Back Door Shenanigans

(alternate title: "Our Freedooom!" Universalis)

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"She ran underneath the table

He could see she was unable

[...] 

So they came in through the out-way

It was Sunday but a black day "

Michael Jackson - Smooth Criminal

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The Marquis of Baltakhand rushes to the defense of his allies! (Mostly because it's good eatin'.)

Now this is how you farm XP

Unsatisfying sieges were one of the original Mount&Blade's biggest flaws. There'd be one ladder up against a castle wall and the attackers would file up it constantly cut down hoping for a defender to get arrowed in the face just as one of them reached the top to secure a foothold. Bannerlord spiced it up with more convoluted walls with multiple access points. But the AI is programmed to instead bank on hitting you before you can muster reinforcements, so it'll rush an assault as soon as its siege weapons are finished, before they have a chance to breach the walls. In this case (wish I'd've written down the fort's name) a snaking road up to the gate gave me time to destroy their battering ram, leaving the AI to send its soldiers to one side of the fort where the only two ladders were close together. It was a perfect storm, especially as I'd equipped a bow instead of my usual crossbow, and found a flanking vantage point near a barrel of infinite arrows.

I ended up personally downing an eighth of the enemy force, 118 kills in one combat. Yeah, no kidding I skilled up six times. (And yet it was still only worth 13 renown! Come on, if this doesn't earn you a ballad in the taverns...) But due to its mix of army management and RP stats, a setup where the player's personal kill count strongly impacts a battle is unusual for Bannerlord.

 

As a rare departure from the norm of multi-pronged combat, such an occurrence makes a memorable story. But for the most part, providing only one way forward yields dull repetitiveness, and even multiple routes can be undercut by clashing with genre conventions.*

 

For instance I've been thoroughly enjoying Cyberpunk 2077's side quests. Multi-level maps with just enough line-of-sight blocking to make you plan your next move, complex without being needlessly convoluted. In fact Night City as a whole makes for some quaint parkour gameplay, almost always providing a dumpster to use as cover, a back-alley you can cut across, a rooftop from which to open a fight with a terrain advantage or a wall you can jump over. Seriously, fortified ankles: best eddies I ever spent. And its cop scanner and gig missions are most often placed on rooftops with alternate access or inside buildings with back doors or skylights if you just circle around casing the joint a bit. But where skill checks come into play, C77's top-notch level design trips into its terrible decision to level-scale the whole damn game.

At character level 33/60, in a zone mid-way from newbietown to the rumored end-game, I reasonably expected a skill level of 17/20 would see me through any gig requirements, especially as (unlike, say, the cyberpsychos) it's not even meant as a difficult mission. But the level-scaling apparently applies to skill checks as well, counterproductively turning alternate routes into demands for min-maxing. Doesn't help that C77 is very obviously an FPS with some minimally-balanced RP-lite elements.

 

I got thinking about this topic last year while playing Baldur's Gate 3, which in contrast to its older cRPG inspirations supplies plenty of diplomacy and especially stealth alternatives, as well as occasional items and spells as solutions or shortcuts. But its propensity for jump-scare event triggers and unadvertised enemy abilities forces inordinate re-loads to find such alternates by trial and error. Morever, as I noted when discussing its strategic side, this often haphazard intersection of options blurred the line between valid strategy and just cheesing enemy AI, and you were more often than not forced to abuse reloads to even discover what an encounter was about.

 

But if you want a counterpoint in strictly regimented options for advancement, try Iron Tower's games. I switched back to C77 from frustration at having to constantly reload in Colony Ship: A Post-Longwinded Roleplaying Title. Though slightly toned down from Age of Decadence's absolute demand for min-maxing, it's still damn near impossible to do anything outside a path you choose from the start. Even by the end of Chapter 1 (of 3) your skill checks require 6/10 points. Nearing the end of Chapter 2 I'm finding fights increasingly impossible, which also makes it impossible to skill up my weapon-handlling for future fights.

Of course, Iron Tower has a somewhat unusual design philosophy for this era. You're meant to run across occasional impossible tasks depending on your skill setup, each quest a do-or-die proposition, with the campaign as a whole using these individual quests and encounters as alternate paths to the ending. On a visceral level as a monkey with a (joy)stick who just wants to break shit, I'll admit it's incredibly frustrating to run up against so much unbreakable shit. Intellectually though, I can appreciate and even applaud a change of pace from the usual video game power fantasy, from The Elder Scrolls' routine of being head of every guild.

 

If we look from RPGs to strategy genres though, such alternate routes and solutions have been the accepted norm for far longer.

Even in a lighthearted, comedic game like Dungeons 3, the enemy alternates attacks through two entrances toward your town hall. Not too hard to prepare contingencies for both, but it does add some flavor according to your preference for traps or guards or nuking. (For instance, since your army can catch enemy squads en route while launching your own attack, you might leave your usual exit (your Black Gate) completely defenseless and stick a Shelob or two by your back door.)

 

Natural barriers and choke points, diplomacy and tech races, strategy was using all such options as selling points for a generation while cRPGs mostly patted themselves on the back if they included even one big diplomacy option (e.g.: NWN:HotU) And it's always more interesting when it doesn't need to be scripted, when you find a risky move growing out of separate game elements.

My last Europa Universalis 4 campaign was an opportunity to try out the colonial system (I'm lukewarm about it, but that's for another time) and since I'd tried Castille and Portugal in EU3 decided on Skawtland Universalis! I did manage to found Nova Scotia (then lost it to the Americans) had greater success in Africa and South America, but naturally the big question was how (or rather when) to deal with England. I grabbed a couple of provinces during a French invasion as part of the Hundred Years' war, but then got stuck in a diplomatic stalemate for a century. It was only when the American colonies seceded that I saw my big chance... and saw also to my dismay that I had zero chance of my monarch growing up in time to declare war. Experiencing a sudden patriotic burst of republicanism I swapped governments just to be able to invade. (I'd already founded the Anglican church on a whim, so why not go for a twofer in shortsightedness?)

 

But it paid off!

Now, swapping governments is not something you'd normally do on a whim. If nothing else, losing the royal marriage diplomacy bonus can cost alliances. But, due to my relative isolation, I spent nearly the entire campaign allied to France, Lubeck and Sweden, in direct contrast to my chaotic Teuton/Uzbek playthrough(s). I got a +2 position bonus to island nation government reform! And though I only took London and formed babbyBritain in 1783 (almost at the end, for the uninitiated) it still yielded a different route than the New World colonial adventure I'd been gunning for at the start.

 

Choosing between divergent approaches works best when it comes with a slew of other factors, gains and losses, triumphs and sacrifices, allowing the player to weigh their value. Take one of Age of Wonders 4's more recent "intrigue" events:

At some point one of the AI players gets dethroned by The Reaper, which then proceeds on a fairly aggressive program of expansion. You have an opportunity to run a quest chain to rescue the idiot who lost a bet with death... but then do you really care? Questing after all costs you time you could spend expanding your own empire, and The Reaper might just declare war on you before you're even done. So there's a time element but not a fixed one, a RP element (an alliance with Death is just all sorts of badass and I happened to be playing a shadow faction this time around) and a practical political element, as the Reaper's new empire has a physical presence on the game map. It may be a thorn in your side or a powerful ally or just a useful third party keeping others busy while you expand.

 

So, given D&D, the grand-daddy of RPGs, itself started as strategy wargame, why is choice so much more meaningful in Strategy than in RPGs, to the point even the roleplaying angle worked its way back into strategy before RPGs expanded strategically? As with stealth, the issue comes down to genre conventions. In this case min-maxing. Lack of nuance appears to have been a core trait of D&D from the very start, passed down to all its descendants. I don't mean just the often criticized good/evil dichotomy. RPGs are supposed to be about establishing a player identity, but that most often just boils down to having one stat higher than anyone else. The DEX dude disarms traps and the WIS bro casts cure wounds. Even when putting up an alternate entrance, it's as an opportunity for a player to prove superior stat allocation in one particular stat, because that's what feels like success and gets the dopamine flowing. 18 tech ability or GTFO. When establishing a party it's just assumed every stat will be maxed on some character. In single-player, single-character affairs, either you let the player max everything (grandmaster of every guild) or you can't lock content behind a stat check the player may not meet.

 

Strategy has no such limitation, because it has no such intrinsic expectation of single-minded simple-mindedness. It doesn't draw munchkins quite the same way - until you get to online actions-per-minute twitchfests like Starcraft which are in fact no longer strategic. In fact it's assumed you'll cover all your bases (offense(STR), defense(CON) exploration/questing(DEX) tech(INT) economy(WIS) culture/diplomacy(CHA)) to varying extents.

 

 

 

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* This, kids, is called a thesis statement, just like your eighth-grade language teacher taught you. See how it's preceded by a brief, mildly humorous and easily grasped introduction illustrating the point but not belaboring it, how plainly it's stated for intelligibility, how it's slightly offset from larger supporting paragraphs, summarizing to prime the reader for their upcoming evidence to that same point?

Werwolfe am being educational.

 

P.S.: I really wish Iron Tower had a bigger market share. Weirdly, despite their frustrating insistence on min-maxing, they've also proven themselves prone to impose different playthroughs depending on your character's stats, and thus apt to bridge this strategy/RP gap. Unfortunately as what feels like a garage project they blatantly lack the workforce to truly flesh out their games with all necessary options.

 

P.P.S.: Is it just me or does "so they came in through the out-way" combined with constantly asking 'u ok babe?' come across like buttfuckin'? I'm not crazy, right? That's a song about buttfuckin'!