The Civilopedia Is Not Optional

There are two games I want to talk about in the next week, and they both turn out to have something not-in-common. See, I've been trying my hand at Not Starving. Which is actually working out fine. It's the "Don't Get Blindsided By An Enemy I Had No Way Of Knowing Would Spawn On Top Of Me"(TM) that's giving me more trouble. Or the fifty-odd game mechanics that are explained nowhere at all in the bare-bones tooltips.

OK, here, look at this:

That's Age of Wonders: Planetfall's in-game "Imperial Archives" - information on game mechanics, damage types, units, buildings, everything you could want. It's a pretty standard feature for turn-based strategy games, as well as for the the more cerebral RPGs. There is no reason why it shouldn't be a feature of games. All games.

Sure, I get it, the spirit of adventure is a major part of computer games, wondering what's around the corner, hanging on the edge of your seat for every new plot twist, getting knocked off a cliff by a random dragon. Good times. But it has to be counterbalanced by the knowledge that playing this one game should not take up your customers' entire life. You could meet halfway, for instance, and only reveal a monster's stats after the player has killed a certain number of them, or reveal each building's particular numeric values after it's been operational for some time, reveal item stats after the player has used it for a certain amount of time. You could hint that "something" bad will happen every three days. But simply dropping a bridge on the player is generally considered cheap, amateurish game design no matter the genre.

I've seen Don't Starve applauded for having a "steep learning curve" which is simply not true. That phrase is commonly applied to games with a heavy strategic element, where you're given mountains of information which you have to balance and rationalize into a coherent plan of action. Games in which you die repeatedly simply by being randomly killed by features you were never warned about, where you're never allowed to see the numbers behind the events on screen, well, those games don't have a learning curve. They have a mindless repetition curve. They have a fake longevity curve.

Neither is this a responsibility to be pawned off to an online wiki (and Don't Starve has a rather extensive one) not only because people might want to play it offline but because that information is logically part of the game. Unsurprisingly, the more I've learned about Planetfall's real numbers, stats and mechanics, the more interesting it's become trying to game the system. The more I've read up on Don't Starve's actual numbers, the more linear it seems, and the less inclined I am to try getting the same retarded chibis to rebuild the same base fifty times over. Even Dwarf Fortress at least had a pause button to let you look in detail at what's happening on screen. When a game's main selling point is hiding its own simple-mindedness, you have to wonder why it ever sold at all.