This is Skeezix’s Brain on Gaming
On Crutch Mechanics
Real-time strategy games (and games with RTS elements) usually provide endless variety, with different factions, units, maps, and mechanics to keep things feeling fresh and interesting. In theory, no two matches will ever quite be the same.
That is, unless you’re me.
I’ll be the first to confess: I’m not very good at RTS games. Give me more than a few units to manage, and any strategy I devise quickly devolves into chaos. Resources go undeveloped, upgrades go unbought, vulnerable targets are left out in the open, and soon, I lose. It’s the same sad story every single time, no matter what game I play, whether it’s a classic like Company of Heroes or a semi-RTS like Total War or even a game for children like Lego Battles on the DS (anybody else remember that)? My brain simply does not run on multiple tracks the way it would need to for me to succeed at these types of games.
But I can achieve victory sometimes. When I do, it’s always the same way: I find a strategy that allows me to sit back and allow the game to play itself while I make smaller decisions, like telling ranged units what to target and building up my base. This more hands-off strategy is very much a “crutch” for me, since it takes something that would otherwise be too hard and transforms it into something manageable, even easy.
We all have these strategies, ways to take a situation that looks bad and swap it out for something we understand better. For some players, undoubtedly, my ranged-firepower strategy would be too difficult (or, more likely, too boring) to execute, and they would prefer a more active, aggressive playstyle. Both playstyles are valid, and people have all kinds of ways of approaching complex games like the ones I mentioned.
But so what? What are the implications of all this for game design? First off, if players don’t have a crutch, they often can’t get their heads wrapped around the game in the first place. The hardest game I’ve ever played isn’t Ninja Gaiden or Dark Souls: It’s Offworld Trading Company, an indie RTS game on Steam that simulates the management of a resource-extraction company on Mars. It’s incredibly difficult to get things right in OTC. You need to extract resources to upgrade your buildings, but you also need to sell any surplus so that you can buy what you can’t otherwise get from the global market. You need to be lightning fast to claim the best resources for yourself. There’s no “sit-back-and-wait” strategy available to players — you just have to go, go, go. I’ve played many four-player matches (versus three AIs); never have I done better than dead last. OTC isn’t a game for me because it doesn’t cater to my playstyle, and it isn’t even close enough for me to figure out.
But games that cater too well to players also tend to suffer. I, like many other strategy gamers who are bad at micromanagement, found my spiritual home in Total War: Shogun 2’s DLC Fall of the Samurai. That game’s mechanics heavily favor passive play because even a low-quality rifle unit can trade evenly with a top-tier melee unit, provided that it gets its shots off. Once an army is optimized with a foreign veteran, a skilled general, at least four units of cannons, and gatling guns, things get to the point where enemy units can barely even reach rifle range, and when they do, they melt instantly. I once had a battle where my force of roughly 1500 defeated over 5000 enemies, taking just under 50 casualties in the process. Needless to say, there is very little challenge to playing late-game FotS.
This all means that a balance needs to be struck between catering to players’ desires on one hand, giving them the tools they want and letting them loose, and forcing them to change up their play on the other, presenting them with situations where their preferred strategy may be suboptimal. In Total War: Warhammer, Dwarf players would like to hang back and let their guns do the talking, but when faced with a highly mobile enemy (i.e. Wood Elves), they must adapt and become more mobile in turn, trying to force the foe into melee, even if that’s not always the easiest thing to do. Bretonnian players would prefer to end the battle in one glorious cavalry charge, but when faced with a staunch line of spears or overwhelming ranged firepower (or both at once, if we’re talking High Elves), they must find a way to distract and flank the foe first. This is part of why I love TW:W so much: It lets me stay near my comfort zone without always letting me into it.
Another game that does an excellent job of all this is Company of Heroes. An aggressive player might go Panzer Elite, while I, a coward, would select the British, but we’d have more or less an equal chance of winning. If the rusher couldn’t overwhelm my defenses in the first 10–15 minutes of gameplay, I’d have time to build up and unleash a counterattack backed up by my superior artillery and infantry line — or, more likely, simply be secure in a position where I could waste both of our time for as long as possible, because winning RTS games is not a thing I do. Regardless, the game caters for both playstyles, and a match can go either way (even if, at the very top levels, aggressive play is preferred).
This is something that playtesting can reveal — how players approach a game, and whether that approach is something that said game is designed to handle. The impulse of anyone, in a situation they don’t understand, is to make it more like something they’re familiar with, and that’s a process that games should accommodate — but only to an extent. If accommodation goes too far, then the game tends to become too easy, but if it doesn’t go far enough, then games will often be impenetrable to new players who don’t take to them right away. A balance must be struck, and makers of strategy games should think more about how they intend to strike it.
Originally published at http://skeezixblogs.wordpress.com on July 21, 2020.
