I thought I was going to write a post all about Brutal Legend's RTS mechanics, but it turns out there's not a lot to say - they're not very good, but they also have the virtue of not being very difficult. You build "merch booths" and attract "fans," which act as your currency for building units. The goal is to control the fan geysers to produced more units and overwhelm your enemy.
The units themselves have some pretty fun designs. My favorite is the Drowning Doom faction. All of their units have this creepy goth look that really adds a lot of character to your battles against them. Unfortunately, the RTS controls aren't very precise, at least for someone as unskilled as me, it all boils down to pointing your units at the enemy and hoping for the best.
But in the end, those hopes were completely justified, and I managed to beat the game. That covers a lot of sins. Sadly, what it doesn't cover is the weak writing in the second half of the game.
Or, rather, I should say that the second half of the game suffers for being the second half and not for being the middle third. Eddie Riggs has a falling out with his love interest and she runs away and becomes this sexy goth sorceress who uses what she learned from Eddie against him, summoning a massive undead horde with the power of a slightly different subgenre of metal. This proves to be a huge distraction from fighting their true enemy, the demon Emperor Doviculus.
The way the story should have gone is that Eddie and Ophelia should have reconciled and joined forces, either right before or right after Doviculus raises the stakes. This would have set up a series of missions where you fought the Tainted Coil, giving each of the game's three multiplayer faction a turn in the spotlight.
What actually happens is that Doviculus kind of just crashes the climax to Ophelia's story, barging in after the big final battle with the Drowning Doom and immediately pushing you into a lamer, less difficult battle with a small fraction of the Tainted Coil's units. And that is the one and only time you face that faction in the single-player game. Ordinarily, it would be nitpicking to claim that a game doesn't have an entire plot, but in this case, the Tainted Coil missions are so conspicuous in their absence that it has to be a sign of problems during the production.
Overall, though, I'm happy with the game we got. Its heady blend of humor, semi-ironic adolescent machismo, and cyclopean scale is not something that I've ever seen duplicated. Still, one of these days, I'd love to play a Double Fine game that is as good at the end as it was as the beginning.
Monday, December 11, 2017
Saturday, December 9, 2017
Brutal Legend - 10/20 hours
Collectibles in games are kind of a tricky proposition. I like the feeling of finiteness that comes from tracking them down. There are only so many and you can grab them one after another. There's something satisfying about having a list of things to do and then gradually seeing that list get smaller and smaller . . . The parallel to my blog was unintentional when I started writing the sentence, but it seems apt. These sorts of systematic tasks are right in my wheelhouse. I like having a goal and making steady progress towards that goal.
On the other hand, collecting doodads in a game is also kind of frustrating and pointless. It's better in Brutal Legend than most because the best thing about this game is the scenery and driving around looking for hidden statues gives you plenty of excuse to look at everything. Plus, the soundtrack is growing on me. I'll probably never be a true heavy metal fan, but I'm coming to appreciate the nuance a bit more. And yet, this sort of exploration always comes with its own set of worries. How many collectibles are in this particular area? How do I keep track of where I've already searched? How can I be sure that, when I've failed to find a collectible, it's because there was no collectible there and not because it's just especially well-hidden.
Questions like that are why I usually only do the collectibles thing when the game includes some sort of collectible finder. As much as I enjoy the order and rigor of crossing things off a list, I hate the uncertainty that comes with not actually having a list. But in this case, I made an exception because I know Brutal Legend is a short game and I didn't want to run out of things to do before I reached 20 hours.
So that's mostly what I've been doing. I found an online guide and I've been very carefully tracking down the various collectibles, gathering them all whenever a new area opens up, so as to not miss a single one and thus have no ambiguity whether or not the collectibles have been found. Like I said earlier, it's more fun in Brutal Legend than in most other games, but it's not, you know, great.
On the other hand, collecting doodads in a game is also kind of frustrating and pointless. It's better in Brutal Legend than most because the best thing about this game is the scenery and driving around looking for hidden statues gives you plenty of excuse to look at everything. Plus, the soundtrack is growing on me. I'll probably never be a true heavy metal fan, but I'm coming to appreciate the nuance a bit more. And yet, this sort of exploration always comes with its own set of worries. How many collectibles are in this particular area? How do I keep track of where I've already searched? How can I be sure that, when I've failed to find a collectible, it's because there was no collectible there and not because it's just especially well-hidden.
Questions like that are why I usually only do the collectibles thing when the game includes some sort of collectible finder. As much as I enjoy the order and rigor of crossing things off a list, I hate the uncertainty that comes with not actually having a list. But in this case, I made an exception because I know Brutal Legend is a short game and I didn't want to run out of things to do before I reached 20 hours.
So that's mostly what I've been doing. I found an online guide and I've been very carefully tracking down the various collectibles, gathering them all whenever a new area opens up, so as to not miss a single one and thus have no ambiguity whether or not the collectibles have been found. Like I said earlier, it's more fun in Brutal Legend than in most other games, but it's not, you know, great.
Friday, December 8, 2017
Brutal Legend - 4/20 hours
I've been doing this blog for about three and a half years now. And before that, I wrote a novel and about a half-dozen roleplaying books. So I think it's fair to call myself "a writer," or, at least, a serious hobbyist. And I say this because as a writer, I am stunned by Brutal Legend. I don't know how Tim Shafer did it. It's like a damned magic trick the way this game just instantly sells its world and its characters.
From his first scene, you know who Eddie Riggs is and you become immediately invested in his predicament. Hell, I could have played a whole game worth of him being a roadie for Kabbage Boy, based purely on the strength of the first three minutes of the game.
Then he gets transported to "The Age of Metal" and it's like a master class in sketching out a compelling fantasy world. And I'm not even talking about the art design here. Eddie's early monologues, where he correctly predicts that the battle nun will be a horrifying mutant, or where he prays to the gods of evil to move a captured enemy vehicle, tell you everything you need to know about what sort of world you're in and what sort of story you're going to experience.
And then the art design reinforces that. I'm not any sort of connoisseur of heavy metal, but it doesn't matter because it is nearly impossible to find a camera angle in this game that does not capture something awesome. Like, sure, there's this layer of irony that comes from knowing that the cross-shaped megalith or giant chrome engine embedded in the sides of a canyon are inspired by a particular musical genre, and thus it's funny that this celebration of macho excess has been realized in a digital world. And yet, it is also a distinct fantasy world of epic scope and grandeur.
There's this thing fantasy stories commonly do, where they're set in what amounts to a post-apocalyptic world. The protagonist is part of a civilization that has been built on top of the ruins of some prior civilization that was both immensely accomplished and tantalizingly mysterious. And in fantasy games, interacting with these ancient ones is often the most memorable part. There's this great optional area in Final Fantasy VI where you see a drama play out between summoned gods and the wizards and royalty that bound them. And of course, the titular Remnants were the best part of The Last Remnant, and so on and so forth, going all the way back to the dungeons of Dungeons & Dragons.
But I'm going to make a bold statement here - no one has ever done it better than Brutal Legend. The backstory is that the world was once ruled by this enlightened race of titans, who tutored both humanity and demons before mysteriously vanishing. And you can see the mark they made on the world almost everywhere you go. There's this 20-story-tall stone guitar just sitting in the middle of a field - is it relevant to a quest? Do you have to fight some kind of guitar-monster there, or perhaps navigate through a musically-themed dungeon? Nope. It's just a giant artifact, left over from when giants ruled the world. You can stare at it, be awed by it, and know deep down in your bones that everything you do is in the shadow of what the ancients left behind.
Sure, this ancient race only exists because the game-creators wanted to build a semi-coherent world around an implied Heavy Metal mythos, but then their inspiration, the fantasy-flavored lyrics of certain heavy metal songs, was itself inspired by the foundational classics of fantasy literature. Brutal Legend is a quotation of a quotation and the net effect is like double-distilled moonshine. Maybe you don't get the same subtlety and nuance as you would in a straightforward fantasy game, but the essence of the genre is right there in your face, in all of its eye-watering glory.
There's this sense that as you play along with Brutal Legend's story, you can predict what's going to happen long before it actually happens. Lars, the leader of the resistance, is a fairly typical fantasy hero and his journey, as seen through the eyes of Eddie Riggs, is one that follows a fairly standard trajectory. And I would argue that that is a strength instead of a weakness. First of all, the game doesn't need to waste a lot of time establishing who these people are or why you should care about them. You know: heroes = good, villains = bad. But secondly, Brutal Legend actually manages to do something really clever here. By making the main viewpoint character someone who plays more of a supporting role, it explores a rather conventional story from an unusual perspective - a heroic fantasy narrative seen through the lens of logistics and diplomacy, rather than personal valor.
Making the game an RTS is therefor a thematic necessity (and as I understand it, Brutal Legend was supposed to be an RTS from the start, the adventure and open-world elements were later additions), but I'm getting ahead of myself. Mostly I've been focusing on gathering collectibles and exploring the world. I haven't actually gotten to the RTS sections yet. I've been putting it off because I remember them being half-baked and tedious, but I should probably just bite the bullet and move on, because the game's story and characters are great and I won't see very much of them wandering around the (admittedly badass and evocative) wilderness.
From his first scene, you know who Eddie Riggs is and you become immediately invested in his predicament. Hell, I could have played a whole game worth of him being a roadie for Kabbage Boy, based purely on the strength of the first three minutes of the game.
Then he gets transported to "The Age of Metal" and it's like a master class in sketching out a compelling fantasy world. And I'm not even talking about the art design here. Eddie's early monologues, where he correctly predicts that the battle nun will be a horrifying mutant, or where he prays to the gods of evil to move a captured enemy vehicle, tell you everything you need to know about what sort of world you're in and what sort of story you're going to experience.
And then the art design reinforces that. I'm not any sort of connoisseur of heavy metal, but it doesn't matter because it is nearly impossible to find a camera angle in this game that does not capture something awesome. Like, sure, there's this layer of irony that comes from knowing that the cross-shaped megalith or giant chrome engine embedded in the sides of a canyon are inspired by a particular musical genre, and thus it's funny that this celebration of macho excess has been realized in a digital world. And yet, it is also a distinct fantasy world of epic scope and grandeur.
There's this thing fantasy stories commonly do, where they're set in what amounts to a post-apocalyptic world. The protagonist is part of a civilization that has been built on top of the ruins of some prior civilization that was both immensely accomplished and tantalizingly mysterious. And in fantasy games, interacting with these ancient ones is often the most memorable part. There's this great optional area in Final Fantasy VI where you see a drama play out between summoned gods and the wizards and royalty that bound them. And of course, the titular Remnants were the best part of The Last Remnant, and so on and so forth, going all the way back to the dungeons of Dungeons & Dragons.
But I'm going to make a bold statement here - no one has ever done it better than Brutal Legend. The backstory is that the world was once ruled by this enlightened race of titans, who tutored both humanity and demons before mysteriously vanishing. And you can see the mark they made on the world almost everywhere you go. There's this 20-story-tall stone guitar just sitting in the middle of a field - is it relevant to a quest? Do you have to fight some kind of guitar-monster there, or perhaps navigate through a musically-themed dungeon? Nope. It's just a giant artifact, left over from when giants ruled the world. You can stare at it, be awed by it, and know deep down in your bones that everything you do is in the shadow of what the ancients left behind.
Sure, this ancient race only exists because the game-creators wanted to build a semi-coherent world around an implied Heavy Metal mythos, but then their inspiration, the fantasy-flavored lyrics of certain heavy metal songs, was itself inspired by the foundational classics of fantasy literature. Brutal Legend is a quotation of a quotation and the net effect is like double-distilled moonshine. Maybe you don't get the same subtlety and nuance as you would in a straightforward fantasy game, but the essence of the genre is right there in your face, in all of its eye-watering glory.
There's this sense that as you play along with Brutal Legend's story, you can predict what's going to happen long before it actually happens. Lars, the leader of the resistance, is a fairly typical fantasy hero and his journey, as seen through the eyes of Eddie Riggs, is one that follows a fairly standard trajectory. And I would argue that that is a strength instead of a weakness. First of all, the game doesn't need to waste a lot of time establishing who these people are or why you should care about them. You know: heroes = good, villains = bad. But secondly, Brutal Legend actually manages to do something really clever here. By making the main viewpoint character someone who plays more of a supporting role, it explores a rather conventional story from an unusual perspective - a heroic fantasy narrative seen through the lens of logistics and diplomacy, rather than personal valor.
Making the game an RTS is therefor a thematic necessity (and as I understand it, Brutal Legend was supposed to be an RTS from the start, the adventure and open-world elements were later additions), but I'm getting ahead of myself. Mostly I've been focusing on gathering collectibles and exploring the world. I haven't actually gotten to the RTS sections yet. I've been putting it off because I remember them being half-baked and tedious, but I should probably just bite the bullet and move on, because the game's story and characters are great and I won't see very much of them wandering around the (admittedly badass and evocative) wilderness.
Thursday, December 7, 2017
Brutal Legend - Initial Thoughts
About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)
Brütal Legend is an action-adventure that marries visceral action combat with open-world freedom. Set in a universe somewhere between Lord of the Rings and Spinal Tap, it’s a fresh take on the action/driving genre, which in this case is full of imitation cover bands, demons intent on enslaving humanity and Heavy metal tunes. Featuring the talents of comedian, actor and musician, Jack Black as super roadie Eddie Riggs, as well as cameos by some of the biggest names in metal music it's a wild ride in the belly of the beast that is not to be missed by gamers and Metalheads alike.
Included as a free bonus in the PC version of Brütal Legend are both the Hammer of Infinite Fate and Tears of the Hextadon multiplayer map packs.
Story
The vivid and wildly creative world of Brütal Legend is brought to life through a spate of chrome, leather, rocker babes, epic music, fire-breathing/stud-wearing beasts, mountains made of guitar amps, and more. Follow Eddie as he embarks on a tour of epic destruction with an axe, a guitar, and his minions as he commands the power of rock in epic band battles. It’s lighter-flicking awesomeness that will melt your face clean off.
Combat
Brütal Legend’s combat is a combination of classic action slasher and real time strategy mechanics. Melee and ranged combat come from your double-sided broadaxe and demon-slaying, pyrotechnic-creating guitar. Add that 1-2 punch to a guitar solo mechanic that can summon objects, buff your teammates, or cripple your opponents, and you have a deep, gratifying core gameplay combat loop that is fun for the hardcore and accessible for the casual. On top of that, players will journey from Roadie to Rock God by commanding legions of metalheads into Brütal Victory and sending troops charging into battle.
A Streaming Open World
Brütal Legend gives you the freedom to walk, drive, or fly anywhere in a fully streaming open world whose art style is inspired by some of the most iconic and hilariously rad metal album covers ever created. Every vista in the beautiful universe of Brütal Legend looks like it was pulled from a Frank Frazetta painting.
Packed With Cameos and Voice Talent
Brütal Legend is full of cameos from gods of metal like Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, Lita Ford, and many, many others. It has a MASSIVE metal soundtrack from every era of metal music: 1970’s classic metal to 1980’s hair metal to the scarier cousins of 1990’s metal. And of course, Jack Black pays the ultimate homage to metal as Eddie the Roadie, continuing the theme from the work of his band, Tenacious D and his previous films like School of Rock and High Fidelity.
Multiplayer Mayhem
4v4 "skirmish" multiplayer marries action combat with a strategic unit-control mechanic. As the leader of one of the factions in the game, the player will direct his armies in a Battle of the Bands where the trophy is survival. Brütal Legend’s multiplayer is online-enabled, so you can conquer your friends online (broadband connection required for online play).
Music
The music in Brütal Legend is truly massive. Made up of 108 of the most rocking tracks from 75 different bands representing every sub-genre of metal, it is something to experience in and of itself.
Previous Playtime
0 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
It was completely free! I didn't need another game. I didn't even want another game. But I'm only human. Tell me something is free, and I'm immediately drawn to it. That wasn't enough on its own, though. I've been getting more selective about the games I've been buying this year, and I've turned down other free games because I wasn't exactly interested in them. But Brutal Legend is definitely something special. I've played it before and loved it, so I was willing to risk falling behind on my annual goal to pick it up.
Expectations and Prior Experience
I've played the console version before and I loved it. It may not have had the most polished gameplay out there (like, why is it an RTS, seriously), but the world design may well be my favorite ever, and the characters are hilarious and the first half of the plot is both funny and engaging (like many Double Fine games, I found it had a weak ending, but maybe my memory is playing tricks on me).
The funny thing is that I was not (and largely am still not) a particular fan of metal music. I always found its over-the-top machismo and embrace of dissonance to be offputting, but put in to the context of a colorful fantasy world, I found it charming. I loved driving around in the hot rod, looking at the album-cover inspired scenery, and blasting Manowar. It's not something I'd do in real life, but Brutal Legend managed to take me out of myself enough, and there's something magical about that.
Which is why I expect the game to go easy, and hopefully fast. I've got 24 days to play 4 games and I chose this one specifically because I know that it can transport me to another world and make me obsessed. I hope to channel that power for a quick completion, though I worry that maybe I've changed enough in the past few years that I won't find it nearly as enrapturing as I once did.
Brütal Legend is an action-adventure that marries visceral action combat with open-world freedom. Set in a universe somewhere between Lord of the Rings and Spinal Tap, it’s a fresh take on the action/driving genre, which in this case is full of imitation cover bands, demons intent on enslaving humanity and Heavy metal tunes. Featuring the talents of comedian, actor and musician, Jack Black as super roadie Eddie Riggs, as well as cameos by some of the biggest names in metal music it's a wild ride in the belly of the beast that is not to be missed by gamers and Metalheads alike.
Included as a free bonus in the PC version of Brütal Legend are both the Hammer of Infinite Fate and Tears of the Hextadon multiplayer map packs.
Story
The vivid and wildly creative world of Brütal Legend is brought to life through a spate of chrome, leather, rocker babes, epic music, fire-breathing/stud-wearing beasts, mountains made of guitar amps, and more. Follow Eddie as he embarks on a tour of epic destruction with an axe, a guitar, and his minions as he commands the power of rock in epic band battles. It’s lighter-flicking awesomeness that will melt your face clean off.
Combat
Brütal Legend’s combat is a combination of classic action slasher and real time strategy mechanics. Melee and ranged combat come from your double-sided broadaxe and demon-slaying, pyrotechnic-creating guitar. Add that 1-2 punch to a guitar solo mechanic that can summon objects, buff your teammates, or cripple your opponents, and you have a deep, gratifying core gameplay combat loop that is fun for the hardcore and accessible for the casual. On top of that, players will journey from Roadie to Rock God by commanding legions of metalheads into Brütal Victory and sending troops charging into battle.
A Streaming Open World
Brütal Legend gives you the freedom to walk, drive, or fly anywhere in a fully streaming open world whose art style is inspired by some of the most iconic and hilariously rad metal album covers ever created. Every vista in the beautiful universe of Brütal Legend looks like it was pulled from a Frank Frazetta painting.
Packed With Cameos and Voice Talent
Brütal Legend is full of cameos from gods of metal like Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, Lita Ford, and many, many others. It has a MASSIVE metal soundtrack from every era of metal music: 1970’s classic metal to 1980’s hair metal to the scarier cousins of 1990’s metal. And of course, Jack Black pays the ultimate homage to metal as Eddie the Roadie, continuing the theme from the work of his band, Tenacious D and his previous films like School of Rock and High Fidelity.
Multiplayer Mayhem
4v4 "skirmish" multiplayer marries action combat with a strategic unit-control mechanic. As the leader of one of the factions in the game, the player will direct his armies in a Battle of the Bands where the trophy is survival. Brütal Legend’s multiplayer is online-enabled, so you can conquer your friends online (broadband connection required for online play).
Music
The music in Brütal Legend is truly massive. Made up of 108 of the most rocking tracks from 75 different bands representing every sub-genre of metal, it is something to experience in and of itself.
Previous Playtime
0 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
It was completely free! I didn't need another game. I didn't even want another game. But I'm only human. Tell me something is free, and I'm immediately drawn to it. That wasn't enough on its own, though. I've been getting more selective about the games I've been buying this year, and I've turned down other free games because I wasn't exactly interested in them. But Brutal Legend is definitely something special. I've played it before and loved it, so I was willing to risk falling behind on my annual goal to pick it up.
Expectations and Prior Experience
I've played the console version before and I loved it. It may not have had the most polished gameplay out there (like, why is it an RTS, seriously), but the world design may well be my favorite ever, and the characters are hilarious and the first half of the plot is both funny and engaging (like many Double Fine games, I found it had a weak ending, but maybe my memory is playing tricks on me).
The funny thing is that I was not (and largely am still not) a particular fan of metal music. I always found its over-the-top machismo and embrace of dissonance to be offputting, but put in to the context of a colorful fantasy world, I found it charming. I loved driving around in the hot rod, looking at the album-cover inspired scenery, and blasting Manowar. It's not something I'd do in real life, but Brutal Legend managed to take me out of myself enough, and there's something magical about that.
Which is why I expect the game to go easy, and hopefully fast. I've got 24 days to play 4 games and I chose this one specifically because I know that it can transport me to another world and make me obsessed. I hope to channel that power for a quick completion, though I worry that maybe I've changed enough in the past few years that I won't find it nearly as enrapturing as I once did.
Pandora: First Contact - 20/20 hours
Good news! I made it! I got through an entire game without having to go to war with another faction. It turned out the secret was playing on a very large map, upping the game speed to "marathon" and raising the alien aggression. My superior human foresight allowed me to grab enough territory in the early game, while the AIs were dealing with alien attacks, that I was able to keep a dramatic lead throughout the entire late game (apparently the AI will not gang up on you if you're able to take them all on simultaneously).
The strange thing I noticed about the late game is that once you've built all the available city improvements, it's more or less a matter of time before your faction starts to spiral out of control. Your population continues to grow, so long as there is food, but once you exceed your residence limit, you keep accruing more and more unhappiness, which tanks your build times, research rate, and tax income. It's lucky that I was able to win the game not too long after that started happening, because total collapse from overpopulation was basically inevitable.
I'm not sure how I feel about that. Yes it gives the late-game a sense of urgency, but for fucks' sake people, use some damned birth control. Malthusian population growth is a discredited idea in the real world for a reason.
That being said, it only really starts happening once the technological victory is imminent, so I have to shrug. It would be nice if there were repeatable techs that could help you cope with excess population, but that's mostly because I like things nice and neat. You don't actually need a precisely ordered and well-managed populace to win the game, which makes sense when you think about its focus on military conquest, but which, obviously, I find pretty unsatisfying.
Overall, I'd say that Pandora: First Contact has potential. It wasn't too bad, once I got over the learning curve, but if a game is going to try and be a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri, then it needs to bring more philosophical exploration and sci-fi weirdness. Also, its focus on being a challenging game left it little room to carve out distinctive identities for its factions. Yang or Miriam may not have attacked at strategically optimal times, but man-oh-man they were insufferable when they did.
I probably won't play this game again, because I have a lot of better options, but it had some unique ideas and I admire the fact that a small company could produce a game as polished as this one. It's not what I want out of a 4X game, but more aggressive players might find it a worthy and engaging strategic challenge that requires a careful balance of economy and expansion.
The strange thing I noticed about the late game is that once you've built all the available city improvements, it's more or less a matter of time before your faction starts to spiral out of control. Your population continues to grow, so long as there is food, but once you exceed your residence limit, you keep accruing more and more unhappiness, which tanks your build times, research rate, and tax income. It's lucky that I was able to win the game not too long after that started happening, because total collapse from overpopulation was basically inevitable.
I'm not sure how I feel about that. Yes it gives the late-game a sense of urgency, but for fucks' sake people, use some damned birth control. Malthusian population growth is a discredited idea in the real world for a reason.
That being said, it only really starts happening once the technological victory is imminent, so I have to shrug. It would be nice if there were repeatable techs that could help you cope with excess population, but that's mostly because I like things nice and neat. You don't actually need a precisely ordered and well-managed populace to win the game, which makes sense when you think about its focus on military conquest, but which, obviously, I find pretty unsatisfying.
Overall, I'd say that Pandora: First Contact has potential. It wasn't too bad, once I got over the learning curve, but if a game is going to try and be a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri, then it needs to bring more philosophical exploration and sci-fi weirdness. Also, its focus on being a challenging game left it little room to carve out distinctive identities for its factions. Yang or Miriam may not have attacked at strategically optimal times, but man-oh-man they were insufferable when they did.
I probably won't play this game again, because I have a lot of better options, but it had some unique ideas and I admire the fact that a small company could produce a game as polished as this one. It's not what I want out of a 4X game, but more aggressive players might find it a worthy and engaging strategic challenge that requires a careful balance of economy and expansion.
Sunday, December 3, 2017
Pandora: First Contact - 9/20 hours
As Pandora: First Contact's aggressive AI pushed me to my breaking point, I looked to the Internet for answers. Apparently, it's all on purpose. The AI "plays to win," which means that if you get too weak, they will opportunistically take you out in order to grab your resources, and if you get too strong, they will gang up on you and take you out in order to eliminate a threat. Sigh.
I mean, I get it. You've got yourself a strategy game, and so you want the people who play it to use strategy. Specifically, you want to capture the feeling and the experience of a big, multi-sided free-for-all game where the player and five of their closest friends scramble after the same prize - victory. And victory is, by it's nature, exclusive. Only one person can win, and so to pursue victory is the same thing as pursuing the other players' defeat.
And in games where military action is an option, the one surefire way to ensure another player's defeat - eliminate them from the game entirely. If they can't play the game, there's no possibility of them winning. It's a direct and straightforward solution to the problem of your opponent's existence.
The only problem is that it's kind of a misguided way to design a game. It's one thing if there are only two players. Then, when one player loses, the other one wins, and the game is over. But if there are three or more players, then one of them being eliminated means the game simply goes on without them. The penalty for losing is that you no longer get to play the game. Which kind of defeats the purpose of getting your friends together to play a game in the first place.
Of course, the AIs are not my friends, but that just raises the question of why one would want to program them to "play to win" in the first place? They don't get any satisfaction out of it. The most they can ever do is thwart the player from seeing late-game content and force them to start over from scratch. Which they could just as easily do by being too easy to beat (say, for example, in a special "easy mode.")
And look, I know every true strategy-game aficionado is fuming at me right now, because I'm missing the obvious answer of "games are meant to be challenging, because how else are you going to get good at strategy if the AI is a pushover?" But that begs the question. Why would I even want to be good at military strategy in the first place?
The obvious answer is because I'm playing a military strategy game in the first place (in much the same way as if, were I playing Ship Simulator Extremes, I'd want to get good at piloting a simulated ship), but with the 4X genre, there's more room for ambiguity. A lot of games in the genre, you can win the game without ever firing a shot. You can focus on building, diplomacy, or discovery and win that way.
And the cynic would point out that this doesn't contradict their point about the weak AI because all of those things are easier if you combine them with military conquest - why build for yourself when you can invest in an army and take stuff that other people have built, and diplomacy is, of course, a lot easier when you can kill the holdouts and leave your supporters alive, and since discovery is a race, you are much more likely to win with fewer players in the running.
All of that is undoubtedly true, and yet I still prefer to win as a pacifist, and for one simple reason: Winning through wars of conquest, even if they are only meant to supplement an economic or technological victory, is a total dick move. Instead of improving yourself, you tear someone else down, and yes, you get material advancement out of the deal, but what of the cost to your soul?
Which isn't to say that you're a dick just because you play military strategy games. I play military strategy games. I enjoy (some) military strategy games. And I like to think I'm only kind of a dick. It's just that if you give me the option to avoid conquest, I will almost always take it. I generally only move my military when things start to feel personal.
And maybe that's foolish. Maybe I should take "allowable within the game's rules" to mean "perfectly acceptable to use when advantageous." Just treat it as an electronic board game, where I'm moving my pieces around with a particular goal in mind, and in which there is no moral dimension whatsoever. Except that I have to confess - I like the moral dimension. I get a thrill out of seeing militarism fail.
And as long as I'm in a confessional mood, I even enjoy being hypocritical about this. Sure, I prefer to avoid war altogether, but there is something super satisfying about a punitive late-game war where I'm steamrolling an aggressive enemy with the power of my superior economy, especially if they're the ones who started it. Mwah, hah, hah! You thought I was weak, but now I'm beating you at your own game. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Not my proudest impulse, but I am who I am.
I guess Pandora: First Contact is just driving home how much I yearn for a game where amity and cooperation are the unambiguous winning path. Where backstabbing and aggressive conquest are net disadvantages in any situation except one of gross asymmetry in skill. Where every player participating all the way to the end of the game is both expected and desirable.
What would "victory" even look like in such a game? I can't really say. Maybe victory itself is an artifact of the militarist mindset. To look at a new world and see only scarcity, instead of the possibility for plenty. Or maybe competition is too fundamental to what people want to get out of strategy games, and such a dreamily idealistic hippy game is appealing only to myself.
Certainly, it would be perverse and pointless to wish for a humanistic and enlightened version of Chess, so why impose the the same standards on Pandora: First Contact.
I mean, I get it. You've got yourself a strategy game, and so you want the people who play it to use strategy. Specifically, you want to capture the feeling and the experience of a big, multi-sided free-for-all game where the player and five of their closest friends scramble after the same prize - victory. And victory is, by it's nature, exclusive. Only one person can win, and so to pursue victory is the same thing as pursuing the other players' defeat.
And in games where military action is an option, the one surefire way to ensure another player's defeat - eliminate them from the game entirely. If they can't play the game, there's no possibility of them winning. It's a direct and straightforward solution to the problem of your opponent's existence.
The only problem is that it's kind of a misguided way to design a game. It's one thing if there are only two players. Then, when one player loses, the other one wins, and the game is over. But if there are three or more players, then one of them being eliminated means the game simply goes on without them. The penalty for losing is that you no longer get to play the game. Which kind of defeats the purpose of getting your friends together to play a game in the first place.
Of course, the AIs are not my friends, but that just raises the question of why one would want to program them to "play to win" in the first place? They don't get any satisfaction out of it. The most they can ever do is thwart the player from seeing late-game content and force them to start over from scratch. Which they could just as easily do by being too easy to beat (say, for example, in a special "easy mode.")
And look, I know every true strategy-game aficionado is fuming at me right now, because I'm missing the obvious answer of "games are meant to be challenging, because how else are you going to get good at strategy if the AI is a pushover?" But that begs the question. Why would I even want to be good at military strategy in the first place?
The obvious answer is because I'm playing a military strategy game in the first place (in much the same way as if, were I playing Ship Simulator Extremes, I'd want to get good at piloting a simulated ship), but with the 4X genre, there's more room for ambiguity. A lot of games in the genre, you can win the game without ever firing a shot. You can focus on building, diplomacy, or discovery and win that way.
And the cynic would point out that this doesn't contradict their point about the weak AI because all of those things are easier if you combine them with military conquest - why build for yourself when you can invest in an army and take stuff that other people have built, and diplomacy is, of course, a lot easier when you can kill the holdouts and leave your supporters alive, and since discovery is a race, you are much more likely to win with fewer players in the running.
All of that is undoubtedly true, and yet I still prefer to win as a pacifist, and for one simple reason: Winning through wars of conquest, even if they are only meant to supplement an economic or technological victory, is a total dick move. Instead of improving yourself, you tear someone else down, and yes, you get material advancement out of the deal, but what of the cost to your soul?
Which isn't to say that you're a dick just because you play military strategy games. I play military strategy games. I enjoy (some) military strategy games. And I like to think I'm only kind of a dick. It's just that if you give me the option to avoid conquest, I will almost always take it. I generally only move my military when things start to feel personal.
And maybe that's foolish. Maybe I should take "allowable within the game's rules" to mean "perfectly acceptable to use when advantageous." Just treat it as an electronic board game, where I'm moving my pieces around with a particular goal in mind, and in which there is no moral dimension whatsoever. Except that I have to confess - I like the moral dimension. I get a thrill out of seeing militarism fail.
And as long as I'm in a confessional mood, I even enjoy being hypocritical about this. Sure, I prefer to avoid war altogether, but there is something super satisfying about a punitive late-game war where I'm steamrolling an aggressive enemy with the power of my superior economy, especially if they're the ones who started it. Mwah, hah, hah! You thought I was weak, but now I'm beating you at your own game. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Not my proudest impulse, but I am who I am.
I guess Pandora: First Contact is just driving home how much I yearn for a game where amity and cooperation are the unambiguous winning path. Where backstabbing and aggressive conquest are net disadvantages in any situation except one of gross asymmetry in skill. Where every player participating all the way to the end of the game is both expected and desirable.
What would "victory" even look like in such a game? I can't really say. Maybe victory itself is an artifact of the militarist mindset. To look at a new world and see only scarcity, instead of the possibility for plenty. Or maybe competition is too fundamental to what people want to get out of strategy games, and such a dreamily idealistic hippy game is appealing only to myself.
Certainly, it would be perverse and pointless to wish for a humanistic and enlightened version of Chess, so why impose the the same standards on Pandora: First Contact.
Saturday, December 2, 2017
Pandora: First Contact - 2/20 hours
I was warned in the review section of the store page. It was a complaint repeated in the negative review that sometimes even showed up in the positive reviews. The AI in this game is absolutely cutthroat. But I thought, "surely easy mode is going to give me a break here." I found out I was wrong the hard way.
I was completely peaceful and yet every damned faction at once declared war on me. It's because the AI is programmed to act aggressively when it senses weakness. And, of course, in a war you lose units, which makes you weaker, which provokes even more of the AIs to pile on. It was kind of a shitshow.
It's a real disappointment to me that my usual pacifist play-style isn't viable, but it's not the end of the world. I see a few possibilities for how I can adapt. I can just spam military units instead of selecting the economy focus when I'm out of stuff to build. I can be more aggressive in the positioning of my units, so as to take out the enemy quickly when they declare war. I can, overall, be less trusting and more opportunistic. I don't like it, but I have options.
The real shame is that I could grow to love Pandora's infrastructure management. At first, I was deceived by its superficial similarity to the Civilization games, so I built my tile improvements out of habit, and was kind of confused about what I was getting out of it. But once I did some research and started experimenting a little, it turned out to actually be kind of a clever system.
Unlike a lot of other 4X games, your resources in Pandora are global. In, say, Civilization IV, if you have a city with a population of 10, that requires that you have farms that produce 20 units of food surrounding that particular city. It doesn't matter if you've got another city that's producing a surplus. If New Byzantium (or whatever) isn't producing enough food to feed itself, it will begin to starve.
In Pandora, by contrast, the farmers in your first city can support miners in your second city and scientists in your third, which really changes the way you look at terrain and settling and building up your cities. Or, at least, it should. I actually just dicked around far more than I should have, which is probably what led to the AI dogpile.
I'm a little diffident about the game, going forward. I don't much care for the idea of having to constantly prepare myself for war, even on easy difficulty, but I do want to experiment more with city specialization and worker micromanagement. I think what I might do is set up a custom game with only one other AI, just so I can work out my build order and learn the nuances of the tech tree. Then, armed with greater knowledge, I can make a run on surviving a true cutthroat arms race.
I was completely peaceful and yet every damned faction at once declared war on me. It's because the AI is programmed to act aggressively when it senses weakness. And, of course, in a war you lose units, which makes you weaker, which provokes even more of the AIs to pile on. It was kind of a shitshow.
It's a real disappointment to me that my usual pacifist play-style isn't viable, but it's not the end of the world. I see a few possibilities for how I can adapt. I can just spam military units instead of selecting the economy focus when I'm out of stuff to build. I can be more aggressive in the positioning of my units, so as to take out the enemy quickly when they declare war. I can, overall, be less trusting and more opportunistic. I don't like it, but I have options.
The real shame is that I could grow to love Pandora's infrastructure management. At first, I was deceived by its superficial similarity to the Civilization games, so I built my tile improvements out of habit, and was kind of confused about what I was getting out of it. But once I did some research and started experimenting a little, it turned out to actually be kind of a clever system.
Unlike a lot of other 4X games, your resources in Pandora are global. In, say, Civilization IV, if you have a city with a population of 10, that requires that you have farms that produce 20 units of food surrounding that particular city. It doesn't matter if you've got another city that's producing a surplus. If New Byzantium (or whatever) isn't producing enough food to feed itself, it will begin to starve.
In Pandora, by contrast, the farmers in your first city can support miners in your second city and scientists in your third, which really changes the way you look at terrain and settling and building up your cities. Or, at least, it should. I actually just dicked around far more than I should have, which is probably what led to the AI dogpile.
I'm a little diffident about the game, going forward. I don't much care for the idea of having to constantly prepare myself for war, even on easy difficulty, but I do want to experiment more with city specialization and worker micromanagement. I think what I might do is set up a custom game with only one other AI, just so I can work out my build order and learn the nuances of the tech tree. Then, armed with greater knowledge, I can make a run on surviving a true cutthroat arms race.
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