War's Ails and Unscuffed Chrome

"It's so gorgeous to be back in Paris once again

Now I wonder what they put in the rain?"

 

Shivaree - It Got All Black

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It's a rainy day outside, but luckily modern man may at at time escape into alternate realities bathed in the undimmed radiance of...

Has anyone invented umbrellas yet?

...ummm, never mind.

 

A dreary, drizzly, drab and muddy day greets my landing in Hvalvik, as I begin testing the literal waters of Bannerlord's expansion.

Haven't managed to get myself into any naval battles yet (chickening out of the first and only one so far) but though as I said in my last M&B post I don't think this expansion addresses the game's real needs for more roleplaying and small-group adventuring, what's there makes enough sense in itself. The ability to call ships to large ports makes for interesting half-and-half round trips, for instance sailing across from Car Banseth to Sturgian lands, then looping around eastward by land. The stealth gameplay hinted at years ago is also finally making its way in. You can now infiltrate a bandit lair solo, stealth-killing your way through patrols to a signal fire to call your droogs in for the last big scrap. 

Be vewwy vewwy quiet.

Quite satisfying. But limited in scope. As detailed in my post on RPG timers, Bannerlord is pretty good at balancing costs and benefits for large things like sieges, but for smaller affairs like quests the benefit of running it yourself is dwarfed by the potential profits of continuing your trade circuit while delegating to your companions.

Well, sorry there, Rhyley me boyo, but cows are not a common commodity, and even if I look at the map and see a village selling them nearby there's no guarantee they'll have enough or at a profitable price or more importantly that I'll be able to loop back this way while still pathing to a trade hub or military objective. By comparison the bandit camp stealth run above is more of a known quantity. You need to wait for dark if you want to stealth it yourself, but sunset can be predicted. Other quests, like capturing prisoners or hunting mobile bandit armies that almost certainly will waste days of your time in the chase, are so unlikely and unprofitable that I've never accepted them personally after the first attempt years ago. So are they really part of the game? Hm. Dreary thought. Let's move on to sunnier pastures, like the scorching deserts of the U.S. Southwest where...

Knew I should've waterproofed my implants.

Well, crap. My first jaunt through Santo Domingo only cemented my appreciation for Night City, in itself, as a monumental achievement in virtual landscape design. There's no strict point of demarcation. As in a real city, the skyscraper canyons begin opening up gradually as you leave the downtown area, shopping centers and apartment blocks growing dingier by degrees, diffusing into an increasingly dilapidated shadow of what must have once been suburban cookie-cutter neighbourhoods, until finally, where the city dead-ends into the dam, the architecture itself loses semblance of habitability, consuming itself in unfinished, patchwork, geometric industrial utilitarianism. I nearly expected to find primitive adobe huts trailing off the end of this downward spiral. But note, I called it a "virtual landscape" and not a game. The downpour which accompanied my climb up the dam finally thinned and passed as I reached the top and turned to look back. At first obscured by sheets of falling rain, my journey gradually reappeared, the fringes and suburbs and shops and high-rises and then the gleaming skyscrapers.

 

I flashed back to twenty years ago while playing Oblivion, climbing the mountains east of Bruma to look back on the entire province. There: that's the spot where I'll hunt deer. Downhill there are Ayleid ruins I can dungeoneer my way through. Follow the river for some good herb spawns. Maybe head the other way to fight some ogres.

 

But Night City, for the incredible amount of effort and undeniable talent going into its construction, lacks even that limited gameplay relevance. The gangbangers you kill are interchangeable. The rest of street life is unchangeable. Too much of Cyberpunk 2077 is inspired by theme park MMOs' fixation on XP/loot grinding. Other than sightseeing, what may motivate you to revisit any particular spot? Is there anything in Northside you can't find in Santo Domingo? Individual sidequests could've been placed anywhere. Is the Northside of today any different from the Northside of tomorrow? At least We Happy Few distinguished polite from impolite society by mandating a wardrobe change and some mannerly comportment.

 

I don't know where I was going with this. Something about the recurring theme of rain, motion, change got my mind stuck once again on environment interaction and the relevance of time. Maybe I just need to ditch these grimdark game worlds where the sky's always the color of television tuned to a dead channel and try something more cheerful, something colorful and cartoonish with a storybook flair, like Wildermyth.

Oh, come on!

I was a bit disappointed when discovering the map zones lack any real personality, aside from your initial decision on resource production. I'm more about the world-building usually. (Which is why I just can't hate C2077.) But more than even Old World's dynastic character growth or RimWorld's Sims-like mood management, this one's all about nudging your randomized crew through randomized events, not only to maintain the status quo but open up new gameplay elements.

She truly is a wit of jam.

In her previous adventure, Jamwit acquired a firearm. By which I mean a fire arm, replacing the ability to wield two-handedly with a flame AoE. You run into several of these transformation quests, turning your plucky farm-boys into forces of nature, which can carry forward into various encounters. She'll never again wield a bow, but flamer-dame here brought her own conflict resolution to an encounter with an ice monster.

 

Well, since the rain's not letting up I may as well return to Calradia. Ironically, though I've moved from my last campaign's home base in the far east of the map to almost the western shores, both areas house herding culture, and both times I've found it impossible to actually sell the insane surplus of work-horses produced. But this time I discovered nearby towns have far more favorable trade prices on meat, and though I couldn't put a dent in the horse market, I gleefully bought hundreds-strong herds of Sumpter horses and flooded butcher shops with their carcasses until they could take no more. And that, the Sumpter Horselocaust, interestingly enough has felt like more of a win than the sheer amount of money my character's making. The real problem with questing in Bannerlord is that running the quests yourself feels unimpactful compared to alternate time investments for your character like war and trade. It's not the quests themselves but what they prevent you from doing. Though Vagrus for instance runs on the same caravan management premise, it more carefully threads quest actions (mostly involving your NPC companions) into your comitatus' business ventures. You can run them in parallel to trading, can still turn a profit on marble in newbietown even if you've polished off its local quests, and those quests in turn have opened you new avenues for local profit.

 

So I suppose I can draw a conclusion here, beyond my usual push for greater consequences for player actions. Making a move should change the board, yes. But your own actions should also be limited by the changing board. It's not as if this is a new idea. The old Dune game for instance had you spreading vegetation across the planet, altering the availability of the spice you needed to mine. And, just as with alternate routes, such costly trade-offs have always been a core element of strategy games, where RPGs' fixation on infantile power fantasy mandated a constant increase in fantastic power.

 

I decided to stay out of kingdom politics in my new Bannerlord campaign, until seven years of trading and questing later I noticed my Battanian homeland's been taking a real battanianing.

(note the lack of green flags)

From five cities down to two, and about to lose #2 and their last castle. So technically the map won't change. The same towns/castles/villages will always be there. The same units can be recruited. But certain goods have become unprofitable due to wartime scarcity (how's that for topical Spring 2026 references?) my ability to be a Battanian will vanish if I don't step in now to rescue them, gaining myself a fiefdom in the reconquered homeland if I'm lucky. Well, that's campaign divergence. If only prices, troops, conquests and reconquests didn't have a habit of rubberbanding back and forth a bit too quickly.

 

Persistent game worlds like Night City have been stuck in the MMO precept of unending grind, ensuring players can always revisit every and all their favorite haunts and victims ("where everybody knows your name and they're always glad you came") but looking at the collapse of MMOs, that cozy familiarity may be far less marketable than it once was. Long-form RPG campaigns now stretch to hundreds of hours but by necessity cannot incorporate repercussions which might lock the player out of completing the main quest. You can see a parallel to Bannerlord's village quests being impractically unprofitable toward your "main quest" of wealth and lordship and world domination.

 

So I can't help thinking Wildermyth was onto something, if not necessarily in its heavy randomization, then in splitting the action into short campaigns whose heroes can hop to the next module and the next, much like you would in tabletop gaming, or as in fact many did with the old Neverwinter Nights modules. Some heroes die, others lose limbs. Some decisions end up opening more campaigns or future quest options. But you're still free to give the current adventure a thunderous climax. There's no reason this pattern couldn't coexist alongside permanent or epic-length varieties.

 

 

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P.S.: Baldur's Gate 3 is an interesting case, as it actually did offer a tremendous, unprecendented variety of quest resolution options which really did carry through to later acts, but lackluster worldbuilding and narrative design kept these from really registering as important.

Thou Art Moloch

"Behind the veil is the machine
It steals your soul, devouring all your dreams
My hand is firm upon the wheel
I control, I am the demon"

 

Jamison Boaz & Jason Charles Miller - Resist and Disorder (Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack)

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"The heart, the heart, there was the little yet boundless sphere wherein existed the original wrong of which the crime and misery of this outward world were merely types. Purify that inward sphere, and the many shapes of evil that haunt the outward, and which now seem almost our only realities, will turn to shadowy phantoms and vanish of their own accord; but if we go no deeper than the intellect, and strive, with merely that feeble instrument, to discern and rectify what is wrong, our whole accomplishment will be a dream"

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne - Earth's Holocaust

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In 1965 Harlan Ellison published "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman, a short ramble against the clockwork pace of mechanized life. It sat in the same issue of Galaxy Science Fiction as a spy story by Robert Silverberg about techno-theocracy and also Laugh Along with Franz, by one Norman Kagan who apparently lost the ensuing inaugural Nebula nomination to Ellison* who kept the narration hopping better than Kagan's more didactic exposition. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the difficulty in meshing analytical and creative thought (stupid Vladimir and Estragon never stop bickering) he seems better known as a film scholar.

 

Aside from that, though, Laugh Along with Franz is yet another techno-dystopian tale. Hey, the hippie era had its fixations. Here, it's automation making almost all humans redundant, with the ensuing anomie driving much of the populace to crime, insanity and general monkey-business. Sorry, is that a bit apropos of our current arguments about chatbots?

 

Let's ramble aimlessly about a different SF yarn instead, Robert A. Heinlein's Waldo from 1942, which incidentally later became the name for such teleoperation devices. It's always been one of my least favorite Heinlein works, for the anti-intellectual twist it takes halfway through. Then again, though Wikipedia erroneously describes "the journey of a mechanical genius from his self-imposed exile from the rest of humanity to a more normal life" Heinlein actually (in contrast to, say, Valentine Michael Smith's maculate conception by towering intellects) has his customary mouthpiece curmudgeon explicitly debunk Waldo's mystique as genius, being instead an above-average intellect deriving much of his success in the field of mechanical engineering by hyper-focus and a personal stake in the machinery allowing him to live with myasthenia gravis. Which made only slightly less galling the denouement of the cranky, reclusive brainiac becoming the life of the party and carousing with the reg'lr folks after getting cured of his ailment, as though the hopeless experiential and existential gulf between competent minds and the subhuman norm were a disease of the intelligent, to be doctored back to accursed normalcy by hillbilly magic tricks.

 

Waldo's side plot about energy beams afflicting all humans with weakness is just the water fluoridation conspiracist icing on that cake, but it did mesh for me with the recent episode #466 of Sam Harris' Making Sense podcast, titled "What is technology doing to us?" which does indeed counterpose the nefarious influence of social media and chatbots against human interpersonal relations. As though the abuses of technology, from facebook gossip to nukes, were not the direct result of human effort to out-compete other humans as human social instinct dictates. As though every single Twit were not twittering of its own accord. The customer's always right.

 

'Course, that's an old dodge. Going back 99 years, I'd never bothered watching Metropolis until now. Compared to most stuff from the 1920s it's more cohesive than I'd expected, plus more modern in its action scenes, dramatic face-offs or hero, sidekick and love interest trinity. Though of course, given its outsized stylistic impact, it's hard to tell how much of that was foresight or later life imitating its art. But as far as the plot goes, imagine me blowing a very loud raspberry. Even if you look past a sludge of Biblical references, the story and moralizing are tired cliches not just for 1927, but could've been dismissed as a rip-off of Dickens or fairytales even fifty years prior. The dashing young prince saving the kingdom from an evil wizard who lusted after the queen, aided by a fetching maid pure of heart and defrosting his crusty old father's aging heart, a whopper of a quarter-hour 'think of the children' scene, villain falls off a cliff, holy Mother Goose the triteness just does not stop.

 

Has never stopped, in fact. I've commented before on the absurdity of dystopian flicks like V for Vendetta, Equilibrium, Snowpiercer, etc. pandering to their audience's herd conceit with evil wizards oppressing the salt of the earth multitudes, ignoring the dystopia could not persist without the collusion of those multitudes. The prototypical Metropolis itself places all blame with intellect, with industry, anything outside the plains-ape tribal norm. Even the climactic riot scene paints the murderous rabble as somehow innocent dupes of an inhuman infiltrator, ignoring that they literally built the system of injustice. Their instinct to murder and replace the prince presupposes such princely positions in the first place for the workers' competitive instincts to aspire to; each worker wants to be the one in the palace and for that there must be palaces, even if their own backs break in the gebilding of such.

 

You could, of course, look at the issue at even baser levels: "Who told you to attack the machines, you fools? Without them you'll all die!!" quoth a rightly enraged shift supervisor in Metropolis' lone glimmer of lucidity. No such moment comes in Waldo, where we deliberately sidestep the population pressure creating such ever-increasing demand for energy because the smooth apes reproduce with the speed of any degenerate vermin. Laugh Along with Franz ends in trite primitivism, the hero losing/abandoning his high-tech job to refocus on his relationship with a female as opposed to self-worth by social rank, but the whole pious genuflection before hormonal tyranny ignores the females are the ones imposing the race for social rank in the first place, ignores that without his fancy job she'll dump him in a heartbeat. Ellison's harlequin will not admit the people don't want to be saved from their degenerative drudgery, though unlike other examples here, Ellison was aware enough of human nature to show where that leads his hero.

 

Whose demand fuels industrial supply?

- and no money down!

I've been warming up to Cyberpunk 2077 more and more by ignoring the grind and just wandering about now and then. At least they included a tiny bit of content out in the badlands, away from the video billboard hellscape. Y'know, for us Gangrels. I was especially thrilled when I discovered the composting composition of the hills to the south. A landfill, bigger than the city itself (albeit not all in the game map and summarily rendered) is one element every modern-day setting should include, considering such do in fact exist. I don't mean just the increasingly continental great Pacific garbage patch, but paradisiac spots turned blemishes upon the face of the planet like Thilafushi.

 

It's all good to rail against Apple pushing a new smartphone every year, but where's the outrage against the billions stupid enough to buy it? You rail against chatbots as the new techno-Moloch, but it's not Sam Altman forcing reddit to fill up with AI slop. The users themselves are eating it up. Musk's Cybertruck may be an overpriced, malfunctioning road hazard, but plenty of suckers lined up for the nouveau-Hummer a few years ago. How many cases of makeup does the average ditz run through yearly? Or even monthly? How many plush orangutan dolls will soon be thrown away because millions of monkeys want to do like the monkey they saw? Until they spot the next fad...

 

In over a century of techno-dystopias the masses have been fed exactly the fantasy of victimhood they demand, an unending pretense of wizardly bogeymen exculpating the villagers with pitchforks and torches, the cold, inhuman metal face of science masking the subhuman appetites driving industry's depredations. Is technology dehumanizing? Good. Dehumanization would be the best possible outcome. "Is the rabble also necessary for life?"

 

 

 

 

 

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* Ooops, turns out they were in different categories. Kagan lost to Zelazny, three times at once.

Game as Service Outage

"She takes a litle time

In making up her mind

She doesn't want to fight against the tide"

 

Garbage - The Trick Is to Keep Breathing

 

 

Let's see, where were we? Night City? 

Nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. I've been jumping in every so often this past year, as one does in these big open world games, but find myself unmotivated to advance in any way. At least in Skyrim, despite putting the main quests off for... almost forever, I could get momentarily jazzed by exploring a new dungeon, crafting new weapons, potions and enchantments, building up my homestead. Cyberpunk 2077's level scaling sours both the combat and crafting, its apartments can't be customized (and once I found the delightfully shabby Northside one I lost interest in others) plus I already got the only car I want.

Quit snickering, it gets three million pixels to the gallon!

The high point so far have been the side-quests, which not only display some nice, professional level design but contain just enough flavor text to each paint an entertaining vignette of life in the city. But as I've been clearing those off board after board, I've been gradually losing interest in mercenary work altogether and launching the game for ten or twenty minutes at a time to just wander around and take in the numerous slices of Night City life, like kids playing virtual hopscotch.

Oh come on, a piece of chalk must cost, like, a fraction of an implant, economize ya lil' shits! Anyway, overall, a modern setting offers less room for the more involved delving of a single, unitary "dungeon" so there's no real feeling of escalation to any of it. Escalation takes more planning.

 

I never did get around to trying Vagrus' new zone. When I left off, I'd just finished a massive inspiraling sweep of the map, polishing off Finndurarth, Nedir and Harvek's companion quests at the same time as cashing in a lot of smaller contracts, battles and investments.

Excess livestock: the best problem.

Gotta appreciate those 400 silver wallet bumps. But knowing I'll need to devote a fair bit of focus to my next twenty-step plan to avoid forgetting crucial details, I parked my comitatus back at newbietown with an empty inventory and clear ledger, and there it's been awaiting my triumphant scheming return for half a year. I'll be saddlin' up some giant ant mounts next time! If there is a next time...

 

There are many issues with the DLC-spam business model as a subset of the game-as-service, microtransaction mentality writ large. Its popularity spread with multiplayer games which ensured almost universal playerbase buy-in. Everyone else is buying the new expansion. Do or get left behind. But single-player lacks that social network addiction as a crutch, leaving only the game's quality as incentive for the next buy-in. How sure are you of your appeal?

 

Then of course there's the issue of demanding your customers pay full price for the bare skeleton of a product, which is why I bought Europa Universalis 4 a decade after its release.

 

Then there's the diminishing returns angle, as latter DLCs get more and more sparse to keep bleeding a supposedly addicted audience with the least effort, which is why I haven't bought the last few years' worth of Stellaris DLCs.

 

At the conjunction of the previous two points you find the limitation of tacking extra features onto a basic system not made for them. I've addressed at some length D&D's problem trying to sell extra classes, modules and settings, when what it so obviously needs is to break down the primitive min-maxing, over-randomized fighter/wizard/thief setup from half a century ago - but the fanboys would never stand for it. Age of Wonders 4 has been scraping that limit with its latter expansions, deftly interspersing yet not touching the core limitations of its six magic affinities.

 

Worse (here we reach my eventual point) you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't, because in electronic-land, a full revamp will probably not be playable with older content. These days, that's a problem. Last year when I joked about needing spreadsheets to keep track of various options I've used (or not) as I jump between games every few months, I started by complaining Frostpunk 2 had killed my last city with its heat management patch. Now that seems to be ramping up into a trend. Low Magic Age (one of those perpetually "in beta" types) has barred my level 13-ish party from continuing. Darkest Dungeon 2 wiped my existing "confession" (a.k.a. campaign) at some point. Worst of all, my excitement at a new Mount&Blade expansion (Bannerlord's got vikings now - on boats!) was severely dampened when it forced me to retire the Marquis of Baltakhand, aged though he now be. Even porn games are starting to nuke old saves, and if you think an RPG party wipe is anti-climactic, try getting caught mid-thrust! 

 

While I don't deny the financial necessity for start-ups or fringe developers to literally buy themselves more development time with piecemeal content, add nuking players' saves as further evidence of post-launch content's limited tenability, no matter how well it worked for No Man's Sky. This is especially true as strategy/RPG campaigns have stretched longer and longer. A Frostpunk city represents a couple days' worth of gameplay. Bad enough. But the likes of Rogue Trader or Baldur's Gate 3 boast 200-hour campaigns. Not an option for them. If the basic idea is that such expansions will come after players have had a year or three to get bored of their existing characters, I refer you to my Vagrus example. Some concepts are playable only by extended, devoted effort, after which you might let the experience marinate for a bit before jumping in again. Not because you're bored, but because you're savoring it... or maybe precisely because you tell yourself you'll play once the next DLC comes out, not realizing it'll murderize yer marquis.

 

So, two or three main issues:

 

1) Micro-doses of content can much more easily be added to dumbed-down gamplay where you just end up wandering aimlessly about, as in Cyberpunk. I don't know if those hopscotch brats were there from launch, and I don't have to care. Even if they did anything it wouldn't affect my trade run... because there is no trade run. No planning. Just mindless twitch-FPS dust-ups. But if I saw a DLC drop for Vagrus when my character was mid-circuit, I would deliberately delay buying it, possibly by months (and it went on sale) until I was safe in town with no outstanding warrants and able to accommodate any landscape changes.

 

2) One of the big problems with post-launch content has been training your customers to refuse buying anything at launch pricing on the assumption they'd only be missing out on later stuff 'n junk anyway. Now pile that on with conditioning them to actively dread expansions killing their characters. Bad enough to market a pig in a poke, but when the revealed cat claws your face off...

("Lately, I'm not the only one

I say never trust anyone") 

 

3) As the entire industry is presumably re-tooling to fill games with spammed, dirt-cheap AI slop as content, the artsier fringe must at long last bite the bullet and start marketing itself not as low-budget small-time indie side-show attractions, but as more expensive, artisanal interactive media. Go organic. Advertise your Amish hand-crafting. Charge more. Take more time to develop. Put out singular, coherently-crafted campaigns from start to finish. Move on to the next and hope your work was good enough to earn you name brand trust. Low prices and DLC spam will soon be synonymous with The Slop.

Abetting the Setting

"My theories are borrowed from somewhere else
And I've never had too many to talk about
'Cause you were real quick and you were quick to point out, well
That was borrowed too"

 

Ugly Casanova - Diggin' Holes

 

 

From my first swipes at Europa Universalis 4 I wasn't crazy about the far larger density of scripted events compared to #3. Granted this is partly a matter of taste, being a bigger fan of strategy than of historical re-enactment, but such events can quickly overshadow whatever theme you had intended for your campaign. Aragon, for instance, gets several major freebie options for peaceful annexation during its early game (Naples, Navarre, Castile) whose overwhelming benefit dictated my early strategy of maxing diplomacy (national focus, +2 advisor) but going on a charm offensive instead of the naval/trade offensive I had originally envisioned. I will say though, I may wrinkle my nose at the implementation but at least Paradox maintains solid justification throughout, avoiding veering from the game's historical grounding, consistently feeding greater immersion and not tossing random shit at the wall to see if it sticks.

 

Which is not to say sticking to central theme completely avoids weirdness. Take Old World:

It's a Boss Baby prequel, just roll with it.

History, after all, is verifiably weird in many places, child monarchs being the least of it. On the other hand, Old World's enfilade of early monotheisms has repeatedly tempted writers to place more emphasis on the supernatural than feels natural to a naturalistic setting. It's a given that your citizens would believe nonsense, quite another to make it a verifiable in-game force. The blessed/cursed attributes (altering your ruler's random positive/negative event chance) always struck me as out of place, and the newer natural disaster expansion plays around with prophetic dreams and such. Still they cultivate a light touch, thankfully, where more amateurish developers tend to smack you in the face with such digressions.

 

Vagrus is a fantasy RPG set in a Romanesque evil empire with half-elves, half-dragons, half-ants and several other halves, all shooting fireballs and swashing their bronze buckle(r)s. Yet when I traveled to the obligatory Thousand and One Nights expansion, I was greeted with this.

Yes, everyone's fighting over oil wells. As in petroleum. Crude, that is. Black gold. Texas tea. Mullah lubricant. Whatever happened to olives and sesame? Instead of the simplistic and anachronistic Arabs=Oil, why not dip into middle-eastern references more appropriate to the old-timey setting like the spice trade or the silk road, which would've meshed so much better with Vagrus' core caravan-management motif, or hell, why not Arabs' obsession with horses? Or a Persian-themed demon-slaying fire cult aping Zoroastrianism? Or a militarily brilliant lame upstart princeling denied noble title for lack of lineage but expanding a namesake empire off said spice/silk trade. Or dive even deeper to show locals pouring libations to their dead relatives in Ereshkigal's domain? Or if you want to go the Egyptian route, a lizard cult evoking Sobek, since you've already got lizard mounts and nonsensical dinos as random encounters? Why the fuck with the derricks out of nowhere?

 

Sure, Vagrus already featured occasional modern elements like your dwarf companion's pistol, but that at least was presented as a rarity and even then just a primitive flintlock that takes an extra round to reload and is painfully inaccurate, as early firearms were. (At least it doesn't blow up in his face as they were wont to do. Don't ask me where he's getting the powder.) Even if you wanted black viscous petro-oleum in your game, you could've stuck to ancient surface extraction and the odd shallow well; crude, unrefined fuel and tar seeing limited local use, not a full-blown mechanized industry over which wars are fought.

 

It's worth comparing how Tolkien for example got away with his own anachronisms, like the bomb at Helm's Deep and the pterosaur mounts. For one, they're very limited in scope. For another, they're contextualized as departures from the norm showing the unnaturalness of both Saruman's futurism and Sauron's brutish, prehistoric primitivism. Yes, yes, you're allowed to roll your eyes a bit at the Shire's cozy Edwardian provincialism (not to mention the books' larger monarchist/medievalist slant) but that secure grounding allows small departures from such norms to spice without glutting. Coherence matters. (Just please don't look for it on this blog.)

 

You might raise an eyebrow, for instance, at Cyberpunk 2077 throwing Buddhist monks into its dingy futuristic mix... but dinginess makes a fine fit for those sworn to poverty, so there you have the same angle of building on an existing theme. The first quest you encounter concerns two brothers targeted by a street gang for forcible mechanical implantation.

You can later revisit the dilemma: though the artificiality of the modern world is opposed to their sought purity, they don't see it as an absolute impediment, merely a lengthening of the path.

Thus it becomes just another angle on Night City's culture of excess, bringing everything back to the central theme. It contrasts nicely with punk rage as well:

As another series of seemingly chance encounters has a monk feeding you meditations on your elemental constituents... via a neural interface. And that's all. A quest consisting of sitting peacefully in various damp, airy, sunlit meadow cutscenes... and don't spoil the ending for me 'cause I don't think I've finished it yet. But once again, though seemingly random, this element feeds back into the game's central theme of raging against the machine - both in rage and machine. And honestly, you could probably substitute Franciscans for the same effect, were you able to turn to facets you actually need for your narrative and downplay or throw out whatever superficialities or heavy-handed moralizing fundamentalists would want included. It's not as if William Gibson didn't do the same with voodoo themes forty years ago.
 

However, many of the worst cases of such digression are not meant to integrate with the rest of the story at all, but are thrown in to browbeat the audience with a supposedly all-important moral lesson. It's harder to find anything made in the 2010s which doesn't fall in that trap, but as just one example within the medium of games, try Dead State which among other ill-advised soapboxing gave us the NPC companion Karen, who turns out to be in the early stages of pregnancy and demands an abortion. Because it's her body, her choice, full stop, and only an anti-abortionist filthy-male-pig-reactionary-loser-fundamentalist-etc. would deny her this absolute right.

Great?

Now don't ask me what the hell this has to do with blasting zombies' heads off.

 

Of course, there could have been endless ways to work the issue into the plot of your survival shelter, as a pregnancy would raise any number of practical and ethical concerns relevant to the situation.

Do you have adequate medical facilities?

Can your makeshift tribe provide the material resources to ensure an infant's care? Have you looted any baby formula and diapers?

Can you other scavengers afford to support her while she's bloated to uselessness or has a parasite attached to her nipples? And is it fair to ask that of you?

Would someone else be willing to raise the child after birth, lessening her burden?

Are you in a secure location where you can start a long-term community?

For that matter, as you have zero information about the world at large, might you assume humanity has been wiped out and you desperately need every scrap of genetic diversity you can get to rebuild the species? 

Never mind all that because our real priorities are having her take umbrage at the very notion of possibly maybe questioning her choice, browbeating you for not supporting her enough and breaking up with her boyfriend and self-inducing an abortion with a random pill overdose (meant to make her look heroic) because woman right, man wrong, nothing else matters. That they named this bitch "Karen" just a few years before that became a meme is just icing on the cake.

 

Maybe your story can accommodate an inexplicable dinosaur or oil rig or some superstitious blather, maybe it cannot. Cases differ. I suppose the real question to ask yourself is: are you being a Karen about it?

 

 

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P.S.: Don't forget to lube your mullah!

"Love the way we communicate"

"I got something to say you know but nothing comes

Yes I know what you think of me you never shut up"

Tori Amos - Silent All These Years

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Spoilers for the TV series Dark and especially the police procedural Criminal follow.

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A few days ago, Wikipedia's front page managed to surprise me by a lone editorial choice:

Female wrongdoing? Is that... a thing? Heretofore, like every other media outlet, Wikipedia has held firm to the dogma of female superiority, refusing to present women as anything other than pure, brilliant agents of progress martyred for their pluck and heroism. But beyond the simple willingness to acknowledge female criminals, consider how rarely you've seen any media, whether factual or fabulist, acknowledge on an even simpler level females as agents of conflict. A documentary called Island of the Sea-Wolves again surprised me with a first-episode cliffhanger in which a low-ranking bitch approaches the den in which her superior in the pack hierarchy has given birth. Will she kill the pups? Be killed in turn? Dun-dun-duuUUN! Now, by the laws of narrative arcs and and knowing a few things about wolf packs, you won't be surprised by the next episode beginning with the reveal that auntie was just stopping by to babysit. But the documentarians' willingness to even float the idea of two females in conflict/competition goes against the grain of traditional nature shows, wherein males are vicious thugs constantly butting heads and females are kind, nurturing mommies unless they need to hunt prey in order to feed their young as kind, nurturing mommies, an' you don't ask no more questions, capisce?

 

The previously impregnable (pun intended) feminist fortress of moral entitlement has been gradually accumulating such minute cracks over the past years, albeit at a frustrating tectonic pace. Straddling docu- and mockumentaries, we have Diane Morgan's hilarious portrayal of the dull in more ways than one Philomena Cunk. Though fundamentally a positive character (sure she's a certified moron but she is Trying to make sense of things damnit) adopting an everywoman as the voice of the terminally befuddled juxtaposes her almost uniquely against occasional male experts on each topic of the week.

 

Or if you're more into games, though Wrath of the Righteous pandered far more than it should have to social justice idiocy, it also included negative female characters like Camellia and Wenduag indicating (unlike, say Wasteland 3 or Deadfire) some self-awareness on the issue of gender relations and the company's next project, Rogue Trader, more conspicuously avoided classic "man bad; woman good" juxtapositions. Cyberpunk 2077 gave me another pleasant surprise if you advance the main quest until meeting your muscleheaded best bud's mother and girlfriend, who turn out to be cut from much the same simpleton cloth as himself. More shocking that the mystical curio shop owner ditz deliberately did not move into his place when he offered because:

Wow. Giving a man some space? In fiction writ large, any such situation would merely present an irresistible opportunity to paint the guy as a heartless monster for not giving his assuredly better half absolute control over every single aspect of his life, cf. every rom-com and dom-com ever written. Then there's Colony Ship, where your potential companion Knurl gives a pretty stark description of how a matriarchal society is established: through the sacrifice of men. 

Few dare to follow this all too rare precept: not only that women are capable of the same crimes as men, but that it is women's greater propensity for emotional subversion and femininity's instinctive entitlement to be protected and provided for which must be scrutinized for harmful and oppressive potential. More shocking when this shows up on television, a more tightly censored industry predictably slower than games to bite back against feminazi control.

 

Dark, a brilliant series in other respects as well (though I still dislike the ending) gave us the character of Hannah, a touchingly vulnerable girl, later a soulful lover and mother... and chillingly illustrative of mundane feminine manipulation. No, not as some femme fatale superspy with torpedo tits and legs up to her armpits, but as a perfectly regular salt-of-the-earth small-town gal with no scruples against lying, cheating, guilting, seducing and betraying anyone around her in order to establish control. 

 

Then there's Criminal, in its various incarnations. The French and Spanish series were weaker, more theatrical, so their swipes against the crime drama status quo were also halfhearted at best. The German series gave us a battered husband, but had to make him an official minority to placate the morality police by upping his oppression score. Plus it still only acknowledges female guilt in adopting stereotypical masculine direct aggression. It was only in the second British season, as their last hurrah, that they dared present the application of femininity as criminal: defamation, lying, projection of one's own faults upon the hated other, weaponizing society's protective apparatus itself by playing the victim. Two episodes out of sixteen, far better than most series ever average. A female child abuser externalizing her guilt. A man falsely accused of rape by a female coworker for no motive more noble than extorting cash through the legal system. That second works particularly well because his character was tempered, in a reverse of Cunk's case, not to appear too sympathetic. He's a self-gratifying yuppie blowhard, yes, but this only outlines the fact that unlikable does not equal guilty. His desperation when it's become clear that even when the case is dropped the system doesn't give a shit that the mere accusation is enough to destroy his life drives home the point of our societal disdain for males' well-being far more poignantly than had the prosecutors suddenly sympathized.

 

But such examples are still few and far between. For every tentatively transgressive episode like Criminal's "Alex" networks can run several days-long marathons in which men are nothing but vicious, cackling villains born to sin. Special Victims Unit is rounding out three decades of top ratings on the precept that men are disgusting pigs deserving of police brutality. The notion that all evil comes from men fuels entire networks like Lifetime. Dark's creators' next series, 1899, immediately dove into "man bad, woman good" rhetoric from its first scenes, probably to redeem themselves in the eyes of bigots. When a no-name video game company becomes the talk of the town out of nowhere, it's a safe bet it just put out a "female protagonist" title fighting evil men for uncritical critic praise. I wonder how many jokes Diane Morgan's obligated to tell about men leaving the toilet seat up to compensate for every episode of Cunk?

 

So I guess in a couple of days we'll be talking about censorship.

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'!

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.