"Find us a trapdoor
Find us a plane
Tell the survivors
Help is on the way"
Metric - Blindness
Let us discuss That Which Shall Not Be Measured. By which of course I mean my dork. But before we expand on that, allow me to slip the meatspace for a swell peep at the private affairs of single-player adventures. Let's start with a positive example:
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| Pop's pops a-poppin! |
From the first time I talked about Stellaris, I gushed "The interface alone should humble other would-be designers." Tooltips provide numeric data on pretty much everything in your galaxy, right down to getting down, to your loyal subjects' reproductive rate on each planet.
... fuck faster damn you!
one-two-three-hump!
one-two-three-hump!
Now, you may think procreative precision a minor detail, and in all honesty it doesn't come up often, but my current incarnation of the Feral Transcendence are Authoritarian Fanatic Xenophobes with the Syncretic Evolution background. I envisioned them as parasitoid bugs reproducing via an avian subject race.
one-two-three-oviposit!
one-two-three-oviposit!
With the advent of mechanical robots my Ferals no longer needed my Brooders in the workforce. Glancing at population growth allowed me to pick the most profitable time to flip their switch from chattel slavery to livestock, thereby tidily avoiding unemployment, new workplace construction, a labor shortage and a food shortage all at the same time. Care for a slice of Scroto?
The real lesson here: Bender the robot's got nothing on your average 4X gamer who'll Kill All Humans just for an appetizer.*
Back to my point: while I can appreciate adventure and role-playing, I'm a strategist at heart. I like to see the cards on the table, and then eat their babies. So with that in mind, I'm not too crazy about being denied information.
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User reviews tend to define it as "a city sim" and "you do all of the usual things" which just about sums up Tropico 4's practical side. Its real strengths are its unusual setting and its quaint aesthetics and humor.
I felt pretty good about my burgeoning bananaless republic until I realized I had no idea how I was winning. I was, in fact "doing all of the things" - placing housing and businesses and moving sliders and clicking "yes" on a lot of propositions but if you asked me whence and whither my money was coming and going I'd be as clueless as Penultimo. Even the most important routine financial event of all, the departure of a cargo ship, impacted the endlessly fluctuating budget only about 3/4 of the time regardless of what it was carrying. As for the current location of resources or when resource buildings "tick" or what exactly motivated drivers to drive at any particular time or direction, eh, fuhgeddaboudit. Most players seem to just blame traffic congestion for everything.
I'm tempted to classify this as merely a brilliant pastiche of the gormless managerial style of tin-pot despots... but still. In its ease and obfuscation (of bugs, likely as not) Tropico reminded me entirely too much of developers who idealize idle games which play with themselves while the player merely exists to execute scripts or click the singular appointed button unto infinity.
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While CDProjekt currently seems to define game design as abusing its employees and disappointing customers, some of its former talent co-founded one of the most intriguing little teams since Black Isle and Troika, 11 Bit. I still think their Anomaly: Warzone Earth shot itself in the foot via anti-gameplay, but Frostpunk ranks among the best games of its decade. Its predecessor This War of Mine is a bit fuzzier around the edges.
- and I mean that both figuratively and literally. It centers on uncertainty. Lost in a 2D war zone, you stumble among the rubble in search of food and construction materials for your home base, your perception limited to a cone of vision, your available destinations restricted by events outside your control. Though these same exploration, resource scarcity and base-building angles would later show up in Frostpunk, This War of Mine overplays them in an endless suite of loss conditions. Opened the wrong door? Game over. Built one wrong item? Game over. Didn't bring a gun to a location with only one guarded path? Game over. Didn't clear a location before it's rendered inaccessible by snowfall? Game over. Ended your day before the trader shows up? Possibly if he feels like it? Game over. Though it shares this harshness with roguelikes, much of what seems randomized in This War of Mine is in fact simply unexplained in the game itself.
Take character traits. "Fast runner" is fairly self-explanatory, but I defy you to guess what in-game advantage "good mathematician" or "talented lawyer" confer in the context of nailing boards to windowpanes. Also, given the strict limit of one foraging run per night, and the absolute need to maximize your resource acquisition early on to secure your infrastructure, you're apparently expected to restart the game thirty times over to memorize every single foraging location's peculiar loot breakdown and event triggers. Starting with character selection you're not told whether a particular group starts in the dead of winter or with one person sick, not to mention vices and hidden item values for trading or hidden guard bonuses.
For all its charm, This War of Mine is unplayable without cheating via online guides. It relies so heavily on secrecy as to negate it, especially considering the damn thing cannot be fast-forwarded or manually saved and has some inexcusably long loading screens, meaning every single time you need to restart you'll be looking at hours' worth of reiteration... only to lose again for being denied necessary information.
11Bit did eventually realize the absurdity of hobbling players to such an extent, as most these mechanics feature in Frostpunk as well, but in a more transparent fashion. You get a weather forecast instead of vague hints the temperature might drop, percentage values for productivity instead of a "handyman" character trait, timers for illness curing, tech and law trees revealed a step in advance instead of being blindsided by sadness and depression for arbitrary negative actions, exact values for outpost production instead of "some parts", etc.
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One of the most interesting games you've never heard of. Seriously. King Oaf Draggin' Ass will require future discussion, as it's notoriously hard to even categorize, much less do justice to. Is it a managerial choose-your-own adventure? Adventure strategy? Boardroom role-playing with epic fable recitation? Low fantasy agrarian idyll? Bronze age diplomacy simulator? A DnD "wish" spell expanded to a tribe's entire history?
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| ** |
For the purpose of this post, where the previous two examples stumbled into or leaned too hard on obfuscation, this one is outright built on it. You will need to make decision after decision based on verbal descriptions of superstitious primitives' hunches, ancestral rights and pride, encounters with talking animals, divine inspiration, self-serving legal spin and yes, dreams... in a low fantasy world where any or all of this may or may not be real (or relevant) from case to case. Overall, the experience can prove both maddening and captivating.
Aside from basics like the number of people in your town and the number of resources you currently possess, King of Dragon Pass will rarely favor you with the numeric values behind events. You're never told exactly how little or how much of a sacrifice or bribe will satisfy or insult a deity or rival leader, the odds of a raid succeeding, the odds of discovering something via exploration, or the myriad bonuses conferred by magic spells. In the example above, regardless of your hero's combat performance you might have won or lost anyway and will never know. On your first run you won't even know whether certain events have repercussions at all, and might be shocked, years later, to deal with blowback from a bit of trash-talk you spouted once upon a time or welcome an exiled child back into the fold as a hero.
So how is it that KoDP's obfuscation grates so much less than the others'?
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If I had to provide a positive counterpoint to Tropico 4 in this regard it would be another of Haemimont's games, Surviving Mars. While I've picked quite a few of its nits these past years, I was never left at a loss as to where my Martians' resources were disappearing or why production was fluctuating. Most events from equipment breakdown to crop failures to suicides in Surviving Mars can be traced through the interface from cause to effect. When unforeseen consequences do hit ("mysteries" for example) they are rarely limited to a single occurrence but built up gradually without interrupting basic gameplay. The unforeseen merely sets up a future challenge.
That seems to be the real issue: what am I getting, in terms of gameplay, in exchange for being denied certain information? In This War of Mine, the need for a space heater or a pistol on exactly day 12 or whatnot only becomes apparent when one of your characters dies or is incapacitated. A.k.a. Game Over. Rocks fall, everybody dies. In King of Dragon Pass, a diplomacy check can open up several future events each with their own decision tree. Good or bad, instead of being cheated out of gameplay by hidden information, you as often as not stumble onto further adventure. The same is true of Stellaris, where many of the event chains you stumble across among the stars prompt you with rather mysterious dialogues (just wait 'til you run into the Worm In Waiting) but unless you deliberately click the obvious End Quest button, those options will do <something> beyond merely set a failure state.
Games (in single-player at least) are not only about success or failure but about content. Information is content. Denying the player numeric values, process flow or precise definitions for his actions is denying purchased content, and must be compensated somehow.
Sadly, it appears we've expended our air time for today, but I do believe that by expounding yet again on the minutiae of strategy games, I fulfilled the requirement of dork discussion as well.
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* - and then there's Dwarf Fortress...
** Oh, and if you think interpreting bird flight as omens is an exaggeration of Bronze/Iron Age mentalities, go ahead and leaf through something like the Iliad.
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