Now Where Was I Then?

"I cannot see your face
Behind the tracks you claim to have erased
And since your place is gone
I cannot feel where you and I belong"

 

Chiasm - Incision

 

 

Having started ranting so long ago, I'm having some trouble adjusting to how fast games change these days, and the general wealth of options in newer generations of strategy or RPG. More than once I've bitched about something here only to fire up the game in question three days alter and find the developers had already patched the issue. The first I saw growing into its full scope gradually was Mount&Blade, but that took a decade and mostly fleshed out existing features. The DLC spam subscription model, while so often exploitative, has at least inculcated a mentality that games can and should be improved. This was not the case in the '90s or 2000s, when only fan patches made many classics bearable and fan mods were often more popular than the original product, e.g. Half-Life or Warcraft 3.

 

Which is to say, I was finally making some headway on 3/4 difficulty in Frostpunk 2 when the latest patch altered heat management and froze a chunk of my populace to chunks, turning the rest riotous and forcing me to start over. But I'm not mad, 11bit, I'm not mad, that's okay (assholes) because the change is a positive one, giving finer control over heat distribution and setting the stage for playing favorites with various districts, so it's a good thing, it's good, it's good they killed my city.

(*sob*) SOBs!

I don't know when I'll try again. For now I'm busy bein' Skawtish in EU4 instead, then maybe I'll jump into some medieval village life, then maybe an old-school RPG (I'm gettin' the squad management itch) if Rogue Trader's big content patch isn't out yet. Point being, this ain't 1995. I'm not playing "the" game that's all the rage at the moment, but picking my way through a hundreds-strong collection dating decades back. It may be a month before I return to the frostlands, and there's no guarantee I'll remember my friends' faces.

Did I already run the fishing cliffs map? Did I try the machinist/thinker combo yet? Have I run on oil alone? Have I ever sided with the frostlanders? Ponder the road not traveled, future me!

 

But of course even a city-builder's options pale before Paradox' replay/roleplay-oriented strategy titles. The Age of Wonders Pantheon of Nyctimus now contains nineteen werewolves, and it's making me feel senile while creating a new faction struggling to recall whether I've used particular skills and feats. Hence:

Hey, shut up, this is not weird at all. I'm sure perfectly normal, well-adjusted individuals maintain checklists like this! But since every single publisher is most likely already tabulating this information from all its users as part of marketing datamining of its customer base, why not make it available and sortable and cross-referenced for us individually in-game? Display it where relevant. Export it effortlessly in a clean, sorted, sortable format.

 

Why not give us access to our own character sheets?

 

Older cRPGs at least toyed with this idea of letting players export text summaries, and given the march of progress I don't doubt you could squeeze an image or two in there nowadays with little enough added memory usage. It's an issue that never cropped up until replay value itself increased in recent years. With strategy games taking on (or back?) so many of the features of RPGs, and both genres now offering so many options, and city sims following suit, isn't it about time to start offering me a sheet of my own overall character? Cross-referencing a plus, but even little tidbits like "you've sieged Diathma 13 times" might be funny to look up upon returning to the game after a long pause. As opposed to that vague feeling of "shit, I've already done this one, haven't I" halfway through a campaign.

 

To a limited extent, companies have already been doing this for a long time through achievements, but keeping track of your adventures is a personal concern. It's not well served by conflation with pissing contests over the most headshots or the platformiest jumps.