Already My Words Have Shaped the Industry
The effect one can have in the world is truly amazing. I've had this newsletter for about half a year, and I have six subscribers. This would lead one to assume I've had a negligible effect on the gaming industry. But this is not the case: for this month, I'll revist two of my older columns, and show how games have been released specific to address the issues I've raised.
Now, some people might say things like "This is just a coincidence" and "Obviously other people have been having the same thoughts as you" and "One of the games you mentioned was released way before your newsletter, and you just hadn't played it until it was released for free on Epic". Fortunately, I do not listen to haters.
Now let's see the brilliant things I've sown into this dreadful industry.
Moneyless logistics
My very first newsletter was about the stain of capitalism in games. Specifically, it was about how I like the idea of logistics, but games about logistics are always intrinsically related to capitalism, since they're ultimately about making the green number that represents your money go up. Some games flirt with different ideals - specially Tropico and Surviving Mars - but they all seem to lose their way near the finish life.
Well, since then, I've discovered a title that does moneyless logistics perfectly: Before We Leave.
This cute, condensed management game has its backstory twist and turn to allow it to reach the gameplay it desires. You play as a group of people that have emerged from a shelter after a solar system-wide apocalypse has wiped out your civilization. This means that, while there is a tech tree, it's gleefully accelerated, and you will discover how to launch rockets to other planets before you discover how to build ships out of steel. It also means that most of the stuff you're exploiting doesn't come from actual natural resources, but from ruins of the bygone civilization. This doesn't quite remove the capitalist stain of the 'explore' part of 4X games, but it mitigates it. (Of course, since there are late game techs that allow you to extract these resources from the environment, so it's not really an indictiment against the idea - which, in my opinion, actually makes it better.)
But the best thing about the game is the money. Or its lack. There is no such thing.
There are no humans in the world other than your haggard survivors, and the society you're building ends up being more or less anarchosocialist. People work at whatever jobs are available and consume whatever resources are available. Play well enough, and everyone will be eating well and enjoying themselves. However, most islands won't be able to completely support themselves, so you need to create shipping lanes to bring materials from one island to the other - and, not much later, from one world to another - stop pollution from gathering, and help keep your peeps (that's what your tiny humans are called, adorably) safe from threats that include abandoned weaponry from the percursor civilization and the giant, world-devouring whales that presumably killed them off. (Delightfully, you can placate the whales by building a space elevator and putting a bunch of food on it.)
The removal of money doesn't harm the logistical aspect of the game. Quite the opposite, it refines it. Things still have a cost, it's just in materials rather money. If building a vehicle or structure in a game requires a raw material that's not easily available in a location, it's difficult for money-based games to reflect that. If you use a global price, what's the point of logistics in the first place? If you use a local price, what if you make bringing the material to a location easier? And if your game accounts for all these factors, it starts to become super complicated and only the geekiest players will understand what effect any action they undertake will have on prices, and it might as well be random (which is actually quite realistic if you think about it). Meanwhile, Before We Leave is completely realistic without any abstraction. The high cost of bringing cement to an island that doesn't have it is that you have to create a bunch of shipping lanes and they all need to work perfectly.
Sadly, the game has a fatal flaw. One of its latest updates included a new option to automate shipping lanes, so that they take anything an island is exporting and take them to any island that is importing that thing. The previous method, now an alternative, is to manually assign materials and vehicles to a shipping lane, which will continue to carry them as long as they're available. However, the automated method doesn't always work very well, and sometimes ships will be sitting idle while and island is bursting with a resource and the other is starving for it (literally, in the case of food), and this option can only be toggled during new game creation, so you won't know you might be playing a completely different game until you've dug into it - or, if you don't try to look this up online like I did, you won't know it at all. And I'm nearly "finishing" the game, and I feel no desire to start over with a different logistics method, so I feel I've lost an important part of the game. It's still a sterling approach, specially for you, now that I've told you its secret!
Roguelikes with Progression
Everyone loves roguelikes, except for the many, many people who don't (and, presumably, the much larger contingent of people who don't know and/or care what it is). I'm definitively in the field that loves them. There are many who dislike them because they feel they are too hard, and while I understand why people think that way, I think this point of view is wrong. To sum up a point, I don't think roguelikes are distinctively harder, I just think they're differently hard. Being stuck in a non-rogue game because you can't get past a tricky section is in fact much worse than being stuck in a roguelike game because you can't beat a tricky level, because in the former you're not trapped having to do the same thing every single time, and you have the breadth to approach the challenge in different ways. But losing in a non-rogue game means, at most, having to go back to the beginning of a level, and often not even that, while losing in a roguelike means starting anew, which certainly feels like a harsher punishment.
Many games have thought up of many ways to get around it, usually in the sense of metagame progression, so that certain actions you perform in the game change it permanently. The first game to do that was likely Rogue Legacy, but I didn't like it so I don't know much about it. However, even Spelunky, herald of the modern roguelike, had elements like this in the shortcut tunnels, which allowed you to go straight to deeper levels; however, skipping a level entirely meant foregoing any useful tools you might have found in them, as well as the score. One might even be pedantic enough to argue that 'bone files' in NetHack - levels in which you have died that are saved and spawn with the dead corpse of a former player character, as well as its abandoned inventory - are a form of metagame progression... although, if you keep running into a level in which an out-of-depth mind flayer illithid killed you by the stairway, that's more of a metagame stall.
How do you get around this? Well, you can embrace it as part of difficulty, but I'm a soft boi and uninterested in that approach. However, you can approach this by separating the game into a roguelike 'delving' section and a permanently building 'overworld' section, in which the action phase is always randomly generated but you progress along a pre-generated track that may also contain a story. Going Under is probably the most successful experiment in this vein, and not only is it super fun, but it also shows the versatility in this approach: containing three different dungeons (which must be beaten as separate instances rather than continous areas) and certain challenges that force you to play the game in different ways, including a hilarious one in which you must walk a dog to the bottom floor of a dungeon.
But it's not the one I want to talk about for this section. I want to talk about Nightmare Reaper. Because it solved this problem is a simple, unique way: it's only roguelike for the duration of a level.
Nightmare Reaper has a pretty non-rogue progression. You get past a level, it stays defeated. You collect treasure, it stays collected. You don't have to beat it in a sitting. (Which is good, because it's very long.) It has a very simple story that you progress through every time you complete a level.
However, each level is randomly generated, and must be completed in one go. They're short enough that any boomer can do that (I guess that makes it the ultimate boomer shooter?) and challenging enough that dying is a common but not foregone occurrence. This means that it has its cake and eats it: you can never get stuck on a single section, but when you get past a difficult bit, it's gone forever. The way it's designed also encourages this multiplicity of cakes: some levels have pre-made structures that throw you a more difficult combat section, or even a boss, but after it defeats you once, you know where it is and can prepare accordingly. It's not like a regular roguelike in which you're always going blind, but it's not like a nonrogue in which memorizing the exact placement of each enemy is possible and therefore the objectively most efficient way to approach it. You know what kind of rumble you're getting into, but not exactly where each enemy is, or even how the arena will be like. You have to be prepared, but you also have to play it by ear.
Does it work well? Beautifully. But it also shows the limitations to this approach. The game only allows the player to keep a single weapon, and the remainder must be found in the level. If I know a level has a hard boss and I have already been through every room and haven't found the kind of weapon that would defeat it, I'm pretty much hopeless. (Of course, I still have to go ahead and try to kill the thing, and failing will give me a new chance.) Conversely, a difficult setpiece might accidentally become trivial if I happen to luck into a powerful set of weapons. Did I succeed at my third try at beating the densely populated room at the end of Disavowed Town Part 3 because I've learned to move around and attack efficiently, or because I happened to have an overcharged minigun and an overcharged rocket launcher? I'll never know.
Still - this is one of my favourite games right now, and one I know I'll be getting back to frequently.
Games continue to evolve. Only time will tell what awaits us.
June's Link Roundup
Business Wargames: Early Complex Text Games
If you've been following me for a long time, well, first, thank you! Second, you know I said I wouldn't be posting more of 50 Years of Text Games, because if I did, I'd just post one of their articles every month. Well, their weekly articles are over, they're gathering material for an upcoming book that'll definitively be worth the liver I'll have to trade for its value in dollars, and who can resist the allure of business wargames? The kickstarter is currently ongoing and has already beaten its target by a large margin.
Speaking of blags I shouldn't post a lot of but had a really fun 'un this month, I bring you back to AI weirdness this week to discover a strange tidbit. Apparently, someone is already using the surprisingly coherent AIs currently available to make a computer-written website. And, apparently, this reveals some weakness AI have when left alone and unsupervised. In this hilarious case, the AI writer is unable to distinguish between the Baltimore orioles, an emblematic bird from that city, and the Baltimore Orioles, the baseball team from that city, and coherently weaves between discussing their sporting records and their avian diet. And you thought Blaseball was weird.
I've already posted an article in the past about Mr. Bernardini, the mysterious literary thief who had been impersonating everyone and their mother (sometimes literally) in the literary world, in order to aquire early releases of books, so that he could... what? No one knows. That article was published shortly before the peculiar thief was arrested in New York, but this follow-up still fails to explain why Bernardini did all the weird crimes he's accused of.
This attempt by an AI to generate an image to match the prompt "Team Fortress 3"
It's learned irony.