ColonySiders and the Definition of "Playing"

"Your dark satanic mills
Have made redundant all our mining skills"

Sting - We Work the Black Seam



I'm done with AoW: Planetfall for the moment and I'm starting on a final playthrough of Torment: Tides of Numenera. However, between strategy with a smidge of role-playing and role-playing with a smidge of strategy this seemed as good a time as any to retry a genre I normally don't bother with. Of course, Darksiders mostly serves to remind of some very good reasons why I don't bother with "action" adventure, RP or other such Gs.

Heap big buyer's remorse. I have no idea how I wound up owning Darksiders I and II, except they must've been on a pretty hefty sale as promotional material for the launch of Darksiders III and IV this past year... also I was just holding it for a friend and a virus must've downloaded it, and I was just asking the young lady for directions, officer, honest!

Unsurprisingly, being a mindless hack'n'slasher with Warhammer / Diablo aesthetics befitting a Saturday morning cartoon, it's also a console game, a gamepad button-mashing game. Due to a fair bit of redundancy in activated abilities / items, its controls seem impossible to map comfortably to mouse&keyboard. Especially galling since even if ability A automatically over-rides ability B (e.g. sword / crossblade modes) they will not function bound to the same key. And there are lots of keys. As noted about Don't Starve, any situations beyond "hit shit" boil down to one-to-one reactions: if X happens, activate Y.  I've gotten as far as the first real boss fight (Tiamat) which apparently puts me about 1/5 of the way through, and I'm not even going to try to beat her. Not because I don't know how but because from the first glance at the battlefield, I'm being put through a blatantly obvious sequence of events. The boss flits about my platform, out of reach. There are bombs I can throw and stick to her, and fire with which to light their fuses, and exactly one weapon with which to do so. The rest is mindless repetition to mold my nerves into performing the physical actions themselves and y'know what? I like my nerves fine where they are.

My own screenshot above illustrates just how much the concept of a "game" can diverge. Upon first entering that building, the treasure chest on the left was just a shadowy outline, inaccessible, and the mottled scalable wall on the right blocked by a weird red growth with a bomb on it I couldn't activate. As a veteran strategy/roleplayer I took obstacles placed in front of me as puzzles to be solved. I tried different weapon swipes, jumping up and down and dodging and trying to clip my view angle through the textures for a hint of mechanisms underlying these objects' inaccessibility. I spent at least fifteen minutes circling both levels of the building, wall panel by panel, looking for secret passages, tried hitting all the light fixtures and other potential hidden levers which might trigger some kind of "passwall" spell.
Of course, there never was a puzzle.
The chest automatically solidifies after you advance the main quest past a series of Eye-of-Sauron minibosses. The wall can have its bomb exploded after you advance the main quest past acquiring a throwing weapon. Your only task is to remember to backtrack pointlessly to the same point. Twice.

So, OK, screw that. I'll play a city sim instead. Those are multifaceted, player-driven strategic challenges, right? Wrong.

Aven Colony was developed simultaneously and would be best discussed in competition with Surviving Mars. Now, while Surviving Mars had its weaknesses preventing it from reaching its potential, it nonetheless offered an enjoyable and challenging escalation of costly expansion, resource acquisition, infrastructure balancing, large-scale construction projects and population management with several capstone "wonders" to round out its otherwise lacking end-game. Aven Colony features most of the same gimmicks: a "day-as-year sol" mechanic, construction via drones, air and water management, interior farming, but where Mars took some minimal effort toward a hard science baseline, Aven is entirely a pulp SF color-by-numbers routine with redundant phlebotina and structures. And I do mean endlessly redundant, as its city expansion seems to function according to the antiquated SimCity2000 approach of placing the exact same half-dozen residences, workplaces and commercial/support structures over and over again to create cookie-cutter neighbourhoods. Hospital. Fire station. Police station. Lather, rinse, repeat. Except this one's got three kinds of fire stations. Balancing workplace importance fills up a bit of your time early on to maximize production, but rapidly loses importance as your city fills up.

Worse yet, its only apparent end-game consists of nothing but whack-a-mole. Your buildings decay and can be damaged by storms and the "Impending Breakdown!" complaints start at 70% structural integrity with function loss at 50% - which means keeping your city operational boils down not to making correct decisions but to clicking the same red floating icon and the same repair button on 200+ structures. And again this is an especially galling (and obviously intentional) timesink since building construction is already handled automatically by drones which fly over to each site on antigravity to spew "nanites" at it. Where Mars actually decreases some of your micromanagement as you advance technologically (triboelectric scrubbers, automated food service, etc.) Aven banks on it.

Though I haven't played God of War, Darksiders has been noted as a blatant copycat of that earlier game. Aven Colony technically predates Surviving Mars, both likely being more inspired by past decades' handful of uninspired Sims/SimCity In Spaaaaace!!! colony-builders (Space Colony, Planetbase etc.) Their simplicity is not merely a result of copycats rushed out the door to steal a slice of the pie from worthier incarnations of the same concept. Nonetheless both Darksiders and Aven Colony share a complete lack of depth to their player interaction. Second by second, your objective is obvious and you're not meant to plan ahead, merely to react. Even taking the initiative to find "secret" bonuses in Darksiders requires simply destroying everything in sight until you get a cutscene showing the treasure chest appear.

We need some new basic terminology so as not to conflate "games" which the player plays by deliberately choosing and moving the pieces with "games" which play themselves out with the human element merely hitting the "repair" button every so often.

The point: yes, some genres are better than others. Aven gets called out on its simplicity and repetitiveness in most user reviews. In contrast, the complaints about Darksiders (and it's not hard to find complaints about anything on the internet) touch on weapon upgrade balance or level design but never bother calling it out on its simplemindedness. You accept being treated like a hyperactive idiot child simply by buying such nonesuch. Which makes me wonder why we don't have a whole sub-genre of "Action" City Simulators, in which the player merely clicks the "more money" pop-up button while buildings construct themselves in the background.

How long before the game industry obsoletes players?