The end of 2020 draws near! I’ve done plenty of meta self-analyzing this year, particularly with my quarterly plans. And perhaps I’ll finish the year out next week with one last one of those, before starting 2021 with my M:tG-inspired series. But this week I figured I’d do an external look back; on some of the video games I sunk the most time into this year, what compelled me about their design, and which of those experiences can translate over to analog game design.
So I dropped some time into Pokemon Shield but I didn’t finish it and I really don’t have much positive to say about the game. It feels notably easier than any of the previous iterations I’ve played, and not in a scalable-accessibility way. A weak story was further undermined by low stakes, and the most-lauded part of the game, the Wild Area, failed pretty spectacularly to impress me. I don’t care about Raid battles, I strongly resented that attempting to catch over-level pokemon was forestalled, and its small size highlighted the entire map’s unambitious scope and simplistic architecture, not to mention it got real repetitive real quick. I guess the only real takeaway I have here is that the job system was a cool way of utilizing the Pokemon that weren’t in my party; a secondary use for your non-1st-tier assets, which improved their chances of becoming 1st-tier assets, gives a nice complete feeling that you haven’t let anything go to waste, and that the gap between your most-used assets and your least can be closed, rather than ever-widening. In terms of tabletop, I can see a “Training” or “Sidequests”-themed such option for weaker Heroes in Fantasy GM Squared. Weren’t going to roster them this season? Engage with this side activity where they’ll age as normal but perhaps pick you up some consolation VP and/or other benefits.
I played a fair amount of Stardew Valley (and am looking forward to the next version next year), but to be honest I’ve already mined the heck out of that game for things to steal and implement/remix in Amberlodge.
Another game that I neither finished nor felt tremendously fulfilled by was Breath of the Wild. Honestly, the fact that weapons took wear and tear damage that couldn’t be repaired - it made me miserly. I ran around the whole game throwing square bomb after round bomb after square bomb just because it was my one reliable, renewable source of damage. I also didn’t care about the entire cooking subsystem, nor was I particularly grabbed by the sidequests, other than for the sake of compulsively checking them off when I could chain them together. So what did I like? In a word, horses. Including skeletal horses, mythical white horses, and (bear) horses. As far as I’m concerned, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a game about acquiring ponies of good stats, and arming and improving yourself so that you can locate and withstand the taming process of increasingly special ponies. I love their stupid stats, I love that they all start off disobedient but that every act of disobedience, once corrected, makes them less likely to misbehave in the future. If anything, I think there should be bigger advantages to improving a horse’s mood (better stats, the ability to ride standing up, horse-sneaking[???], leading you to hidden Shrines, better lateral movement, swimming, flying - the literal sky is the limit), and conversely I think that your horse getting injured or pushed too hard should have undone some of that bond. Overly meticulous for a method of transportation? FOR SURE. But again, this subsystem was the highlight of the whole game for me, so naturally I’d have liked to see it expanded. So I guess the analogue here is, there should be a boardgame called Fantasy Horse Tamer, where your bond with your horse+* (horses, and other guest mounts) must be managed, mimicking the disobedience-breaking mechanic but adding in setbacks a la red maneuvers in the X-Wing miniatures game, and with bond-dependent extra abilities gained for juicy horizontal progression. This is a good idea I have, and it should absolutely be explored further, resources committed to it, etc.
How about we move onto games I actually liked? I still haven’t finished this game (nor have I booted it up in months) but I still might: Fire Emblem: 3 Houses. This is a cusp game for me, chiefly because I heard “Your protagonist is the newest professor at a mage academy” and thought I’d be a Hogwarts DILF with glasses, elbow patches, and an extensive tea collection, and instead I was a supposed-to-be-sexy older teen fighting alongside romanceable(???) supposed-to-be-sexy teens (oh, JRPGs) and they learned from… my example? At least the extensive tea collection part was accurate. But much as I enjoyed the feeling of recruiting and managing the emotional and martial progression of some genuinely interesting characters (except for you Hubert, you cringey little Snape-wannabe), the game made me worry about fiddly things that were very dull (battalion maintenance? Why?) while allowing me very little control over much more interesting systems (why was gardening so dull, and why didn’t that system interact with the tea system at all)? The choices I had, story-wise, were pleasantly profound. I really agonized over a few in particular (sending many a screenshot to my sister), but the choices regarding how I wanted to play, were - limited. There was a very obvious best way to play, from party composition, to which classes to direct your students toward, to how to spend each of your “free” days, to the order in which you should pick your battles. The multiplayer aspect held absolutely no appeal for me, and I was a bit too squicked out to really learn how the romance system worked. I set it down after getting fairly far, because the battles had grown quite repetitive, I’d never lost anyone permanently, and there wasn’t a whole lot of meaningful teaching left to do. We’ll see if I finish it, but let’s talk about positive takeaways: The character progression that took place outside of battle was my favourite part of the game (though I did like character proximity as a bond-building mechanic), and I think could port over to analog. I’d probably take out the part where talking to everyone gains you a slight bond increase with all of them and the only resource taxed is your patience, and I’d add in a way to play where if you so choose, you can avoid combat entirely and train/bond with your students entirely in an academy setting. The study goals thing is also a nice bit you can layer onto the character progression, with a tidy little xp bonus to the portions of character development that will most help them get to their target, and I liked that occasionally characters would propose their own personality-based goals (though I wish those were somehow more powerful or otherwise more interesting than a standard goal-combination).
Good Lord but I’ve been going on about this. Onto one of, if not the, top games for me this year: Hades. Just a brilliant, brilliant game, and VERY boardgamey to me. Because its key innovation is taking the roguelike (push your luuuuuuck) and adding on long-term resource acquisition and skill progression across multiple runs (legacyyyyy) with procedurally generated rooms and rewards based off of limited pools (not at all unlike, say, a deck of room cards and a deck of rewards with specific boons). Now, obviously, the production is incredible: the story and its portrayal and execution are 10 out of 10, and the nuance that leads to the replayability takes FULL advantage of being digital and having all the overhead handled by the medium. But it’s easy to envision a card game (or, ugh - a miniatures) version of Hades with threat decks, modifier cards, a Boon deck, Doom/Deflect/Frost tokens, a legacy playerboard, scratch-off cards for tracking your relationship, etc. Man, what a great game.
Finally, the game that has consumed me the most, the game I procured a PS5 for, and which has been an absolutely outstanding simulation of a childhood fantasy: Star Wars Squadrons. A much better single-player campaign than it needed to be, which gently and unpatronizingly acts as an extended tutorial for all the ships, mechanics, and skills for both the Empire and the Alliance. I think my absolute favourite part of the game, sadly, is power management. I wish I could say I was amazing at drifting and that I was a pure speed demon like I always imagined I’d be. But that’s just not my natural strength; rather, what I think I’m fairly good at is timing out my bombing runs, and most of all, shifting power between my systems to maximize my advantages at the expense of parts of my ship that aren’t as necessary to the task at hand. Being able to shunt weapons energy into escaping once you’ve completed your strafe - chef’s kiss. It’s not entirely unlike worker placement in a way, but with the units of energy you have. I’d love to find a tabletop game where fluidly re-allocating your power like that (perhaps at the top of your turn or of a round) can give a player that same feeling of control, of their engine shifting beneath them. Another less sexy but important lesson? In terms of power, story takes a backseat to balance. In the lore, TIE fighters are cheap fodder, and X-wings should plow through them like Poe in That One Sequence From The Force Awakens. And an Interceptor, in turn, represents a cutting edge investment that only the best TIE pilots are permitted to fly. Y-Wings are simple and un-impressive. B-wings rain hot death. In the game however, the field is leveled somewhat. For the most part, that comes in the form of making each type really good at what it does. An A-wing is not an X-wing plus speed: It’s a fast, fragile fighter with its own thing going on. Y-Wings may be slow but maaaaaaan do they have a literal arsenal of options at their disposal and they, not X-wings, are likely to deliver that final blow. Not that X-wings are any slouch to play, though: They do a little of everything, and they do it pretty well. On the other side, TIE fighters actually have enough armour to take a beating. They can stand their own, which Interceptors can’t always do, but damned if Interceptors can’t still pull off some brutal, vital hit and runs. It’s not a hierarchy of firepower or of cool factor; it’s a rock-paper-scissors metagame to be exploited by the players based on the opposing tactics and the styles that play to their own strengths. Like I said, unsexy, but a good thing to keep in mind.
Alright, I’m sure there’s games I forgot, more I could add or clarify, and edits I should make: But that’s already a ton more than I planned to write, and certainly more than anyone’s likely to read. So I’ll hit publish on this, and go walk my perfect fallen angel of a dog. Catch you next week for the last blog post of the year. And whatever holiday you celebrate - abolish ICE.
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