The big division in gaming

Phoenix Point Game Feedback
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I am probably a good deal older than most of you…

I began my gaming career playing chess at the age of five… by the time I was twelve I was playing Avalon Hill wargames (it was a new company back in the day, wonder how many of you are familiar with it) and later SPI wargames (SPI games could be huge… a simulation of WW2 took two rooms to set up, and was comprised of tens of thousands of unit counters, not to mention four forty page rules booklets)…

Back in the day we played against fellow humans (I know, right…?) and there was little difficulty in generating interest in one’s opponents as it was, on some level, instinctual…

I was standing outside a tiny game store in Berkeley one day when I encountered a fellow named Gary Gygax… he talked me into buying three little books that described a new gaming experience called role playing, titled ‘Dungeons and Dragons’… I took the books home, fell in love with the experience, and jumped into the new genre with both feet… later I created a very popular system myself, ran it at GENCON for a couple of years, but left game design after graduating college as I became busy with a career…

Back in the day we did our role playing with fellow humans too… we were strange folks back then…

So here is my point… gamers come primarily from one of these two principle schools of thought… either pure tactics and strategy, or pure narrative story telling… And yet a great game requires elements of both.

When we played against fellow humans the narrative was in built, as there is, as any of you know who have that background, there is enough in built history, animosities, jealousies, love, hate, to go around in a long standing game club to keep interest in any victories… that, and historical wargaming has its own prebuilt historical context…

A game with a machine is an entirely different animal altogether… the machine doesn’t care whether
you win or lose… and it runs the danger of becoming a sterile experience if this difference is not understood.

For a computer game to overcome this obstacle it must make you care about its world and your place in it… Sadly, in the past couple of years, there have been some potentially great strat/tac titles that have, on the one hand, given us the ability to game out sophisticated systems (think the recent Battletech) without all of the number crunching (yes, back in the day we did our own math too and we didn 't even have calculators until I started college…)… but these games have completely failed on the narrative front… I could probably write a book on all of the titles that succeeded on the narrative end (sadly, those of us attracted to the true strat/tac titles are a minority of gamers) and missed out badly on the tactical or strategic play…

I like PP… the game has great potential… but I do not know when, if ever, I will play it again, despite, as I pointed out in an earlier post, now owning all of the future dlc… as I have mastered the patterns in the game, and it now bores me… on so many levels…

My troops are nothing more than placeholders… no individual distinctions, no reason I should care if I loose them, as they are readily replaced by other placeholders from my placeholder factory (ie training facilities). The enemies are mindless, soulless crabs, et al, probably best relegated to the dinner table… one of the complaints is that they do not adapt their strategies and at least this feature would have given us some sense that we were interacting with, and impacting our pixled world… my bases could be eliminated altogether as they are little more than game menus with the added feature that I have to run a boring base defense every few minutes (at least they appear to intend to fix this last)… And the plot device used to bring tension… a red screen… doesn’t even begin to work for me… all it does is obscure the graphics…

I suspect there is a good deal of ‘cart before horse’ in the building of these games… and it feels as though the narrative on recent strat/tac titles was added after the fact, almost like… well, we have a game, now we need to come up with some reason for playing it… which is the opposite of the way reality actually works… as we care about our world and therefore actively engage in its defense, we don’t defend our world, succeed in that defense, and then wonder why we ever expended the energy to begin with…

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Some excellent points there, I feel. Also, amazed you met Gary Gygax in person :slight_smile:
I have a large D&D collection and ran my own campaign for many years. As a DM I can concur in the sentiment of what you are saying - the computer is playing effectively Dungeon Master and should be adjusting the experience for the player to make it fun… or it fails as an experience. We’re well past the days when a game is ‘just a bunch of rules’ and today, games are expected to provide an experience in the same way as the players of a pen and paper RPG desire. In fact those three little books state the rules of D&D are to be bent and broken, to make the game yours - and this is exactly what happens at the game table to make things more dramatic, interesting and fun for the players. Time is precious for all of us and we do not have it wasted. The number of times I ignored the result of a die roll, in my players favour, and created dramatic tension (keeping that character alive when the cruel dice said he was dead) is very high, but my players loved it. The /spirit/ of the rules is more important to the experience than the rules themselves. Unless PP devs begin to understand this aspect, they’ll fail to craft the kind of game modern players want. Heck, even Doom secretly adjusted the damage inflicted by enemies downwards the lower health the player has…

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You remember David Hargrave… The Arduin Grimoire… he and I had a running competitive feud in the early days of rpgs… but I left gaming for chemistry (not a bad trade and the graphics are better) and a close friend who worked with me on my design went on to join with Hargrave… have not seen either of them, well, Hargrave is long dead, since 1975…

Been looking for that next big game fix for some while now… Battletech wasn’t it, although I have not played any of the dlc so maybe it has improved… but spending my free time putting a self-entitled brat on the galactic throne does nothing for me…

Perhaps they can fix this mess… lost count of the times I woke my wife while screaming at the screen over some insane bug (my office is on the floor below my wife’s bedroom so it required some pretty intense screams to get her attention)… but those will eventually be zapped… And maybe they have a team working on world building even as we write… maybe…

The game is worth saving… and I hate to think I have wasted my money on dlc I will never use…

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Love hearing about this stuff, is so far before my time (I was only born in 1979). Fascinated how it all came about, the personalities involved, etc. AD&D was well and truly established back when I was at an age to start roleplaying, 2nd ed was out and Gary Gygax was really like a legendary figure. I collect lots of things to do with D&D, have the Dragon magazine annuals, even old Judges Guild Journals (some of which are like big broadsheet newspapers!) and own a number of retroclones. My longest running campaign actually used the Labyrinth Lord ruleset, similar to basic D&D. I have every edition of D&D but only 4th was the one I never played, despite owning it. Maybe one day I should, but having D&D reduced to just a miniatures game only wasn’t really that appealing to me. Speaking of legendary figures, Arneson looks like he’s starting to get more of his due now (see Secrets of Blackmoor).

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Interesting…
I think you are slightly before my time, but not by much - Spurious Rules Incorporated, now those were looooooooooooong games, but how we loved them ;0)
I still own a copy of Avalon Hill’s ‘Longest Day’ - once spent an entire week playing the 3-day-long scenario…

I gave up D&D at university when I a) discovered Live Action Roleplaying and b) we realised that ‘tabletop’ RPGs were so much better if you just threw out the rulebook altogether and made them up as you went along. I used to run freeform games in my flat for upwards of 20-30 people, and I knew they were working when I could go downstairs to make a cup of coffee, squeezing past earnestly plotting groups of people in the stairway and corridors, then wander back up to the main room and no-one had actually realised I was gone! Those were the days :smile:

Anyway, one of the things I love about the latest XCOMs, and this title tbh, is the way that character customisation actually has me invested in these little clusters of 1s and 0s in a way that rarely engages me in computer-run RPGs. I still remember when that b!$£*rd Thin Man took out Sophie ‘Sixgun’ Robinson, and ‘Moby’ Wong’s escape from the ‘Nantucket Whale Disaster’ is so legendary in my own little world that she makes regular guest reappearances in every game I play - she is currently my main Heavy in PP. So I have to disagree with you on the lack of personal investment in these games, but the rest of your post conjures up so many memories… :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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The weird thing when it comes to PP is that this narrative exists. There has been an interesting lore written during the early stages of development, but this lore turns out to be mostly absent from the game. We have precious little bits of characterization for factions and faction leaders, a small narrative to retrace the steps of a Phoenix Project ranking member, but it feels disconnected from the game.

I’m not gonna compare this to FiraXcom because their cheesy narrative is supported by expensive cinematics that are beyond Snapshot’s budget, but OGXcom had a more compelling narrative and a sense of escalation of the threat that PP mostly lacks.

Even Xenonauts’s lead researcher is more memorable than PP figures, and his defining trait is his assholishness.

The poor narrative is a guilty as the stunning lack of different enemies. A late game crab with full power machine gun, lots of armor and whatever left arm pisses you the most is undeniably much more dangerous than a starter crab, but it still feels like the same enemy. It also only provides one single research opportunity early on and that’s it, and as a byproduct, the tech tree is more of a tech bonsai.

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I get the impression from early backers that there was a great deal more game, not to mention numerous promises, that never made the final cut…

I understand the desire to see one’s work achieve purpose, not to mention profit… but rushing a product to market is never wise…

Perhaps these various treasures will make the subsequent dlc, perhaps they simply became more then the design team could accomplish… guess time will tell.

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I disagree. Board games and pen and paper RPGs were never a big thing where I come from, yet I enjoy both. I don’t need narrative to play chess, but I do need a narrative for games like Phoenix Point. It doesn’t depend on the gamer, but rather the game. I enjoy role-playing games for their stories, and grand strategy games for the puzzles. I bought Phoenix Point due to all the promises, but haven’t touched it since the release…it’s simply missing a lot of what was promised/sold.

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I think I’m similar tbh, I’ve always felt that a lot of my gaming choices come down to mood that I’m in at any given time, but I can certainly get hooked by many different types of game when those games have been made well.

I’d say that the other factor for me sometimes is how social a game is. I’d play pretty much any given game with a good company. In my personal experience of D&D it was always about the crack that we had with each other whilst playing the game… that and the snacks :wink:

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Not every game needs narrative. It boils down to the basic motivation of the player on what to do in the game. If you play something like a DayZ then a basic narrative told in few lines of text is more than enough. Same goes for many sandboxes. But if game tells player that he is suppose to be doing something specific then you do need to have a narrative to establish some baseline of motivation not for the player but for the agents - characters or what ever else is player agency in the game. How important that is debatable and varies from player to player.

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There comes a time when one has to pay the bills and keep the lights on in the building. Phoenix Point got delayed three times that I can remember off (I bailed at the second one when Epic entered the scene and gave me a chance to get my money back) and I’d guess they never had the funds to remain in development indefinitely and had to push PP out at some point or face trouble.

This is further shown by the fact that they iterated quite deeply on the basic mechanics from the tactical game shown since backer one, but delivered rushed content in many other aspects of the game :

  • Poor research tree that received quite a bit of criticism
  • Unengaging strategic layer
  • Simplistic factional warfare
  • Poor game balance and abilities design
  • Severe lack of diversity on the pandoran side.

I keep an eye on these forums and still hope Snapshot can turn this game into something great, but I’m in no hurry to repurchase and waiting a year to see it on Steam is hardly an issue at this stage.

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Point taken, but one might argue that risking the jobs of your employees or even going bust by not getting the game to market is even less wise…

I’m not entirely opposed to getting a game out with less than the intended content as long as it has basic functionality. Battle Brothers is another squad game, and that’s been going through constant improvements and additions since release.

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There is a great deal of innovation here… I too am holding out hope for the steam release. Unlike you, I am fully vested having bought the dlc early on… but I stopped playing after the game was beaten…

It is never good to establish bad faith… I remember when Richard Garriot said, in regard to Ultima Online, if you don’t get what we are doing here, get out… I have never touched another project by that man since… I will relegate Snapshot to the dustbin of gaming history should they not fix this mess… as I am certain many others will as well…

Let’s hope this story has a happy ending… for us, at any rate, not necessarily for the Pandorans…

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Hear, hear!

raises glass before downing drink and walking away

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First I’d like to say thanks for playing Avalon Hill titles I was one of the tech support people that worked there just before the computer gaming division went under. But I agree I’m starting to play older games thanks to dosbox and when I compare them to some of the titles from today they seem to be more enjoyable I liked PP in the beginning and still do but when your team gets murdered only a few hours into your game and you either have to start over or have a stock pile of men it gets old fast. PP isn’t a bad title it’s just lacking I’ve played the original X-Com and it was hard but not as hard as this game even on it’s easy level, the battlefield doesn’t give you room to make a mistake and maybe that’s because the designers wanted to add realism but it’s alittle too overkill.

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I played my first AH game in 65-66… somewhere around there… They were the only game in town so to speak… My first endeavor was Blitzkrieg… played the heck out of that game… followed by so many great titles I can’t remember them all… so thank you for running interference for such a great company…

I was in the army from 72-74… I can tell you from personal experience that in a military unit everyone at the platoon level knows everyone else… very, very well. You develop a kind of camaraderie in the military that is unique to that world. This game model fails on many levels… from the callus disregard it shows your men, to the mechanism employed for difficulty scaling… something you never do, punish your players for success… That I was required to scale back my game play in order to keep the game from scaling beyond my reach is… well, I can’t even imagine who thought that was a good idea, but it appears to be a band-aid that was placed over an open wound when the original scaling device, ie genetic modification, was not able to be made to work.

Let’s hope that better heads prevail at Snapshot, although I get the impression that we will be waiting on the dlc now for any major fix, assuming that a major fix is in the works and that the inertia accumulated from so many questionable design decisions is not too much to overcome…

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So true one of my favorites at the company was Acutung Spitfire and Over the Reich loved those 2 titles, they mostly had me testing their the 1st person shooter which sucked eggs. As for PP it could do more it does have so much going for it but your very right about the fact that it punishes your troops for doing well. I hate the aliens that can cloak and shoot and the grenade launcher crabs which can cause tons of damage to your guys. But the worse 2 are the mind controlling freaks who you have to use almost everyone in your team to just waste 1 or the giant monster which shots plamas or whatever the hell it is that takes out the whole team had one of those and 3 mind controllers on the field at once I gave up. They need to tone it back some make the game fun and rewarding XCOM can get hard but it doesn’t kill you in the very beginning.

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Let’s put it this way: my standard description of these XCOM-style games to anyone who will listen to me is: “It’s Squad Leader with added Command & Control.”

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Difficulty scaling needs to be tied to a function intrinsic to its world… Could Pandoran infection work… sure… but then there should be in world variables tied to the spread of infection… say a level five bio-weapons lab that is heavily defended, takes some planning to take out, but the longer it is allowed to carry on its research the worse things get… The whole upgrade the Pandoran threat model could be tied to this… with say five levels of infection each with its own evils. There could even be a hidden Pandoran tech tree that allows the variable evolution folks have been wanting back into the game…

As is, everything about the game feels artificial with the exception of a brilliant tactical backdrop… And I mean to take nothing away from this last, as it is no mean feat… but as is, for me at any rate, the tactical brilliance of the game serves mostly to point out what the game could have been, provides maybe some hope of what it might yet be, but little insight into what, if any, vision the devs might actually hold regarding its future…

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If the game had billed itself as a tactical sim you might have a point… as is, it serves poorly in this respect as it completely lacks multi-player function… but if that works for you too, great…