Dancing on the Treadmill

"Circumcised for the operation

Full spectrum generation"

Beck - Novacane (sic)

 

Well, I got my second punky encore city to respect my authoritah!

When first commenting on Frostpunk 2, I remarked the oddity of its return to SimCity metropolitan RCI district strategy, when the original Frostpunk had been a noteworthy follower of Banished's cozier village simulator trend. Such a flip warrants remembering some of SimCity's flaws. For one, because you're not placing individual structures, you have coarser control over your city's aesthetic, and the farther zoom also blurs together the few structures whose placement you do control. In a more practical sense, progression can feel flatter after the first few districts, even with the ability to customize each via their two of many upgrades. You're building districts merely to keep pace with your population, not for any greater goal. RCI output feeding into each other's demands, keeping up with your growing mass of Joneses, instead of powering some distinctive escalation can feel like horizontal advancement, can feel like sidegrade-farming, can feel like sideways leveling, can feel like... eewww... level scaling?

 

Well, not literally, but even a vague impression of that moldy old gimmick sends me reaching for the next game on my shelf after twenty years of annoyance. Unfortunately, in that next game it is literal. After my first day's trek to the border in Cyberpunk 2077 I settled into hunting down random crackhead trash and keeping an eye out for police scanner rumbles and fixer gigs. Luckily, newbie island's proven entertaining enough to run a few circles around.

From random ditzes treating the local street corner doom preacher like a tourist attraction to the surprisingly well-paced and well-conceived side quest gigs providing a great deal more entertainment than older RPG "kill ten rats" fare, I've not yet lacked for engaging pique. That is except for every enemy and every piece of loot being exactly level 1 and being unable to find any higher gradations anywhere... until at level 5-9 I spontaneously start spotting harder thugs and second or third-tier loot and suddenly realize: well, damnit, there goes the neighbourhood. We're auto-leveling this shit.

Why?

Why couldn't Watson be a level 1-10 or 1-20 area from the start and just stay thus, a nice place to come home to like Santa Monica in Bloodlines, a low-key dive, a low-yield, low-payoff side attraction, a lazily wretched hive of petty larceny. Conversely in C77, if I were to follow the main quest skipping gigs, I'd presumably advance the plot to supposedly high-threat missions nonetheless filled with lvl 3 mobs to suit my supposed (lack of) playstyle.

Why do developers keep doing this? Why why why, you idiots, why would you numerically flatten an otherwise multilayered virtual world into some monotonous grind removing both risk and reward? Why trivialize the power, plot and personal progression? Why homogenize?

 

To answer that question we need look to a different genre. Old World's 200-turn limit for a score victory annoyed me at first, usually leaving time for one war before the final tally, but it is true that for the most part this serves merely to truncate the victory lap, when nothing changes yet you merely keep conquering city after city indistinguishably one after the next. Granted, there are more artistic ways to draw a finish line, Civilization's spaceship being a classic example, or other capstone projects of that breed. Even better, establish a timeline, adjustable according to player preferences (like Stellaris' early/mid/late classes of galactic events) so that the world's progression is neither frozen nor locked to the player's. Triumph Studios made a particularly good show of layering its threats in AoW4. Individual mob camps or spawners can grow somewhat stronger as time passes, yes, but your greater metric for progress is escalating the class of threat you address from goodie huts through spawners up through multiple-army, multiple-objective war campagins. As they've spammed more DLCs after launch (they're publishing through Paradox now so... yeah) they're added even more gradations between passive mob camps and AI players.

The "umbral abyss" seen sprouting darkly there in the upper left is filled with Lovecraftian tentacle-faces sporadically ambushing weaker armies passing by their entrances like antlions. Acting as a separate map layer (and poor man's teleporter network since they can connect at distant parts of the overland or cave layers) and damaging units in affected regions, it's basically up to you when to mount the time and resource-consuming expedition to clear out one or more of the Abyss' many scattered teleporter islands, which may themselves be barren, offer a couple resource pickups and nodes, or be occupied by spawners or entire cities of the demons. So no matter how close this particular threat sits to my capital (a.k.a. newbietown) it won't be until mid-game that I address it decisively.

 

A variety of challenges, neither completely passive nor forcing any particular order, letting the player organize his own campaign weighing costs and benefits. Could Triumph instead scale every fight to the player's army strength? Umm, actually yeah, very, very easily. Except as I remarked in the case of Battle Brothers or Urtuk, in a more tactical or strategic RPG such an approach rapidly waxes monotonous, and it's simply not a widely accepted gimmick. Ever since Oblivion though, it's in the more FPS-oriented RPG subgenre that autoleveling has refluxed up with such scathing regularity.

 

So don't tell me we're not dealing with different player mentalities, or lack thereof.

A proper sense of escalation is important to those who consider entire campaigns. But twitch-gaming FPS carries a quicker subsapient limbic payoff. A customer base merely shopping for "boom, headshot" will keep chasing that direct hand-eye sensation, not any more deferred or diffuse satisfaction. It wants only a reiteration of exactly the same fight, over and over endlessly shooting the same four enemies three times each. And I do mean endlessly, since RP-lite titles (whether FPS, Diablo-clone, etc.) are also most prone to stretching into endless games. So do endless games create unrealistic expectations? Of what? That the game will be forever interesting or that it will be forever the same? Are you shopping for an interactive adventure or a security blanket?

 

Moving RPGs into FPS interaction has always promised greater immersion, more natural movement and orientation, but such mechanics inevitably call attention to themselves away from the actual content they're supposed to portray. Twenty years ago one could have said the jury was still out, give it a chance... but I think there's more enough evidence by now of the continual pull such twitch-appeal exerts away from planning, management or depth and toward mindlessly repeating the same idealized power-trip moment of hitting the magnetic bullseye, winning a fight which looks hard but is always scaled specifically to feed you the same exact dram of undeserved success.

 

Are RPG mechanics now better represented in other genres not labelled RPGs? All that good old adventuring and alignment-shifting and stat-finessing? (I've pointed out before that "grand strategy" is just a way of saying roleplaying on a population scale.)

 

There's actually a problem currently in AoW4 with the mistwalker event (fairy invasion) which scales poorly with the slow game pace I prefer, hitting with nigh-unbeatable strength much earlier than similar challenges. In more than one match I've seen the mistwalkers wipe the board, killing both myself and the computer opponents one by one, by itself, making victory either impossible or assured. Should this be patched?* Yeah... probably... a bit... but I'd hate to see it lose all of its oomph. I've found it being somewhat out of sync with the rest of the game actually makes it more interesting.

So why am I not seeing a fairy-android rampaging through Watson?

 

Is Frostpunk 2 an RPG? Did Skyrim offer me any more role-playing than championing Reason over Tradition and neutering my city's criminals? And would Frostpunk's audience bother with it if your populace merely built residential, industrial and commercial districts automatically as it grew? When your character starts rolling all the dice himself, and they always come up seven, what the hell are you still clicking?

 

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* edit 2025/04/25: It has now apparently been patched. Damnit Triumph, quit undercutting my bitching.