Looking back at Mass Effect Andromeda

This is a game I have played, past tense.  I don't give a damn about spoilers.  You have been warned.

There are many, many autopsies on this game and I can only add in a few bits and pieces from my own perspective.  You can find many more thorough reviews just by using a search engine and finding people who will take this game apart from all possible aspects, so I can only give you the viewpoint of someone coming in new to the Mass Effect universe since, yes, I have not played the prior games.  I have watched some good background material on those games, just to understand the context of the Andromeda entry, but that is all I've done with the prior games.

Coming into the game, the player is given an intro, some minor amount of background and then put into the game tutorial section.  The first shortcoming of the game is that, for an action-shooter game with RPG elements, it sets the wrong tone right from the start.  What it does in the intro is present a figure of how many survivors are on your ship and you don't know where the other ships or the entire Initiative is at.  When a game gives you an on-screen number at the very start of the game, that number should be meaningful: your job is to get as many of those people through to the end of the game as you can.  It is a horror or survival game element that can easily be inserted into any other major genre to demonstrate just what the actual actions you are doing represent.  It is a number you can be judged on and your entire run's success will have that number as a first major piece in your game play.  When a player is given a number like that it can and must be tracked so the tone set at the very introduction of the game is carried through.  It isn't.

Why is that number important?  First off it tells you that the game designer has a set number of people in this game and that number will be tracked.  When getting to the Nexus which was sent out before most of the other ships to provide a major hub for the races coming to Andromeda from the Milky Way Galaxy.  It is in a star cluster, the Heleus Cluster, which means that this is a formation of stars that are closely packed together and they tend to be of similar age, though the star types will be very different from system to system.  A star cluster with few of the larger star types (O,B,A) means that the majority of systems won't have to worry about local supernova or hypernova events that go with those star classes.  Of course you aren't told this, just that the cluster will tend to have many stars that tend to be ones with habitable zones that even have some target planets that might be worth looking at.  Thus the number of people in transit, in full, should be available on the Nexus which should be tracking everyone who is in the Initiative.  That number of people never, ever updates.

That is extremely important as the Initiative at the Nexus had a rebellion while your ship was in transit, and a large number of people left it to try and do their own thing in the Heleus Cluster.  What that means is that every single, solitary individual that you kill that is from a Milky Way species was a member of the Initiative.  That number can and should be tracked as it is FINITE in nature.  In a universe of infinite size having to get a finite number of individuals through a game is vital and important.  Every single decision you make, every encounter you have will effect that number and whenever you kill someone, that should be tracked by reducing the number of survivors left.  Every time you, as a player, find a place where people from the Initiative have been killed, that number should go down.  And if you make a large scale decision that drives anyone permanently out of the Initiative that should also be tracked with the amount docked from the overall total and then shown separately as those permanently lost but alive due to your actions.  That is the expectation of having a real number thrown at the player at the very start of the game: it is a survival or survival/horror typical statistic.

For game play this also means that there will be no respawning Milky Way species encounter zones as that makes no sense at all.  In fact a player might want to avoid truly hostile encounters ENTIRELY to find a way to keep those people alive through other means, typically through diplomacy, negotiation, trade or other inter-personal methods.  That would require some serious RPG elements, major and minor stories set up around the Initiative rebels, where they landed, and offer a way through the game that isn't through arms and weapons.  That body count of those lost is not a positive feature to you, unless you are playing as a psychopathic kill on sight type.  All of that means that the game setting, from the introduction before the tutorial, sets the tone for the game as an action-shooter based survival/horror RPG.  The base type is the same as the rest of the game as that is what the tutorial teaches the player and sets the genre.  It should be in the survival/horror or RPG genre as THAT is what the tutorial is trying to push through, and every player decision should make a difference in the outcome of the final game.

This is where the game failed, for me, and it was right at the start.(YMMV)

Instead of a tightly written Survival-Action game with RPG elements it decided to drift into the Shooter-Action genre, with only a smattering of RPG elements.  Now from the setting this could also encompass the Military or SF Military genre, so all isn't lost, right?  Oh, wait, you as the one of two surviving fraternal twins, are basically told you are to be the Pathfinder instead of your departed dad who couldn't show a lick of sense when encountering his first real alien site died doing something with unknown consequence.  He was SUPPOSED to be the experienced one and outright failed at his job.  Yup, you got the job that your dad failed to do and you have absolutely, positively NO TRAINING IN DOING IT.  In fact each colony vessel should have its own Pathfinder (just one?  no, really, just one?), which is basically the head of the Red Shirt (yup a Star Trek thing) team with major scientific duties to be set down onto a planet to see if it is either habitable or can be made habitable through putting down equipment to protect from the environment.  That means the player must have a character that has a good science background AND military or militia background to even begin to qualify for the position.  Instead dear departed dad just said you are it, go and do your job now.  You are now The Chosen One, sucker.

And as The Chosen One is an Archetype and it is normally associated with being the savior, redeemer or simply being anointed and predestined to do great things and shielded by the higher powers.  Greatness is granted, not earned.  It is an Archetype that can be done very well if the game is well thought out and the path obscured so actually finding it and moving along it is a challenge.  Unfortunately this is rarely the case in gaming as witness how, in Fallout 2, being The Chosen One meant some of the toughest decisions a player can make versus Fallout 4 where there is only a single semi-interesting decision along the main story line.  Both games are set in the same universe, yet different developers took wildly different approaches on how to implement this Archetype so that in one game actually fulfilling the title was difficult with many dead-ends along the way, and in the other there was just a bunch of Filler Quests shoved in to keep the player busy.  So in MEA your first mission is to get the people under your care to the Initiative HQ at the Nexus.

Hey, getting the ship someplace where the PC can hand over that job to someone more qualified, I'm willing to do that.  You are the protagonist, after all.  And that is an important job that, luckily, the Captain of the colony ship can do.  Job, done!  OK, you do a bit of poking around at the Nexus, but that doesn't make you a Pathfinder.  A scavenger or some equivalent, maybe, sure.  Or just a careful science officer candidate who has a bit of diplomatic skill so as to not PO everyone on meeting them.  That is something the Player Character (PC) is actually able to do.  Stick to the basics, then hand the job over to someone more qualified.  I mean, really, there was supposed to be a corps of Pathfinders, right?  Right?

Sadly you don't get to do that or even say that you are absolutely, positively not qualified for the job of Pathfinder. You can't refuse it, you can't look to get trained up on it and there is no way to let everyone know that you are NOT The Chosen One.  No matter what dialogue you choose, as the player, there is no way to actually AGREE with the people who say 'this isn't the way its done'.  I'm more than willing to serve in an exploration vessel under someone else who thinks they have the chops to do it, too.  I think that would be fun and exciting game play which would still offer major decisions and a chance to learn some of the job of Pathfinder.  Even if the ship's captain is JUST a ship's captain and not shooter-in-chief this would mean getting to learn that job as part of the training for exploration and maybe becoming a Pathfinder.

The game gives everyone a scanner and you can adapt to it better than anyone else as you have an implant linking you to an AI your dad made, called S.A.M.  Having the job as an AI augmented science officer sounds like a heap of fun, at least at the start of things, and then should present a complex set of decisions to make on what you want to do for a full career.  The first planet that is made habitable has a wide variety of slots open in it, and should serve as a major stop for the player to do other things and get other ranks within the Initiative that then will certify them for better jobs.  Like there would be at least an understood protocol within the Initiative to start ranking and certifying people for jobs.  Either a civil or military administration would have this as a feature, yet that is true of neither of them.  There is a 'militia' system for multi-player work that is disconnected from the main game, but that is all it is: a separate part of MEA, not impacting the main story line or offering job advancement in a known system that would be laid out for the player.

Sadly, all of that isn't done.  You get to be the damned, 'inexperienced hero' who starts to serve as the main way to move SAM around from mission to mission.  All the real heavy lifting that needs to be done is done by SAM.  And you don't even get to turn the comms for SAM off on your own.  When the disconnect does happen, the PC is so crippled that they can't even walk properly any more.  Huh?  The link between the character and SAM is so deep that SAM gets to control and augment much of the motor skills of body of the PC to the point the character isn't really much of anything as a physical being.  Instead of giving the player the chance to learn skills and beef up their body without SAM doing that, you are stuck with all the benefits of SAM and all the negatives of not actually being able to learn to do things on your own so that losing the SAM link DOESN'T CRIPPLE YOU.  As this game has a leveling system form of game mechanics, it would and, indeed, should be possible to show what is possible without the AI assist and then what the top tier or two of skills are opened with an AI assist.  That would let the player know that if they don't want the hand-holding and just being a way to move the AI around, they could go it alone and learn skills on their own, and only use the AI when it is absolutely necessary.  Add in having to go back to the Nexus for that and the entire experience would put some elements of RPG into the game to have the player given a chance to think ahead about what it is they want to do next. Sadly, no, you can't do that and get to be a physical cripple when the link is off.

Spooky, huh?  Wanting to do things without a hand-holding AI might show a spark of independence that requires player agency.

Perhaps even a bit of role-playing.

Can't have that!

Player Agency or Player as Agent

Even worse, as the plot revolves around SAM helping to train your brain to utilize alien technology via neural expression. When SAM is gone you, as the player, realize that you don't know how to do that because you never, ever got to practice doing it without SAM.  There are plenty of small tasks to do with alien equipment that should allow the PC to turn off SAM's help and see if they can start doing things on their own.  Which would be better: an augmented person who nearly falls flat on their face when their augment is disconnected or someone who bothers to train themselves and their mind over time to do that task with minimal to no augmentation at all?  Sadly you do not get to make that choice.  That is an unnecessary loss of player agency.  Instead the PC is now an Agent of SAM, and only a few choices make any difference in the game and none in the actual outcome of the game.

Most critics will point at the dialogue tree and its severe lack of options as the point where player agency has been, effectively, removed.  I'm going to point at the base character who can, should and must have options over how they want to run their own damned body.  Are all the abilities that SAM helps to unlock fun?  Yup!  Yet you do have a smattering of Biotics training, training in the sciences, and know enough about weapons and armor to at least be able to protect yourself.  While, for the minimal narrative, you do have SAM, the player should be able to find a way to turn that link off (or tone it down so that SAM doesn't have complete neuro-physical integration) and then learn to train their own skills, physique and mind up to the point where they are effective without SAM.

Turning the augmentation back on would then radically boost all that you have done on your own, of course, but then any experience gained in that state will NOT help to further those skills save for top rank, AI required ones.  In fact the SAM based augmentation could be kept separate and added in only when needed and removed when it isn't so game play balance is still retained along with player agency.  To go with that would be hard caps on skills without SAM, so you would know when you have achieved the maximum capability in that area and show what SAM can help you achieve if turned on and activated.  And in certain skills, like in the sciences or biotics, there should be no cap based on AI assistance, which would require an actual science and biotics set of skill trees to demonstrate just what normal humans are able to do, not just the combat oriented biotics one.  In theory the Profile switching via SAM does a bit of this, but it is all done by SAM, which means that you need that assistance to change up skills and powers.  Of course that makes no damned sense as these are the skills of the PC and should have them all available, all the time.  By putting a steeper XP curve on the skills the player can choose between becoming very effective at a few skills or somewhat effective across the board in a Jack of all Trades role.  Yes that is role-playing and could have been accomplished via reducing or toning down a 'feature' of the game instead of using it as a crutch.

The worst part of that concept of Profile swapping is that once the player has a good play style that meets their requirements, they will almost never have to swap a profile throughout the entire game.  In theory a player can choose alternate play styles on the fly, but as a player I did that so rarely, that I even forgot that I had that capacity for the character.  Really, if that system was gone then I would have been fine with honing some skills and abilities with...ahhhh... skill trees.  The lack of variety of skill trees to have a character build means that you are always going to be a generalist at high level, though the player is likely to finish the game long before that point.  Allowing for diversity in skills then gives the ability for game developers to put in multiple, alternate solutions to problems that then allow for some role playing on the part of the player. It is true that branching paths to do things requires a lot of forethought on the part of the developer.  Doing so gives the game replayability and longevity, if the basic narrative is at least OK and semi-interesting at least.  It can be made much more interesting by giving the player options and choices based on how they want to approach the game.

From all of that lack of diversity and lack of player choice that is meaningful, the story becomes linear and the player is an agent in the story. Stuck with one way through side quests are not considered a major part of the story which is why they are side quests and while it is possible to choose which combat forms you want to use to deal with foes, you will deal with them without choice.  There are things that are impossible to accomplish in MEA: a no-kill run, a kill everything run, a no armor run.  You will fight, you will kill and if you don't then your companions will do it for you.  That isn't bad in a Military Shooter and if this game had actually adhered to that genre there would be no problems, yet that was never implemented as a top to bottom theme for the game.

Commitment Problems

Player agency and diversity of skill trees are both removed at the start of the game to streamline the Shooter and Action game mechanics.  At the end by not committing fully to these genres and trying to keep RPG elements, the game actually suffers.  If the game started with the PC tossed into the pot with not much in the way of preamble save to say its all gone south, here's your pistol and space armor, it would have been much, much better off.  Don't use the magic scanner to repair the helmet, have the equipment actually function properly, and just leave out the 'get to know you' bits until after the firefight and returning to the Hyperion for down time.  Remove the RPG elements, add in cut scenes and there you go.  And there are more than enough cut-scenes in the game so this would not over-burden it and by removing the majority of RPG elements and would make for a faster paced, more streamlined shooter with the few skills you do have making a lot more sense.

To an extent this is done, but then come the 'choices'  and the limited dialogue tree that tries to honor some RPG aspects of the game, but never, ever delivers on them.  If they are so unimportant, get rid of those parts of the story and concentrate on the major aspects of the game.  The few 'missions' that are RPG in style are essentially meaningless with very few consequences involved, so why bother with more than just the one or two that matter?  If the answer is 'flavor' then why not commit to that with a branching story line which heavily branches and has long-term consequences for the player beyond the 'who shows up for the final mission?' one. Most of the side-quests and miscellaneous quests are Filler Quests, meant to pad the game with some items of interest, but then not following up on them.  Lack of commitment to a fully fleshed out shooter or RPG means that MEA does neither of them well nor in a satisfying manner.  The short development time left after staff turmoil, restarts, false starts, and generally having to get an office prepared for a full game after only doing DLC previously can allow for the understanding of what came out as a game.  And a $60 price tag also meant it had to be 'a full AAA title', just when what THAT meant was in serious flux at the major holder for Bioware, which is EA.  None of this excuses the game that arrived, but demonstrates how it arrived as a fundamentally broken game that could not commit to any genre.

The story isn't deep enough or complex enough to justify even RPG elements, but those are still thrown in without any mechanics to back them up.  Make that choice in 20 seconds because it might be meaningful!  Or not.  Thus the dialogue tree is neutered, and the story path is on the hardest of rails available with all options leading the same way with the choices becoming meaningless.  This is a Choose Your Own Adventure without the Choose part included.

Background to the story indicates that there is a society behind the Initiative that planned out how the new system in the new galaxy would work, but there is no commitment to any part of that society by those who started it.  The council or group running the Nexus are dysfunctional, untrustworthy and generally uninteresting, yet these are the people you have to support.  A training structure for anything is absent for the PC because of being The Chosen One, thus there is a Golden Path you will follow that has pre-ordained success.  Proper mechanics to even implement an SF/Military Shooter are spare, though generally reasonable.

All abilities are tactical in nature and limited to use just in combat: no using those skills and abilities elsewhere as they might give the nameless NPCs the vapors, you see.  What little depth there is in the abilities is not backed up by actual game mechanics to properly ensure that these abilities are properly earned and recognized via some designated group.  Thus there are no ranks to earn which would serve as a way of gating content so that the PC would have some minimum capacity to handle the game in sections based on rank or missions completed.  Further there is no logistical group that can provide minimum necessary equipment in the way of space armor, clothing, weapons or a standard (if minimal) kit for the next mission or mission area.  This would entail some sort of exchange quartermaster with access to the ability to modify the kit to meet certain standards.

A standardized kit would mean the PC would be very identifiable as a member of that organization and that would be true for all team members, as well.  Instead of trying to put any lore in place and allow such mechanics, the player is given free reign to do as they wish.  It must be noted that the Pathfinders do fit squarely into a civilian controlled military organization that is, presumably, supported by the Initiative.  Yet if the player wishes to don armor identifiable to a different species/organization they are free to do so without gaining any negative attention.  At this point the Military and SF shooter genres fall to the wayside, and the game only falls into the far broader Shooter realm by default.  Without a clear idea of what sort of game this is supposed to be, the developer pushed something out the door with trappings from a few genres coated with a thin film of lore and then hoped it would sell.  And it did sell, but instead of garnering community support for more content the developer found themselves unable to even fix some broad issues in the game in the way of bugs and content problems.  EA, the publisher that controls Bioware had the Montreal group shut down and its personnel absorbed into another EA organization nearby.  Apparently content mattered.  Or perhaps there just wasn't enough 'recurrent monetization' in the game to satisfy the publisher who gave the project and its publication the green light for development and publication.

The game needed a severe dose of 'back to basics' in gaming

Do you want to be a science based character?  Forget it.

Engineer?  Nope.

You get lots of choices on the weapons and suit end of things, yes, but basic skills to help play in different areas?  No, that must be another genre you're thinking about.  This is an Action-Shooter game at heart with some other skills thrown (like Biotics but only on the combat side), but if you want to repair equipment in the environment then you can only hope that the story allows for that. Even then it will happen only in that instance through the magic of your scanner and SAM.  If you want to actually start figuring out the alien science and engineering that you do encounter?  Hey, its all magic, right?  You don't need any actual skill at that sort of stuff.  You see, you are the Pathfinder!  Chief cook and bottle washer!  Person with no experience accepted!  Greatness has been granted unto you, not earned like all the other schleps around you.

And if you happen to have an actual ship's captain, like on the Hyperion, the ship you arrived in, they don't have a second in command that can be the captain of the Tempest, right?  Because that would point to an actual chain of command on the naval side of things, which is pointed out is DIFFERENT from the civilian part of the Initiative, though follows its orders as part of the...chain of command. Oh, wait, they do.

There you go: Navy gets to run ships, Civilians get to do the researching and colonizing bit plus run the Colonial Militia/Army.  Then the equivalent of Marines would be with the ships headed by the Pathfinders under supervision of the Navy.

Got it?

Good.

Because the game designers couldn't be bothered to figure that out.  Without a good concept of the way things should be run, they made it up as they went along and failed at creating a coherent environment.  By not having a good understanding of a framework to work with, the game production team lacked a coherent vision of how their narrative could and should be presented.  Just a bit of formalizing the military and social structure would mean that ships get properly categorized and assigned duties.  And even with the Tempest being the Pathfinder vessel, it should properly fall under the Naval side of things.  The Navy runs ships that are armed or even exploration vessels that aren't, though that can be varied based on the universe and setting.

Pathfinders are delegated the latter duty, but it is a duty that is primarily naval that answers to the civilians directly via the chain of command, with the Navy providing the platform for performing such missions.  Thus Pathfinders are Marines and Marines can be the Captain of a ship, but they do fall under Navy control (even though they can be delegated ships, men and supplies directly by the Executive).  Marines can and do operate their own vessels, yes, and it falls under their bailiwick for particular missions, as well.  And when out on operations they have a supply line and that is provided by the Navy or other military assets that have been tasked with that duty. Marines are allowed to vary their kit, weapons, equipment and so on as their mission variety varies greatly from that of the standard Army or Militia.  The Pathfinder group is a Marine style group that does exploration, research, counter-intrusion, and espionage duty.  When there is no valid Pathfinder for a ship, the Navy which is the operational organization that does have ship captains, has the duty and responsibility to ensure such Marine vessels operate for their missions until a valid operator can be found.  This can cause friction, yes, and that should be an element of game play.

I would have loved to recruit a squad of Marines from the Militia!  That would have been a viable game design as a Military-Action Shooter as it would discriminate between purely local Militia and the larger organization of the Pathfinders to the Initiative.  Sadly that would require commitment to a coherent design of the Initiative, and the game designers couldn't be bothered with that.  Turn the game into a 3D Action Shooter based on squads and the entire thing starts to make sense as a game and would fit the setting.  This allows for some interesting down-time recruitment as well as recruiting those who may have left the Initiative but want to get back in it after seeing just how ramshackle things are on the outside.

Personally I would have loved to have the Captain of the Hyperion run the Tempest!  I mean when the Hyperion is docked and everything, there isn't all that much to do save keep up with logistics, and that is what a second in command is good for.  You know, the part of paper-pushing in the digital age that still needs to be done but really doesn't need the Captain to do it.  Now THAT would have been interesting!  A proper Captain would run the ship, and the PC would have a couple of teammates to do the exploration bit as Marines attached to the Tempest until everyone is satisfied that there is a Pathfinder that is certifiable for that job.  There had to be requirements and certifications as there were other Pathfinders before you arrived on the scene and there did have to be standards for becoming one.  I mean, we hope there were standards, but after seeing how dad was running things, you begin to suspect those were never nailed down.  Say do we ever find out what those standards actually were?  I mean the entire Pathfinder group had to have accountability and be a part of a larger bureaucracy before it headed out with the Initiative, way back there in the bureaucratic Milky Way.  You know founding and conceptual documents that would then be backed up by concrete and measurable requirements for staff including training and such.

No?  Uh-huh, the answer is: NO.

Use The Setting To Create The Game

By the time the Hyperion docks with the Nexus and gets it powered up, the player should have figured out just what the actual command structure of the entire affair is, even with rebels leaving the place bereft of key skills that should still be possible.  It should be possible even before that, but cramming that at a player right after an exciting action-downtime loop would have been a bit much.  I would have expected that the Hyperion would be getting people out of cryo-sleep to address those shortages in a jiffy.  Getting people ready to settle would take a few months since the Nexus has seen a skeleton crew on Operations and Maintenance and must have a huge backlog of things to do that are second tier, not absolutely critical but needs to be addressed to get the place functioning type of deal.  This would have offered viable career paths for the player in Engineering, the Sciences (with a variety of those), etc.

With a couple of ranks for a few valuable skills necessary for Exploration the player can then join up with a group that will be using the Tempest for a look at a failed try for a colony without a proper Pathfinder or even proper exploration team.  At heart exploration of a failed colony is a clean-up job that would come AFTER the Nexus has all of the primary and secondary maintenance done to it.  That is the scut work of being a low-level character, and would set aside the fun and excitement for a couple of hours but allow the player to learn the systems and methodologies in their areas of interest.  Taking time after work to train in combat or a secondary job role would also be available, and as we do find out, there are some areas where vermin have gotten into things, so shooting ET rats and stuff would have offered a good diversion and chance to level up in small arms.  Exploring on potentially hostile and known hostile planets requires knowing the basics of combat.  Put a certification test at the end to signal the end of the full introduction to the game.

This would have fit in with an overall game design in which you, as the PC, were pressed into emergency duty for an exploration mission right at the start, and then have to sort out your life once the Hyperion got to the Nexus.  Socially and politically the Nexus can still be a mess.  Getting things to where people can safely live on it should be the priority which will be held by all factions on-board:  if you don't live then your politics don't matter all that much.  Treat space as a real danger to be dealt with and respected, not something that just passing those jobs to be done by 'other people' as you are the chosen one.  Earn the right to be good and highly regarded by those around you, so that the PC is respected, not denigrated.

Trust is earned, not granted, and being anointed as a Pathfinder with no skills will leave a very bad taste in everyone's mouth that will be hard to remove without demonstration that basic skills are learned and used responsibly.  Yes it would have required an intense re-think of the entire game by its designers, but seeing as this doesn't take more than a hour of thought time to put down a coherent overall schema for what the narrative must adhere to it is not difficult. It would have allowed for proper shifts in duties for level designers, script writers, and overall story editors to fit this chunk into the game, proper and then make sure the rest of the game adhered to it.  Missions would have to be diversified due to multiple skills available, but that is what game narrative development is all about.

Redesign of things for the Nexus would be relatively simple as a lot of corridors and rooms would be cookie-cutter and meant for personalization by later inhabitants, so the level design for the Nexus could be simple and varied only for a few sections.  Remember that the primary task of keeping structural integrity has been done by the skeleton crew, so no running out of oxygen unless you shoot a window out or part of the hull busts out when you shoot something that shouldn't be shot.  Being on Cats and Dogs type of jobs may not be fun nor glamorous, but it can be made interesting and exciting, plus offer a few bits and pieces of the stories of those who left to be rebels and why they left.

Start from the beginning, build from the ground up

Environmental storytelling could go a long way with this, and you don't even need logs or recordings for it: just what people took, what they left and the state they left things in.  It might even offer an opportunity for the player to find those people, later, and see if there are other ways to interact with them based on having checked out their quarters on the Nexus.  And players with a bit of intuition might start to piece together the events without having them pointed out by quest markers but through simple observation that would give later dialogue choices in the game.  Do the work well and more options are opened up later.  That would require a player to be attentive, get the immediate job done and then realize that there were clues that could be pieced together.

The few times that this does happen when they are main mission story critical the player does not get to investigate on their own, but must have SAM there to interpret everything.  SAM needs a break and has to learn how to shut up, really.  And SAM isn't needed for C&D jobs unless you want it there for doing them, giving the player choice and a choice that can matter later in game play.  Thus the player would get agency, options, choices and have a game structure that would still push to the same missions but the player's role would differ based on their skills.  That would be 'role playing' within an Action-Shooter genre by having enough elements of an RPG and the developers deciding to put in enough time to fully flesh out a story to allow for multiple paths through it.

If that path were taken a lot of the 'see what the Evil Alien Overlord thinks of this' scenes would be removed (until they could be found via missions) and the entire game would concentrate on: the Nexus, fixing up said facility, going to the failed colony, finding out why it failed and letting paths of science, engineering or combat play different roles with different results.  On a combat path the player would have to heavily rely on SAM for doing the alien deciphering and heavy lifting, but could leave SAM out of the rest of the neuro-physical work so the player could get their own skills without help.  That would mean the character has a lack of secondary skills on their own which would close out some ways of doing things.  On a science path there would be having to figure out the codes and ciphers on your own, using the scanner to understand them and then try to fit in what happened with dear deceased dad when he did it, but without knowing what he was doing.  On an engineering path would be figuring out the power structures of the alien devices, how they fit together and then open the possibility of bypassing the entire coding system to gain entry via altering the input device or augmenting it.  That is basic game structure design work adhering to an Action-Shooter genre with RPG elements and it takes a lot of work.

Redesigning the rest of the game: Form follows Function

All of that with the PC proving to be a reliable part of a small exploration vessel crew, working very hard to make any advances and exploring in hazardous areas would then be the first 1/3 of the game.  Once the alien systems are made to work, the greater exploration of the planet opens up, and the other places that have alien technology would also become available.  Again the three paths through would be available, with the science and engineering ones concentrating on how to get around the mandatory platforming sections via analysis of the systems involved.  No civilization would ever require platforming to get through any necessary facility.

Security checks, yes; platforming, no.

And these are functioning operations: those large open spaces with platforms and such are INTENDED as part of the actual design of the facility.  Imagine making that required to go through by design, and then having to debug or otherwise fix something that has gone critically wrong AS THE DESIGNER of the original facilities.  Works great for non-corporeal beings, I guess, but all indications are that this is a physical species that made this stuff.  So would any sane design require this if failure to navigate it in time meant the loss of the equipment, the facility, the lives of those in and around it and, possibly, ruining of a biosphere of the planet?  If the answer is 'yes' then that species places no value on life, itself. Yet the entire design of these facilities demonstrates that they are made to preserve life by their function.  These two things do not mix. If they had suits that could just fly...then they wouldn't make such wide-open platforming areas and put in more mundane checkpoints, corridors and such as that would be a more efficient manner to allow access to the control area.  Plus a way for critical staff to get through the entire thing without having to check in at every point during an emergency or even to iron out bugs in the equipment: flash a pass and proceed to the problem.

This would require a redesign the areas of interest of these alien facilities with a functional design methodology in mind, thinking it through as a place that once did function with design intent, and then allow players to use means and methods to discover the short-cuts, and maybe discover that the whole platforming area is just a testing area that is only peripheral to the design of the entire base.  The combat people end up going through those areas, while the science and engineering types either find a way to falsify credentials or work on the systems to disable them or by-pass them.  Give the player who is role playing to some degree the opportunity to work as their roles intend them to work and the entire game could make loads of sense by designing in a 'back to the basics' manner.  The rewards at these secondary objectives are ones that should be of high-value in game design as they are only garnered by the patient player not trying to push forward but trying to learn what the game is presenting.

From doing functional design to suit the aliens who made those planet changing facilities, the obstacles to be overcome would be separate based on role playing elements.  There would still be security measures and robots of some sort that would get involved at failed checks, and that would require finding a way around the enhanced security measures.  This is not, of necessity, cascading failure but a chance for a player to do a basic re-assessment of their skills and the situation, and perhaps seek a different way forward utilizing other skills or back-tracking to see if they missed anything.  Failure at one check is an opportunity to challenge a player, not to put a permanent road block in front of them, and even in an Action-Shooter there is room for that sort of minimal role-playing.  The design team for the game obviously understood this, yet they decided that there was only one way through a dungeon: it was made linear by design.  And that design makes no sense.

The idea of an emergency exit or alternate path didn't cross their minds as they focused on the 'lets make the interiors big and awe-inspiring' with large platforming sections that make no sense for the situation.  Drawing inspiration from the movie Forbidden Planet, the game designers forgot that there were walkways around the massive equipment which had unknown function made by the long-gone Krell but was obviously still doing something.  In fact the various observation areas and windows along walls points to safety to keep people away from the big, nasty equipment so as to control it from a distance in a control room.  Keeping the Krell in mind, their entire base wasn't even secured with checkpoints, mostly due to what the actual function of the base was which empowered individuals to the point where things went lethal to the species but left everything else running. It was easy to check on the running parts and accessing the controls actually took a Krell mind attuned to the equipment.  The equipment left behind still functions, repairs itself and awaits the day when it will receive input to do as bidden. A few of the most basic forms of thought patterns proved to be coincident with humans, and that led to problems for the humans.  The Krell found they couldn't control their own instincts and died because of it.

MEA developers could have learned a thing or three by actually taking the design lessons of written stories and movies to heart as they are aimed at getting the protagonist to a place via adventures and then wondering 'what the hell happened here to leave things like this?'  Really, isn't that the entire central story in MEA?  The Evil Alien Overlord is also a new-comer to the cluster and doesn't understand the equipment or what it was meant to do, and his species has had a lot of time to be poking and prodding there, but can't make headway.  If the major antagonist organization is perplexed by this, then finding out just what all of these facilities do in the cluster becomes a key concern, as it does in the game that shipped, so this would be in keeping with the actual spirit of the overall design.  By designing to the setting, making the aliens who created these masterpieces of bases actually be rational and in keeping with some minimal time pressure need, the actual game could have been crafted along these lines in a coherent manner both for narrative and game play options.

From Function Comes Story

In not using a functional design concept, player agency is restricted to linear game design in dungeons and throughout the entire story.  What choices the player does have are restricted by the lack of skills that can be developed and by the design that required this to be the case: rushed design decisions limited play and play styles.  By not having the time to think the game through the designers took a brute force approach to make things interesting even when they were not in keeping with good sense or any sense at all.  If aliens had the ability to easily move over these platform areas, then why have them at all?  The argument that they are in ruins ignores the sites where they were designed this way with a purpose in mind: those sites without the magically appearing bridges or sections raising from the depths make no sense for emergency use as they hinder progress to stop a disaster or even diagnose a malfunction.

What they are good for is putting in sections to show off game play dynamics and the physics engine of the game.  This is done for making 'exciting' encounters, which could still be had without the platforming.  Even if enemies actively used such space, the overall concept of having these areas as the critical path for preventing problems is not rational.  As there are control panels to be used, the physical presence of a being is required and anything preventing that in an emergency is an obstacle.  If the argument is that these aliens had some sort of pass or control device, then where are they or why can't they be backwards designed from functional understanding of the control systems?  Having quests to understand, truly understand, these systems would have made for a far more interesting piece of game design rather than requiring brute force platforming or 'do this to raise this bridge' game mechanics.  Let an astute player who thinks ahead and uses reason get a reward of learning how to by-pass these systems and even advance a different story line and outcome because of it.

Without an alternate set of paths through MEA there is no opportunity for creative thought on the part of the player.  Combat skills are all well and good of course.  Creating a game where the player is put in a brand new setting with clear, functioning equipment and even entire planet altering systems that they can use and NOT offering the opportunity to understand them goes against the very concept of space opera in its widest sense: space exploration while encountering the unknown requires something more than gross levels of interaction but actually attempting to comprehend the design principles behind the technology itself.  Going from point to point to operate pieces of a system with poorly understood intent of the system or what it actually does and requiring an AI to tell the player what to do is restricting the player to just being the means to move the AI around.  That is pure removal of player agency and the reward is that everything at the end of the game is just as much a mystery as it was at the very start.

Arriving at some sort of artificial construct that isn't a Dyson Sphere, but a spherical world with some sort of power source on the inside creating an artificial environment with sunlight equivalent at the end of the game isn't an epiphany of understanding but a 'Gee Whiz' moment in which even the technical people barely understand how it functions.  I'm sure that there is a real control center for the place...just expect there to be heavy platforming to get there, because you wouldn't want to spend any extra time doing anything else in an emergency, right?  Wouldn't want it to fall apart because a circuit breaker needed to be reset at a critical location and have the sphere thing come apart dooming millions if not billions of people.  Because when the lives of millions of people is at stake, the most important thing is getting through a platforming section!

By deciding to not make a story that revolves around understanding and comprehending this alien technology, the player is rushed through these awe inspiring edifices and left clueless about what they can actually do.  Of course you have SAM there to hold your hand.  Maybe there should have been less hand-holding and more thought on making a comprehensible environment with player involvement.  Learn the story from the functioning equipment and realize that the forms that are the actual buildings then tell you about what they can do.  By the end the player should be able to immediately recognize the different forms of building and understand their purpose, and then quickly work to get them back on-line.  That doesn't require hand-holding, but does require serious thought into what the actual alien civilization made so that the setting that is at the end makes sense just by looking at it from the outside.

Aliens are what were made of them

We get to see quite a few non-sentient critters in MEA.  Lots of them.  Sentient aliens come in only a couple of categories outside of the Milky Way sorts that we encounter in the game.  First we have the nasty aliens and their Overlord working behind the scenes.  Then we have the friendly types that will help along the journey.  And then there are those that are genetically altered nice aliens to become servant bad aliens via genetic manipulation.  That's it!  You gots your good guys, your bad guys, and the good guys genetically enslaved to become bad guys.  That was easy!

Oh, and then there were those of the predecessor species that created all the neat technology to alter planets.  They skedaddled.  Left behind a huge construct world in a 'ready to be used' state that we stumble across at the end of the game via the AI figuring it all out.  We do see the predecessor robots, but those don't tell us anything about their creators.  Finding a floor sweeping robot from our civilization doesn't tell you much about humans, although we can learn something about floors, I guess.  Otherwise the robots meant to defend areas are just weapons with legs, floating weapons, or weapons with legs and shields, and they all hop around or hover.  They aren't AI in any sense of the concept, just point defense robots with a geometrical design aesthetic.  The predecessors liked geometry, since it is seen all over their works, but that doesn't say much about them: tile patterns in flooring or used to create pleasing patterns in human cultures doesn't say much about that culture if you have no further background on it.  A mosque, the mansion of a wealthy man or someone who just likes to lay mosaic flooring all have pleasing geometry as part of their style, but that doesn't give insight into culture without a further basis for understanding the designers.

What is relatively clear is that the good-guy aliens are some sort of genetic design of the the predecessor aliens, though why  this was done is problematic.  Where these an attempt to create a new sentient life form?  Or where these an attempt to improve their own genetic design?  Was this to be a slave race?  Or was it done just for the heck of it?  Who knows, right?  I mean we don't get a clear idea from what little information the game developers put in, so maybe they didn't know, either.  Of course the bad guy aliens already know how to cook the genes of just about any being to become just like them, so that's some advanced science right there.  Not used all that intelligently, true, but trial and error can get you there, don't mind the corpses along the way.

If you want species diversity, various neutral species either hiding out from the Evil Alien Overlord group, not liking the friendly aliens, and not too impressed with the Newcomers From Another Galaxy, then you are out of luck.  After looking at the diversity of the Milky Way groups, the paucity of similar diversity in the Heleus Cluster is a real negative point.  Even just finding out there ARE other species and organizations would be something positive, yet they are absent from the game.  Perhaps they were on some 'roadmap', too bad the road, itself, didn't go anywhere interesting.  The actual 'Empire' that the Evil Alien Overlord and ensuing minion come from aren't all that interesting, and serve as the required villain and antagonist.  They could have been substituted with any other generic Evil Alien Overlord group from SF, Fantasy or even just pulp classics and the game would have been better of for it by getting some depth to them.  At least they adhere to some sort of command structure, got to give them that.  What is lacking are those species members that have fled from the Evil Alien Overlord and don't want to be found by the locals in the Cluster or these outsiders from another galaxy.  Because there would be people like that as the Evil Alien Overlord is seeking to mold every species into drones of his or its species: no matter what you start out as, you end up being the same in the end.  Even worse is that there isn't even a cute side-kick sort of species that couldn't be adapted into drones but did agree to serve under the Evil Aliens, thus there is no comic relief and that was something that could have really changed the mood for the better.

A strange sort of SF game that can't figure out how to do aliens right.  Or even give a good split between a villain and a simple antagonist.  Actually that is hard to do, so no blame on the folks who made this game for not having time to add some finesse to it: that takes real story skill, crafting a believable antagonist who is not the villain but someone you can be sympathetic to while you go through the story.  It wouldn't have to be great, but a simple Darth Vader and Emperor deal would have done the job, no need to go to Gordon R. Dickson depths on it.  What is even worse is that the Evil Alien species doesn't have vices, they are not known for their pleasure in drugs, sex, or simple torture.  Robots could have done a better job in the role and be more sympathetic as they are only doing what their programming requires them to do, even if their base AI has problems with it.  Instead the flesh automatons of the Evil Alien group have no vices nor virtues, and adhere to only power, command and control, and execute anyone who tries to think for themselves.  How did this species get so advanced with that sort of mindset?  For all their ability this species isn't presented as all that smart or very intelligent, neither of which makes for any depth in character or civilization.  Millions of years of trial and error, I guess.  As a monolithic species with imprinted genetics upon all others in their way, the Evil Aliens are evil and uninteresting.

If you can't get the Evil Aliens to be interesting and only interested in power over others, then they become dull and you always know that they will take the most direct, most blunt route to any objective.  Where are the landmines when you need them?  This monobloc form of thinking would have driven anyone who disagreed with them before them, and since it takes time to incorporate a new species into the imprinted genetics, those fleeing would have had plenty of time to escape and warn others.  Ruthless Efficiency takes time, lots of time, because it is ruthless and single-minded, and anyone wanting to cut corners gets executed for lack of obedience.  There is no carrot, only stick, and those not wanting to get stuck leave ASAP.  Yet these people are absent from the game and only the Nice Aliens are putting up a fight against the Evil Aliens.  That's it.  Help the nice guys defeat the evil guys, get into a fast fight on a sprawling landscape you aren't given time to explore nor will you EVER be allowed out into it, and that will wind up the game.

For Functional game systems the Evil Aliens can and should have been toned down, made more distant and the antagonist fleshed out.  Better to have a feeling of dread rather than a smirking of 'look at what that idiot is trying to do' sense for the player.  In a complete redraft of the game the Evil Alien bases can serve as the main way of learning about them, their culture and even finding out how to locate and break into them.  Make their presence something that has a methodology to it, and make the big strike to take them down locally and impair their reach a Big Deal.  When the top-down structure loses some bricks in the middle, the entire thing becomes less stable.  Then the Big Evil Alien Boss must take a hand in affairs as he answers to someone else further up.

That should have been the end of the game intro which would end Act I of securing and exploring the local region.  Thus MEA would be a long first act that gives a taste of what is to come.  Acts II and II would follow up with the reprisals and yet winning out against long odds, say against an invasion force of theoretically overwhelming strength, and then Act II is taking the fight home to the Evil Alien systems.  A pretty well known structure that MEA screwed up.  And that is the problem with MEA not knowing just what it wants to be: without a framework to work with, by not following that framework and not taking time to think out just what needs to happen inside the game to meet that framework, the game is left without direction.  As a simplistic Action-Shooter that has antagonists you can't relate to, its not bad but it isn't all that good, either.

It can be modded, it can't be fixed

What is MEA good for at this point?  A lazily made but somewhat fun space shooter to kill some time with, but not take seriously.  It can be modded to some degree but without a good character interaction system and a way to generate at least generic or via template NPCs to fill in the game, it will never be all that interesting for replay value.  The decisions you make as a player don't do much if anything to the way the game ends, there is no major problem with screwing over everyone, because the few opportunities to do that is set in a situation where no one will ever want to join the Bad Guys, and in a larger context it is either giving up your personal identity or helping the people who PO'd your people.  This can be fixed only with a substantial redraft of the entire game, top to bottom, and the modding community would take years to do that with a complete game overhaul.  Without a fan base, without any endearing characters, and with a totally forgettable story that will not happen.  Even in a beloved franchise a game can deviate too far from the way the prior games went and actually drive fans away.  Without those fans a remake of the game, an overhaul, a complete conversion to something, anything else is not going to happen.

That was my major only real thought when I uninstalled the game.

The potential for a good and interesting setting, characters and game universe were not delivered, and the generic feeling of the game as a shooter means it doesn't have the game mechanics to encourage replay.  There is a lot of tactical fun to be had, yes, but that is in service to a story that was poorly conceived from the start. A good shooter needs a reason to replay it, be it for the characters, memorable scenes, a great protagonist, a story that changes based on what you do or don't do, or such a wide variety of game play that it can be approached from nearly any perspective.  And in those areas MEA is lacking on all counts.  As a $10 game you might play through once or twice it isn't bad and if you are willing to put up with its publisher it might even be worth it if you have nothing better to do.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

Game service models

I took a look at video from Game Wisdom on the Paradox model of sales for post-launch content expansion in comparison to other 'games as a service' model of games and games that rely solely on DLC content to expand game play.  Paradox Interactive is a game publisher for design studios under it (Paradox Design Studio) and many other game developers that are not, necessarily, held by Paradox Interactive.  As Paradox Interactive publishes games tend to cater towards the Grand Strategy market it has some positives and negatives going for it versus other publishers for developers in the standard 'games as a service' model area.

The first area of major difference is that many of its publishers host boards on PI seeking feedback into their games.  PDS does this and includes feedback from its developers who work in conjunction with the feedback which often spurs on discussions that lead to future content.  This is not unique to PI as other publishers will do this.  What separates PI and its Developers is that this takes place not in the typical Shooter or Action genre with high-paced, fast action are the norm.  There the 'economy' of a game is important especially for free-to-play titles that need in-game linked 'monetization' to garner income for further development.  The compelling game loop of such action games requires constant updates, refreshes and attempts to further monetize the game via expansions and new items to purchase.  As 'Surviving Mars' is the game that is brought up as problematical, it should be asked: does it fit into the action category?  No, it does not.  It is part of the Grand Strategy game group utilizing a Paradox methodology for continual feedback and improvement for new game material.

Thus the second part of the problem presented for this game: it was released without key features that most city-builder games require and was seen as such by the gamers who purchased it.  Further the first DLC fills in those holes, yet requires a separate purchase.  Once filled the game plays in a substantially different way than it did at launch.  Rightly criticized for this, the move was to address fan needs in a paid for expansion.

Does this happen in other PI published Grand Strategy games?

The methodology of Paradox for Grand Strategy or City Builder type games is to improve the game playing process via a dual track of paid-for content as DLCs and free updates to the base game, often addressing the problems of DLC integration into the game.  This has happened with Crusader Kings 2 and, more importantly, Stellaris.  Players of the base game of Stellaris would understand the major game mechanics as a system within the base game, and yet if they purchased all the upgrades at one shot and updated the game, they would be unprepared for the complexity that greeted them in Stellaris.  Everything has been revamped, sometimes via DLCs and sometimes via patches.  What Stellaris didn't have was missing fundamental game mechanics required for its genre: as a game it was playable, enjoyable and didn't require DLCs to make a complete experience.

In the City Builder genre my recent experiences are limited and historical game playing of prior generations of games only gives me some overall and broad knowledge of City Builders, yet the fundamentals of income, management of resources and expansion should remain.  If any of the basics of how to gather resources (or garner them via trade or general income), order up buildings to be built, and then have an infrastructure to maintain said structures (with Overhead and Management costs) were not well integrated or missing from the game, then it can be said to be broken and not worthy of being a finished game.  If there were items that were required that were physically impossible to purchase or required far more resources than could ever be gathered, no matter the size of the city (or base), then the game has shipped with broken game mechanics and lack of game balance.

Those are immediate criteria for a City Builder style of game and can be generalized into: never show a player something they should be able to do and then deny them the path and means to do it.  And that is a touchstone for all game types, without respect to genre.  Hiding the way to get it is allowed and that requires player ingenuity to find, yet the path to it must be available in the game.

Game mechanics must reflect what is allowed to be done in the game, and if the player is unable to do them then a pathway to doing them must be contained in the game.  To facilitate that a User Interface will be used as the means of explaining content, showing what can be done, and what else is available to the player.  Additionally any history or background material can also be given in the UI, so that the player can better understand game mechanics which they may gloss over to just start the game.  This often requires a tutorial game in which game mechanics are shown to the player via the UI, so that the player understands how what they have learned is then implemented within the game.  A tutorial is not required and simply bringing up hints in minor on-screen boxes or information areas is another way to do this so as to not interrupt game play, yet still offer information.

What is the model that Paradox uses, in general, on games it publishes?  It is an odd system, to say the least, though it depends upon a non-broken and relatively polished game shipping that may have a few bugs, and is then patched to get rid of them.  As a publisher, the design studio is then on task with a successful game to start adding in more content on a regular basis, and this has worked well in the Grand Strategy genre with updates to already published games adding in more story content, new game mechanics and new ways to play within the existing framework.  The recent "Holy Fury" DLC for Crusader Kings 2 opened up Pagan Reformation, which had been added via prior content, but regularized it with a set of game mechanics that may or may not be good but are well understood and integrated into the game.  This opened an entire new category of play that features much variation and allows for the changing of game play for Pagans while not changing much for the standard religions.  The Stellaris MegaCorp DLC added a new form of corporation built on franchising, then put in additional government ethics including a criminal type.  It was now possible to create a MegaChurch or Interstellar Criminal Syndicate that both operate like a MegaCorp, and each has its own ways of approaching the game within those restrictions.  A recent story DLC featuring archaeology, artifacts and relics added in many new back-stories and put in some new game mechanics for the use of said artifacts and relics.  Some of the stories are short and others span multiple sites, and not all endings are happy for the past or present, either.  This has been going on for years.

By including end-user feedback and mod creation for many of its games, Paradox the publisher encourages the design studios under it to participate in the user community to the point of actual developers holding weekly or monthly dev meetings to discuss what they have found inside their individual game communities.  What happens is that the individual games have core mechanics updated and enhanced, and then purchased DLCs integrate with those updated core systems, which allows developers to have a wide range of issues to work with and take in the feedback to create new content and systems for the game engine.  Getting into CK2 or Stellaris, at this point, becomes a heavy cost proposition for potential players who must be enthused enough about the genre and game, itself, to then put in far, far, far more than $60.  While some groups of DLC are bundled and discounted and cosmetic packs, music packs and such tend to come in at extremely low or no cost, the cost of getting into CK2 might actually stop potential players from picking up the game if they do not understand how the game is supported.  It is possible to pick and choose from the DLCs and still have a perfectly playable game.  With Stellaris the entire way of playing has been radically altered, so playing the base game is in no way similar to playing it with expansions added in: the core mechanics have been extremely refined, the economics improved and the effects of that are now for every government type and every play style.  Stellaris was very playable upon release, but now it is a more detailed simulator that requires far more attentive game play than it did on release.  That is not a bad thing, but it is something that does happen to Paradox published titles.

The model is to publish a strong base game with good game mechanics with content to make for satisfying game play and good to excellent replayability.  After that extra content is provided by DLCs either via Story Packs that can tweak existing game mechanics (sometimes adding in new, story oriented mechanics) or full DLC extensions with new game mechanics that can fundamentally alter and extend existing mechanics.  There is a strong feedback loop with developers having sites with the publisher so that fans can interact with the development studio and its personnel, so that the personnel can give an idea of what they are doing and fans can give feedback on areas where the game has areas that are lacking in robust elements, where stories may not feel 'complete' and should be extended or polished, along with outright bugs to the game.  Included in this are Quality of Life issues on everything from the interface to the game (which can often be opaque to the new user) to addressing base game problems for building, extending and interacting with game elements (or the lack of some elements entirely).  That is a good and strong model which very few other game companies even try to do and is almost completely unknown in the AAA part of the game community.  As smaller studios in the Paradox publishing domain understand that continuous feedback with the gamers and fans of the game is essential to game longevity, there is a different view taken with that active game community trying to service them with free updates to the base game mechanics AND add in new content that the developer wants with fan input.

If Surviving Mars has deep and fundamental problems with its game play, game mechanics and Quality of Life as compared to Cities Skyline or any other equivalent builder style game, then that is a black mark for Paradox as a publisher and its game development studio.  The requirement is to have a complete and relatively well polished game go out the door, and that game is eminently playable and replayable with no major bugs, glitches or game mechanics issues: it must be a solid and good game.  The 'ship now, fix later with DLC' concept is not only poor but unacceptable to gamers who have come to expect quality content from Paradox publishing and points to poor QC on their part and not holding their developer accountable for shipping a game that was not solid and good at the outset.  That is because the publisher and developer depend on a long-lived game model where a game can continue expanding and offering new game play to satisfy existing fans and entice new players to the franchise. 

Crusader Kings 2 was published in 2012 the year after The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was published (and did wrap up its DLC content in 2012), and 3 years before The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was published.  From that CK2 is an old, old game, yet it is continually refreshed and expanded with new content, new stories, new game play mechanics and free downloadable content that offers some nice bits an pieces for how units look and music, as well as some user oriented piece to allow for customizing the at-start ruler the player wants for their next run.  A 7 year old game that is continually patched, updated, and has new content coming out for it on an annual or bi-annual schedule, with further depth of game play done for the fixes is something that no other publisher attempts to do outside of the MMORPG realm.  Yet this is a Grand Strategy RPG.  Likewise Stellaris came out in 2016 and had a lot of new content coming out for it early on, and still receives attention for new Stories and thematic game play extension with proper DLCs.  Getting Surviving Mars FIXED so that the fans are satisfied and then finding a way to deal with the black mark (either real or just perceived) of a game that wasn't fully finished on launch is vital and necessary for Paradox publishing.  Fixes could include something like adding in the DLC to the base game for free or for a very minor charge as bundle, combining the two pieces and calling it Surviving Mars Enhanced (or something similar), and giving those who bought the base game a refund for the first DLC if they purchased it and sending it out for free to those who have the base game but not the DLC.  Fixing community relations must be a top priority as Paradox publishing has a reputation of satisfying the fan community so that those fans will continue to buy updates for the long haul.  Look at CK2 and Stellaris to get an idea of what that means for long-term revenue for the companies involved.  Hurting that reputation and not fixing the problem will start to make current gamers leery of new titles from Paradox publishing, and might start to turn off some existing fans when they see how another fan base is being treated by the publisher.

Shipping broken or perceived to be broken games is not what Paradox does for publishing.  The rest of the industry does it to get easy money up front and then may decided to drop a broken game after it has made its initial money back or if players are not supporting new content.  That is a disease that will kill Paradox as a publisher and many of its studios as the model they work from is the exact opposite of that.  This can be fixed as the first DLC for Surviving Mars is seen as a major fix to the problems the game had at launch, and the solutions are obvious on how make good as a company that relies on a business model for long-term survival.  I dearly hope that this is fixed, even though I don't normally play in that genre, it did look interesting as a game but seemed a bit generic.  After playing other games published by Paradox and looking at what it takes to get financially involved with games that have been continually supported for years, it is safe to say that this business model is easy to see.  Screwing it up is easy, too.  Fixing the reputation after screwing it up takes guts and determination to actually realize that a game was shipped without being properly finished and making good on finishing it and then finding a way to mollify players who purchased the broken game.  They don't even have to apologize openly, just fix the problem and make sure that existing players have a complete game experience that was promised at launch.  That is easy to do, though a bit hard on the bottom line as it admits to screwing up internally.  The player base doesn't care about that: they want the promise that was made, not the paid for completing of the game after it was launched as feature complete.  This doesn't even have to be a 'real' problem but a perceived one, and fixing the latter even if the company believes it isn't a real problem is essential: long-term sales and annual revenue from new content is how this works at Paradox and screwing it up at start means lowered long-term revenue.

I like this business model!  It does require ethics and commitment to producing and publishing games that players like, giving players a means to interact with the developers and then giving an idea of what areas new content will be in to build enthusiasm among players.  Feedback and incorporating external ideas means that games can be expanded in new and different ways, often beyond what the original developer had ever thought about.  The result is good games that addresses the player base, incorporates ideas from the player base and then seeks to make sure that this is known to that same player base.  That is a service model that ISN'T 'games as a service', that's for damned sure.  And that doesn't even get into the aspects of how modding is generally encouraged and means for custom player made content to be added into the game made known.  With an extensive and even officially recognized fan modding area, many developers now get to see how their games are repurposed to other venues.  Try and get that from AAA gaming today.

Things in CK2 that just seem surreal

And I'm not talking about following your  heart, becoming a Waldensian, having a few kids married into the family from the Byzantine Empire, getting one of them called back and putting said kid, now converted, on the throne.  No, that is actually not that far out, given the game.  Likewise rowing out to visit scenic R'lyeh is par for the course, if you just make a few of the right... or wrong... decisions while watching the stars.  Actually that stuff isn't that strange.

What is strange?  The monetary system.

Remember that back circa 769 to 1456 AD there was no standard coinage in Europe or much of anywhere else.  What was put in place was the gold piece system, that fantasy RPG players have come to know and utilize across so many games, starting with D&D, that it is just commonly accepted.  Yet the GP in CK2 isn't a gold piece, but represents a much larger quantity of gold than the normal Player Character in any RPG would tend to have in their pockets.  And the cost of getting things built is way out of whack...I mean, seriously so.  And it is to be remembered that this is in the era before the discovery and exploitation of gold resources in the New World which caused some major economic problems for those doing the importing as the value of gold dropped.

Coinage tended to center around varieties of copper, bronze, and other metals, including silver.  The silver mines at Joachimsthal that became the source for minting the Thaler, from which the name 'dollar' is derived, but that was in post-CK2 times, just a fun little tidbit.  Within the CK2 time there was a currency that was locally well known in England and that was the pound (£) which was minted from a pound of silver, back in the old Anglo-Saxon days, and the Hanseatic League didn't debase their coin, the Easterlings, so tradesmen asked for payment in pound sterlings, shortening Easterling up a bit.  The Anglo-Saxon coin had 350g of silver, and serves as a ready basis for coinage in the era of CK2 which starts just after the Saxons getting to the British Isles in numbers after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.  After William I conquered his way in with the Normans, his son, Henry I, guaranteed that coinage would not be debased as well as following all the other traditions set in place for the rights of the nobles.  With the Hanseatic League (as a concept, they might not show up in CK2 at all) that helps to span the CK2 timeline with at least on reliable currency, the pound sterling.

Now in the British Isles, just prior to 1400, came the offensive use of castles in Wales that would drain the budget of England for about a decade.  The smallest of these castles for cost was Conwy that ran about £ 15,000.  The most expensive, reported to be the entire budget of England for the year, was Caernofon at about £ 25,000.  At 1400 the first of the gold coins in England was produced, which was the noble (9g of gold), which had a conversion rate of 3 nobles for £ 1.  The noble coin was not in great circulation but steps in the direction of the first gold pieces produced in quantity that is readily convertible with a known coin for the era of CK2 (though just at the end of it, to be sure).

The cost of those castles included land surveying (at least as much as there was in the era), working to clear, drain and otherwise get the site ready for building, and then the start of actual construction for a modest castle that would hold 100 to 300 men-at-arms.  This wasn't for a castle complex with multiple wall systems and such, nor was it a stand-alone Keep (or Keep integrated into a castle), but the actual relatively low walled fortified structure that allowed for quick staging of forces, warning of emergencies and passing information about enemy troop movement to friendly forces.  This could be built out over time and get rather complex with support camps turning into small towns, and then the expansion of those and the castle itself over time.  A few castles would actually become the start of cities that surrounded them and then became separate civil organizations as the castle wasn't meant to handle that sort of administrative work (by and large with many exceptions).  Basically this was a castle that would be seen in many variations before and just after that era.  Some were cookie-cutter, others evolved in style and quite a few no longer served a purpose and were abandoned as politics and trade shifted across the landscape.

In CK2 the cost of building a castle varies greatly, with the lowest I've seen around around 400gp and the highest around 900gp (the last spot in a highly built up and prospering area with other cities, temples and castles already there).  Now as the places in Wales were not highly built-up, that variation of £ 15-25,000 seems pretty good...but what is that in actual gold?  I mean if we convert it into nobles, then that is 45-75,000 noble coins.  For ease of comparison lets say that the initial castle clearing, building and such in CK2 is 500gp for something the size of Caernofon, and that would make 1gp = 150 nobles.  Great!  There is a 1400 equivalence for a generalized mid-range built-up area slot in CK2 with a currency in circulation just after the building of a castle that can be used to Wild Ass Guess on the rest of the game, but with some actual backing.  Who knew?  Is this a 'good' coin to choose?  Probably not, but it is easily convertible with known weights and comparisons to a known coin that (though slightly debased by this era) was still supposed to represent a weight of something widely accepted in the timeframe of CK2.    It is convenient and can be readily adjusted up and down, but has some actual comparison basis to start with.

So the cost of getting the walls beyond the basics to Level 2?  Well that is around 66gp, which is 9,900 noble coins or £ 3,300.  A bargain!  And a Keep for a castle, basic, runs about 250gp, which is 37,500 noble coins or £ 12,500...pretty much the cost of Conwy castle.  Ooops!

Now what isn't factored into this is the slot system CK2 uses, which is a generalized pre-determined place ready for building a temple, a city or a castle, because they are all the same, right?  Note that in the real world, things don't work like that.  So the cost of those castles in Wales INCLUDES the equivalent of slot clearing in CK2, because reality doesn't work like CK2.  How much does that cost?  Well, from what I've seen in discussions and by in-game use, it is 150% of your annual budget to open a single slot in a single province...from lowly Count to Emperor, this number SCALES to the size of your economy for a SET PIECE OF LAND CLEARANCE.  By setting it at the cost of what you have as net income plus 50%, the cost of clearing a slot in CK2 is greater than the cost of the actual building to be built on it.  In other words first you pay for the generalized slot and then you pay for the thing to be built on it.  So that use of Caernofon had the 'slot' cost built into it and the entire thing came out to the entire net income of England for a year.  If there is no pre-cleared 'slot' then you will pay more for the equivalent of building slot than you will for the real life cost of clearance and building COMBINED.

So that readily convertible amount?  Yup, doesn't work, though it should.  In fact, by scaling costs to the economy, the game is intentionally trying to force you to keep a large amount of cash on hand to deal with the other, non-building effects of CK2.  It is a game of nickel and diming the player CONSTANTLY. Your Steward wants roads?  Pay up.  Want a better harbor?  Again, pay up and be prepared to keep on paying, periodically and NOT set up an office to do that work FOR YOU.  Yes in real life the Liege would set up an office with some minor functionary who is DELEGATED the responsibility and a tiny fraction of the income from the port (or city or whatever) that would leave a lower net amount in revenue but ensure that the roads are kept up, the harbor properly administered and cleared, and generally do the things in the background that someone in power DELEGATES to others.  You, as the player, are not allowed to do that.  Period.  And your Steward is obviously too damned busy to do it which is why you get nickel and dimed to death constantly.

This is important as CK2, at its heart, is a game done at the margins.  Every single hundredth of a percent of research counts as it builds up over time.  Every single expansion for increased income means that after all the upkeep is removed, you get a net percentage and if you have a vassal in-between then you get a percent of a percent.  Those capital expenditures are not something where you can set up a physical lock box to hold a bit of spare cash and keep a bit of change in it.  That gold amount is always staring you in the face and there is so much that needs to be done that the natural inclination is to spend it and pray.  Then get nickel and dimed into debt.  CK2 is the game that accurately reflects the poverty of the era, true, but offers none of the advantages of tribal, feudal or other systems that allow for delegation of duties and responsibilities with accountability.  Sure your Court Chaplain can be caught selling favors, ditto for those other Council members, but those, strangely enough, aren't the main concern.  Getting people to run the daily affairs, and oversee things that are generally small enough to be handled by someone who isn't the Liege, that should be much of the point of it.  That would mean scaling back the entire economic system to reflect the actual poverty of the era but allows for the systemic advantages that certain types of government and religions allow.

Lets say you are a Catholic Heretic that doesn't recognize the Papal authority, and devolves power down to the local level.  Great!  Yet you will still get Bishops asking if they can increase the tithe or put on an extra one...but that is no longer in the hands of the Liege, is it?  Go ask your parishioners and local priests for it...but you can't say that.  I would actually expect the locals to do up the temples better than what the bishop or Liege could do, though donations would always be accepted, of course.  A decentralized religion means things are handled at the local level for religious affairs: that is the advantage of a heresy and you can stop paying the Pope, as well.  While you do get the latter benefit, true, the former of local control doesn't seem to have made it into the realm of what is and is not passed up to the player for decision-making. This might mean lower revenue from such temples, yes, yet it would have the benefit of the locals investing into it with their own money and labor.

If a religion is decentralized then the point of it is: if you take it up then you figure out the basic tenets on your own and start putting them into practice at the local level.  When outsiders hit the player up for wanting to convert to such a thing, then why isn't the answer: "Sure, go right ahead, I'm not stopping you because I can't stop you and that's the point"?  In many ways it sounds like some precursor of Lutheranism before Luther, and the great heresy is that you will follow Christian doctrines as laid out in the Old and New Testaments, but for that you don't need a head of the religion but locals willing to preach to their neighbors by choice or local assent.  To the Pope that is damned dangerous, of course, but for local concerns the overhead and worries (including conversion of other kingdoms) should disappear as a game mechanic. 

Economically the Liege can kick in some funds to build things he or she considers necessary, but that is, and should be, mostly left up to the locals.  As temples/churches don't have a large amount of troops or tax revenue attached to them, and their size is very limited, their actual utility in warfare is slim.  Marginal, at best, and this is a game at the margins, so if that investment is going to happens locally it is for just a slight increase with some ready cash on hand to spend.  For some of the additions like to the main temple or walls, the revenue would go up, marginally, and the oversight of it would be local (by and large).  By having the locals put money into the temple the result is some small amount of cash to be put into the annual budget that becomes the cash on hand for the player.

Cash on hand if you have it.  New roads, apothecaries, enlarging a harbor, paying for book materials to write a book that scales with the size of the domain (thus its 50gp if you are a Count and north of 300gp if you are an Emperor, more or less, as it scales with your economy so it is a rough ball-park on this).  Then if you need some specialized skills that you can't find via inviting nobles to court, you then have to pay for things like Asking a Holy Man to court, finding a good commander, presenting a debutante...and the cost with those ALSO scale to the size of domain.  And the amount you pay to fabricate a claim on a county also scales to your domain size, so it is cheap at the low end and prohibitively expensive at the high end, yet the job is just the same for your Chancellor.  Greedy buggers the lot of them, huh?  And no paying a pittance to uplift some lowborn who has decent skills you need to your court, either, which was something that was done in the era.

The economic considerations of CK2 are weird, to say the least.  Mods can help in this respect, true, and a few address each point of the above concerns to an extent. The Court Physician recruitment can also scale although it can be damned near free for a few of them, so that isn't as bad...and if you have someone with high enough learning at court you can actually just appoint them to the position as the 'Renowned Physician' trait actually only boosts the learning skill by a couple of points and doesn't give them any, you know, actual skill at what they are doing.  If that trait boosted them to the next rank of skill (and that is in there, somewhere, as at the highest level of learning you can get some pretty good treatments that you won't see with the skill at less than 30), so even with mid-level learning they can be practicing at a higher level of skill.  So, yeah, that girl who is great with the books?  Make her the Court Physician.  At anything over 18 learning skill you won't notice much of a difference between that and the mid-20s which are rare.

In CK2 you must save money.  Period.  And you must spend money to improve the buildings in the kingdom, too.  Plus pay out for the random events that will nickel and dime you to death.  And some Secret Societies start to have any costs with them scale to your domain size, which is weird, as the best tools for an experimental lab should be the same since you are generally getting them through trusted intermediaries at Court or via the society.  But that isn't the case.  Now the technology trees in CK2 are a mess, which is why you'll want a learning or stewardship based Secret Society as the cost of buildings is high, and any little bit your character can do, personally, to gain any advantage to anything related to the military, economics or culture matters.  Choose wisely.  Even Societies that just concentrate on self-improvement and then improvement of close kin or courtiers, can really help (and means you might be able to forego some of that hiring if you can't find someone good to import to Court).  You will be punished for spending, even if it is defensively in response to random events.  And when you need to build a hospital...expect the cost to be astronomical for all the parts inside of it (or its complex but the game doesn't actually go into that until the highest level of building).  And, no, you don't get to appoint someone to run the thing, either.

Disease is a real concern in CK2 and even before the Plague, if you are prospering you'll find that all that trade is making a county vulnerable to diseases and disease spread.  Plus depopulation if it is a really bad or long-lasting epidemic.  Hospitals are purely defensive against such things and can mitigate spread and depopulation.  And that is it, though it is great in concept, and hospitals were relatively rare in those times as they were expensive.  Luckily it has its own slot that you don't have to clear!  And the base building, with nothing in it, is useless, though relatively cheap.  Now a Court Physician can ask if they can oversee the place, but in multiple runs I've had that happen twice.  It does beg the question of why it isn't a position that can be appointed.  And ditto that for the University (if you have the whacking large amounts of cash to build one) and, no, they don't work with each other because...well, that is never explained in the game but is due to game mechanics separating out Economic venues so that there is no way to bonus off of a University AND a Hospital in the same Province.

If memory serves the University at Bologna, back in the middle ages, was also a teaching hospital that was quite well known and people educated there were highly sought after.  These are separate things in CK2, and those sorts of capabilities must be built into the hospital with higher tech...they also don't come as a freebie when upgrading a University from Level 1 to Level 2, and if you thought the original cost money...well save up for a few years for THAT upgrade, you'll need it.  Since investment in one doesn't help the other, the player will get hit separately for getting a hospital high enough where people want to train there.  And hope that a plague doesn't drain your economy dry either through mortality or building hospitals or building universities: choose wisely.  Or that you need to build some structures to get more troops.  Or to improve the economy, like expanding that market to Level 2 after you've built it at Level 1.  And if you don't have enough troops to fight a war then you'll probably need to hire mercenaries, which has an up-front cost and then a monthly cost.  And they can take months to arrive, too!  Heck, its possible to think you need mercenaries, hire them, have the war going on, win the war and then have to cancel the contract even though the mercenaries never showed up and get nothing but loss for it.

Oh, and actually calling up your troops means you pay them more.  And it is expensive, though not as expensive as calling up your fleet (if you have one).  Yeah, if you want to kill your economy, go to war!  Now some groups get raiding, in which the troop cost is put at 10% and the troops can raid and send back goodies if there is a continuous line of supply for them or load up boats with loot if you got those in the sea/river area.  You won't be liked for it, very much, but it isn't a cause to go to war, so there is that.  Raiders are cheap to maintain, effective, and the only thing they can't do is settle in troops after a siege, as that isn't their job.  Luckily that is only for a few Pagan groups and Muslims.  Morally upstanding Christians don't do that, though they will loot a place for petty stuff as any army does that has decent conduct: sticky fingers has always been the rule in warfare, but more civilized people limit it.  You might get someone you can ransom off for some cash, though!  Piddling amounts for lowborn and even up to Counts, but Dukes and beyond can get some nice ransom if they are rich enough or have a Liege willing to pay for their release.  That actually makes a lot of sense for the period!  The low rate of capture of those holding up on the inside after the siege is won, that is strange as a decent siege means all the easy ways of escape are blocked off, but I guess a Baron is willing to forego dignity to being captured and leave via tied together sheets off a relatively unguarded part of the wall.  For those performing the siege, the monthly cost in troop maintenance is high, which is why any technology that can be researched to improve the effectiveness of a siege are paramount.  The shorter the siege, the shorter the drain on the economy.  Now having a slot based system means that the first slot is always the first thing put under siege, then following in order slot by slot.  No going around that well defended castle with few people that can sally out and going to take over that nearby city!  For shame if you think you can do that!  Even Pagans can't do that!  Why?  Game mechanics.

And since all the troops are paid out of the coffers of their liege, well, just what does that mean in the terms of real money?  Yeah, we're back to that since it wasn't established in the first place and game mechanics run contrary to the way the actual world worked in that era.

Outside of a few principalities that were somewhat forward looking, who grades out, drains and etc. an area and then doesn't build on it immediately?  Wouldn't that cost tend to be bundled in with the thing you are building?  It is understood that some places just beg to have something substantial built there, and yet even the best sites still need that care and attention to detail that the creation of a new slot would entail.  Mind you a small city with just a thousand or so people might not start out in the best of places, but as they grow they will improve their surroundings (at least to their technology level, so don't expect those open sewers to disappear any time soon).  If that were explicitly stated in the cost of new buildings, then it would be fine, yet the way it is presented conceptually is that the initial cost of clearing the land to make a slot then makes it open to anything from a castle complex, a temple complex or major city to be built there and the cost of the first few buildings is from the cost of founding the place.  After that?  Hey does that castle need to have a Barracks for Heavy Footmen?  If the answer is 'yes' then be prepared to spend a lot of money for it, and then to have new troops trained up to what the Barracks can hold.  Of course you'll need to improve the walls of that castle...or temple or town to do any expansion.  Walls are cheap!  Even the lowest of buildings, say a town market or castle town, costs more than a good wall.  So much for the open air markets one would expect and, instead, you will get nice buildings for a few wealthy shopkeepers, and that means it is possible to tax them at a higher rate!  That more or less works, if the basics of what the costs actually are were nailed down, yet there isn't even hand-waving for that.

What is overlooked is that some feudal societies actually had agreements between the population and their liege to allow for labor to be used from the local population for a percentage of the year for each person.  Yes you had free labor which, although it didn't involve everyone all the time, was something that would tend to defray cost of construction.  This is a purely regional affair by culture, which the game diligently tracks, so there is no reason not to have implemented it to give either a lower cost or time to construct buildings (or both) for areas that are under those cultures.  While something like slavery is not unknown in the medieval period, it did exist, though usually not at the level of the State (be it County, Duchy, Kingdom or Empire) which would use them to its own purposes.  That sort of thing went out with the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire doesn't reflect the changing values of slaves from objects (property) to subjects, which happened in the time period of the Early Medieval Start in CK2.  Mostly slaves or thralls were household in nature during this era, not part of the economic backbone of a State like in the Bronze Age of Greece or later Roman Empire where slaves started to outnumber freeman.  Labor in CK2 also does not account for labor that can typically be contributed by men-at-arms, who are already being paid for their jobs.  By making a very generalized system of building, CK2 handles the regional, ethnic, cultural and religious differences across the Middle Ages in a way that doesn't lend to specific understanding of locales and having their advantages and disadvantages show up in game play.  Perhaps if a CK3 is ever made, it will delve deeper into these areas.

Another surreal bit is defaulting of inheritance to a kind that was extremely limited in geographic extent and not widely practiced: Gavelkind.  Gavelkind, as opposed to something like Primogeniture, is a system where when the Liege dies the first eligible child gets the highest title, and then the rest are distributed among the rest of the children.  This was generally practiced in a few and select parts of England and Wales, and suited the generally poor households all the way up to modern times.  Outside of a few established Kingdoms and Empires, this is the DEFAULT mode of inheriting in CK2, and the main job of every Liege is to research how to get the hell off of it so that there can be continuity of government between generations.  Primogeniture or Seniority were well established methods for passing down multiple titles so that they would remain in the hands of one person in the family which should allow for continuity at the highest level of government for non-elective systems.  These were the general standards and should be the default ones in CK2, yet they are not as it puts a game structure imperative on the player to quickly move up in power so as to be able to perform more research and then, as quickly as possible, shift to something reasonable before death.

That is more than just surreal, but it is changing the very foundation of historical game play to suit a game mechanic to put a hard and fast limit on players so that they are driven to seek more power to do more research.  Something like Gavelkind might make some sense at the Nomadic or possibly Tribal level of society depicted in the game, but it has very limited historical scope as a feudal method for property inheritance.  Taking something practiced in a few Counties in England and making them the global default is insane and surreal, both.  For all the things done well in CK2, this is the one place it falls short of the goal of putting together a viable depiction of Medieval society at the upper levels of Nobility.  Mods are available to address this, but those are to fix something that shouldn't have been in the game in the first place, outside of those few places that used this as a legal framework for inheriting titles and goods.  For families where there might be few survivors, this makes some sense.  At the level of a Kingdom it is surreal as no one would ever attempt to run a Kingdom with that hanging over their heads.  Assurance of who was in line to inherit was of paramount importance at anything above the level of a County so that there were no questions about it at lower levels of society.

Naval combat does not exist in CK2.  Period.  Piracy is something that impacts cities with Ports for trade, but aren't treated in any real way via game mechanics: suffering Piracy at sea is something you can point fingers at potential candidates, but you can't send anyone out to confirm just who is doing the actual Piracy.  Raiding on land is a main point of the game, so having some Pagan show up to start looting and pillaging is all part of the game and anyone uncivilized enough to do it has game mechanics attached to it.  That sort of raiding cannot be used a Casus Belli against the group sending them, but only gain generalized hostility to the sender for 180 days after last contact.  Vikings can be a real terror force, able to go far up rivers and loot out counties around those rivers if they have sufficient numbers and time.  As this is a form of Personal War, the game restricts what can be done: it isn't possible to declare war against that person, as an example, and put all their holdings at risk.  While rarely done (as real forces from opponents that didn't raid tended to be the main problem), the idea of being able to hunt down an individual and put an end to their ways would be in keeping with the spirit of the eras involved.  Going beyond the plots to kill should be the retribution Casus Belli: your warring ways are at odds with civilized peoples and action will be taken against you and all who aid you in your ways.  That is what happened in history and wars were started over this sort of thing, though minor wars, to be sure.

Yet all of that is the lust for gold that is done in a system that doesn't properly handle the actual mechanics and costs of building anything with its gold based system.  Paying troops is a variable amount by era, and what might be a good pay in one era (say paid in salt, which is the basis of what we call a 'salary') might be too much or too little in another.  Similarly troops in the field had widely varying costs, and that would often include the cost of the supply train necessary to keep those troops fed, clothed and resupplied.  That is handled in a generalized way by the concept of how much supply a County can sustain going through it, though that can be augmented by a separate fort made to help bolster the supply lines.  The actual supply train, itself, requires some troops and were often a target of a shrewd commander who might seek to detach part of the main force to go around the enemy and go after their supply train.  That is not part of the game mechanics for CK2 yet is part of the history all the way up to the modern day.  The reason it isn't implemented is that the game is, at heart, a Grand Strategy RPG that will whitewash a number of smaller tactics to serve the greater component of Strategy over all the tactics.  Thus troop pay and upkeep is generalized to such an extent that morale only gets low if the liege has gone deeply into the red and can't pay those fighting in the field their normal field pay.  That is a large scale concern, and one handled relatively well.

The icing on the gold piece cake is that the game engine cheats, and horribly so.  The personal experience of having a decent sized military and sending them against a smaller organization, usually a Duchy or Petty Kingdom that has lost most of its land, has been one in which the listed forces available and the cash on hand available to that opponent are known before declaring war.  Yet the game engine can and will ignore those to grant an opponent mercenaries that they could not pay the up-front cost to hire, not to speak of actually keep those forces paid in the field.  And this is no small thing when the amount of combat effective troops that can be fielded by levy of home troops is under 1,000 and the cash on hand is under 200gp, yet this organization can pay for mercenaries in the 5,000 combat strength range that would eat up all the cash on hand...and do that with more than one group at the same time.  The Pope usually has huge coffers to fund this sort of thing for himself, so that isn't unexpected.  A Petty King or Duke, who has the exact same problems the player has, does not have the actual ability to suddenly whistle up an entire annual revenue in a few days.  Period.  This is doubly true if they have no external large allies supporting them: there is just no way to get that revenue in fast enough to hire large mercenary groups.  Thus in one day a land holder of 3 to 5 Counties can call up the revenue that even a proper Kingdom 5 times that size couldn't bring in, even in an emergency (unless it cheats, of course).  And then, after that, even when its territory is getting sieged out and looted, the income remains STABLE and doesn't drop.  The ability of in-game AI to handle just what a player can do is lacking, and thus the game engine cheats for the AI NPCs it controls and that means they are not bound by the same rule set as the player is.  In theory it is, yes, and much of the internal game mechanics is the same for the AI and the player, right up to the point where the game cheats, which means there are other game mechanics available to the AI that the player doesn't have available.

This form of cheating is part and parcel of nearly all Grand Strategy type games from multiple companies, and its an expected part of the game class.  The RPG elements, however, add something to it that most other Grand Strategy type games don't handle well or at all.  By having a firm NPC back-engine to determine what happens to each NPC every single day, CK2 transcends most other Grand Strategy games as it puts in more than just flavor of the era, but actual mechanics that have real-world foundations.  The most important of those, indeed the over-riding one, is that Personnel is Policy.  What ever you do for individual from marriage to giving honorary titles to making them a councilor to granting land: all of that is done on a personal basis, and the individuals have a general history and running game mechanics behind them that are then CHANGED by what the player does or does not do.

There are a number of full-blown RPGs that don't handle this well, and rely on pre-scripted stories to deal with events.  To a degree that is true in CK2, yet each and every individual has their own Focus and Ambitions, along with their Stats, Traits and Skills, plus membership in a religion or religions, and Secret Society membership all playing continuously in the background.  While a series of events may be pre-scripted, they each have decision trees to them, and this is as true for the player as for all the NPCs.  When 10s if not 100s of NPCs are each doing their own thing, and can respond to what the PC does but in a manner only known in a general way by the player, the concept of 'immersion' moves to the forefront.  This is not an immersive town, country or 3D landscape, but is, instead, the social and inter-personal immersion that so many RPGs have drifted away from to move towards visual immersion.  The truly surreal part of CK2 is that it has good RPG game mechanics, beyond mere elements, built into the game and an essential part of it.  Those game mechanics MUST work with the general combat, overhead and maintenance AI used to run everything else for the NPCs.  For all the fact the player never gets to see a 3D rendering of anything, the individuals the player works with as NPCs begin to get their own back-story and the more you interact with them (which is slow, given the era) the more you understand them.  Of course much of this is built up by the player, but the foundation for that building is in the game play and RPG mechanics.

CK2, at its heart, is still a Grand Strategy type of game, never doubt it.  The player must have good conceptual understanding of how a hand-waved economy works that had difficulty tying itself back to actual world costs and functions for the era.  The generalization is huge, and the defects are plentiful, but then that is true of nearly every other Grand Strategy game on the market.  By putting in more than RPG elements but having an NPC game mechanics system (all dice rolls in the background done on a daily basis) the actual game, itself, blurs the line between Grand Strategy and concepts of working relationships normally relegated to the RPG world.  While the player may only have some scattered instances of direct interplay with an NPC, their character sheet can be brought up so that it is easy to piece together just what is going on with that individual.  Get to know them via their character sheet and their interactions make sense (unless they are Possessed or a Lunatic, of course, but even those have their own way of doing things).

A good strategy gamer may miss the RPG aspects and just put them to the side and ignore them, by and large, until they get hit with personal matters that have finally forced themselves into the forefront.  At that point the player must move from strategy and move to personnel and policy of how to deal with individuals, far beyond the 'Leader of another Country' deal that most Grand Strategy games offer.  No it is necessary to deal with a spouse, children, who you need with decent skills for jobs necessary for your domain that you want to remain in the family bloodline, and then there are marriages, seeking to arrange long-term superior positions by marrying well and shrewdly, and, of course, paying strict attention to dynastic dynamics.  Not doing so will cost a Grand Strategy player dearly.

Similarly an RPG player may yawn at the lack of instant do something now or fulfill this quest as fast as possible game play, as those aren't available in the Middle Ages.  Interpersonal concerns, particularly where what you do as a player will have profound implications for long-term game play, which means trying to plot out a different methodology that goes far and away from 'shoot this, kill that, reap reward' style RPG games.  By not paying attention to infrastructure, troop disposition, which Vassal is getting powerful and finding a way to deal with it, and then not paying much attention to going to war, n pure RPG gamer may find themselves overwhelmed with the strategic aspects of CK2 that are a MUST in game play.

That is surreal.  Very surreal.

Vast 'open world' games do not have the sort of variability for NPCs that CK2 offers, as they must cater to storylines, quests and pre-set characterization.  For all the grand number of individuals that show up in the typical 'open world' setting, only a handful of them are ones you can interact with and all of those have their own world design and story purposes.  Everyone else is window dressing.  In CK2 the window dressing is removed and the pre-scripted plot is generally removed as well, and what actually happens is put to chance and so many types of events that it is impossible to tell just what will happen, save that it will be setting appropriate for the individuals involved.   This is something that NO RPG will attempt because if it did then the story designers would need to take the high degree of variability into account.  By focusing in on the day-to-day mundane activities of a player the amount of variability for the NPCs is limited in scope.  Yet a couple of months in CK2 demonstrates that even with extremely limited time-scales a lot of events can happen that will change the disposition of individuals across the entire game.  This is a time frame that would include most RPG settings, and some settings are worthy of a year or two of in-game play, which would readily see shifts in CK2 for individuals (births, deaths, marriages, and all the affairs of state including wars).  This is not a 'living world' concept, but rather one with such a high degree of scope for the individuals involved (with limits then put on each individual) that the ability to predict who does what over a given span of time is nearly impossible, yet stories do get told within all of that.

This concept of creating a world-based theme based on the actions of those in charge of governments at multiple levels, along with the lower-tier individuals at the courts of those in charge, is one that typically is outside the scope of a tightly scripted RPG experience.  A compelling story, a narrative, story, plot, characters and all of that are the traditional realm of RPGs as they are the genre for that sort of story telling experience.  A loosely scripted set of stories with generally open-ended game play that would feature multiple ways to go through the story would require a lot of storyboarding, scripting, addition of NPCs and so on based on the older methods of story telling in RPG game mechanics.  A truly 'open world' wouldn't feature a tightly woven narrative with single ending, but would feature a tightly created story for the player to discover as they chose the means and methods to play through their game experience with other goals in mind.  This doesn't mean that the tightly created story is unimportant, far from it, but that story must exist among many others that are on-going in the game, and some of those may have compelling reasons for players to play the game and treat the actual narrative as something to be discovered that will offer meaningful content and change to the character, NPCs, or game world as a whole.  That story may be the one that drives the character at the start of the game, but is quickly moved aside as it becomes apparent that there is no easy way through it: the complexity of the changing cultural and social landscape means that the player cannot expect to find a 'golden path' left for them, although key points of discovery can and should be left for discovery.

In the game play of CK2 there are no assurances that what a player sets out to do will actually be the thing that matters most after game play starts.  Each player gets to determine how certain events and changes in their character and game world effects them, and those choices have short, medium and long-term consequences.  Just choosing who to marry can alter the entire course of the game as marriages can create non-aggression pacts that can be developed into an alliance.  Choose a different spouse from a different family in a different government and the impact of that will change the entire direction of game play, and there is no assurance that the individual you found to marry in a prior game with the exact, same start will be available in a new game.

Within CK2 are narrative events that require work, investigation, PC investment of time and resources, or just personal contacts to help aid in achieving the end of that narrative cycle.  Many of these are repeatable, but with variations that allow for different outcomes.  Some outcomes may be a set-back, in which the goal isn't achieved, and that can have ramifications as well.  The idea that there could be a tightly created but loosely available story in such a setting is par for the course in CK2, which sets it apart from standard RPGs that invest more in individual characters within a given setting and planning a number of paths through the game to guide the player along.  This requires intricate and complex story design, that can be huge in its overall scope.  Many game design companies have decided to remove most of that complexity to fit the console market, thus removing background depth and immersion from RPGs as individual games and as a genre.  What CK2 demonstrates is that such removal of complexity need not be performed if a good game world with multiple game states can be created at the start or as something the PC moves in certain directions during the course of game play.  By not emphasizing the story, and putting it into a string of longer decisions, each with a constrained set of choices based on the PC's stats, skills, and background, the pure number of decisions can be increased but not presented at a single point.  By charting out paths within a narrative tree, the interior and end-points can change game variables and thus alter game play.  Stories may be a bit generic, to be sure, but the sheer variety of them and the circumstances that invoke them means that game play will never be the same twice, even in the exact same starting setting.

What CK2 achieves in its grand strategy RPG concept is something that can and should be emulated by AAA game producers as it allows for a much wider 'open world' game concept and would allow for the insertion of multiple stories into a game that can be developed indefinitely based on the game engine.  One of the most daunting aspects of CK2, as a game, is the amount of new and varied content that has been added as DLCs over the years: it is huge and expensive if bought as a single package.  Yet by creating a compelling game with game play mechanics that remain the same in conception, each of those DLC packages expands on the depth of game play, puts in new decisions for players that have dramatic long-term consequences and, generally, refresh the game periodically with updates to the core game system and mechanics for both the core game and how it uses each of those DLCs.  The CK2 with all of its DLC content today is not the game that was brought out originally, yet the core game mechanics are, essentially, the same though with greater variation and additions to them.  By interacting with their players at a fundamental level as a game design company, Paradox Games remains involved with a core development team that takes input from the player base so as to fix bugs and adjust content while at the same time developing new content and refreshing older content.  This is far more than most RPG game development companies do in the RPG genre in the AAA section of the market, and most AA companies can't afford that sort of involvement due to overhead costs.  Yet to retain an active and vital player base willing to buy new content, it is exactly what such companies must do to retain market share.

The concept of 'games as a service' brings into question: who is the main beneficiary of such 'service'?  Without deep and meaningful interaction with a player base, and acknowledging that bugs need to be fixed while working with players to understand their criticisms of the game and its design, a game company that pushes new content out may find that its 'service' model isn't meeting the player base.  Enticing a few individuals to spend lots of money for such content can be lucrative, but that also means that the function of the game is no longer geared towards interesting game play but towards those few individuals who spend the majority of money on a regular basis for new 'content'.  This is self-defeating in the long-term, though lucrative in the short-term: without wider player interest the compelling reason to play a game for more individuals will die off and it is those individuals who feel ill-served by this service that will leave such a game as its actual play content becomes static but 'features' that a player must pay for become more numerous.  'Features' that don't add fundamentally to a game means that game play becomes static: a few new pieces of loot or a recycled plot story as an 'addition' do not actually add to game play as they do not tinker with the fundamental aspects of such game play.

By restricting the genre but opening up game design within the genre and involving the player base in long-term discussions and encouraging modification to their games, Paradox Games has hit upon a long-term, sustainable formula for multiple game titles.  CK2 is one of the better examples of this, and it has had more 'legs' than many other franchises that feature RPG game mechanics.  While highly abstracted for CK2, the ability to have players run across new events, find different means to address older ones and broaden game play scope all mean that CK2 retains a player base AND adds new game play and features on a regular basis.  Few if any 'games as a service' can sustain game play for as long as CK2 has been around.  It doesn't offer huge monetary rewards or income for the designers or publisher, but it does offer a steady monetary stream, year on year, as new players come into the franchise from discovery of it from other active community members.  This is a goal that many 'games as a service' titles aspire to, but never achieve, thus that 'service' based game will, eventually, get closed down or just die out due to lack of players.  By not making that a primary goal, Paradox Studios achieves it.

That is just surreal.  We could use more of it in the gaming world.