I know I'm late to the party with this, but I'm a procrastinator at heart, and I still have 20ish hours before February (and by extension, the GI/BI theme) is officially over.

I suppose I should start by what I mean by daily content. For the purposes of this post, my definition is - Anything that you can do on a daily basis in a game, once per real-time day. Anyone who's played Brain Age should be familiar with the concept, as the meat of the game - the brain training portion - falls under my definition. For those who haven't played it though, Let's start with some examples.



The first game(s) I noticed that had daily content were Pokemon Gold and Silver. When you started the game up, it asked you what day and time it was, and this information was stored on the battery-backed cartridge. Based on this information, the game "knew" what time it was as well as what day of the week, and these were both reflected in the game's world. In addition to the day and night cycle that determined when and where Pokemon could be caught, several events in the game could only be done on certain days. For example, the player could enter a bug-catching contest on Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday, and a different shop would be open in the Goldenrod City underground area every day of the week. For the most part, these events were limited to once per week. However, there was one thing you could do every day; if you had a Gameboy Color you could "Mystery Gift" - exchanging data using the IR connection with another player in the hopes of getting a rare item. The more recent Pokemon games haven't had events that happen only on specific days, but they've kept the idea of repeating daily content since then.



For a more recent example, we needn't look any further than The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. This game has several things you can do that are reset on a daily basis. As soon as your DS's clock hits 00:00, lots of things happen; the items for sale in the stores all reset, the apprentice guard in the lower left corner of the map gets new presents, the mailman has a letter for you if you sent a postcard the day before, and the Ho Ho tribesmen ask for a different type of treasure, or change their offer on what they've been asking for.

More recent games don't need to ask you what time it is because they already know. In Brain Age, Pokemon Diamond/Pearl and Phantom Hourglass, the date and time are read automatically from your DS's built-in clock. (I assume Animal Crossing as well, though I haven't played that game myself). What is perhaps the most famous example of daily content uses a different system, though.



You don't need me to tell you how popular World of Warcraft is. I haven't played for a few months, but before I stopped, the game developers introduced a new type of quest players could complete once a day. Up to ten of these daily quests can be completed in each 24 hour period per character... presumably the limit is intended to keep the game's economy from getting out of control. There are many daily quests you can do once your character is sufficient level. These are fairly diverse, and include such tasks as throwing stuff from your flying mount, fetching something for someone too lazy to get it themselves, rescue/escort quests, collecting various macguffins to turn in, killing X number of Y creatures and... well, that's pretty much it, really.

And that leads me into the "Bad Idea" part of this. By its very definition, daily content is repetitive. No matter how much fun it is throwing boots at disobedient orcs from the back of a glowing purple dragon, if you do anything fifty times it'll start to get boring. Be honest - you haven't touched Brain Age since you finished all the Sudokus, am I right? Similarly, WoW's daily content falls into the same old MMORPG trap of fetch quests, collecting, and hitting monsters until one of you falls down... but the grind is easier to see due to the unvarying nature of the content.



While I'm harping on the negatives about daily content, I should point out my biggest pet peeve - the reset timer. I've mentioned several DS games that have daily content - and each and every one of them resets that content when the DS clock hits midnight. Sure, I know I could do them all anytime during the day... but if I don't do them right after midnight, I tend to either A.) forget entirely, or B.) forget until 11:55 pm and have to make a mad scramble to get it done before the clock ticks over.

A disclaimer: As I said before I haven't played WoW for about 3 months, and this all may have changed since I was playing. WoW's system is a little more arcane than simply resetting at midnight. Each server has its own day/night cycle based on its time zone. Your limit of ten quests per day resets at midnight according to what time it is on your server. However, which quests you can do doesn't reset until 3AM Pacific Standard time... which is strange considering the servers are all located in California. For most people this works fine, but if you do quests in between the midnight server time and 3AM reset, you can end up not being able to do things on a true daily basis due to the server thinking you've done something you haven't or vice versa. It's especially frustrating for an insomniac like myself who wants to do them as soon as they become available, get them out of the way, and then go to bed.



Since this is Good Idea/Bad Idea and not just the latter, I should probably get to the good stuff.

Daily content can add value to a game by adding replay value. I'd have stopped playing Phantom Hourglass by now if I weren't obsessed with filling in my ship parts collection, so every night I load it up and hope Beedle has something for sale that I haven't seen yet. Additionally, I'd probably have stopped playing WoW a lot sooner than I did if the daily content hadn't kept me occupied for a couple of months.



The best daily content isn't repetitive. The Wii's Everybody Votes and Check Mii Out channels are good examples of this. Every couple of days there's a new poll or contest, and since they're player created, there's always something new. Booting up the Wii means there's something you can do, even if that something isn't neccesarily playing a Wii game. That's also why I think the downloadable player-created levels for SSB Brawl will be such a great idea, though I wish it were possible to save levels you particularly like.



Time to wrap this up... it's 4AM, I have class tomorrow, and I still haven't done my dailies in Zelda yet. So in closing, I generally like daily content, but it frustrates me. What do you all think?



Q