Negative Narrative And Malicious Multiplayer
What does it really mean to have a tight design focus?
Design Focus Failures
Anyone who follows me outside of this blog knows that I don’t have a lot of patience for narrative in gaming. In fact narrative is one of a few design targets that I consider to ruin not only strategy games but also RPGs, or at least turn based combat games. The other major culprit, as indicated by the title of this post, is multiplayer.
Everyone talks about feature creep and tight design focus, as if art assets, sound/dialogue, or even complex stories and quest lines don’t count. And of course multiplayer is even more pervasive regarding design considerations. Narrative in a game will never be as good as in a novel, or even a movie. And while movies lose out in fidelity to a story for tons of reasons movies can be as much visual or audio spectacles as tightly focused plot vehicles.
Whereas in games the famous “choice and consequence” never *really* connects. In the final analysis you have one or two or maybe 3 fancy endings/endgames and then everything you do in the middle doesn’t truly count. And if a game allows you to kill major characters outside of an intended plot point it breaks the story part of the game even if you can still goof off in the open world.
From the first concept of the game you are already making trade offs to add complex stories or balanced multiplayer or in some cases both. If you choose to let this things go you open up a whole new section of the possibility space that was blocked off. A truly single player strategy game, turn based combat game, or progression focused rpg can do things that would be unthinkable if you were constrained by balance or story concerns.
“Micro-Narrative”
And it doesn’t stop at overarching narrative. What I like to term “micro-narrative” has a pretty similar impact. Games like Wildermyth are a good example. You promised hand crafted content and built the system around it so you can’t dump it later when you realize the limitations it imposes. And when you promise this kind of content players also implictly expect fancy audio and visual assets and if you try to skirt those expectations you pay for it in reviews and sales. You are locked in. Voice lines, backgrounds, splash art, complex texture changes, in the case of Wildermyth, and more.
I don’t want to single out Wildermyth. This was a famous pain point for Stellaris, a game with huge financial and human capital support from a major strategy publisher. Nothing will set off a 4x gamer more than hearing about that damn teapot again. I do think in both cases you could argue that the decision was a decision to appeal to casual gamers. Non-genre fans probably don’t play the games so much that the limited number of events is significant. Of course I can’t see into the minds of the devs for either game.
CK3 from the same publisher as Stellaris had a similar issue recently with the release of their court focused content pack. Not only did they have too few events but they didn’t, and couldn’t given the use of dialogue and such, track the game state properly and also there is the comedy/no comedy disconnect for some players.
Another example of a much older, and less well known, game which exposed this issue was the Kudos series from Positech. A sort of turn based 2d social simulation game which went a different way from the more famous casual social sim game of the 2000s. While it mostly left events mechanical in a way I approve of it did have written dialogue that got repetitive after you did made similar social activity decisions. Arguably Kudos was closer to what I consider the simulation ideal than these more high budget modern games. It just needed to take one or two steps to drop pre-canned dialogue and a couple other things.
Axioms And Abstraction
Ironically in this case I actually prefer more abstraction rather than less. Those who have followed my numerous bloated blogs before will know that typically I prefer to increase simulation detail. For espionage, for logistics, for trade, for magic I added more stuff in rather than taking things out.
I think that cutting down on canned content is a very good trade off for adding simulation complexity. You save more time than you lose, it is cheaper for obvious reasons, and you have fewer features that are difficult to integrate with other parts of the game.
I think that while you can theoretically make an argument for canned content in a story heavy pure RPG, even if I wouldn’t buy it, there’s no real viable argument for such things in strategy, social sim, or combat focused games. You end up leaving players wishing for more or less canned content but unsatisfied either way.
In Axioms you can evaluate the personality and interests of a character, look at your available activities and social connections and material resources and craft a relatively unique ongoing experience of character interaction. In the context of strategy or strategy adjacent games I think that pays off even if you offload a lot of the imagination work to the player.
Your character history summaries might be more dry and travelogue/textbook like than what a Paradox game or a narrative rpg provides but they will be deeper and more meaningful mechanically. Please don’t count how many times I used the word “mechanically” in this post.
It takes far less effort to add and then integrate a new system for social, intrigue, magic, combat, or economic simulation. No need to dumb things down or make them bland to save development time.
I guess I won’t know if these choice and feelings were correct until a few months after Axioms goes on sale.
Greetings. I would like to know if the game will be free or paid and on which platforms can we get it?