Divergence

"This isn't music and we're not a band
We're five middle fingers on a motherfuckin' hand!"

Marilyn Manson - Vodevil


Recently I played Spellforce 3, curious how attempts at melding role-playing and real-time strategy games have shaped up. Not great... but it did remind me of my Convergence post last year on the other logical genre meld of RTS with first-person shooters.

The concept of RTS / FPS logically grows outward from FPS into squad tactics and beyond, or inward from a desire for greater RTS immersion. In multiplayer the two viewpoints are complementary, with a player commander taking over all the fiddly bits of resource management and base building while relying on other players as autonomous peons and knights. Even in single-player, it mostly just entails a change of perspective. You still give all the same orders as you would in a top-down RTS, only from a mobile command center instead of the usual eye in the sky. Then once in a while, lead a mighty charge. You strategize while not engaging in direct combat, while not first-person shooting.

RPGs, on the other hand, come with their own suite of noncombat activities: level up, pick feats, memorize spells, chat with NPCs, violate your alignment. Good stuff, but it does sort of get in the way of placing gold mines and upgrading Tesla towers. The fiddly bits of RPGs and RTS clash. (Indeed Spellforce 3 mostly alternates instead of mixing them.) This is not just a matter of time investment or button mashing. Any RPG worth its salt encourages choices based on factors other than Machiavellian power-lust, whether it's supporting a noble cause or just building a party around a specific theme. Make a note of this, as it will come up in just a minute: the goal of playing a role is at odds with the goal of winning the game.

Perhaps most importantly, the customization which allows both RTS and RPGs to meld so well with FPS' otherwise linear routine of 'point and shoot' is redundant when instead paired with each other. As a strategy game commander, you don't need magic spells for healing or AoE fire damage. Instead you order your combat medics to heal your flamethrower infantry. If you want to do piercing damage from range you either upgrade your character with archery feats or you order a squad of archers to do it. Doing both is redundant. Units and tech tree upgrades are spells and feats. The wealthy in the real world learned this millennia ago: specialists are stand-ins for personal ability. Be a brilliant poet to word-smith yourself a stellar autobiography... or hire a ghostwriter. Knock down the enemy fortress' gates with a single mighty kick, or get twenty disposable random dudes from the nearest village to run at it with a battering ram, and just take the credit. But trying to do both at the same time is redundant and ridiculous. (And will probably earn you a ram up your ass.)

So while RTS and RPG elements can coexist, they cannot do so at the same time. They have to time-share the player's attention, not vie for it. Some titles have indeed managed to combine all three.

This is Mount and Blade: Warband, one of the best games ever made. My army's composition is a matter of strategy. Knowing I'd be fighting in a mountainous area, they're mostly archers and skirmishers. In a few moments I'm about to charge and lance a few of those oncoming bandits in full FPS physics-enabled glory. I also positioned my archers up this conveniently elevated hill, ordered them to stay put and will order the cavalry charge when appropriate. In other words, individual battles mix FPS and squad tactics. What's missing is the role-playing angle, which takes place entirely outside of combat: what kinds of weapons I specialize in, what kingdom I choose to serve, who exactly I'm fighting, what trade goods my wife wants me to bring back so she can host a party, etc. No stopping to shoot the breeze with a rival baron mid-melee.

In multiplayer, a similar split was achieved by the (self-destructed) FPS / RTS Savage 2, which also allowed players to customize their playstyle by upgrading gear in simplified RPG fashion. The team's commander needed no gear. His personal development was embodied by the team's tech tree. But that of course is a very limited form of "action" RPG reset with every 30-minute match. What about truly incorporating roleplaying into long-term strategy / shooter success? What happens to personal preference in MMOs?

I shortly re-visited EVE-Online during a 3-for-1 monthly subscription deal back in 2015-16 and while I'd been expecting disappointment, I found myself surprised at just how far it had fallen. Where at launch it had touted as one of its biggest selling points the ability to customize modular ships and equipment, a decade later it was filled with prestige class ships purpose-built to a single role and slotted with overspecialized equipment. If you wanted to take part in group content, you had even less choice. Alliances would only let you join the fight if they get to dictate not only your ship class but every single piece of gear you slot. The idiots call these cookie-cutter builds "doctrines" without the slightest twinge of self-analysis.

While EVE makes an interesting case study for its sheer scale of wasted potential, personal choice has been a problem in every MMO. For instance, City of Heroes had more than enough variety within its archetypes to allow players to break the usual tank / healer / nuker holy trinity. But good luck playing a Force Field Defender or a Dark/Fiery Armor Tanker. They were compatible with each other, but most players stuck with traditional roles of high mitigation tank and restorative healer, fabricating demand for each other to the point of excluding any other styles. In fact, go to any such game's message boards and you'll likely find them swamped with complaints about balance because such-or-other class can't get seats in dungeon runs.

In most cases this is sheer gamer stupidity. The less popular choices are demonstrably valid yet denigrated by the majority just for the sake of aligning themselves with the "winning" choice. And there's the rub. Winning. Multiplayer games are about winning. Your personal stylistic choice to play defensive artillery support instead of an all-purpose nuker, or a defender of the forest or a mace-crafter mean absolutely nothing when the latest dungeon has you charging forward constantly to burn down a forest and loot a better mace than you could ever craft. Your personal goal of role-playing means nothing in the face of fifty other players' goal of winning the latest challenge. So nobody likes multifaceted bards, and individual players become mere specialized appendages of their guild's strategic needs: nukers, healers and tanks. Heroes become units, embodying arrows or shields. Fingers on the communal hand.

If you want to institute role-playing in online games (beyond mere aesthetic decor) then remember it cannot occupy the same space and time as communal strategy... unless it becomes communal strategy. There must be some in-game benefit to not just playing a druid or paladin but to forming a druids' guild or a paladins' guild. There must be some communal benefit to making some moral choice like declaring cows sacred and having all members of the community abstain from killing cows. There must be some synergistic effect beyond damage numbers to render individual players' choices relevant in a larger context: multiple-school ritual magic, phalanx formations and cavalry charges, modular tiered crafting, pet breeding associations, sustainable farming rotations, anything so long as it incorporates individual player choices into some kind of communal victory. Otherwise, when individual and group interests diverge, when the fiddly bits clash, the individual always gets hanged as a witch.