are locked unless you play for hours and hours, which infuriated fans of the previous game. In MAG, high-level players run faster, have more health, plant and defuse bombs twice as fast, can heal each other, are less vulnerable to explosions, and suffer less recoil than low-level players. Low-level players have none of that. The most common thing for a new player to do in that game is quit within an hour.
You can eliminate much of the bullshit from video game analysis by adopting a simple Process/Strategy filter. What part of the game’s interaction is process and what part of it is strategy?
Games like Super Mario Brothers and Mega Man are very high on the ‘strategy’ side and low on the process side. In Mega Man, you can choose which weapon to use as well as what stage to select. Mario has choices as to what blocks to brick or what arc to jump at to progress. The parts of the games you really get annoyed at are the process parts. It would be those silly jumps in World 8 where there is no strategy, just ‘process’. Your hands and mind either process that part of the game or you don’t progress. With Mega Man, it would be the appearing and disappearing blocks and you had no other means like a Magnet Beam or Number 2 Rocket to get around.
In most racers, all the ‘cars’ that are presented are not actually choices. So many are copies and very similar to other abilities. Super Mario Kart only had four different choices with a clone of each to make the game viable in two players.
So I disagree with you when you say developers found that gamers didn’t like having too many choices. Just because you had different options didn’t mean there were different choices. Was there any HUGE significant difference between the cars? Probably not. “They found gamers responded better to having the content locked.” Since these were not actually choices, they end up becoming noisy process. You turn on the game and you get like a hundred different race cars to choose from. There is no way there is 100 different choices there. It becomes a process to filter the actual choices from the clones and repeats.
No one had any trouble having access to all of Street Fighter 2’s characters. They were all choices except for Ryu and Ken.