Tag Archives: Video Games

Crusader Kings 3: Should the players have fun, or the devs?

I can’t find the quote right now (and I have a headache so I don’t want to), but a quote attributed to Sid Meier is that in a video game, the goal should be for the player to be having fun, not the devs. I think of that a lot because one of the reasons I hate modern Paradox is because they think it’s the other way around. The player should dance to the dev’s tune, and if they’re not playing “right” then the devs need to “fix” that.

I say this because I recently posted about playing Imperator: Rome, and one of my friends thought it would be funny to gift me Crusader Kings 3, since I said in that review that I didn’t plan on ever buying another Paradox game. And when I started playing my gift, the first thing I realized is that CK3 is definitely a game that looked at CK2 and decided “the players weren’t playing right, we need to fix that.”

There’s a ton of things I could say about CK3. I’ll briefly mention that the lack of a ledger, most UI elements, and a MINIMAP make this by far the most tedious Paradox game to play. There’s some good ideas but it’s way to hard to get to any of them, pointlessly so. The whole thing needs a UI redesign from the ground up, but that’s not what I’m here for.

In CK2 and CK3, you play as a feudal family through the generations. From lord to lord you get to take the reigns of some feudal noble and expand your kingdom, fight off rebels, go Crusading, and what have you. As it’s a dynastic game, decisions about succession and titles are paramount. To cut to the chase, the primary inheritance law is called “Gavelkind” or “Partition,” in which the realm is divided among the ruler’s children. So if you hold 3 counties and have 3 sons (assuming male-preference), then each son inherits 1 county. This makes it difficult when your character dies and you start playing as the eldest son, since you’ve become 1/3 as strong as you were before.

This means that Gavelkind succession in CK2 was an endless loop of getting strong, realm partitioning, and working your way back to square 1. Most players hated it, and so the first piece of advice given to new players was always “get rid of Gavelkind.” It was fun to choose different succession laws for different occasions. Seniority let you reunite family lands as elderly, title-holding members of your dynasty were the primary inheritors. Primogeniture meant only your eldest son inherited. And elective meant you could choose your heir as long as you could game the election. It was pretty fun.

Then the devs saw this and decided that the players were playing “wrong.” They needed to be spending more time in Gavelkind as it was “historically accurate.” So now Gavelkind is renamed “partition” and it’s almost impossible to get out of it. Elective succession laws only apply to kingdom level titles, so your counties and duchies still get split on death even if you’re elective. Primogeniture has been relegated to being only available at the tail end of the game. To add, they’ve removed the ability to actually start at the tail end of the game, so you can’t even get any use out of Primogeniture since most people’s games will end much sooner when they get bored. And finally seniority succession is now locked behind a cultural tradition available only to the Bohemians. Because I guess no one else is able to just study the idea and decide “hey, we’d like to do that too.”

The game still isn’t historically accurate by any means. Succession was never this cut and dry. But the devs are having more fun now and the players less, so that’s really all that matters, isn’t it?

I’ve bought my friend Kenshi in return for CK3, and I feel I’ll quickly fall off of this one much like Imperator. It’s definitely not bad, but it’s moving in a direction I don’t appreciate.

Kenshi: A better game than Rimworld

Like I said in a previous post, I like Kenshi a lot more than Rimworld. The two aren’t actually that comparable, the title is just a dig at a friend of mine who called Rimworld “a better Kenshi.”

Kenshi is a brilliant mix of fantasy RPG, post-apocalyptic survival, and real time strategy. The game is also dipped in a more fantastical flavor that makes it a lot more novel than the scores of Fallout-lite clones where we fight through ruined 1st world cities. Instead, this is a world where wandering ronin have sword battles with skeletal robots, where 20-foot-tall “beak things” fight giant gorillas, and where a death-cult race of Foglanders capture and eat anyone who wanders into their domain. There’s a lot to love here and I’m glad the setting isn’t generic like so many others.

As an aside, I love the implication that this world has had multiple apocolypses. Nobody knows who built the skeletons or where they came from, as well as a number of other giant mechanical monstrosities that litter the world (like an orbital death-laser). In turn there are a number of libraries scattered throughout the world. They apparently come from the “second empire” and post-date the skeletons, but by game start they have all been abandoned and mostly destroyed. What few that remain are poured over by wandering tech hunters to regain their lost knowledge. This wasn’t a simple apocolypse that destroyed this world, it was a long-multistage affair, and it gives you a lot to think about as you wander across the wastelands.

And wander you shall because that’s the primary gameplay loop of Kenshi: running around and trying to not die. But the game lets you keep and train up a party of a few dozen dudes to do that with, and it can all get really fun. Putting your guys on different jobs, sneaking around if necessary, building up a team, this is where the fun of Kenshi is. And the part where it gets a bit Rimworldy is that you can eventually create a base of operations and have all your murder-hobos do manual labor like they were Rimworlders. Unlike Rimworld, the game doesn’t give you progressively harder challenges but gives you the hardest possible challenges pretty much all at once. If you want to settle down anywhere you’d best be ready for a war.

But having a war is also fun because the gameplay isn’t about numbers. You can have 100 guys, and you’ll still get wrecked by a single gate guard. That’s because during combat, the game takes a martial-arts movie approach of having all allies and enemies pair up for one-on-one combat. And if there’s 100 guys and 1 master, the 100 guys will patiently wait for their turn to attack, while the master will have such powerful swings that he can destroy 5 enemies with a single slice.

So the game is still enticing you to build up a squad and survive, but it’s not about tricking the AI into giving you easier challenges, but rather about building up the skills of your group until you can take on any challenge. When you finally train up some random schmuck to the point that they can solo and entire squad of Paladins, you really feel a sense of accomplishment.

Sorry, this post was a bit scatterbrained, but I really just wanted to gush about Kenshi. I hope there’s a sequel some time soon.

Understanding why I don’t like Mana in EU4

So this is a big topic that I’ve thought about a lot but I’m going to break it down into little pieces to try to get something written on paper.

I don’t like the introduction of Mana in EU4. If you’ve played EU4, you know this is a well-worn topic, but for the others, here goes.

In EU4, most every action in the game will cost one of 3 resources. These resources are called “monarch points” but the community calls them “mana.” Your admin mana mostly deals with stability and integrating conquered provinces into your realm. Diplo mana mostly deals with peace treaties, trade, and the navy. Military mana mostly deals with the military and rebels. The problems with this system start right off the bat with how one imaginary resource is performing multiple completely unrelated tasks. Why will signing a big peace treaty prevent me from hiring a new admiral? And furthermore, why do most actions happen instantly once I save up enough mana, shouldn’t technology be something you research over time? Instead here you just save up your mana and at the click of a button all your soldiers are better.

The unrealistic game-y-ness is the origin of the (originally derogatory) term “mana,” as the system makes your king seem like a wizard casting spells rather than a monarch ruling the country. “I was casting a spell to summon a general, but now I can’t cast cannon spells!” <- I spent my military mana on generals and now can’t afford technology. Diplo mana is the worst by far with how game-y and spell-like it is. Peace treaties, trade powers, naval leaders, espionage ideas, diplo is just the dumping ground for anything and everything that doesn’t neatly fit into either admin or military.

Another big downside with the mana is how it is earned. Every country gets 3 points of each, but the lion’s share of your mana will come from your ruler, who can add up to 6 points in each category. You can also get up to 3 points of each type from advisors, but in the base EU4 game half or more of your country’s total mana comes solely from their king. This brings EU4 back into the “Great Man” theory of history, in that the country of your ruler doesn’t matter a bit. It is your ruler himself who is solely responsible for researching tech, maintaining stability, summoning generals, reducing war exhaustion, and everything else. There are a lot of questions about why some countries succeed and others fail. EU4’s answer is that successful countries just had a powerful wizard as ruler who generated enough mana to research all the tech.

And in a way it’s downright racist to present history this way. Countries don’t just succeed because of their ruler, European rulers weren’t smarter than their counterparts in the rest of the world, making every single action a country takes or can take come down to how much mana their ruler generates just makes it seem like you read Edward Gibbon once and then slept through all your history classes.

This isn’t just ahistorical but it’s bad gameplay too. You don’t have any control over who you get as ruler, so your game will largely be determined by how lucky you get with this. Making pretty much every action a player can take come down to the luck of how much mana they can afford (because of how good of a ruler they got) is just bad gameplay design. Oddly enough it’s pretty clear Paradox even agrees with me, because while they haven’t abandoned mana in EU4, they did mostly abandon it in Imperator:Rome, and in EU4 they have added a number of systems to address the luck-based irregularity of mana.

Pretty much every DLC Paradox puts out mostly revolves around new ways to let the player generate mana. Getting advisors up to level 5, estates, razing enemy territory as a horde, disinheriting bad rulers or heirs, it’s clear that Paradox knows that the mana system is unfun and too luck based. So every DLC lets players pay for the privilege of ignoring it more and more. But it’s too much work to change EU4 now, and Johan is too stubborn to admit that he’s wrong, so mana is going to see out the remainder of Paradox’s EU4. Fans should hope they see the light and remove it for EU5.

Imperator: Rome, a laundry list of grievances

I said in my last post that I could give a laundry list of grievances for why I didn’t like most of the game. So here they are in no particular order.

The Republic mechanics are terrible, offering no real long term strategy and consequences. You either set up your Republic well in the first few years, in which case you spend the entire game with zero problems, or you stumble early and can never recover, and you might as well just restart. If you get the factions on your side, they’ll stay happy forever. But if they hate you, then every new election sinks your country lower and lower into anarchy and you can’t do anything about it. We can make jokes about how this is accurate for a democracy, but the problem is that it isn’t fun. There’s no actual haggling or politics in a republic, no real interesting choices. You can easily ensure that your favored factions retain all their power and influence and ignore the other faction, and from then on the republic just doesn’t matter, you’re basically an elected king.

The mechanics for levying soldiers are too gamey in many respects. The game does a good job of realizing that for ancient Rome, military service was the job of citizens, not just everybody. Because of that the game only lets you levy a full compliment of troops out of pops that are your correct culture. In all other territories without your pops, you simply get 4 cohorts of light chaff. However you get those 4 cohorts no matter how many (or FEW) pops reside in your new territory. So conquering a new territory with just 1 pop in it expands your army more than conquering the remainder of your home territory containing 100 pops.

Why does founding cities require mana to begin with? And why is there a limit on the number of mercenaries you can raise? These two things together just mean that by mid game, there’s nothing to spend your money on. I quit my games with 1000s of denarii in the bank because I just couldn’t spend them, having already build all the buildings I wanted, being unable to found more cities due to the mana restriction, and being unable to raise new mercenaries because you have a hard-cap to the number of companies you can raise regardless of your size. This is a game that has made money absolutely useless outside of the first 10 years of the game.

Speaking of useless money, the AI plays the same way. Every single tiny tribe in Europe is sitting on a Consul’s ransom of gold and the moment you go to war with them they’ll raise their maximum allowance of mercenaries against you. This means that expanding into 5 Gaulic tribes ends up being more painful than fighting large empires such as Egypt or Carthage because those 5 Gaulic tribes actually end up with more armies to use. It’s nonsense and it just shows that this game is balanced horribly, since both the player and the AIs can’t find anything to spend their money on.

You set up trade routes by importing goods from a foreign province. Then when that province gets conquered, you have to restart the trade route manually even though the new owners will still accept the trade. Just let the route have continuity unless the new owners would forbid it, stop giving me pointless busy work.

Trade in general is underwhelming. There are a tiny number of nice capital bonuses (stone, for the early game) and then a whole lot of boni so minor you won’t even notice.

Every civ feels exactly the same. Defenders of this game will wrongly claim that the Roman classical period just isn’t popular (ignoring Rome: Total War), and will likewise claim that there isn’t enough history to put in any real flavor. That’s just nonsense, the game is just bad at flavor. Playing as the King of Armenia shouldn’t feel identical to playing as the Consul of Rome.

Let’s go further with the above point: base-game EU4 actually felt very different depending on where you started. You could play inside the HRE with Austria or Brandenburg, which gave you lots of bonuses but also limited your expansion and forced you to comply with HRE laws. You could play as an HRE neighbor like Poland or France, in which case your expansion into the HRE was limited but the small states within it were unlikely to hurt you. Or you could play somewhere far away from the HRE like the Ottoman Empire or Muscovy. Your expansion was unconstrained, but being next to high-tech neighbors does help you boost your tech, and so you might find yourself falling behind on tech due to lack of HRE-neighboring bonus. Finally you could ignore Europe and go colonizing with Portugal or Spain. In this case you played the colonial game instead. All those types of games did feel very different from one another, and they were all played in the same game-map covered by Imperator: Rome. And that was base-game EU4, no expansions or patches which brought Japanese Shogunates, Chinese Tian-zi’s, or native American confederations. Just straight out of the box EU4 in Europe.

NOTHING in Imperator:Rome feels different or unique in this way. Nothing has its own unique flavor or game-play benefits. There’s just no reason to ever play a second game after you’ve played your first. And I think that’s why this game failed.

Rimworld: a game of entropy

Rimworld is a very popular colony sim game.  I’ve seen a number of other games paint themselves with it’s brush, aping its style and mechanics, and yet none have come close to offering what Rimworld offers.  Rimworld puts you in the shoes of 3 survivors who crashland on a sparsely populated world at the edge of human habitation.  The survivors must immediately get to work building shelter, growing food, and finding some way to escape their new home.  The planet is also home to hostile pirates, insane robots, and murderous bug creatures, so the deck is stacked against you.  But if you can learn to grow and manage your colony, you can survive, thrive, and escape.

This basic outline of growing a colony and surviving against enemies and nature alike is used in a number of other games I’ve played. But none of them really offer the same experience that Rimworld does. Now, cards on the table, I think Rimworld is good-not-great, and I enjoy some of those other games a lot more. But I wanted to examine why it is I think that Rimworld is offering such a rarified experience when the basic outline is so widely used.

One of the things to understand about Rimworld is that this is a game of entropy.  Your position in the world is always decaying and you need to work just to maintain it.  You’re fighting an uphill battle just to survive, so growing and prospering is going to be pretty hard.  Food is not plentiful, so your first job is to immediately start farming, foraging, and hunting for raw food.  But raw food isn’t healthy or fun to eat, so you also need to set up a cooking station to make meals.  Meals spoil quickly so you need a refrigerator to store them in.  And unsanitary conditions lead to disease so you need to keep your food areas as clean as possible.  

Keeping your colony fed it a hell of a lot of work on its own, and that isn’t even getting into all the other entropy the game has, like how clothes degrade and need replacing, or how electric appliances short circuit, or how your colonist will eventually age and acquire new ailments that need treatment.  Surviving on a barren world is hard, and Rimworld wants you to realize it.

Now, other games I’ve played have included some amount of survival mechanics.  Kenshi and Oxygen Not Included both include the need for food.  But in those games I never really felt like I struggled to survive.  The games were tuned so that keeping everyone fed felt like an occasional annoyance, not a difficult necessity like it is in Rimworld.  

SURVIVAL IS DIFFICULT

In Rimworld, there’s a lot to do and only so much time in the day.  At the start of the game your colonists might spend half of their day on basic needs (eating, sleeping, etc) and a third of their day doing the work needed for the colony (cooking, getting food).  That leaves just ⅙ of their day to work on expanding and improving the colony, doing things like making new weapons or building better living quarters.  

You can try to finagle the numbers a but, but they’re pretty tight.  If you have your colonists work less on the colony’s needs, you might run out of food and starve.  If you don’t let colonists sleep, they’ll have a mental break and stop working for you.  Mental breaks and dead colonists decrease the total amount of work you have available, so it’s best to err on the side of caution and not rush towards colony expansion.

So in Rimworld, playing the game “well” involves making the colony run as efficiently as possible so you can get as much work out of your colonists as possible.  If the beds and food storage are near the dining halls, colonists don’t have to walk as far for breakfast.  And if you make sure the skilled planter does the farming and the skilled builder does the building, basic necessities will get done a lot faster than they would otherwise.  This lets you siphon off more and more of your colonists’ day towards expansion and improvement.

But this is where the “storytellers” of Rimworld come in.  At semi-regular intervals, the game will drop some crisis in your lap that needs solving.  Maybe half your colonists get sick and need healing, maybe space pirates start attacking your colony.  Either way you now have to drop what you’re doing and fight for survival.  

These crises are multifaceted in how they test you: first of all your colony needs to be well enough run that you can drop everything for a day without your colony going to crap.  Secondly, these crises will often bleed you of scarce resources, such as medicine or single-use-items.  Thirdly, you rarely come out of these crises unscathed.  Even if no colonists die, Rimworld battles tend to include long-term and even permanent injuries that not only need to be treated but can also make your colonists less efficient for the rest of their lives.  

These crises are an excellent way to test your colony and see how well you’re managing your supply of “work.”  If space pirates kill your best planter, can you still grow enough food to survive?  If half your colonists get space-flu, can the other half take care of them?  And after you’ve spent your resources and lost your colonists (or your colonists have lost their arms), can you build yourself back up and continue?

So survival is very hard, and the storyteller makes it harder, but even that’s not the end.  I said before that expanding your colony is part of the goal of getting off-planet, well Rimworld makes sure that expansion is even harder than survival.  

COLONY EXPANSION

To expand your colony you’re going to need new colonists, but while Rimworld is a war-torn backwater there aren’t just plenty of people wandering around happy to join your dirt farm.  There’s a few different ways to get new colonists:

First, you can incapacitate enemies who attack you, lock them in a jail cell, and then persuade them to join your colony.  This will require you to spend a lot of work feeding your prisoner and keeping them alive, as well as dealing with the occasional jailbreak.  For a colony just barely scraping by, a single extra mouth to feed can be the breaking point, so this method isn’t easy.  Also the game makes sure that the vast majority of enemies will die rather than surrender, so the Stockholm Syndrome route isn’t very productive.

The second option is to rescue colonists as part of a quest, at which point they will join you in gratitude.  This option is a gamble itself since the quests usually involve a lot of fighting, and as I said above Rimworld’s combat is a huge test to your colony’s survival.  Still, if you can manage it, this is usually the quickest route to growing your colony.  

Finally, you can sometimes pay to have a colonist join you, but this usually costs an exorbitant amount of money, way more than an early game colony can afford and way more than a mid-game colony would usually spend.  These opportunities are also few and far between, so even if you are rolling in cash this option isn’t a given.  

Finally, in all three of these options you don’t have the ability to “pick and choose” what type of colonist you want, you get what you get.  And if you end up with 4 artists who your single planter/chef/doctor struggles to keep alive, then oh well.

Expanding your colony is the easiest way to have more “work” available to do things.  The game knows this, and will fight you to prevent it.  As stated above, the game is finicky about giving you new colonists, but that’s not the only trick up its sleeve.  If you do luck into a big colony, you’ll find you don’t have as much extra work available as you might think.  This is because the game increases the difficulty as your base gets larger, and always keeps you in check to make things challenging.

NEVER SATISFIED

The game measures how much “wealth” your colony has.  Wealth includes the rooms your colonists sleep in, the food in their pantry, and the number and abilities of the colonists themselves.  As your colony expands, it has more wealth.  As it has more wealth, the colonists will get more and more picky.  

Remember what I said about mental breaks, they are one of the ways that the game forces you to look after your colonists’ needs.  If you don’t keep them happy, colonists may hide in their room, start setting fire to things, or start taking drugs in order to cope.  When you’ve just crashlanded on the planet, the colonists are happy just to be alive, and their mood will be high enough that they’re unlikely to break over little things like not having good food or clothing.  As your colony expands, your colonists’ needs expand too.  They’ll want more entertainment, better living quarters, more time to themselves.  As colonists’ needs increase, you need to spend more and more of their labor on meeting those needs, having less and less available to do other things.  

So growing your colony isn’t always going to give you more available “work.”  With 3 colonists, you can perhaps use ⅙ of their daily labor to do your own things, while ⅚ are needed for their survival.  If 3 more colonists are added, everyone may suddenly demand more niceties such that all their daily labor is spent keeping themselves alive and happy.  If another 3 colonists join, maybe people will demand so much stuff that you can’t keep all of them happy.  Again, good play means making your colony efficient enough that each new colonist gives you enough labor to offset the expense of keeping them alive and happy.

And even that’s not the end of it!  Your colony’s wealth will also determine the difficulties of the challenges that your colony faces.  Your crashlanded survivors will only be attacked by small animals or single, melee-armed humans.  A large and wealthy colony will be attacked by wasting diseases, herds of wild megafauna, killer robots and more.  The game is constantly testing you, and the tests get harder as you get better.

So that’s what Rimworld is.  I may not have explained it well but it is a game of entropy.  Every day is a fight for survival, your position in the world is always moving backwards.  You need to struggle to keep what you have and struggle harder to get anything more.  Even as you run forward, the game ups the speed on the treadmill giving you harder and harder challenges so you’re always struggling.

THE UNIQUENESS OF RIMWORLD

This contrasts pretty strongly with the other games that I’ve been told are “colony sims” and “like Rimworld.”  Now to lay my cards on the table, I like these other games a hell of a lot more than I like Rimworld. But I don’t like them for their “Rimworldness,” in fact I’d say I like them because they do a lot of things better than Rimworld, and their “Rimworldness” often holds them back. But these games keep being talked about in the same breath as Rimworld and I’d like to discuss why I think they really aren’t like it at all.

The closest approximation of Rimworld I’ve played is Oxygen Not Included.  Like Rimworld it gives you a few colonists and tells you to keep them alive and grow your colony.  Unlike Rimworld, keeping them alive isn’t the hard part.  I haven’t played more than 20 hours of Oxygen Not Included, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a mental break or been close to starvation.  Dirt and water on their own can be turned into cheap food, and a single skill can turn that food into something the colonists actually enjoy.  You don’t have to put a huge amount of energy into farming, fueling your stoves, or even keeping your food clean.  Food is very cheap and a simple CO2 trap keeps it fresh and unspoiled forever.

Not only that, Oxygen Not Included isn’t shy about giving you more resources.  Every hour or so of game time it gives you a new colonist for free.  You don’t have to take the colonist mind, but unlike Rimworld I was struggling to keep my base small, not struggling to grow it.  Before I knew it I had more labor than I knew what to do with, and half my colonists were wandering around aimlessly.  In Rimworld this is usually a sign of a very efficient colony, in Oxygen Not Included it was a sign that I didn’t really know what else I should be doing. 

Kenshi is a game I like much more than Rimworld, but again I think comparing the two is unfitting.  Kenshi will also let you set up a colony to farm, grow, and survive, but it’s not hard for the reason Rimworld is hard.  In Rimworld it’s hard to stay fed and clothed, and the random events add spice to your entropy sandwich.  In Kenshi it was very easy to stay fed and clothed, I found a single farmer and a single cook could keep 20 people fed no problem.  The difficulty in Kenshi is entirely in the politics and combat.  

Everywhere you can settle in Kenshi is already “owned” by some organization, either a nation or a bandit tribe, and so if you set up a dirt farm the owners will come to collect.  Sometimes they’ll demand tribute, sometimes they’ll ransack your storage, sometimes they’ll try to kill you, but keeping them assuaged or fighting them off is the real test of your colony.  

Unlike Rimworld and its “wealth” system though, Kenshi doesn’t have a way to scale these challenges up or down.  The same horde of bandits will descend upon a dirt farm as will descend upon a thriving metropolis with harpoons guarding the doors.  Once you’re strong enough to fight off the attacks, nothing else can touch you.  

Furthermore, Kenshi isn’t shy about giving you colonists either.  You can pay for people to join, but unlike in Rimworld the costs isn’t that great compared to the amount of money you can expect to have on hand.  It’s not difficult to fill your ranks in Kenshi, and as I said it’s not difficult to keep a large horde of people healthy and happy.  The difficulty is because (in true action movie fashion), untrained mooks are useless in combat while trained swordsmen cleave through them like butter. Kenshi rewards you for your skill, not your numbers.

So Rimworld is a game that’s all about Entropy, and I think that makes it different to every other “colony” sim I’ve ever played, including several I haven’t mentioned here.  It’s difficult to survive in Rimworld, most of your time will be spent on bare necessities with little left time over for expansion.  And even if you do expand, you’ve only increased the challenges you’ll face and the needs of your people, so they game ensures you’ll always struggle.  I’ve stopped playing Rimworld, but I think this is what people need to understand if they want to make a game to challenge it.  It’s not about adding farming and a “mental break” mechanic, it’s about making the mere act of existing a genuine struggle.  That’s what Rimworld is really about.

The circle of Skyrim

This probably won’t be controversial, but The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is a pretty good game. For what it is, I’d say it’s a masterpiece. There’s certainly some parts I don’t enjoy, (the guild quests can be lame, the main plot meanders, the civil war is undercooked), but none of those bring down the enjoyment of what Skyrim actually is. Skyrim is a time waster, expertly designed and developed to have you spend hours upon hours without even realizing you’re doing so, ensuring that at any moment there are 5 different activities you could be doing and a dozen different goals you could be working towards. I remember first thinking about this topic due to a post written by the late Shamus Young, but I can’t remember the exact post so I’m sorry I cannot link directly. Here’s how a few hours of Skyrim may play out:

  • Load up the game and dive into some dungeon. There’s tons of the map and the combat is engaging enough to make this enjoyable. You may even get some nice loot depending on where you dive: rare materials, dragon souls, even a Word Wall to give you new powers
  • With the dungeon now thoroughly dived, make your way back to town. It’s here that the time wasting really begins. You can sell your loot to merchants, use the proceeds to buy better gear or a house in town. You can buy training in a skill, unlocking more perks you can use out in the world. There are 3 different crafting-based skills and your loot may well suit all 3, so you can run around town crafting new weapons and items with the loot you acquired. These and other time sinks give you ways to keep strengthening your character, making you better able to head back into the world and fight.
  • DING! You leveled up! Since Skyrim uses the “learn by doing” system of level-ups, just crafting stuff will advance your skills and earn you new perk points, which can be spent to unlock new abilities
  • New abilities in tow, you may head back out into the world to try them out, plus you have whatever sweet loot you got out of your last dungeon. Maybe you can disarm opponents now thanks to a Word Wall you found, plus maybe you have a fancy new Dwarven Blade courtesy of the Smithing perk you just bought.
  • Having now dived a few more dungeons you may be getting bored with the combat, new perks or no. Fear not, the game still has ways of entertaining you, in town you may learn of an interesting new quest which could break up the monotony of combat, or decide to join one of the factions for a different flavor of gameplay. The factions themselves will give you a bit of story and their own quests, again breaking up the monotony and keeping you engaged even if all you’re doing is running around doing more fighting and gathering more loot.
  • And since you’re doing more fighting and gathering more loot, you need to keep heading back into town, spending more time running about the shops and skill trainers, leveling up further and further and buying more and more new cool abilities to try out in the world
  • And the world itself may have fun quests. Go into a random dungeon? Hey there’s a guy here wanting to kill the people looting his family’s crypt. Well that’s what I was just about to do, but I’ll fight on the side of justice this time. These quests out in the world do even more to frame the repetitive fighting and make it still feel “fresh” even as you hack your 1000th bandit to pieces. You may be doing the same thing over and over again, but it never really feels like it
  • And the maximum carry weight even feeds into this. We all know how much it sucks to be overencoumbered with all your loot, but that’s a GREAT incentive to head back into town to sell or use it all, again letting you spend time there, power up, and again want to go back out into the world.

Skyrim does an amazing job at making a super simple combat and leveling system keep you engaged for hours. The fact that every moment feels fresh and new, and the fact that every activity pushes you towards doing other activities, is a testament to how fun the game is. Running around town makes me want to use my new gear and go dungeon diving, gathering a bunch of loot in dungeons makes me want to go back to town and cash it in. The quests and questlines are all enjoyable enough to make the umpteenth Draugr crypt still feel engaging, and there are enough memorable characters sprinkled around the make the world feel real and alive. I only write this post because I just lost an entire weekend to Skyrim, and I hope I can get this game out of me so I can get back to work later, but this decade old game is still really really good.

Why can’t I seem to finish a game of Dyson Sphere Program?

I’ve talked a couple of times about Dyson Sphere Program on this blog, and while I’ve enjoyed my time with it immensely, I’ve never managed to actually sit down and finish a game of it. This post will be a sort of ramble on why a game so similar to Factorio just doesn’t do it for me the way Factorio does.

To start with, I’ve already talked about how I feel the game doesn’t “scale up” in the same way Factorio does. Later research goals in Factorio cost exponentially more than earlier ones, but in Dyson Sphere Program the relationship seems more additive or multiplicative than exponential. Then there’s the difficulty with blueprints, I can’t have a nice big blueprint that does everything I want anywhere I want it because since planets have to be spheres, the gridlines get broken up closer to the poles. This means a blueprint developed for the equator doesn’t work at the poles and vice versa, and means it’s not nearly as fun to make and place my blueprints for a big mega-base.

I’m also not to keen on constantly having to move between planets. In Dyson Sphere Program you have different planets that you’re collecting resources from, which should be really fun but the time it takes you to GET to those different planets is very boring. They couldn’t have realistic space travel ala Kerbal Space Program, but they also didn’t do enough to make space travel interesting in and of itself. So sitting there for a few minutes while you travel to another planet is just boring, and you HAVE to keep going back and forth because there’s no way to build things on one planet while you’re standing on another. This was something Factorio dealt with very well, running around was also boring in Factorio but once you build radars everywhere you could go into your map and change things anywhere that you had radar coverage without ever having to move your character. It was fun, it worked, and Dyson Sphere Program should have incorporated it so I don’t have to trek back and forth between planets just to make minor changes.

The lack of enemies is another thing I think I’ve talked about but it bears repeating because in Factorio the enemies actually did a lot for the game. Their attacks kept you on your toes, pushing back their bases gave you something to do while waiting for research, and it was a very fun structural problem to try to figure out how you were going to make everything you wanted to make while still protecting it. Factorio gives you an infinite canvas to build on, but gives you constraints in that you must protect everything from the enemies. That’s more interesting to me than an infinite canvas with no constraints.

Constantly needing to refuel your character (a robot), as well as needing to physically be in the places you want to build, work together to make me not enjoy the endgame. I don’t like running around making sure I have enough fuel or am standing near a charging station, and I don’t like building a giant conveyor belt across a tundra planet if it means I have to march across the planet myself to make sure it gets built. Having the bots build actually makes building long belts go a lot more slowly in this game than it did in Factorio where at least you could build a belt at your running speed.

Unclear benefits to building the actual Dyson Sphere. The Dyson Sphere in literature and science is an idea of harnessing the nearly unlimited energy of a star to do our bidding, and yet I got all the way to the final Research cube and never found myself with the kind of unsolvable power troubles that seemed to require a Dyson Sphere. I built one for kicks (it’s also unclear where you’re supposed to build the launchers but whatever), but I feel like I’d have been just as well or better served building more and more solar grids across the surface of the planet. Land was super plentiful and why should I spent more to build solar grids in space when I could just build solar grids on the ground. The efficiency gains (if there even were any) weren’t worth it and the energy gains for running your planet-wide base weren’t so great that I felt I needed it.

So overall Dyson Sphere Program is still a very fun game, and it’s a somewhat unique way to combine Factorio with space travel. But I’m feeling less and less confident in recommending it to others considering I can’t even bring myself to finish it.

Final thoughts on Cult of the Lamb

A couple of days ago I said I’d gotten into playing Cult of the Lamb. Well I finished it and as of right now you can buy it for 20% of until December 12th. Note: the game isn’t really about story, but there are total spoilers below.

As I said in my previous post the plot was pretty much what you would expect from the outset, the Evil God you’re serving is your final boss fight after you’ve defeated the False Gods who tried to kill you at the beginning of the game. Let’s put some names to these characters: the Evil God you serve is called “The One Who Waits” while the False Gods you fight are the four “Bishops of the Old Faith”. The only sizzle to the plot is the tiny bit of interest that Bishop #3 is scared of you instead of angry and murder-y towards you like Bishops #1 and #2, and that Bishop #4 basically knows you’re going to kill them all and isn’t too upset about it when you speak to her. They throw a tiny interesting twist that The One Who Waits was originally Bishop #5, but they were so proud of that revelation that they have Bishop #4 repeat it to you verbatim about three different times, killing its gravity.

The Bishops are vaguely themed after a couple of different things, but this theming in incredibly bare-bones. The first 3 Bishops are all obviously deformed, #1 has his eyes removed, #2 has her throat slit, #3 has his ears removed. The in-game achievements then spell this theming out for you as “See no Evil, Speak no Evil, Hear no Evil.” Bishop #4 has a head wound, so “Think no Evil,” and The One Who Waits gives you an achievement for “Do no Evil” to complete the set. Cute. Then they’re vaguely themed after the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, only here it’s War, Famine, Pestilence, and Entropy/Change. Bishop #2 (Famine) will make your cultists starve when you meet her, Bishop #3 (Pestilence) will sicken them and Bishop #4 (Entropy/Change) will turn them against you so you have no choice but to kill them.

By the way, I’m saying “Bishop #whatever” here because I genuinely don’t remember these guys’ names, they were not really key to my enjoyment of the game.

The only sizzle the this story is that The One Who Waits and Bishop #4 were an item long ago. The One Who Waits was the god of Death, the ultimate inevitability. But his association with Bishop #4 (who’s dominion was Entropy/Change) screwed him up somehow, you can’t change what’s inevitable but he damn well tried to. This led to the others imprisoning him and killing off all lambs (I guess?) so he could never return. But again Bishop #4 is all about Entropy/Change (it honestly wasn’t clear to me which) and so she knows this situation won’t last, knows that she’ll get killed by the Lamb (your protagonist), and even knows the Lamb will kill The One Who Waits, which indeed you do at the end of the game.

So that’s the story of the thing. I’m pretty sure my few paragraphs are about as long as all the dialogue in the game because story really isn’t the focus here, gameplay is.

As for the gameplay, remember I discussed last time that the game is really made up of 2 separate games that vaguely tie together: you have a cult who you have to manage and who reward you with better weapons, and you go dungeon diving with your better weapons to get items and cult members to expand your cult.

Unfortunately the cult ran out of fun things for me way before the dungeon diving combat sections. I had bought every weapon/card upgrade in the game by the time I’d killed Bishop #3, but I still had #4 and The One Who Waits so I kind of ignored the cult and focused on them. This was to my detriment, I hadn’t noticed that each dungeon you entered had a minimum number of cultists required to let you enter, for dungeons 1, 2 and 3 I had had exactly the minimum number and so I actually thought this wasn’t a minimum requirement, it was just the game alerting me to how many cultist I had at the moment. But Dungeon #5 requires 20 cultists so after getting all geared up to kill The One Who Waits I suddenly had to run around and find 6 new cultists in order to proceed.

Like I said managing the cult just isn’t fun enough on its own to justify it’s gameplay when it isn’t providing you those sweet combat level-ups. This isn’t a Rimworld sort of game, the cultists don’t have enough personality or enough uniqueness to really make you care about them. And the good or evil rules you can lay down for your cult are quite interesting in how they can make your cult more efficient, but they grow stale over time.

Remember, I had a rule where I could murder anyone in the cult at any time and all my cult members gained faith when elderly members were murdered. That was a fun little synergy, as was throwing a Feast when Bishop #2 made all my cultists starve. But the cult system isn’t interesting or challenging enough to keep that fun going for the length of the game, which is unfortunate.

The combat sections however are quite fun for the entire length of the game, especially as you start getting into the weird and unique late-game benefits you can acquire. To remind you of how the combat works: you enter a dungeon and get a random weapon and a random magic spell with which to kill your enemies. As you continue through the dungeon you’ll find rooms containing either cards or new weapons/magic for you to choose from.

The cards are pretty sweet, giving you things like extra health, extra damage, or the ability to drop a bomb whenever you dodge-roll. The weapons can be too, with unique abilities like poison, stealing health, or summoning ghosts. One late-game item you can equip though is a new robe which gives you 4 cards at the start of the dungeon but no new cards during the dungeon. The trade-off is clear as getting these super-powers early might be worth having slightly less of them overall, but what wasn’t clear was that this ability also dramatically lowers the number of new weapons you get as the weapon rooms are removed also. I mostly liked using Axes, Hammers, or if I had to Swords. I didn’t like the Daggers or the Gloves, but since I had so few new weapons when using that robe I kept getting stuck with weapons I didn’t like which was unfortunate.

I want to talk more about the combat but I feel I just don’t have the gaming vocabulary to do it justice since I play so few games of this type. I like that the enemies often glow when they’re about to make an attack, as it helps you learn their attack pattern and dodgeroll out of the way. I like that you can cancel an attack into a dodgeroll or a dodgeroll into an attack at any time. I do not like that you can’t cancel a magic spell this way, and find it weird that when aiming magic spells the game slows down time to help you out a bit.

The early game enemies are all about learning their patterns and dodgerolling at the right time. Later enemies start throwing out loads of projectiles (is this what folks call “Bullet Hell“?) which require you to focus on the projectiles and dodgeroll through them to escape. Nearly every attack is telegraphed in this game, so I’m sure speedrunners and the like can learn to play the whole game without taking damage.

I think the boss fights are interesting, they all have a similar gimmick of combining a massive number of projectiles with a massive number of minor enemies plus a big enemy boss, all of which makes it hard to know what you need to concentrate on and makes it easier to take hits. Still the boss fights against the 4 Bishops felt tangibly easier that the dungeons and minibosses that preceded them, I wonder if this was a deliberate move on the part of the devs to make the Bishops feel climactic while still letting you beat them on your first try and feel powerful in doing so. The one exception is Bishop #5 aka The One Who Waits and that’s because he doesn’t even have a dungeon, you just walk straight into his boss fight. I guess again they wanted that climactic feeling and a dungeon would kind of ruin it.

What few quibbles I have left are mostly minor things that other roguelike enjoyers (this is apparently also classified as a roguelike) probably don’t think are issues. I always hated a run where I got stuck with a weapon I didn’t like (say a Dagger) for too long, and sometimes the cards just are useless for you. But whatever, it was a fun game.

New game I’m playing: Cult of the Lamb

Cult of the Lamb is an exciting little hack-n-slash mixed with base building game that I’ve been playing a lot of recently. The game opens up with your protagonist (the eponymous Lamb) being sacrificed to prevent the resurrection of an Evil God. Turns out killing the Lamb just sent them straight to Evil God instead, who resurrects the Lamb and tells them to kill all the False Gods who stand before them. From here the resurrected Lamb is handed a sword and some magic to start going nuts, as well as a few servants to build up a cult and become ever more powerful so they can slay their enemies and presumably resurrect the Evil God in turn.

I haven’t finished the game but I assume once you resurrect the Evil God, everything is smiles and happiness forever and the Lamb just retires to running their cult. There’s no way the Evil God is actually the final boss you’ll be killing at the end.

Anyway this game isn’t anywhere near the kind of thing I usually play, fast paced hack-n-slashers just aren’t my forte, and playing one with a mouse and keyboard probably brands me a heretic in most people’s eyes. Still, it’s a very enjoyable experience with an easy-to-use dodgeroll and a variety of enemy patterns to keep the game interesting. You can cancel sword attacks using the dodgeroll as well (though infuriatingly, not magic attacks) meaning most combat arenas turn into me rolling around like Sonic the Hedgehog on cocaine, hacking and dodging all the while. I actually learned that I get better at the game by taking things a tad slower though (your weapon has knockback and often cancels enemy attacks), so this isn’t always the best strat.

Anyway when you’re not dodgerolling through the cultists of the False Gods, you’re managing your own cult to gather the resources needed to improve and expand your abilities. The two sides of the game (cult running and hacking/slashing) are actually way more disconnected than they seem, the combat bonuses you get from managing your cult are rather modest, but it’s definitely a fun way to take a break in between the hyperactive combat sections. Your cult is made up of cultists you randomly capture or save during combat sections, and as per usual they all need to eat, sleep, and stay healthy, and in return they will believe in you more which unlocks higher tiers of weapons and magic later in the game. But besides these very modest combat benefits, running the cult feels mostly like playing an entirely separate game. That’s not a terrible thing mind, because it’s still a fun game, it just doesn’t have as much combat benefits as it at first seems.

The cult itself includes the usual Rimworld-eque activities of getting food, building beds, and making sure everyone is happy. I’m sure Rimworld wasn’t the first game of this type but it’s the first one I played and so everything reminds me of it. The unique selling point of this game though is that since you’re running a cult, you can make all sorts of arbitrary rules and regulations to make it more efficient or just torment your little cultists. You can hold feasts, you can appoint a tax collector, you can unlock the ability to murder any cultist you want (good for removing dissidents). All these rules can make your cult run just a bit more smoothly which lets your cultists level up more and will allow you to unlock those modest weapon upgrades for the combat I was talking about.

To go back to combat, the last big selling point is the cards and weapons randomizer to keep the runs fresh and interesting. Each time you go on a “crusade” against your enemies, you will enter a dungeon with a randomly selected weapon and magic attack. They all have unique properties so two runs can feel entirely different depending on whether you get the hammer (slow as molasses but deals huge damage) or the dagger (quick strikes, lower damage).

In addition, each weapons can have one of several unique bonuses such as stealing health, poisoning, or unleashing ghosts. You may then randomly find weapon shops in the dungeon where you can exchange your weapons for 1 of 3 others. But in addition to all this you will find card shops that will let you select 1 of 2 random cards for a separate benefit. These cards range from poisoning anyone you hit, to getting some extra health, to swinging your weapon faster or more strongly.

The randomness of which weapons you’ll get combined with which cards you’ll get adds a huge layer of replayability to any run ensuring that no two crusades feel the same. And since you unlock higher level weapons and new cards through the cult, they form the major way that the two areas of gameplay interact.

So the game is really two separate games that are both fun in their own right, but which somewhat combine to become greater than the sum of their parts. If I do have any quibbles they are minor, but for completeness sake:

  • I don’t like how choosing the rules of your cult locks you into that rule and can’t be changed. I also don’t like how you don’t get to see all the possible rules before you pick. In my first playthrough I chose a rule that locked me out of being able to murder cultists on demand, which later became a problem as I had a few dissidents running around and not enough wood to build jail cells to contain them. I then found that I had chosen another set of rules which didn’t actually synergize that well with each other, and that I’d prefer to have picked the “murder anyone” rule because it synergized pretty well with the “cultists gain faith when old members of the cult get murdered” rule as well as some others. I decided that even though it’s against the spirit of these types of games, I’d have a lot more fun by just restarting and choosing different rules
  • Speaking of restarting, I don’t like how the game has unskippable intros and tutorials to start off. Maybe there’s some option to skip them but I didn’t find any, so I had to rewatch the opening cutscenes and replay the opening tutorials before I could get back to where I wanted to be. In a game all about high-octane combat, starting a new game should put as few barriers as possible between you and the “good stuff” so it’s disappointing that this game has so much unskippable faffery to start off with. It’s not that the first sections of the game are bad mind you, they should just be skippable on repeat playthroughs.
  • The story is passable, which is both good and bad. Actually I guess it’s mostly good, since in less than a minute it sets up who you are, your goals, and your enemies, but still it isn’t going to knock anyone’s socks off but then it isn’t trying to.
  • I guess every game now wants to let you customize and name your little Rimworld-esque cultists, but to be honest I’ve never felt so disconnected from them as in this game. In Rimworld and other games, the cultists (colonists in Rimworld) are your main asset and avenue of gameplay. What they do IS what the game is about, so customizing them and watching them grow, level up, and die is fun and tugs on your heartstrings. Here the cultists are mostly devoid of personality and unique attributes, and there aren’t even good ways to wrangle them in the ways I’d like to (you have to talk to them individually to give them specific jobs). So customizing them does nothing for me, I’d much rather customize the Lamb (your protagonist/Avatar of Destruction) and give them a unique name and character model, but alas that’s the one character you can’t change.

Anyway with all that said, it’s a fun little game that’s retailing for the equivalent of 2 shares of Ford ($F) common stock. So if you have 2 shares of $F go ahead and sell them to buy this, because it’s honestly a better use of your money.

My favorite mystery trope: the untwist

Before I begin, WordPress tells me this will be my 100th post, yay! Also, here there be spoilers for Deadly Premonition.

I’d like to talk about my favorite mystery trope, I don’t know if it has a real name but I’ve come to calling it “the untwist.” An untwist is when a plotline that you thought was resolved turns out not to be resolved after all, making its true solution all the more unexpected. The plotline that got me first thinking about the untwist was Deadly Premonition, a game with an incomprehensible budget allocation but a strangely alluring story.

The player takes the role of Francis York Morgan (please, just call him York, that’s what everyone calls him). Throughout the game, York will turn to himself and talk to an unseen character “Zach.” York’s conversations with Zach always appear to give Zach total agency over the situation: Zach is asked what he wants to do, or what he thinks, or what the proper course of action for York is. In many ways Zach appears to be guiding and leading York through his entire adventure, but whenever anyone asks about Zach, York dodges the question and refuses to give a straight answer.

At this point in the story I and a couple of other people I know concluded that Zach was a stand-in for the player. Games have occasionally had a habit of addressing the player directly, and having York ask for guidance from the player (who is directly controlling York’s actions through the controller) seemed like an eccentric way to continue in this tradition. Even when York sort of gives an answer on “who is Zach” to Emily (his apparent love interest), he doesn’t say much more than that Zach has “always been with him” and “helps him in every way.” This just seemed to some of us as more confirmation that Zach was a player stand-in since the answers were still vague enough to justify that conclusion.

Speaking of York’s non-answer to Emily, he tells her a story about how when he was little his father killed his mother, cryptically saying “at times we must purge things from this world because they should not exist, even if it means losing someone we love.” Yeah it’s that kind of game. This “why did York’s father kill him mother” mystery appears to take center-stage now that the “who is Zach” mystery has been “solved.” After this point Zach is rarely mentioned and the focus seems to have shifted, again lending credence to the idea that the the mystery is solved and the player was supposed to believe that Zach is just a stand-in for the player but that the game just can’t come out and say it because it doesn’t want to totally destroy the 4th wall. But that the simple answer isn’t the true story.

In the very last moments of the game’s story, York sees a vision of his father killing his mother again. This time he sees the whole scene, in which another character is shown to have “infected” his mother with a tree-like eldritch horror which is growing inside her. This causes his father to utter the line “at times we must purge things from this world because they should not exist, even if it means losing the one we love.” But now he adds another line: “I couldn’t do it, but you have to, you have to be stronger, OK Zach?”

Those two words “OK Zach?” had me staring agape at my screen, suddenly a plotline I thought was solved had been unsolved, then resolved in front of me while a separate plotline also got solved. The story continues with York realizing he is the alter-ego of Zach. Zach couldn’t handle seeing what his father did and so allowed a different personality (York) to take over while he went dormant inside of York. York asks Zach for guidance not because Zach is the player, but because Zach is the personality that is guiding York while York is taking over. This revelation causes Zach to re-take his place as the primary personality, complete with a new scar, a new hair-color, and a new voice just to complete the picture.

The twist worked so well for me because it solved a mystery I didn’t even realize was unsolved. As I said, I had assumed Zach was an eccentric way for York to refer to the player the whole time, so to see that he was actually a character in his own right was mind-blowing. I’ve talked with some others who didn’t have quite the same experience, they didn’t think the Zach mystery was actually solved so weren’t as dumbstruck when it was “unsolved.” But I feel like my interpretation is valid for the story, and it’s what makes the story so great in my mind. Anyway, all mystery stories depend a bit on how you take them yourself, some people get disappointed when they guess the right answer, or angry when they can’t guess the right answer. But for me, I will always hold this as my favorite way a story ever fooled me.