I got really into Dark Souls about ten years back, eventually playing through all the Souls games multiple times. I was attracted to its sense of craft and attention to detail; it felt noticeably deeper than other games, at least to me.
For example, like many roleplaying games, Dark Souls leaves items lying around for the player to collect as they explore the world. The difference with other games, though, is that item placement is very deliberate, often featuring small story connections; a soul found in one location or a set of armor found in another tell you something about the world, or its characters, or the lore. Each time you play Dark Souls, you peel back another layer of the onion, drawing connections between item locations, descriptions and character dialogues from one playthrough to the next. It’s a tightly crafted game - there’s an intentionality to it, and the more you play, the more you uncover.
For example, early in the game you find a Firekeeper’s Soul near the imprisoned Lautrec. If you don’t kill Lautrec, he travels back to Firelink Shrine and kills the Firekeeper there. The implication of the first soul you found is that Lautrec was originally imprisoned for killing a Firekeeper; the placement of the item hints at something about his backstory.
Not all games work like this. Loot in Oblivion, for example, is largely randomized, even within named caves. (This stands out to me because both Morrowind and Fallout 3 were much better about intentional item placement. I’m not trying to say that the exploration mechanic works the same way; I fully acknowledge it’s stylistically very different from Souls.) Items you pick up in Final Fantasy or The Legend of Zelda usually have gameplay implications - a healing item or a refresh of an item you use regularly - rather than hidden story connections. And so on and so on.
The depth to item placement design in these games - the intentionality, appropriateness, and so forth of how items are sprinkled throughout the world - is easy to miss if you only play through them once. The story connections of items in Dark Souls, for instance, usually require multiple playthroughs to pick up on. Similarly, the randomized cave loot in Oblivion is hidden from most players because discovering the mechanic requires looting the same cave twice in the same playthrough.
In other words, in the absence of scrutiny, it’s easy to miss how much differently these games approached this mechanic, and how one game in particular succeeded at doing something that the others didn’t even attempt.
Scrutiny Changes Things
I think scrutiny is an important thing to keep in mind when evaluating mechanics in competitive real-time strategy games. The depth of a mechanic - or lack thereof - usually requires a lot of scrutiny and competitive pressure to be revealed in the competitive meta.
One example of this is the ability Revelation, cast by the Oracle unit of the Protoss. Oracles have often been a popular unit in the competitive StarCraft II meta; however, frequent use of Revelation throughout the early- and mid-game took some years to develop in the meta. Eventually, it became too popular, and was nerfed.
Why did the power of Revelation require years of scrutiny to fully reveal itself? Well, I think there’s many reasons, but one of the biggest is that while Revelation provides reliable and free scouting (costing only energy), it’s also mechanically intensive and quite finicky to pull off. The skill floor on executing it is high; yet so too is the skill floor of actually using the relatively limited information it offers. It’s not exactly the “path of least resistance” with respect to scouting your opponent.
StarCraft II is an incredibly competitive game; it’s been played professionally since it was first released 14 years ago. Yet despite all this scrutiny, the meta still took time to develop. Holes in the design and balance - like Revelation - sometimes took years to emerge.
And I can think of several examples of this. For instance, the turtling potential of Egypt’s strong early game defenses was not, in my view, how Ensemble intended them to play out in Age of Mythology. The three Egyptian civs had a slower start and a stronger reliance on gold than either the Greeks or Norse; in return, they were given better defenses and early-game scouting (via obelisks). When Age of Mythology was first released, the interplay of Egypt’s slower start but stronger defenses against Greek and Norse Classical Age raids and attacks was exhilarating and fun; I still remember the old war stories of Anubites jumping over walls and counter-raiding in pre-release descriptions.
Quickly, though, people figured out a stronger way to leverage this mechanic - turtling to the Heroic Age to access stronger tech. And that’s by and large how the Egyptian meta played out for several years (with the exception of Set’s absurd animal conversion play), with the strong early game defenses reinforcing a strength (strong, mobile Migdol units) rather than compensating for a weakness (a slower start).
Scrutiny, competitive pressure, forcing functions, whatever you want to call it - the more that people dive into a game, the more they figure out the optimal ways of using the different mechanics. And that fundamentally changes how the game is played, for better or for worse.
The Grey Goo Conundrum
I reviewed Grey Goo’s campaign about a year back, and I couldn’t help but notice that the title featured a dizzying and extensive array of gameplay mechanics. This didn’t come as too much of a surprise to me, though, because I had spent the previous few years being told by fans of the title that actually, mechanic so-and-so works perfectly fine - look at Grey Goo!
The challenge here is that Grey Goo is played by effectively nobody; there’s almost no scrutiny on how its mechanics work in a high-pressure competitive ecosystem. And without scrutiny, it’s hard to draw an accurate conclusion as to whether said mechanics actually work as intended.
I ask this question anytime someone brings up the design of a different real-time strategy game to defend a given mechanic, or really any aspect of the game development process. Well, Warparty’s developers were rebalancing constantly in the game’s early days; that’s how StarCraft II should be, too.
Yeah? How’s that working out for Warparty?
Cheap shots aside*, I think indie RTS games, in general, are something of a graveyard of ideas that seemed good on paper but don’t actually work out in practice. From a casual player’s standpoint I think that’s one of the biggest misunderstandings in the genre; but from a competitive standpoint, it makes it even more critical that we be careful of the examples we choose to follow.
I think an important implication here is that games that have faced scrutiny have earned themselves a degree of deference with respect to how they approach design and balance. I’m not saying that success and longevity imply every decision in a game is good; but rather that if mechanics have proven themselves to stand the test of time, we ought to respect and appreciate the difficulty and care required to achieve that, rather than assume it’s trivial.
I think the Dark Age of Age of Empires II is a good example. This is sometimes cited as overly long; too slow for competitive play and too boring for casual players. And I get that critique, but when I grinded it competitively, I really appreciated the nuances of the first age. The skill ceiling is actually really high - there’s tons to do and a lot of depth to it, from basic scouting to luring deer to sheep scouting to vill management and all that. The fine-grained timeline also enables quite a few different openers, from 18-pop 1 range to a 26-pop drush FC. I think a good amount of early game strategic variety stems from the decision to have a long first age with several valid exit points.
Now, I’m not saying the design here is perfect, or even that it ought to be replicated to other games. But Age 2 has been played competitively for more than two decades, and the length of the first age has stood up to a huge amount of design and balance scrutiny. That’s worth appreciating and respecting and considering, especially before casually suggesting that a more fast-paced version, like Empire Wars, is somehow automatically superior.
Depth Is Relative
Now having said all that, I want to close by observing that I enjoyed Grey Goo; I enjoyed picking up items in Final Fantasy and the Legend of Zelda; and hell, I enjoyed exploring caves in Oblivion. It’s not relevant to me if Grey Goo’s mechanics hold up after 10,000 hours of competitive play if I’m only planning on playing it for 10 hours.
And that’s worth remembering - it’s reasonable for a game to be designed such that its mechanics are really fun for the first 10, 20, 60, or however many hours, but turn out worse after thousands of hours under the magnifying glass. Not every game needs to provide that level of depth, and actually I would say the hobby as a whole would be worse off if every developer tried to design their games that way.
One of my favorite memories, for instance, is figuring out the mechanics in the original Force Unleashed. There’s some really broken stuff in that game! But I enjoyed it for what it was and had a good laugh while I eviscerated opponents with unbelievably overpowered spell combos. It didn’t need to be all that deep to be a good time. Actually, it would have been worse, in my estimation, if it was “fairly” balanced.
Competitive titles designed to be esports are different - their mechanics need to withstand a level of scrutiny that most games don’t, and they ought to be held to a different standard. Players will spend a thousand hours trying to break the game in every which way - that’s a high bar, and a really challenging one to hit consistently.
Until next time!
brownbear
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* Haha, yeah, I know this is unfair. I appreciate every indie developer, including the folks behind Warparty. My humble suggestion here is that they should have laser focused on the casual gameplay experience instead of hanging out in Discord and debating balance for competitive play.