Category Archives: Hypoetheticals

Part 3 of A Big-Budget Roguelike?

The concluding entry in Mr. Adequate’s ‘A Big-Budget Roguelike’ series. If you missed them, read Part 1 and Part 2!

This is the fact that roguelikes are traditionally turn-based. This is vastly more consequential that first blush suggests, so much so that I think addressing it one way or another would be among the most important parts of any effort to make a big-budget roguelike. The reason for this is that being turn-based is what dictates the pace of the game, and what makes all those other elements important in turn. You enter a room in a dungeon and see three monsters, two of which you recognize as tough enemies, the third you’ve never seen before. Now you have to stop and think; Can you guess what the third monster can do, and how strong it is? At this point the many options of a roguelike come into play, and being turn-based is at the heart of that. Out of all your skills, spells, and items, which ones will serve you best in this encounter? Wiping out some small-time idiot is simple, but when you come up against a challenge in a roguelike, it is a tense game of tactics, luck, and knowing what you have on hand and how to use it. The fondest memories of pretty much any roguelike player will come from these fights, where you overcome ridiculous odds through the clever use of your tools, and most roguelikes pride themselves on designing encounters which can go from unwinnable to trivial depending on the player’s use of their tools.

Also note that there are a million items as well.
The skills available to just one class.

Going real-time changes that equation. By definition if your players can’t stop and think, your game design has to accommodate that. Imagine trying to play Dark Souls with the number of skills, items, potions, etc., that are present in a game like ToME. It simply isn’t feasible. There are still solutions to this; you could have a turn-based first-person dungeon crawler nonetheless, a game like Legend of Grimrock or Etrian Odyssey, as there is certainly a healthy market. You could do as The Elder Scrolls does, and have real-time combat with the ability to pause, go through all your spells or items, and select them or use them instantly. That gets unwieldy, but may be a sufficient solution. And this all assumes a change from the top-down grid-based perspective anyway, and that may not actually be needed. Instead you could keep that but have very high quality graphics, properly animated sprites, and plentiful effects. I am not entirely convinced of how well that could sell, but it is certainly one angle that would be interesting to see attempted.

And in the end I might just be barking up the wrong tree here. As I said above this is a hobbyist’s genre. Modern indie stuff has hugely benefited from the possibilities opened up by crowdfunding, and more than one existing roguelike has used it in order to improve. Games like ToME, ADOM, and Cataclysm have expanded gameplay as well as made themselves more attractive, whilst a game like Dungeonmans has helped refine things so that it is more accessible. Games from FTL to Project Zomboid have taken aspects of the genre and made something new. Japanese devs have always taken some parts of Roguelikes and incorporated them into exciting games, with a particular focus on first person, Dragon Quest-inspired dungeon crawlers. All of this makes it hard to predict the future of the genre, as it may inspire a bigger effort from a bigger developer who thinks they see a niche, or it may simply continue being a smaller, constantly remixed genre for those who want to go and find it.

I'm definitely going to resist the siren song of Legion btw.
It wouldn’t be the first time a genre has had an unexpected breakout hit that changes everything!

Either way, though, Procedural Death Labyrinths are in rude health as a genre. There are a wealth of entries that range from the brutally hardcore NetHack to the much more approachable, yet still challenging, Dungeonmans. And as I have said there are also many games that take some aspects of the genre whilst leaving others behind to make new subgenres or gameplay experiences. Despite this I would still love to see a company with real resources take a shot at the genre. Any takers? From Software? Bethesda? Anyone?

Brexit Simulator 2016

By now you have almost certainly heard that, in an historic referendum, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Whilst markets and quite possibly nations crumble, an interesting idea occurred to me. Where is the game about this?

Well, of course, there’s unlikely to be a game about this issue specifically because it has only just happened, and it was not the outcome which was expected at that. No, what I am really getting at is where are the games about a topic like this. There are a lot of games, primarily in the simulation/strategy/management tent, which focus on some kind of aggressive acquisition of objectives. Be it land, money, resources, there’s plenty of games out there if you want to relive the campaigns of generals from Alexander to Napoleon. But what if you’d rather a game where you choose between playing Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Wilson, or Orlando, in an effort to get the best deal possible after the war is over?

When I found this file it was called "clemmie.jpg" and I ain't changing that.
Preorder bonus is early 20th century statesman’s facial hair.

In games, conflict is rarely boring. You are thrust into the action whether as a foot soldier or high-level commander, and charged with anything from assaulting Caen to stopping an armored breakthrough with limited resources to crossing the Rubicon. And these are often mightily enjoyable experiences when you’re in the safety of your own home. On occasion a game takes a look at the costs of war too, whether through the strikingly austere presentation of DEFCON or by directly putting you in the shoes of a civilian, as in This War Of Mine. Yet the end of war is never treated with the same kind of detail. In some games such as those from Paradox there is often a nod to the complexities thereof, for instance by making wars require explicit casus belli, but even this is not the norm. Generally peace is achieved through extracting resources, territory, or both, and nothing more is said on the matter.

Moreover this is far from the only kind of non-conflict topic which could be examined in a game. As I said, what about a game where you have to negotiate a country’s exit from (or indeed accession to) the EU? Whatever one thinks of that decision nobody denies that leaving will be a vastly complicated and lengthy procedure, with an extraordinary number of issues that have to be settled before the exit can actually take place. Or what about a constituent part of the UK, where you play as for instance Scotland trying to negotiate independence from the UK and EU membership at the same time?

There were some historical inaccuracies, yes, but "English get tae fuck" remains a powerful rallying cry.
Every man dies. Not every man truly spergs.

These do have the potential to be dry topics. One of my classes in university was on the EU, and much of it was indeed quite a dry and thick topic. However, our final exam was not a written one but rather a role-playing exercise where we formed groups of delegates from EU member nations, and the EU itself, to try and resolve a policy issue that was put to us. This was stressful due to being an exam, but it was also a lively back-and-forth affair of trying to set out our position, suss out everyone else’s, and of giving and getting compromises until everyone went away annoyed but ultimately willing to commit to the deal.

There are a vast number of examples where peaceful negotiations, peace treaties, and so forth could be used as a model for such a game and I am just providing a couple of particularly salient examples to make my case. The next question, if that basic idea is accepted, is how could such a game be made? In truth I am quite a bit less certain about this than that it should be tried. It would not be a totally new genre – games such as Democracy 3 and Shadow President provide at least an outline to start from – but it would nonetheless be something that needs to be developed largely from scratch, without the convenient genre conventions (and occasional crutches) that typically provide the framework for both designers and players to rely on.

What about a city builder where you deal with a large army invading as the civil administrator?
It’s not like genres haven’t been invented before though.

We can draw some outlines though. First is to establish what constitutes win, and lose, conditions. I suspect it would be best to focus on a particular situation, such as Brexit or Versailles, rather than to have a one-size-fits-all approach with multiple scenarios. That sounds limiting, and I do believe some element of randomness should be present (e.g. a Versailles game should involve a possibility for the US to be absent, or Imperial Russia to still be present with no Brest-Litovsk having taken place, or so forth). How to define victories and losses in such a game would be the real problem, in no small part because such things were hotly contested in real life. My proposition would be that the country or interest you represent would have some semi-random objectives it wishes to achieve, and your job is to do that. Post-game, you would ideally be shown the longer-term consequences of these choices, but I’m not sure that it would be good to e.g. be France at Versailles, get everything Maréchal Foch wanted, and then see that twenty years later your success as a player led to WW2. Failure states, conversely, could encompass a whole array of things, from simply not getting everything you wanted to reigniting the war.

Gameplay itself could meanwhile take quite a variety of forms. The two which most immediately spring to mind are either dialog trees and responses, something like L.A. Noire perhaps, or by making some sort of card game in the style of Fate of the World or the diplomacy side of Star Ruler 2. These are obviously fairly at odds in how they approach matters and the former would seem to be much more difficult to implement well than the latter. Regardless it would be a venture into untested waters, and in the absence of glamor I expect such games would be exclusively the domain of indie devs. If any do want to give it a shot, you’ve certainly got one potential customer who would be deeply interested in taking a look!

I would love to hear what you think about this possibility. Have I missed any obvious ways it might be implemented? Any problems you can foresee? Are there in fact such games in existence, which I am unaware of? Please leave your comments!