Stormgate's Accessibility Everest

It's an illusion, Michael

About twenty years ago, I picked up The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind after hearing about it from my brother. It was my first truly open world game, at a time when my understanding of the concept was limited to Hyrule Field. It’s an excellent title that holds up very well - from my perspective, a good portion of the open world genre’s “forward progress” has been about undoing the damage of later open world titles and instead working backwards to games like Morrowind, games that figured it out decades before everyone else did.

There’s a moment in Morrowind, very early on, that sets the tone for the entire game. Walking out of the tutorial area, the game presents you with this:

Wait… On my own? “You should probably check out” - so it’s up to me? I can just… do whatever I want?

Holy cow!

After spending years and years playing games that were basically a straight-line, the idea of getting dropped into a huge open world and being allowed to do whatever I wanted was mind-blowing.

There’s a little mini-quest in the starting town that helps illustrate the concept. As you walk out of the tutorial, a guy named Fargoth comes up and complains about his ring being stolen. You learn a rumor from another guy that you should try surveilling him at night. Another tip leads you to the top of a lighthouse, where you wait. At a certain time in the night, Fargoth comes out and secretly accesses his stash - including his ring - which you can then take after he’s done.

You can do this quest, if you want. Or you can not do it, if you don’t want to. Or, if you don’t talk to the right people, you may not even realize it’s there. It’s just something that’s happening, one of thousands upon thousands of somethings that you might stumble across as you explore the vast world of Morrowind.

Never before had I felt such a sense of excitement about exploring the unknown. I felt like around every corner there would be a new surprise, a cool new thing to discover. When I played Morrowind, I always felt like I was on my own adventure, telling my own story. I still remember the time I got caught by mudcrabs on a beach, when I was really low level, and I wasn’t sure whether I would make it out of there.

Honestly, in retrospect - I remember it like I was actually on that beach. Like it actually happened!

Smoke and Mirrors

I tell this story to illustrate that Morrowind is a game about exploration and discovery. I didn’t play through Morrowind to live out my lifelong desire to be a cat archer who can’t wear shoes. I mean, yeah, that’s what I was doing, in literal terms. But that’s not why I was there. The mechanics of the game were a vehicle to an experience that I was looking for. And a little text box prompt did more to take me to that experience than a hundred side quests ever could.

Which got me wondering - beyond just the mechanics and the nuts and bolts of the gameplay, what are people looking for - really looking for - when they play a real-time strategy game? And how can we make that easier for them?

From a gameplay perspective, I think the genre has made some really incredible strides. StarCraft II, in particular, does an exemplary job at it, offering an easy-to-understand economy, one-button army management, slowed down gameplay on normal or casual difficulty, and a relatively intuitive user interface. There’s always room for improvement, of course, but I don’t think any other game gets closer to a sit-and-play experience for a newcomer.

But from an experiential perspective, sometimes I wonder if people are really getting what they’re after, particularly in regards to “strategy”. Strategy is really hard; the deeper and more complex your game is, the more players will struggle to understand what’s going on. Think about how often you see threads like, “how do I counter lurkers?”, and start thinking about all the complexities - the build orders, the reactions, the map, the match-up, the playstyles. The more you learn about the game, the more you realize this sort of question is, by itself, unanswerable. There’s just too many variables to offer a simple response.

I wrote awhile back on how I think one of the reasons co-op was so successful in StarCraft II is that it essentially sidestepped this problem entirely:

Realistically, it’s very, very hard to make tactical and strategic decisions in real-time while controlling an army and managing an economy. It’s just, by definition, hard. So what the designers of co-op decided to do was to emphasize one part of the gameplay loop (execution) and de-emphasize another part (strategy). That doesn’t mean there isn’t any strategy - just that it’s hard to pick a “wrong” strategy the way you can in the campaign, and there’s a lack of that baseline “what should I do next” feeling you sometimes get when you play RTS.

I think you see this in the evolution of the campaigns, too. Contrast, for example, the a-move comp-stomp of the Collossus mission in Legacy of the Void, against the a-move… get stomped Battlecruisers mission in Wings of Liberty. It’s hard to directly compare these missions, but in my eyes, they’re representative of the design philosophy of their respective campaigns. The Wings mission is more complicated and punishing, and you don’t get to appreciate the utility of the Battlecruiser very much. The Collossus mission is much simpler, and you feel pretty darn good about yourself as you demolish your way across the map with a blob of units.

Both missions are trying to accomplish things in terms of the player experience, including making players feel good about the power of very high-tech units. But the Legacy mission (and the Legacy campaign more broadly) does a better job, at least from my perspective, because it’s conceptually much simpler. Players don’t have to worry about stuff like relocating their base or continuous damage to their units or dealing with random DT raids. And while that stuff is really not that hard to deal with (especially on lower difficulties) and is actually kind of cool, it’s still a distraction from other things the mission is trying to do.

The best way I can describe this is that the Legacy campaigns do a better job of making you feel in control; that your units are doing what you want and that you’re able to execute on the strategy that you set out to do. And it does this by doing a bunch of things differently from Wings, some of them big and some of them very subtle.

I think one thing Stormgate could do to be more accessible is to really work backward from the experiences it’s trying to deliver, perhaps somewhat separately from the gameplay itself. For instance, I think one large opportunity here is social features - not the actual mechanics of voice or chat or anything like that, but building an experience that’s compatible with socializing. It’s really hard to talk to your friends while playing StarCraft, because it requires so much focus. If the experience were more amenable to mental multi-tasking, you could actually socialize while you played. And not only would that be more fun, it would also be more accessible - it would give more people access to the experience of thinking about and playing a strategy game while also enjoying time with their friends.

The thing I would point out here is that StarCraft already has a solution, albeit an imperfect one - you can just pick an easier difficulty, which slows things down considerably. But left to their own devices, I think a lot of players end up choosing the hardest difficulty they can handle, because they subconsciously prioritize the nuts and bolts of the gameplay over what will enable them to socialize the easiest. And I think sometimes they do this even when the latter is what they would prioritize if given the explicit, hypothetical choice.

Then there’s the campaigns. Stormgate plans to support cooperative campaigns out of the box, which is awesome. But how will it enable you and your friends to coordinate and think strategically, when you maybe aren’t good enough at the game to properly coordinate and think strategically? Co-op handled this partly through strong implicit incentives - pushing players to collaborate without having to explicitly think about it. But I wonder if there’s more that could be done here, like designing missions that force players into certain roles (attacker or defender, economy-heavy or military-heavy, etc) or that become literally easier when players work together (like offering heroes with buff auras).

When a community member designs a custom game, how do you ensure they make it easy for a new player to get started? What if every custom game that was submitted to the arcade required the creator to fill in a “how to play” section, rather than just a “description” section?

What if the game booted up directly into a tutorial mission - as is so common nowadays - instead of offering you the choice? How many people would this annoy (the answer is me), versus how many would learn how to have more fun thanks to knowing how to actually play the game?

Stuff like this, in my mind, is a really hard problem. How do you give someone the experience of strategic thinking, without actually requiring that they understand a complex game? How do you give someone the experience of socializing in a strategy game setting, without asking them to think and focus at the same time? How do you give someone the experience of fast and responsive gameplay, without them necessarily having the physical capability to actually handle fast and responsive gameplay?

And how do you go about all of this without making hard trade-offs - without unintentionally hurting the experience for someone else?

I mean, honestly, I’m not sure. I have some ideas, but it’s such an ambiguous problem - it’s almost like a magic trick. It’s not like you can just slap a text box on the screen that reads “wow, mass vikings against lurkers? There’s a new sheriff in town, Maru!”

The Final Boss

I trust that Frost Giant will deliver on the nuts-and-bolts of the gameplay; they even list several neat accessibility ideas on their Steam page. I’m interested, though, in what the team will do beyond that. What will it feel like to play this game? What experiences will it offer that the best real-time strategy games of the day cannot, especially around strategic thinking, socializing, and a sense of being in control? And is this a needle that Frost Giant will really be able to move, compared to games like StarCraft II?

I think many modern RTS games already do plenty in this area - like I mentioned before, a lot of the problem is less about the reality of the gameplay and more about how players perceive it. But I think if Frost Giant truly wants to deliver on their goal to be “the RTS that everybody’s been waiting for”, this is the problem they need to convincingly solve, more than any other gameplay feature or interface optimization.

And it’s a really hard problem!

It’s pretty fun to be a cat archer that can’t wear shoes. But sometimes, there’s more to it than that.

Until next time!
brownbear

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