F4 Protagonist, Synth or not?

 I've watched multiple videos and read essays on the protagonist form Fallout 4 being a Synth.  They center on a few instances of interest.

First is that The Institute had already damaged the Vault computer system for life support and may have been able to rig up something so as to put a Synth duplicate of you in the Vault.  It is true that yours is the only registered as working cryopod in the Vault, and that, maybe, The Institute would spend time and effort to re-enable it and place a synth in there that looked like you.  It is to be noted that Vault-Tec equipment is not always up to par, and with a social experiment that was done at the last minute, the ability of The Institute to even figure out the system being used is questionable.  This system is custom made, unique and done on a shoestring budget after diverting Vault 111 away from whatever its original purpose was.

- If The Institute was able to do this, then where is the cryogenics technology in The Institute?  Surely, just for life saving measures, they would have a few of these ready to handle accidents or diseases that cannot be easily cured and need to be researched.  It's telling that your son, Father, has cancer (which was cured in the Fallout timeline prior to the Great War) isn't stuffed in one while The Institute seeks out the old cure for him.

- The use of VATS as an Institute form of targeting, seen in a terminal inside The Institute, is put in the protagonist, because you can use it without having a Pip-Boy, then why isn't it more widely available with Coursers?  Coursers offer a much better field test agent then you, the protagonist, and from observation only, Coursers are little better in combat than Gunners or even Raiders.  Higher tech equipment for more damage, yes, but accuracy leaves something to be desired.  This is either a coding error by Bethesda that didn't want to tie VATS to Pip-Boys (and given the Vault-Tec expansion one can see why that is the case) and tied it to the protagonist.

- Does anyone really trust the readouts of the cryopod system after it has been tampered with?  One can see keeping track of life signs during the early chilldown phases, in which a couple of individuals did perish according to the logs, but once you get frost on the skin, there should be no life signs at all.  A proper inhaled substances that prevents the blood from freezing would be in use, and the lack of life signs might actually be normal, though it is registered as deceased.  That brings up the point that this is a Vault full of non-radiation exposed individuals without mutations in their genome due to radiation, so why take Sean?  Why not cycle everyone out and take them back to The Institute to help bolster the genetic stock of the people there via slow replacements children from pre-war couples?  That is a plotline problem of the first degree beyond the protagonist being a synth or not, and as this is glossed over by both sides of the argument, I'll bring it up and point to the actual problems of The Institute itself.  Whoever authorized this kidnapping wasn't thinking straight or knew so little about genetics that they were 'winging it' on this decision.  This is the missed opportunity of Fallout 4: finding out that the people in the cryopods were actually in a deep freeze and could be recovered from it.  Combine Vault-Tec equipment problems, custom made equipment, Institute ineptitude and blindness as to the situation, and then putting in a remote recall system and the people of Vault 111 just might be saved.

Second up is the lack of memories on the part of the protagonist, and this is usually cited due to the Far Harbor DLC.  There are extreme problems as you do have memories from before the Great War and you can explicitly state them to others.

- Going to Graygarden you can remember what Dr. Gray was doing, and marvel that the experiment is still working.  That is an explicit memory made before the Great War of using Mr. Handy type robots by a RoboCo engineer to make a self-sustaining food producing farm.

- When arriving on the Prydwen and getting a medical exam, you can bring up a sarcastic incident when you were in college, about a one night stand with someone who was ugly enough that they may or may not have been human.  Yeah, that is going back to the college days of the protagonist and is long before the Great War or even getting married to their spouse.

- When you talk to Kent Connolly you can call up memories of episodes of The Silver Shroud and even remember sitting around and listening to the show with your family.  That is not something you would do with your infant and spouse as adults.  This is an event that would be a childhood memory of the protagonist listening to the program with their family as they were growing up.

- The Far Harbor DLC wants to railroad the player into not having pre-war memories beyond the day of the Great War, yet in the base game you do.  In fact you can go through the base game, recount ALL those memories and then immediately forget them when going to Far Harbor.  That is bad writing and plot development, and as a player I fully expected to bring these incidents up to disprove that the protagonist was a synth.  You aren't ALLOWED TO DO THAT, and that is robbing the player of Player Agency.

Third is that the protagonist takes environmental damage from radiation, like radstorms, while Gen 3 synths do not.  This is not brought up on either side and yet needs to be addressed as the player must deal with environmental radiation.  Gen 3 Synths do not have that problem as described by The Institute in their entire Gen 3 endeavor.  It's such a small thing that it needs to be brought up.  I've played with a mod that actually does that, though it doesn't remove rads from ingested material, it does prevent any rad damage to happen from the environment, and with that you have a lot more leeway in where you can go and what you can do than a normal human does.  Far from being a minor point, it is a huge one, and if you were a synth this would be part of how you were built from the inside-out.

Fourth a recall code.  If you turn against The Institute why not just use the recall code to stop you?  Plenty of loudspeakers in the place.  If you were made there, then you will have a recall code and you would be stopped.  Never happens.  Could there be 'reasons' for this?  Sure.  But who would violate basic safety protocols for 'reasons' that aren't explicitly stated?  The Institute believes that free will for synths have limits and that would include you. No one in their right mind inside The Institute would ever authorize such a thing.

Fifth is that all the personnel of The Institute refer to you as a parent of Father.  Now there is either a large amount of humoring going on here, or they actually believe that.  Creating a parental duplicate synth would be an important project in The Institute, even if 'secret', word would get out.  Particularly to those hostile to the protagonist, they could unlimber some harsh words under duress to point out you were made, not born.  They don't.  Even other synths treat you as human, and that includes Coursers.  It's a small point to be glossed over, of course.  Yet you do not find ANY project updates ANYWHERE in The Institute referring to you.  Not in SRB, not in Father's Quarters, not in Robotics, not in Advanced Systems, none.  If you are an experiment they would keep track of you and record results for analysis.  Doesn't happen.

Sixth is the curious cases of Synths that are identified as Synths that don't drop Synth Components on demise.  This one is easily overlooked by pro and con, but does deserve mention.  The first case is Gabriel, that you have a mission to recover this rogue synth that is leading the gang at Libertalia.  You can pre-visit the place and get rid of the gang there, which is drawn from Minutemen breakaways who went Raider.  It's interesting to note that group isn't there when you arrive on the mission.  At the end of it, when you get to Gabriel, you can go against orders and actually kill him.  On his body there is no Synth Component which only drops on death of a synth.  So what happened?  Obviously this place has been set up for this 'mission' to prove your abilities to retrieve a 'dangerous synth'.  To get to that point, however, if you didn't pre-visit the place then what happened to THAT Raider gang?  They are gone and this 'new' gang is in its place. Could it be that The Institute actually went in, got rid of the ex-Minutemen turned Raiders and then installed a compliant gang in its place with its leader brainwashed to go cataleptic if a recall code was stated?  That fits the facts.  Of course that can be marked down to Bethesda just not properly putting in the component on death...

- But there is a second time this happens and is a bit more difficult to pull off but can be done.  The place is Warwick homestead and the synth is Roger Warwick.  Join with the guy who suspects Roger of being a Synth and off him.  Roger Warwick does NOT drop a Synth Component on death.  Institute records report him as being a synth replacement, but he doesn't drop a the necessary component when killed.  Again, another coding mistake by Bethesda, right?

- When playing the game it is stressed how high value Synths are as property to The Institute.  They are willing to risk more assets to return a rogue synth.  Yet in two cases of individuals identified as synths, we can find that these were not synths due to lack of component drop.  So which is more likely?  A rogue synth forming up a Raider gang, or a paid-off agent who is a gang leader asked if he would like to relocate and get a hefty fee for playing patty-cake with The Institute?  It would have to be an awful lot of bottle caps, but I'm sure they could to that.  And as for Roger Warwick, was he ever really killed?  Synths are...unreliable...even when pliable, and isn't it more likely that Roger Warwick was brainwashed and sent back believing himself to be a synth and only a few problems with the brainwashing leads to a nervous farmhand to thing he is a synth?

- Would The Institute put a highly valuable, customized Synth into a Vault to 're-awaken' with some rudimentary memories and then not have a recall code installed in it?  Would it let such a synth go around without constantly monitoring it?  And that would mean more than a few crows or traders supplying information, because The Institute would want feedback on their project, wouldn't they?

- They did this with Zimmer and he hasn't been in very good contact with The Institute for years, would they want to repeat that mistake on an advanced Gen 3 with built-in combat capacity?  While Zimmer was a synth in charge of the SRB...or 'commonwealth police', he was a KNOWN synth that was the head of the SRB and he has gone out of contact for far too long.  Would they repeat that mistake with the protagonist? Unlikely. And it should be noted that Zimmer was a unique synth that also designed other synths, and his mission is to track down high profile cases in the Capital Wasteland.  Perhaps he was a bit TOO good at his job and being out of communications might be an indication that HE has gone rogue. Once bitten, forever shy in this case, and trying to put a Synth in charge of the entire Institute is going a bit too far for the place in question.

- Father as acting director of the Institute points to another problem, and one not brought up that often.  If he is an acting director then who is the actual Director of the Institute.  Be it upper or lower case 'acting' that institutional designation for any organization indicates the individual is only acting in the stead of another person who cannot be there to make decisions and participate.  Father has had a few years in this position, but no longer than Dr. Ayo has had working as the Acting Director of SRB.  What this means is that there is an individual, organization or group (take your pick) that does actively run The Institute, but who cannot be there and have put Father down in the acting position for them.  Even if you take over his position, there are no changes in policy that you can make: there is no post-game for The Institute to reflect the values of the new head of the organization.  As policy determines the direction of an organization, the titular spot you can get at the end of the game is meaningless: all directives remain in place and you don't get any policy choices because they have already been determined by someone else and cannot be changed until they return.  If the player is a Synth, then the question of how those who actually run the place in the way of policy will view the new leader comes into focus.  Indeed, it is expected that SRB, at the very least, will do a deep dive into the PC and see just what it is they can find, because it really is something closer to a Secret Police than just the SRB.  And if you were a specially ordered up Synth by the directives of Father, then there will be a paper trail or trail of information on that, and would require willing accomplices in Robotics.  You cannot find such individuals in the game, not even if you are the one in charge.  Is The Institute really fine with replacing its own people with Synths?  I suspect not, as Synths were supposed to be a subservient class, though they might have some talent at certain jobs they are not fully human.  If the objective is to replace humanity with Synths, then that underclass treatment would have stopped the first time actual sentience showed up in any Gen 3 Synth.

There are good, solid reasons and rationale behind the concept of the player not being a Synth.  The arguments for it are few, and involve an instance of VATS working before it should, and the false set of choices presented by DiMA in Far Harbor.  There are other and better ways to have a player question the humanity of the PC they are playing, and the few that we do get to put the question into play are weak.  As an advanced Gen 3 Synth the PC would not have the problems with radiation that they get in the game.  Also, by setting the various Synth patrols out as hostile to the PC, The Institute is putting a highly valuable and expensive piece of property at risk.  Father shows little emotional attachment to the PC and letting you loose was an 'experiment' and he attempted to give you 'closure' by letting you kill off Kellogg.  That level of detachment not just from the PC but humanity as a whole is one that would value the life of the PC more if they were property created inside The Institute than a human being.  By treating the PC like a normal surface dweller, they show the disdain that one would expect for a human.  They don't marvel that their creation has survived and come home, which would have been the expected reaction to the PC getting back to The Institute. 

It is the removal of Player Agency that brings this topic up from Far Harbor, and it is surprising that DiMA's question isn't rebutted easily.  I fully expected that after giving responses to Daisy, Supervisor White and the doctor on board the Prydwen that I would get multiple instances of memories from before the Great War, and if I had talked with Kent and was the Silver Shroud, I should get memories going back to my childhood. Do humans retain all their memories?  Yes, though not on a conscious level, so asking someone what they remember as their earliest memory means having that person pull up something from their early life after having most of it edited out of the conscious memory.  It is a way to save on internal cognitive overhead, and some people actually lack that and can have severe problems later in life with having remembered everything at a conscious level.  The question is unfair for self-perception which is something DiMA should know and recognize.  He has to off-load memories to continue functioning and humans have a similar system of internal suppression to gain unimpaired cognitive function.  People do have gaps in their memories, and using that as a chance to ask if you are a Synth is an effort in instilling self-doubt to the PC, if not the player.  Why not ask if you take external, environmental radiation damage?  That would be fair and an easy question to answer, and definitive of being a Gen 3 Synth.

Over all of this is The Institute's motto of 'Mankind, Redefined', and no one,  not once, asks what the original definition of mankind is and what it is being redefined to.  No one can even state it, which makes it a handy excuse to trot out for anything done for any reason.  A few people have to be replaced?  Well that is just part of redefining mankind.  Entire factions need to die?  Mankind, redefined.  Thwarting an effort in governing of the surface?  Well that needed redefining.  Any atrocity that treats those who have suffered from radiation damage as sub-human that need to be 'redefined' out of the picture is not from an organization that cares all that much about humanity in the first place.  Curie will tell you that ghouls are a victim of the Great War, and that would include anyone with radiation damage that can still function as a human, too.  The Institute doesn't see those on the surface as victims in need of help.  Thus their own humanity is called into question.  As a Synth you would be highly valued by The Institute, as a surface dwelling human you would need some 'redefining' if you hadn't gotten to them.  And The Institute only has one means of 'redefining' humans and it involves lots of bodies and rivers of blood, and only humans could get so obsessed with such an idea as to lose track of what makes them human in the first place.

Games as interactive alt-history

The sub-genres of historical games are those that cover historical and known periods and events, and then sets up a framework that represents what actually happened.  Everything from economic factors to societal factors, plus technology and its changes are all ripe for game mechanics in any historical game.  The majority of these games tend to fall in the Grand Strategy to Tactical simulation types of games, and these date back all the way to chess and was more regularized and modernized during the Napoleonic era.  Chess gives weight and movement ability to units based on social, religious, and military capacity, which makes for an interplay between those pieces on the board as representing how a ruler might attempt to maneuver the pieces of society and the military to gain victory over a foe.  It is a primitive sort of game, to be sure, as it doesn't vary pieces by culture, economy or technology, but then it isn't supposed to be representing an actual conflict in fact but one of extrapolation where these matters are considered to be roughly equal.  History, and regimes, are not so easily described and the varieties of peoples, religions, societies, economic practices and technology across the entire sweep of these things all help to define a game when it is set in a definite era or time frame.

A game like Third Reich from Avalon Hill described the immediate time of when World War II started and constrained it to the European, Western Russian and North African strategic theaters of war.  Nations had units that were built with Basic Resource Points (BRP) and any savings in those at the end of the year saw a portion of them going to grow the economy.  Any conquests of nations with BRPs also added to that economic total for the entire Nation, though didn't grow the economy.  Victory was achieved by taking a number of strategic cities or other locations, and that would determine the game's end.  The United States was an off-map power that would become available to the Allies when it declared war on Japan, another power not represented in the game.  Each player got to determine what to build each quarter, with some units, like ships or strategic units (submarines and ASW units) playing a part in BRP supply for the UK.  As this is a top-level game and personalities are not considered, the premise is that certain historical actions will happen , though there are some random alternatives that can influence the game but only at the start of the game.  The mechanics are set and relatively static, but the disposition of economic output is up to the players.  Gaining a nominal victory is difficult for either the Axis or Allies, though there are some benefits to the Axis early in the game which shifts due to economic factors to the Allies as the game unfolds.  It is possible to not declare certain wars, to declare wars on other powers, or seek to get an agreement with some powers if certain conditions are met.  Any start of the game depends on the skill of the players involved and history then revolves around the decisions made with the known game mechanics for movement.  An Allied victory isn't guaranteed even with the slight shifts in resources that amount to quite a bit in the latter stages of the game.

A more modern game, like Crusader Kings II by Paradox Design Studios, spans the early Medieval from just before the rise of the Vikings all the way out to approximately 1500.  That isn't to say that religious conflict didn't continue, as it did, but that the mechanics for that need to shift given the changes to societies and technology across the known world and take the New World into account.  CK2 is a dynasty centered game, and the player has a bloodline to protect and one that he or she will pass over to their heirs.  As such it has an important social dynamic that reflects the era, even when it has elements that aren't represented in a decent fashion, historically.  Wealth, prestige, piety, buildings, units and technology are all present, even if having a major amount of hand-waving at them for play balance.  Thus playing a CK2 campaign is an exercise in alternate history with the dynamics represented ones that were important to that 8th to 15th century world.  Are there elements left out, badly represented or downplayed in the game?  Of course there are!  Gavelkind inheritance was NOT the standard for that era outside of a few counties in Kent and Wales, so it is a bad conception of how to hand over power across generations that is aimed at game mechanics, not history.  The Holy Roman Empire was divided during the early years of Charlemagn's rule among his sons who had Kindoms under the Empire.  Thus the Empire, itself, was set for being fractured, even if one of his sons got the Imperial nod, the other Kingdoms had already been set up under that larger banner.  All members of that dynasty in the following generation got a claim to being a legitimate holder of the HRE, and that would pass down and cause major problems and see the HRE decline.  This was not Gavelkind in any way, shape or form, but the actual ruler creating a way to ensure that the dynasty would continue, even if it also set them at each other's throats after he died.  Of course if you take up that role, then you can try and change the dynastic situation, alter the line-up, and maybe do a few choice assassinations.  History isn't set in CK2, although the rulers do, typically, have things they want to do:  Nations or rulers have no perpetual friends, but they do have perpetual interests.  CK2 replicates that pretty well given the constraints of the game.

The Strategy and Grand Strategy games are the main venue for historical work, though the concepts of 'theater of war' would only slowly evolve as Nations grew in power and reach so that there could be separate 'fronts' and theaters.  Those concepts grew out of those first put down by Rome, Persia, Greece and other Nations, in which fighting one foe in one area might invite an attack from a different foe from another direction.  This caused a split in manpower allocation, resources, and would bring these ideas of 'front' and theater into being.  From simple single instances of two-front wars there would come a time of multi-threat wars that required more than one simple venue for practice.  Different games offer different dynamics for this.  The larger the scope, to the point where armies are a form of influence, could be seen in the game Diplomacy by Avalon Hill.  At he largest scale the pre-WWI game represented the attempt to spread national and imperial influence on a global scale.  Diplomacy as a game was a highly abstract one that was a first solid attempt to move the Grand Strategy game to a much higher level of representation to both simplify game play and yet leave complexities of how one supported influence abroad.  This concept would later be expanded by the game designer Greg Costikyan and Pax Brittanica, a game that still featured influence and diplomacy, but also represented much of the pre-WWI ethos and the rising tide of diplomatic and military spheres that would serve as the pressure for the Great War.  Players have to be aware of global tensions as their actions and activities can push the world and its Empires slowly into that fateful showdown.  A minor conflict in a far-off land may not seem like much, but if the tensions are already high then that might be enough to tip the balance.  Trying to defuse situations requires diplomacy among the players, to the point of actually making their own treaties and then deciding if they will abide by them.  By giving so much free-play to players, the ability to come into a dominant position before the Great War is a matter of skill, intrigue, military deployment and then seeing if enough of the influence of one's own Empire is enough to be in the predominant position when the Great War comes.  Britain is in the supreme position in this game from the start, and can simply lay basic claims to the entire world and not have to do much of anything else.  As such it is an easy to play Empire for novice players, while experienced players take on the role of 'Who will be in Second Place?' which is viable for all the major and minor Empires available in the game.

Game dynamics must represent the era being presented in some form, be it economic, political, diplomatic, dynastic, military or even personal.  Factions are a standard part of game play for most Strategy based games, though they can just be the Nation or Empires involved but can go all the way down to the family level.  Factions inside larger organizations are also a viable dynamic, thus in CK2 there can be factions seeking their own ends inside a Kingdom or Empire, and those might not necessarily by related to dynasty or might involved other dynamics between other dynasties that the player may not catch on to early on.  In Pax Brittanica there are no interior factions, but the ever climbing world threat meter which encourages circumspect use of force for only those things that truly matter.  These game dynamics represent certain aspects of the real world that were present, even if those who knew about them didn't understand what they were leading to.  In Europe, leading up to WWI, there was no understanding how the technology had changed the use of troops and their deployment.  Yet the Battle of Richmond which did have military observers from Europe saw what had happened there: trench warfare due to the high accuracy of rifles that could be reloaded very quickly.   The Gatling Gun was not understood as anything other than a form of artillery, even after Maxim had introduced his machine gun to the European powers.  The trench warfare in the US Civil War would be the way of the future when all sides had such technology to use.  Pax Brittanica assumes this continued leveling of technology as a 'given', and can't be influenced and, truthfully, wouldn't change the slow move into WWI.

Any time a player puts themselves in charge of a group, government, nation or military in a historical setting a new take on history begins.  One person with a slightly varied background or even the same background as witnessed in history is not a guarantee for history to replay itself.  That is true of any era so long as the AI for the other individuals is up to the task of simulating those goals and directives held by those who were in historical positions.  Yet battles can be determined not just by numbers of troops but by the quality of those leading them and the technology they deploy.  To get to mounted Knights in Europe requires the invention of the stirrup which allows for the transfer of shock to a horse from an individual mounted on it.  Without that a man on horseback could be a wonderful archer and might even do a bit of slashing with a sword or saber passing lightly armored troops, but the ability to concentrate the momentum and force of the horse and man via a lance is impossible, or at least impossible to stay mounted thereafter.

While an ancient invention, it took time to understand the actual utility of it in mounted warfare, which meant that armored soldiers on horseback with lances was a late term development as all the rest of that had to be discovered as well.  Once properly mounted and trained, a Knight on horseback was a truly armored unit, and it would only suffer once the longbow and crossbow technologies were up to the task of taking down the mount and/or rider at long range.  These are expensive people to train and maintain, and once they are available and made, they can begin to dominate the old scrum of hand-to-hand combat by outflanking front lines and attacking with force to shatter most defenses, save those that used polearms as no horse will impale itself on a prepared polearm defense no matter how well trained it is.  An AI must have the necessary scripts to properly evaluate such units and decide on their potential as part of an army. This means the game developers and designers must be cognizant of the history and approach of the people of the era a game is in.  Yet such AI must also have all the alternatives available to it, so that it can pick and choose among them for what best suits the current condition.

Warfare is the prime area for historical recreation as it involves conflict that changes the course of history, and that course can then be played out over the course of the game.  What the player does or does not do will influence the decisions of others in the game, be it AI or other human players.  Living individuals can take very different views on what to do given a set of tools and a mindset of what they wish to accomplish.  Games that allow for victory conditions based on goals, objectives, or completing a number of tasks can also take place outside of the direct military venue or be a part of wider and extended game play that also includes the military as aspects of that era.

Looking back on Third Reich, it has objectives on the map that, when taken in sufficient quantity, can determine victory conditions, and each Nation or Alliance has its own number to collect.  These are strategic objectives, and the point of warfare is to secure them.  This can be done through military conquest or via the shift of a government by events under the umbrella of a larger Nation or Alliance.  The region of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria typically do this in a given run of 3R as a pre-scripted event.  Random events, drawn at the start of the game, can also put Turkey or Spain into that category.  An entire branch of theory and alternate history is one in which Nazi Germany didn't attack the USSR so quickly and, instead, continued the westward push to steamroller Spain and then perform a multi-prong attack on Gibraltar.  That single port that allows the UK to trans-ship goods from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic is key to a larger offensive against the UK and, thus, the Allies.

The game rules have stipulations on how to drive fleets out of a port so they can't be there during a ground assault.  That is done via paratroop drop, and the German military did have paratroops from very early in the war.  Fleets at sea can be kept busy by opposing Fleets, thus a joint strike on Gibraltar using Italian and German Fleets to tie up the British Navy at sea is required.  As paratroops are neutralizing the defenses of a fortified position to some extent, a large push from the ground against the prepared forces of the UK in Gibraltar can start, and tactical air assets should be able to assist in that assault to neutralize whatever air assets are used in defense and to generally add strength to a ground assault.  It is no easy thing to pull off and requires cooperation between players if there is no single Axis player.  The result is a high risk operation with a good chance of success, as the air assets pummel the defenses as the paratroops drop to force the fleets out.  After seizing the port the UK's economy is crippled and its BRP allocation per year is greatly reduced.  This represents goods from the British holdings in India, Australia, New Zealand and the islands in and around Oceania having to go around Africa and thus be easier targets for a U-boat campaign in the Atlantic.  Givraltar is just one of the strategic objectives in 3R and does not come into play often nor easily, and requires planning and a bit of luck.

If performed well, then the Allies are in a bad state to defend the UK and the strategic campaign of U-Boats vs ASW assets shifts in favor of Germany.  Even when the US enters the war, the might of the US economy will not offset this shift in strategic advantage even if held for a single year.  The moribund African Campaign can now restart for the Germans as there is now a direct supply link through Gibraltar if the Axis forces move smartly across North Africa over French colonies which need to be neutralized if they are Free French.  That single operation in the European theater represents something that the German General staff had on the drawing board as a plan as they recognized the threat of an unsecured rear and a two-front war with the USSR as being strategically untenable.  Thus doing so is to alter the course of historical events for that run of the game and see what the results are.  There are still choices available to the Allies, but they are fewer and harder to execute.  Most players won't try this and, instead, try to optimize an eastern assault against the USSR in a mad dash to get strategic objectives and then force any kind of peace, at all.  The Axis will still be short a few places, true, but the choices at that point center on the Middle East or the UK itself.  An Operation Sealion might be attempted if all has gone swimmingly well after taking Gibraltar and then shifting air assets as fast as possible to the coast across from the UK.

That is the sort of planning and thinking that must go into a plan to change history, and to be done it must be executed well and the player have the game mechanics nearly memorized so that the important sequence of events are prepared and operations can be reinforced.  Delay in waiting for supplies can be lethal, as the Winter War demonstrated, yet in good campaign season being out of supply is simply waiting at the last part of the season for the strategic resupply lines to open up, though in preparation for winter that requires no late summer campaign.  Spain doesn't have that problems so the 'mad dash' solution across France to Spain and Gibraltar is viable yet requires good execution to pull off.

In the dynastic Grand Strategy RPG that is Crusader Kings II, a much, much wider set of options and limitations are handed to the player given any level of start from simple county to an Empire.  Working your way up from the bottom is one of the better and more challenging ways to play as it allows the player to learn the personalities involved and all the factors of culture, religion, dynastic policies for who inherits, and taking part in a Secret Society (or not) with the benefits and drawbacks those bring. Getting a throne and passing it down via one's family is no easy business, as there are many who want power of any sort, thus a player needs to understand the threats in their given area and learn how to deal with them.  Bribes can work, so can granting honorary titles, or even landing someone to satisfy them and, possibly, neutralize them into a dead-end position.  For those who are part of a dynasty you don't want to offend but do want to neutralize, handing them a City holding which runs under the rules of a republic may be a very viable thing to do.

Thus for a game to feature good mechanics of what happened in any era of history has that as a basis for creating alternative scenarios via game play.  The more freewheeling the game is over a historical period or multiple periods, the more the game developers have to create content for the variations in possible types of game play.  Short scenarios for a year of two on a single front of a wide-ranging war is relatively easy unless there is a rapid development of technology and deployment of technology via some sort of industrial system.  Staging features to be amenable to different rates of research, engineering and production require a system that fits a wide variety of possible products and how to research them, though that may be an out of map system done just by the game engine in a scripted fashion.  The more that falls under the player's direct control, the better and more robust the system has to be.  A game may be aimed at an historical period as a start date and then move that date back for wider ranging game play, and thus it will have to introduce mechanics to retard the research rate or renormalize the system to make technology seen at the later start date have a higher base cost to it.  Either are acceptable as database manipulation techniques.  By hard-coding in certain technologies, or locking them behind very steep research costs, a game can then introduce historical changes that they have tried to put beyond the reach of the player.  That can be frustrating to a player who spends a large part of their time researching that technology, and then find it granted automagically by the game mechanics running an early start date: good game play would indicate that such technology grants would need to be adjusted if the player has already unlocked them, perhaps kicking off a historical change earlier but having a very low adoption rate for a period of time.  In any event, the ability for players to utilize game mechanics to their advantage and optimize them still plays a part in the overall system and vital to alt-history in a given period of history.

Game developers who develop such games need to do a lot of research just to understand the period of history they will be showing and depicting it properly.  Stopping early tanks via light infantry is possible and requires a different set of equipment from standard small arms unless that suite of small arms has some effectiveness against early tanks.  Ballistics, explosives, toxic gas, and other forms of assault to slow or debilitate a tank might not be well represented in standard combat at anything above the individual level.  Representative units can be given a Close Assault Tactics capacity versus armor that changes the base attack score to represent that specialized equipment held by normal units, and anti-tank squads given a major buff to their own CAT, indicated by their representative marker, perhaps.  In a campaign that allows the design of specialized units, this form of unit may have a relatively weak attack against softer enemies but have a good attack against armored or hardened enemies.  Thus an anti-armor team may be utilizing a Recoilless Rifle group, bazooka armed individuals with their own ammo carriers, or have a squad that is equipped with anti-material rounds for a few individuals with heavier equipment.

The ability to continue such attacks over the course of any given battle may be limited, and that would mean having good training and high accuracy would become a paramount background piece of information for that unit type.  Longer training means fewer in the field, and that then requires having a good mix of light units, anti-tank or anti-armor units, and heavier armored units of one's own which could also feature a limited number of tank destroyers (tanks made to take out other tanks).  Further back in history the crossbow and English longbow marked the decline of Knights in armor on horseback and specially made arrows or bolts were created for high velocity armor penetration, yet only when these are massed into coherent units and trained as a unit do they become a game changer on the battlefield.  The same rule applies, and the training time for a longbow is substantially longer than that of a crossbow, yet arrows fired by such skilled archers may be far more effective than the relatively low training time crossbow groups.  Deciding on what to field, what mix of troops to have and how well trained and equipped they are then makes for interesting alt-history game play.

With a wider historical period comes wider divergence from the norm, which requires game developers have a framework for the activities in their game to properly reflect these changes from standard history.  The economic system needs to be well defined for the entire scope of the game, and even if it is highly generic like the Basic Resource Point system of 3R, it should have some basis in representing the actual economy and its sub-sectors either by direct investment or simple unit types being built.  Any reinvestment game mechanic that alters the game play requires that it have a well understood basis, and that effects are properly measured at the scale of the game, itself.  Again with BRPs there is a percentage increase in the base economy of unspent BRP's from the prior year, permanently.  There is a partial roll-over effect that can make an economy stronger over time so long as the entire budget is not spent.  In a game like CK2 the money is measured in gold pieces, that are, themselves, extremely abstract and not representative of actual gold but a measure of a treasury under control of the player.  A system of abstract currency is that there are nebulous ties to the actual, real currencies of a period, which makes an actual estimation of economic strength as measured in historical expenditures impossible.  The concept is sound, and investing in trade, military, religious or other buildings will garner something, even if it is just the generally non-fungible personal currencies of Prestige or Piety.  Trading in one currency to build a base in another type is a viable and valuable option, and should not be overlooked by any player in games that feature multiple statistics and currencies.

Games are very well suited for tracking things that are mentioned in historical context, but not something that can be easily tracked.  Thus, when we speak of the Moral Authority of a religion in historical context, there is no real world way to gauge it: there is no Karma or Piety or Faith currency accrued to the followers of a religion to grant derivative statistics that would drive Moral Authority.  Similarly in the currency of Prestige there is no currency that can be tracked, because we can't pin down what, exactly, will drive that in one direction or another.  As this is not a publicly traded currency or generated up in any real world way, there is no way to track it.  Yet games can establish a framework for these things and track them by attaching that currency generation to offices, titles, holdings, and even to individuals of certain capabilities that are generally accorded to have such things as part of their background, like via a bloodline.  And as in the past, so in the future, so that Political Power, the ability to Sway others via National Reputation and so on can apply in the post-medieval setting while the older currencies lose their relative value.  If done well then in the base game history will have a very high amount of fidelity to the model, so that players can understand just how the world as we know it was shaped by the forces that drove it forward. 

By playing in such a model, however, the players can also move in ahistorical ways that are also allowed by the system as this represents the effect of minor changes in history having a ripple effect, outwards.  One can start as a defender of the Roman Catholic Church in Lancaster under threat from the Viking invasion and turn around that threat and then research the history of Christianity and become a Waldensian heretic, spreading that heresy according to the lands held by that leader.  I've played as that person, becoming a heretic in the early 9th century and in less than a century it had ripple effects that were felt all the way to the Byzantine Empire.  By the late 10th century Roman Catholicism led by the Pope was no longer considered the standard form of Catholicism and the Pope and the Papacy had become heretics as the wildfire spread of that minor heresy hit Europe and even Pagan lands where it was found to be an appealing alternative to standard Roman Catholicism.  While actual Waldensianism wasn't invented, the heresy, itself, is a way to examine early Christianity and come up with a variant answer, and the sheer number of heresies that arose demonstrates that the name can represent a set of beliefs rather than the actual heresy created by Waldo.  Naming it after the founder that you were playing, doesn't really suit the game of CK2, while the broader definition within that branch of thought does, so that sticks as the defining type.  Yet all it takes is the holder in a single county seeking to beat back the threat of the pagans at the doorstep to achieve this, by having high enough learning and going to a religious focus for a decade or so. 

The ripple effects are something that historians would shake their head at as 'unpredictable', yet game designers who wish to keep a high fidelity to history create systems for the seen and unseen to help model those very effects.  Every time a new game of any historical context is started, then the real world history no longer applies.  The game mechanics and systems still DO apply so that things that didn't happen in our history can happen in a game.  From that history is shown to be contingent upon minor changes that can have profound effects on the outcomes that shifts individuals, peoples, societies, religions, Nations and the state of the World.  This goes beyond the lack of a nail for a horseshoe, yet that very concept demonstrates that history hinges on contingent events and that our current world is made of all those events that happened in a certain way to get the results we honor as history.  Playing games with a historical context that go beyond simple military ones requires some knowledge of the game mechanics and what they represent.  With that understanding and knowing how events are modeled in the game, different results by treating events in a different manner can and do yield different results.  That is the fun of playing such games as games: they allow for a greater leeway in asking the 'what if?' questions of history and seeing what the results might have been.  Alternate History used to be left in the hands of those writing stories, mostly science fiction or fantasy, and that was joined by historical context games by the mid-20th century and is now a permanent part of the gaming landscape. 

History professors and professionals may not like what has been done by these games, but that doesn't really matter as they haven't knuckled down to actually make good historical frameworks that can be derived from what we know of historical facts and events.  The field was left wide open to game designers who knew and loved history, though not as professionals: their heart, like that of a Waldensian Count, went in a different direction.  And as James Burke points out, the pinball effect of history is something that is very real and in play not just in the past but in the present as well.  The interconnected world of today isn't just about global systems of industry, commerce, tourism, culture and the like, but can be boiled down to asking a question: if you are in an elevator and the power goes out for good, what do you do?  How the real world changes due to the history and the systems behind it is a very real thing to understand.  Any gamer that delves into historical games will realize this as that is what attracted them to that game from the start.  What you do with history is all fun and games.  What history does to you, that is another matter, entirely.

Surviving Mars - A look back

The game produced by Haemimont Games and distributed by Paradox a few years ago, so any look at it now is a look back since it appears there will be no more DLC content for the game.  At its heart this is a form of city builder game taking place on an extra-terrestrial environment, and will have the expected mechanics of managing air and water as well as the standard resource gathering expected in this type of game.  As a city builder it is at the low end of the scale, meaning individuals matter and choices on who gets to be a colonist or not is important, at least early on in the game.  There are different modes to the game beyond standard game-play, like a Challenge mode and a Creative mode, so that specific challenges or just plain having fun sandboxing are available once the player is familiar with the game mechanics.

Surviving Mars depends on a game engine that works via a monthly pulse cycle for larger scale work (like maintenance) and more immediate pulses to keep track of the daily needs and supplies for the colony and the colonists.  Colonists have health meters covering health, needs and desires, which tend to interact with each other.  Social, shopping, gaming, gambling and other needs are a vital part of the game and those require buildings in domes that address those functions (groceries, bars, diners, clinics, etc.) that need to be staffed to fulfill those functions.  Keeping the sanity meter of colonists in the green is a part of the background of colony management up to the mid-game where social and other technologies can begin to address these concerns so the player can address higher level concerns of the overall colony.

To get a colony up and running requires sources of energy (wind turbines or solar panels), water (either from evaporators or sub-surface melting and gathering of ice), a breathable atmosphere in the domes, food, and drone hubs with drones to do most of the exterior work.  Concerns of the environment in the way of meteors, cold, dust storms, and some environmental features are part of game play and vary by location.  Resources to gather vary by location, and those resources of metal, concrete, water and such will also vary by location.  The colony is started on a grid map with a couple of sectors on the grid explored and the player can then prioritize further exploration or utilize deep probes (either provided or purchased) to get the basic scanning done.  Once done a cycle of very deep probing starts to reveal harder to access resources.  Drones can work with surface material, as can some automated equipment for concrete and water, but mining requires humans, so a colony will have to run on people with mines as part of the set-up.  Supplies can be purchased on Earth and shipped to Mars, but that is not a fast system and can be slowed down as a game setting.

Starting a colony requires getting a sponsor, which sets the difficulty level of the overall experience from very easy to hard, and then choosing the leader focus (with many different singular perks available to help out the colony and expand on some later decisions).  The first job is to choose the first landing site and get to work: there are usually some starter supplies and more can be included as part of the start game settings.  The objective is to get a colony started utilizing those materials, constructing what is easy to construct and getting all the resources in place so that the colonists can start producing food, metals and attending to other needs upon arrival.  That first arrival starts a timer of 10 sols (the largest time unit) but a live birth by a colonist removes it as this demonstrates the viability of the colony to your sponsors.  From there it is a game of expansion and tending to the needs of the colony, as well as dealing with a storyline that the game will send your way at some point.

This is a game that the designers claimed to have studied what would be necessary to survive on Mars and build a colony, yet some of the resources and choices are problematical.  Concrete, as an example, is something produced generically from a gathering device, which just scrapes the surface material, uses power from the grid and generates concrete and waste rock.  On Earth concrete is made up of a calcite based cement material with sand, gravel and small stones added in to give physical stability and structure to the cement material that bind it together.  Typically water is utilized in this and the resultant concrete needs to dry as it solidifies from the outside.  Large scale structures, like the Hoover Dam, were made with a continuous pour of concrete over molds that were then raised as some of the outer parts of it set.  In addition cooling pipes were put into that system prior to the pour so that the entire thing could undergo steady cooling as this is a chemical event that generates heat and can cause cracking on larger structures.  Another form of something approaching concrete is demonstrated in Lunar tefra that has undergone a molecular bonding across small pieces of material of similar molecular composition and is a form of vacuum welding.  Vacuum welding requires that close molecular type of the materials to allow for a true bonding between them that is, theoretically, seamless and is one of the most interesting types of welding available and is only practical in space with a hard vacuum.  Mars offers neither a ready supply of water nor a hard vacuum, and the concrete plant does not use water.

I was trained as a geologist in college and Mars has some simple things lacking on its surface, like hydrated calcite deposits necessary to make cement to make concrete.  There may be very small deposits of it, yes, and it is not a stretch of the imagination to say those could be available in a game setting.  If so then where is the water coming from?  The material in the deposit has to be processed, and that will remove some of the hydration from it to allow for the proper making of cement.  That water is not enough to make much higher volumetric sizes of concrete: more water is needed.

That would have made an interesting dual purpose building that takes in surface material and then provides cement and a small amount of water, or takes in water to make concrete.  Mars has the added bonus of having a lot of iron oxide on the surface, as that is what makes the planet the 'Red Planet'.  Now that same building could be made into a smelter, and it would provide a small amount of oxygen, water, metal (the game is generic on this, and aluminum can be gotten from this, too though in smaller quantities, but it is generic so keep it that way), cement and crushed slag.  In the other mode it would take in some water, provide oxygen, produce metals and concrete.  Adding in cement would be adding another resource to track, however, and the devs wanted to keep it simple.  The concept of an auto-smelter doing all this is not that far-fetched for real life and not that far out in game terms.  Instead of having to mine for metal, it would be gathered from the surface material, and there is a lot of that and it is many feet deep deep.  That would have made for interesting game play and feature an understanding of concrete as something that isn't pressure formed stone but an amalgam of materials with a cement.  Getting the cement would be the problem, though most of the other materials would make up the vast majority of the mix, so volume of cement necessary is low in comparison.

That is really a different way of utilizing the same systems already employed in the game to create a different set of production systems.  On surfaces that are rocky, a specialized crusher might be used in the single use system as it wouldn't be as easy to get yields of metal high enough to justify a full multipurpose smelter/cement/concrete system.  An all-in-one system like that would require maintenance...and if there is anyplace Surviving Mars actually fails it is in the monthly pulse maintenance system.

Every month (and the actual named timeframe doesn't matter and it could be weeks or quarters or whatever...most games from Paradox publishing utilize a pulse system for updating the databases behind the game) a bit of maintenance on a maintenance bar gets filled and the material to repair it is indicated on the bar.  Fine so far, right?  What happens is no one, or none of the idle drones, get tasked with actually addressing incremental maintenance.  The system is made so that maintenance is only done when something fails.  Take a moment to digest that.

On a planet far from any supply lines, with limited resources for a colony, locally, there is no daily, weekly or even monthly maintenance performed on equipment.  And the people need that equipment working to survive. For a few hours, a day perhaps, people might be willing to don environmental suits, but productivity will plummet and those suits only have a limited supply that will need to be refreshed from the overall systems of the colony.  And everyone waits for something to fail before doing something about it.  That is a non-starter and anything contrary to survival where you can't breathe the air outside and might freeze to death in a few minutes even if you could, is not the way any sane individual would run a colony.  When survival necessary tasks are not performed then survival becomes a very precarious thing.  There are mods attempting to address this and the general lack of understanding of how maintenance is actually done.  Public and most private buildings that house more than a few people have maintenance staff to deal with janitorial duties, maintain the HVAC, make sure the toilets aren't plugged up, refresh the consumable stocks of thing across the building and generally do everything necessary to make the building a fit workplace.  That is usually a daily activity.  In Surviving Mars no one does that, and just wait for the drones to do the scut work, and they will only do it when something has gone off-line for maintenance and might take their damned sweet time in doing it.  And if the materials necessary are pretty far away, then the inter-drone network might not be up to snuff for getting materials passed through the drones by the drone hubs, and you might go days, weeks or months without vital equipment being repaired due to lack of maintenance.  This in a place where if something critical fails everyone could die.

While it is supposed to make for 'exciting' game play, there is no way to schedule preventive maintenance.  Period.  This is a system designed to cause crises on a frequent basis, and heaven help you if it is a critical drone hub that has gone off-line that is one used to service life necessary equipment.  That is actually poor game design when trying to replicate how a colony with this sort of equipment would be run.  This system can be used, use, and it requires a severe investment in over-lapping drone hub control areas, and creating a few more vital hubs with restricted areas for dealing with the sudden failures that are supplied by the surrounding hubs.  Yet no one, in their right mind, would ever make a system like that for where survival is depending on automated drones to do repairs ONLY when something fails.  That should be a very last resort, not the way things are run on a day to day basis.  This system needs to be seriously revamped, overhauled and made into something that mirrors how things are done in the actual world.  And if that means I would have to have a few more colonists with a specialized workshop dedicated to managing that, then that would be fine.

Truly that is a very bad part of the game, right there, and it is such a large part of the game that it might disqualify it from the 'city builder' genre as most in that genre do maintenance tasks as a background activity where it is addressed at all.  Production of materials used for building and maintenance is done by colonists or shipped in from Earth at great expense.  There are buildings for specialized products that are generic and made by people working in them:  circuitry, machine parts, and polymers.  Those things are made up using energy for the building, and then a consumable supply or set of supplies.  Circuitry is made up of Rare Earth material dug out at specialized mines, Machine Parts are made from metal, and Polymers come from water and fuel (used on rockets and to power some systems).  I'm fine with that, really.  Yet these are also things that have been heavily automated in today's world, and base plastic feedstock for other work is done by automated systems: the days of someone hand tending to mixing and such are pretty far behind us.  The same is true with machine parts, as CNC lathes and end mills have been around for decades, and at a hobbyist level since the late 1990's.  And circuitry would require material for circuit boards, which are mass produced by machine, and fitted with semiconductors, also mass produced by machine, and then fitted on to circuit boards and for the less complex types those are also fitted by machines.  People can do these things, yes, and for complex circuit boards that is almost a necessity.  So where is the automated equipment for this?

On a game balance side it would be suitable for individuals with some skill in these areas to run machines to produce the consumables out of materials and be more efficient per hour than an automated system (using productivity and number of personnel as a game balance concept).  What the machines have going for them is continuous, though slower, output.  Too bad the idea was to ship people with lots of equipment to give them busy work when there are machines that could do that already.  Having people do it and be more productive would be a fun game-balance system, where it might make sense to have a few people doing stuff by hand at the start, but to then start making automated equipment or shipping it in from Earth so that a lot of the background maintenance and low level construction materials are made by machines.  Yes there is a mod for this and it is there for that very reason: the game, itself, makes no sense in this venue.

So that's two major strikes against the game for lacking realism of mirroring the real world and efficiently utilizing modern technology (not the 'out there' stuff of some SF) to ensure the safety and productivity of a colony far away on another planet (and it could be any planet that had a similar setting in a much higher SF category, say Stellaris).  Getting the colony started should be and is hard to manage, and a lot of pre-planning needs to go in and then the player needs to execute on their plans and adjust as events happens.  Artificial disasters that would have been stopped before they even started aren't necessary for this game, but as it focuses more on the management end of things rather than the actual technical end, it hands those out because of no one thinking of safety and maintenance as critically linked for survival. The focus of the game designers was on trying to achieve this survival via artifice, and not through overcoming obstacles and actual disasters of the types expected on Mars.

Visually it is a wonderful game, and laying out where everything should go and watching the drones get to work on it is a real treat, similar to watching an outpost station or any space structure being made in Stellaris.  Individual colonists have a thumbnail psychiatric profile, meters to show how they are feeling about things and the entire personnel management concept is available for those who enjoy that sort of thing.  The buildings and what they actually do needs an overhaul, and there are mods that add in buildings that would more naturally fit into the colony concept and attempt to add game balance via their own staffing, costs and maintenance mechanics.  The base game ones aren't all that good but do the job of having the player focus on the sorts of people to be brought to a rather limited colony.  As a bonus it is possible to actually zoom in on individuals and see what they are doing in most places, which is fun in a voyeuristic sort of way.

The stories should be more varied in such a game, or have many overlapping smaller decisions like in Crusader Kings II, which becomes a very personnel oriented system when it isn't a Grand Strategy RPG.  Surviving Mars falls in-between so many existing Paradox published games that it is one that is easy to dismiss as it doesn't do any of the things it attempts to do very well.  Would an actual colony and Mars be run anything like this?  No.  Anyone going there would know this is a one-way trip as even a few months without constant weight training will cause bone deminiralization and changes to heart strength.  With only 40% the gravity of Earth, living on Mars has severe ramifications to any prospective colonists.  Getting 'Earthsick' is done in the face of having to spend  years of building up muscle strength, rebuilding lost bone material and getting the heart used to actually being under the strain of 1g.  That individual may get 'Earthsick' and may not like Mars, but the process of going back would be severe, not to speak of the weakened immune system as is seen with people isolated running bases in Antarctica during the winter there.  Psychiatric problems would be expected, yet the way to deal with them is to point out the utter reality of the willing decision made by that individual.  Unless you land and immediately want back on the same rocket (which took weeks or months to go each way), there is little to no real prospect of return.  Go as a colonist to Mars is a one-way trip unlike that of any other colonist in history.

That is not to say that the game is bad for not realizing this actual problem!  There are infirmaries that the player can build on Mars, and they need to be open and staffed for all shifts to deal with a multi-shift environment.  As the Martian day, or 'sol' is just a few minutes longer than an Earth day, the circadian rhythm adjustment to work cycles will not be severe.  People used to working a day shift will suffer problems for working another shift, and that is something that should have been included in character profiles when choosing prospective colonists.  That would be handy to get people who like working the evening or night shift, or are flexible enough to work any shift actually appear in the screening process.  A simple additional trait check would allow for this to take place, with the assumption that if shift work isn't mentioned then the default is day shift only.

Colonist screening, back on Earth, is not very good at filling the pool of available people with those who can suffer a bit of hardship in their lives on an on-going basis.  Yet a simple check would be to take anyone who is a prospective colonist out camping for a week, with minimal support and help to see how they fare in a controlled situation where a modicum of roughing it is required.  This would help to weed out the prospect pool no end, and allow for traits that would hinder the prospective colony to show up early and be removed from the pool. Of the negative traits the ones of 'Idiot' and 'Glutton' would be easy to identify and the former could be politely told that they really aren't making the cut for various reasons.  Space travel and colonies in space are very harsh environments in which true idiots may not accidentally kill themselves but tens or hundreds of others by doing something incredibly stupid.  Space is an iron bar to such people, the Moon is a harsh mistress, and Mars is the nastiest task-master around.  There are times when warm bodies are needed for a colony, but choosing someone who might get many, many people killed by being an idiot is something that a player should only consider as a last resort and that person put where they can do the least amount of harm.  Why ANY sponsor would support idiots for a project they want to succeed is a very deep problem in the game mechanics for colonists.  Not a strike against it as those people can be sorted out of your prospective pool by the search tools provided, but why they even show up in the first place is beyond me.  Possibly for 'fun', of a masochistic sort?  If so check that 'assorted forms of fun' box for the game!

The game offers good choices on difficulty and a few bits, like maintenance, can be turned off, though you don't get achievements when doing so.  There are harsher choices available for the technology section (either a fully or mostly randomized research tree, instead of just lightly randomized), and ways to ask for more disasters or the entire planet suffering a severe cold spell for beyond the length of the game.  A setting for one group of colonists only is available as well as not being able to get food from Earth.  The game modes are various and the choice of what type of person will administer the colony will get differences in immediate small events that are generally short-term in nature.  I do have personal preferences in both setting and administration and those choices will change the way you actually develop a colony.

The skewed maintenance and game mechanics are meant to be challenging, when the actual challenges would tend to be deeper and harder.  Daily maintenance should be a real thing for the game, and breakdowns rare if the colonists are mentally stable and fit enough to do such jobs.  These don't need to be high end jobs, mind you, but necessary ones for people who want to earn their way as a colonist.  Maintenance and support functions are just that: necessary functions.  Necessary functions should be well regarded and people doing them treated with respect as these are dirty jobs that, if they aren't done, have real and even lethal ramifications to them.  Game mechanics for drone hub zones of control are good ones, so that large zones can be used for general control over wide areas, while smaller zones can help address problematic areas.  Putting depots down to facilitate the movement of supplies across a colony is a subtle game mechanic, and even when air transport is available on Mars, the basics cannot be overlooked.  Getting to a colony that mostly manages itself, internally, and only needs guidance for external and marginal expansion is a role the player will transition to over the course of game play.  Moving from micromanagement to macromanagement gives the player a good 'feel' for what they've put down and can applied their knowledge to address any problems that crop up during a given run.  That is a hard thing to do, going from day-to-day management to the long-term needs of a colony, and kudos for Surviving Mars for doing it well.

That is the strongest part of the game, moving from day-to-day or even hourly concerns at the very start to then managing a functioning colony as an overseer, of sorts.

There are features that are problematical, like the tunnels that only allow support functions (electricity, air, water) to pass through it, yet drones adhering to a static hub cannot transition zones of control via the tunnel.  Nor is it possible to build an inter-dome connecting passageway through a tunnel.  Really, if getting to different elevations for large drones that can take direct orders is possible then why not people in environmental suits?  The investment in those pieces of architecture is large, and providing a human walkable surface should be part of that investment.  It is a quibble, yes, and for game mechanics a player must show they understand the roles of the larger drones in colony development.  Once a drone hub gets established on the other side of the tunnel connecting lowlands to uplands, then development in the new area can proceed.

Managing isolated colony sites with no easy connections back to the main colony is a real and necessary growing step for playing Surviving Mars, so that everything learned when developing the main site can then be applied to new ones: the player should be familiar enough with the game mechanics to get a modicum of success via expansion of the colony on the game map.  Structurally that is well thought out, and even with the need to build tunnels, something like that would be necessary as the actual necessary resources tend to be at some distance from each other.  Setting up a colony just for mining, or just for scientific purposes is a real thing in Surviving Mars, thus specialization in function for new colony sites is something the player must take into consideration.

To sum it up, the things that Surviving Mars does well is at the large scale end of things and providing a good set of growth mechanics that a player will have to master from the very start of the game.  Expect the first few runs to fail for various reasons, especially lack of resources and running out of the starting budget.  Shipping Rare Earth material to Earth on return rocket flights will garner need cash infusions, though it is to be remembered they are also need for colony maintenance.  While there are some deep and extreme questionable decisions in colonist choice, they can be adjusted with search tools... mind you, home grown Idiots are your own problem for lack of a good school system.  Yes, you need one of those, though the Nursery tends to be a generic place to dump off kids as there are no (as in none) game mechanics for families, all the way down to not having family names associated with an actual family (the names are generic from what I can see).  Ditto the School which can be considered to be Primary and early Secondary education for unspecified general labor candidates.  The Martian University and higher level research institute are also available with later game research.

The difficulties are artificial and ramped up in nature, and the sidereal day or 'sol' actually covers a time period closer to weeks or a month.  Otherwise the hurdle of keeping a colony going for 10 sols would be the equivalent of 10 days, plus anyone having a child on Mars during that time would have conception take place on Earth...yet that is a major game event that can happen just a few sols into colony development.  What the actual time span covered in game play is...that is a bit hard to pin down.  Some of the artificial difficulties can be removed for non-achievement game play, like having a huge pool of colonists always available or having infinite money or resources.  And if you are looking for a more relaxing form of the game, then those settings offer it.

Personally I was expecting to see a bit more of what has actually been mapped on Mars to show up in game play and where you start.  Yet if you choose a custom start location, what appears is one of the few standard maps with resources scattered around it in a standard way for that region.  That is questionable, given that the entire surface had been thoroughly mapped when the game was in design, and creating a 3D database to draw from and smooth out for game play should have been a real thing.  That would have made it a bit more 'immersive' and allow for players to pick interesting areas with interesting terrain and surroundings and have that reflected in the game, itself.  But that was just a personal expectation, only.  If you don't like nitty-gritty resources grinds and city management games, then this will not be your cup of tea.  And if you are expecting something like CK2 levels of personnel interactions, then you will want to shy away from this game, as well.  As a city builder it starts at the very low end and works its way up to the very high end of city management, save that you are the one choosing sites, buildings and having to track resources, thus if you are expecting a more automated builder, then this is a warning flag that Surviving Mars isn't that sort of game.

Surviving Mars isn't a bad experience, by any stretch of the imagination.  Past its major faults, quirks, and quibbles, the game runs smoothly and well for what it is.  Yet it could have been so much more.  At this point it would require a DLC that overhauls some of the basic mechanics, adds in new ones to address actual automated equipment and put in personnel as something to focus on beyond the generic level.  Better and more diverse buildings, an actual maintenance system that makes sense, and perhaps a bit less of the sudden event style of emergencies and addressing some of the short and long term problems of colony growth would all be required to make the game more compelling.  Review the mods available for it to see if the way things are going in the mod community can address concerns, and make a purchase decision knowing that it is a game with major flaws in it, yet is still an entertaining game.  I put my personal threshold on the purchase decision at $15 and paid a bit more for the whole game with DLCs.  Not a bad game for a total of $20, but the entire package feels like a complete game, and is a decent buy at that price point.  I'm not a great fan of city builder games, yet Surviving Mars has the feel of a decent enough game in need of serious polish and some overhauling, even with the DLC content.

Mods for games

Mods are modifications to existing games utilizing the structure, scripting and game world as the basis for the modification.  To achieve this modders have to understand the way a game works with files which are utilized by the game engine that coordinates scripting, visualization, objects, characters, the environment and the rest of the game.  Mods cannot be classified as any one thing, as they will run the gamut of interests of those who see a game and then ask themselves why the game is showing or doing things in a certain way.  As such game mods will most likely date back to the invention of games, themselves, once understood rules for a game are developed and accepted.

Take an ancient game like chess, as an example.  The movement of the pieces, size of the board and required one turn per action rule, save for certain circumstances that are codified, create the basis for the game.  It is a form of battlefield simulation of equal force distributions with one side have the prerogative of moving first.  The form of it is well understood, the rules well known and set, and it is otherwise a game that offers a form of game play that has a plethora of strategems for the early, mid and late game.  Yet as a battlefield simulator it lacks the actual mobility of the pieces.

Take the humble pawn which can take an initial move of 2 squares forward and threaten to either of the forward diagonal squares and generally just block a unit ahead of it.  They move only forward in their rank rank, which is towards the enemy, and can have a special replacement upon reaching the last row of an enemy.  It is a piece for opening up the game during play.  Yet well trained troops, in the battlefield, could also move backwards in moves to help cut off enemy incursions or otherwise shift the balance of forces in the battlefield to change them in favor of the commander.  The chess piece that is the pawn does not move backwards, nor does it have a backwards taking rule.  If, however, players wished to experiment with this on their own, they are free to do so.  When done the game can be considered to be running with a modified rule set to address the pawn and will be adhered to by both players.  Chess can be modded privately for the greater enjoyment of the players involved.  This, at its heart, is an example of a mod and a relatively simple one, at that, in a multiplayer environment.

Other games have developed their own suite of 'house rules' that are not codified but well understood to exist.  In the board game 'Monopoly' the square of Free Parking is just that: a place that charges no rent and is free to land on.  It is not a place where money that has been accumulated via fines gets that money as it is to go directly to the bank.  The latter is a 'House Rule' to enliven game play and extend it.

Game mods can also address drawbacks in game design that make no sense to the player or players involved.  In another strategy board game, 'Dune' the Family Atomics card was played only to make the Imperial Basin susceptible to sandstorms, which includes the two major settlements there.  By using it on the rock structure protecting the settlements, the storms could get in to harm them.  Yet every settlement has such a structure protecting them, so why limit the use of the Family Atomics to just the one place?  It is to drive game play to center on those two strategic places, but by canon of the lore for Dune (the book series) it makes no sense to have such a restriction.  The use on actual geographic features and not on people directly in settlements or cities is allowed.  Troops caught on that geographic feature are, sadly, killed.  If the players agree to waive the use for just the one protective piece and open it to all of them, then the path for a variant of game play starts.  In many ways a solo win becomes easier, unless someone figures out that person does have the Family Atomics, then they may find themselves the target of alliances against them.

In the modern sense these examples are modding to the core rules of the game: how the game works is modified in an essential, though often minor, way.  Modern computer games would require a set of scripts and instructions to be inserted into the game engine to enact these changes, which requires that the game scripting engine be opened up for additional changes via outside code.  That is a complex task, and many games are not made with modifications in mind and generally have closed structures that will not function if anything is added to them.  Other games have more open structures or have a game system that can be adapted but only after close examination of the game engine and how it works is done outside of the developers of the game.

By and large, with very notable exceptions, in the modern era modders don't make games.  Modders seek to make games better, more consistent, address bugs, fix issues the developer never had time or money to fix, and generally start adding in projects of passion to a game.  Most mods are simple ones of adding better textures to...at this point...everything a game can encompass.  Some mods offer better designs of items as seen in-world, even if they are static, as the maker of the mod doesn't see why something should look so bad when it is relatively easy (with their skillset) to make a better model or texture, or both.  Old games can get better and higher definition models, textures and generally given a more modern 'feel' if the game engine can actually support them.

Game mods can add new items, features, systems or even new play areas in to a game that will feature their own stories, quests, trials and tribulations.  In the modern era mods to games have added in 'survival' systems to pre-existing games, put in entire new scripting for NPC interactions, fixed up buggy quests that have been game stoppers for many players, and even try to make a game truer to the lore as presented in prior games so as to make it more in line with them.  None of that is official, save in certain, and rare circumstances where the game developer will not only acknowledge the mod but even stamp it with official approval.  In the game 'Just Cause 2' modders found a method to add in networking script that would allow for multiple players to be in a single game.  They worked hard at it and the game even started to develop its own community where you and 2,500 of your closest friends could surf jets in the sky, cause mayhem in races and otherwise go on a tear in a fully destructible game world.  When the developers of this were shown it, they embraced it and decided that this should now be available for free to all users of the game: it got their stamp of approval.  That is rare.

The actual complexity of achieving anything in a mod takes skill and time to understand file structures, designing compliant code that isn't buggy, testing and retesting the mod, making sure nothing else breaks because of it,  and utilizing the Unofficial patch developed by the community for a game post-launch and end of service by the developer.  Developers have to move on to new games to keep their companies going, and so old games receive a final end-of-cycle patch and that is that.  If a game is popular enough to have a community that enjoys the game and wants to see the bugs still in the game patched, they must get together to do so.  There are many games that have just such communities around them, and the modifications done by these mod creators and teams of creators can be awe-inspiring.

A game like 'Stellaris' by Paradox is a 4X galactic strategy game featuring different types of science fiction typical races and situations is a game with an active modding community.  It is possible to be an insular imperial empire or an open megacorp seeking to spread a gospel, and thus be a megachurch.  And so much more.   In two areas a modder saw that Paradox hadn't really covered two entire subsets of SF to show the diversity in them.  That started the creation of Unofficial DLCs for Machines and Hive Minds, which would start to reflect the diversity of ideas presented in SF for these species or machine types.  A Hive Mind was no longer just a Devouring Swarm (with variants) but could now be a Symbiotic System that allowed parts of the ecology to work for the greater whole.  That would mean that outsiders were no longer seen as just a food source, but could actively be encouraged to migrate to suitable worlds so that their particular skills and  traits would lead to a better functioning Hive.  Individuality wasn't lost and seen as a vital part of contributing to the entire system.  Developing that, implementing it, giving good back-stories to it and adjusting game events to reflect the nature of such a Hive are all required to make playing such a Hive consistent to their background and ethos.  Similarly Machines went from either Exterminators or Rogue Servitors to encompassing things like trade and understanding it as a system of function for a larger machine run empire.

Bethesda Game Studios was known for a strong modding community once The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind came out.  Moving to a new game engine and having an expansive attitude towards encouraging mods, it would start a long-lived community that would then adapt to other titles made on succeeding generations of game engine with the same policy.  That would include not just TES titles (Oblivion and Skyrim) but Fallout 3, New Vegas and 4.  These continue to be extremely strong modding communities, and while few modders make mods for all those games, it is possible to find similar mods made by other makers on other games in those franchises.  The Elder Scrolls community even started to work on the first two titles (Arena and Daggerfall), and have even gotten to the point of replacing the game engine with one that is open to mods, while using the rest of the original files.  Similarly TES III: Morrowind has gotten the OpenMW project that seeks to replace the old game engine with a brand new one crafted for not just Morrowind but adaptable to the later games in the series.  These are labors of love, that have the creators getting little monetary value for their work via fans willing to fund them with small amounts monthly.  By having games that are set in stone and not updated, along with an open modding policy towards them, new content has sought to move these games into a modern era of gaming via mods.

Such a community is built by its members and a company that allows this to thrive without any serious intervention means it can garner support and purchasers of future titles.  These games in both series have seen efforts to not just regularize content but to add-in new content that fits in the game world and thematically with prior games.  Such support cannot be bought at any price.  Even when BGS tried to monetize Oblivion with Horse Armor content one had to pay for, it wasn't seen as a big deal and more of a bad joke.  The move by the gaming industry for constantly increasing income and to move away from the spike and valley system of game releases with large sales for a short period of time and then much, much lower residual sales over time, means that new content has to be offered more frequently.  Such content does not have long development times which leads to problems in presentation of content, types of content and if the content is actually meaningful to gamers.  An attempt to monetize mods directly on Steam (a distribution platform for large numbers of games) ran into serious issues of content theft or even offering no content for cash.  This was a failure and even opened up problems of liability due to Intellectual Property rights and who actually owned what.

BGS has since tried to monetize the two recent examples of single-player games, Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition, which has become problematical to the modding community.  To offer new updates the game files must be changed to allow for them to be used.  That means that the game, itself, is no longer set in stone at a file level, and every update that comes out has the potential of breaking older mods and requires new working by the script extension group to allow for modding scripts to be inserted into the game engine.  To garner revenue the concept of a stable game platform is broken and that is a breaking of faith with the modding community.  In search of revenue they now put something that is priceless at risk.  A few years ago Bethesda Game Studios was considered near or at the top of the role-playing game heap, something to look up to and a company that got trust from its fans.  Even before the release of the buggy and fundamentally broken online Fallout 76, the fan base was starting to sour on BGS with its new monetized mods from its 'Creation Club'.  Some modders did move over to make content for the Creation Club, mostly as just a one time supplement to their income as these 'Creations' do not have a long-term revenue sharing stream for the creators.  This is industry standard contract work, where the contractor gets paid once and the continuous revenue goes to the company.  Fundamentally this is 'gig work': work to do one thing for a set price to spec and then move on.  But that is not modding as the community has come to understand it: mods are a labor of love for a project or just wanting to fix something that just isn't right but can be made right with the proper skills at a very base level.

If the game files are being touched, and they are, then there is one further problem with the Creation Club that remains unmentioned.  For all the revenue it gets, NONE of it is going back in to fix the game.  While checking to make sure that these paid mods aren't breaking the game, no one is working on fixing these games.  They are End of Lifecycle for development...but that isn't true, is it?  Development continues and yet nothing gets fixed.  Buggy physics remains buggy.  Bad placement of terrain remains bad.  Broken Quests remain broken.  And myriads of issues, large and small, are never examined.  Fixing problems doesn't take much, just look at 'Just Cause 2' as an example that goes far beyond what the developers had ever imagined could be done with their game.  In the case of Skyrim Special Edition and Fallout 4, a gracious and good thing that could be done is to include the community patch into the free content for the game.  Acknowledge the hard work of the community, include it, offer kudos and when a new Community Patch comes out that can then be examined and included if it has done more to fix issues that remain unresolved that the developers can't divert any of their revenue to fixing.  This would show an that BGS is open to the modding community, appreciates its efforts and goes so far as to make the 'unofficial' an actual official part of the game.  The cost for doing so is so low that it boggles the mind that this hasn't been done.  But as there is no money on the table for BGS, it remains undone.  Repaying good will and rewarding hard work through simple recognition appears to be impossible.

And for those who think BGS doesn't pay attention to the modding community,  it is possible to find modes for Fallout: New Vegas that have a system of establishing new settlements, placing down defenses, getting people to work at them and then Take Back The Wasteland.  If that sounds an awful like the stuff included in Fallout 4, then you will have hit on something that does point to a corporate cultural problem: not giving mere credit where it is due.  Not including a Community Patch is one thing.  Taking ideas, systems and working ideas presented for free, then cleaning them up and incorporating them into another game and never giving credit to those who worked hard on a free mod...that is something else, again.

Modders seek to add in or adjust the game for their own reasons and let everyone know what they are doing and why, plus what bug testing they have done to try and show what is and isn't compatible with what they do.  Take the large scale mod for FO4 called 'Horizon', which is a complete and total overhaul of the game mechanics centering on a 'survival' mode ethos that tries to emulate what a 'realistic' survival situation would look like in that universe.  It is a mod with other mods attached to it to deactivate or reconfigure older mechanics so that they no longer act as they did for the original game.  Skills are earned not just by level up, but by choices of skills, stats, and using such skills actively.  In many ways it adds in a sort of continuous experience system seen in The Elder Scrolls series.  It changes the magical effects on weapons and items, replacing them with parts that can be used for research or for creating components to craft better equipment.  Survival has a complete overhaul and replacement, and that extends to settlements, as well.  Item condition returns, though still not as user friendly or thoroughly integrated as many players would like, it at least shows that such a system can be made and utilized within the FO4 game engine (and this was pre-Fallout 76 mind you).

It is a popular mod that has many other modders adding in patches so that their mods work within the new Horizon framework, and there is a community around these mods that also give feedback on what works and doesn't work in the way of other mods with Horizon.  An entire weapons pack took individual weapons by other modders, adjusted them to work in the new framework and then was available as a mod that seamlessly worked with Horizon, no further patch needed.  There have even been attempts to make Horizon work with another large scale mod that changes the entire settlement concept so that the player isn't left to do everything in settlement building.  That mod and its community is built around Sim Settlements, and it has its own systems for how settlements work, what their needs are, how they grow, when they grow and what the problems are based on resources that are available to them.  That is its own large scale system added into the game, and getting it to work with Horizon is an effort of love and dedication by those who like both of the systems.

Sim Settlements started out with modest goals in mind, but has since grown to start overhauling not just the way settlements are made and developed but to even add in new methods of game play in which settlements will develop independently in the wasteland so that the player will never know what that settlement is like when they arrive.  It may no longer be a couple of farmers on a plot of land but a thriving community that doesn't need the player's help.  With the Conqueror expansion to Sim Settlements and the added factions that other modders make for it, the opportunity to work with base game hostile factions and actually become integrated with them is possible.  Older factions have returned, new ones have been created and those thought impossible are now possible as actors in the wasteland due to the modding community of Sim Settlements.

All of these are enabled by a scripting extension system developed by a group that has dedicated itself to extending the way scripts can be added in to BGS games.  That group must update its scripting extension system every time the base code of the game changes, so that it can work with the new items and features added into the base game.  That means with every new release of 'Creations' the script extension group needs to rework their code, and everyone using mods that use that scripting extension system have to wait for it to be updated, and then for other mods to update to the new changes in the scripting extension system.  Mind you the actual game of Fallout 4 has seen no real new development, no bug fixes, no changes beyond those for the 'Creations' it now covers.  Older games, like all the prior games in the TES series, save for Skyrim SE, are set in stone and almost never see updates.  It is only the microtransaction added games that have this problem, along with the frustrating concept of BGS having sent new files for early 'Creations' that take up drive space even though they aren't being used by the player.  This was 'fixed' for later 'Creations' but that first wave still sits on drives when not used taking up space because BGS never figured out how to NOT do that even though they DID with later 'Creations'.

If this seems like needless harping on BGS, then to a degree that is correct.  Paradox Studios has much the same problem with some of its games, though not on the microtransaction side, but on actually listening to their user communities and updating the game engine, game play and revamping systems, often centered on major DLC releases.  Paying for the DLC can be expensive, especially if you aren't keeping up with the game, but in return you get new content, attempts to fix bugs, and a developer that listens to feedback and keeps a game fresh and exciting for years after the initial release.  Plus they are open to mods and tell the community around those games what has been changed and why, so that mods can be changed if they have touched on features or game mechanics that involve particular mods.  Frequent updates can be frustrating, yes, but as a player you know that they are made to address concerns or add features or make a game more consistent for all the players.  That is worth the price of lower cost DLCs coming out once or twice a year for a major update and brand new features added into an old game.  Even if you don't purchase all the DLCs, Paradox ensures that their bugfixes will still work for you: they care about the end user experience for all the players and understand why their community is important to future game development.

I enjoy Paradox and BGS games, and use mods for them to get new and interesting ways to play the games.  There is a stark difference between the two ways that monetization and player appreciation is handled by the two companies.  One keeps games fresh, interesting and uses player feedback to improve the game, while the other just puts out new content and doesn't bother to do bug fixes and when they take in user feedback it is not given any appreciation beyond a few reps saying nice things.  One gets meaningful results that add value to purchasing expansions to make the game better based on feedback, the other sells stuff to people who want it and don't bother to ever fix problems or really listen all that well to feedback.  One honestly seeks cash and hands back more than you expect, while the other converts money into store credits and then changes pricing on items on a whim to market them and entice people to pay for more credits.  One looks at user mods, examines them and then offers to incorporate them as official content with credit, while the other takes in ideas and systems, incorporates them from prior mods, and gives no credit at all.  One continues to build a user community by paying attention to it, the other puts out a way to mod its games and then doesn't pay much attention to the users save for when something that might be useful comes up and then just take from the users and never tell what they do.  There is a line between these approaches and it is one that users and people paying for games need to pay attention to if you use mods.

Another company, CD Projekt Red, is known for its wonderful games, like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, but not well known for its modding tools or support.  In fact it doesn't offer much in the way of either and doesn't take a stance pro or con to modding their games.  Those who wish to mod their games need to garner what tools are available among the small community that creates mods and then learn the necessary file structures, coding and means to inject new material into the game engine.  Part of the reason why this is the case is that CDPR address each game individually and is prepared to scrap most or all of its prior game engine to keep the few parts that will work in the next game they develop and then make a new game engine from the ground up to focus on the game and its content.  Thus much of the game engine running TW3 is different from the prior entry in the series and the new game engine for Cyberpunk 2077 was first tried as a simple expansion on TW3's engine and much of that engine was found wanting and reworked or scrapped in favor of a new design.  Thus tools used for a prior game may only partially function or not function at all for a new game.  Yet CDPR is not hostile to modders to their games, nor are they supportive: they let the fans figure out what to do and leave them to do it.

From that stance and the necessary changes to game engines per game, they do not have a large modding community.  This is yet another path a company may take, that of being neutral and letting everyone know that, by and large, their tools for game development are in-house only.  Anyone wanting to mod their games will have to wait until the game is available and older tools tested to see if they are still valid or even partially able to help create new material to put into a game.  CDPR recognizes that fans may add play value for themselves, and let fans do just that.  As they are responsible for the concept of why microtransactions are not a good fit for single player games, they also do not tend to add or adjust older games via updates for microtransactions, meaning that there is a relatively stable code base once a game is completed and the company ends its support for that game.  It is the stability in code that allows for tools to be tested for modding and for a community to expand marginally if the game has a wide player base and individuals willing to invest their own time in learning these tools to then mod the games from CDPR.

This approach is, like that of Paradox and Bethesda, oriented towards a business model, and that model for CDPR is to make the best game possible from their creative teams, add in content to expand the stories and world they are showing, and to then call it a day when they are finished and then go on to the next project.  The concentration is on the excellence of the game, itself, and is aimed to not just provide an excellent game but one that is highly polished with few bugs, few game crashes and having a highly consistent story and game world design that allows the story to be presented in a compelling manner.  As a company they are lauded for those stories, often very personal stories, that drive their games forward.  Their settings are compelling on the surface, visually beautiful and yet may only be enough to serve making the story compelling, not making the entire world compelling.  Great kudos go forward on making a city full of people, and yet only a handful can actually be interacted with: that seller in the market hawking their wares and calling you over may turn out to be someone you can't interact with.  That is fine, as far as it goes, yet leaves the actual NPCs that are available for meaningful interaction at a level of something like TESV Skyrim from Bethesda.

Yet one company gets lauded for its realistic depiction of a world and the other is criticized for how little there is in the way of content in a sparsely populated city.  One is lauded for dynamic, colorful and immersive design and the other criticized for places that appear empty.  Yet the amount of content presented by the games may be similar in number of quest lines, scope of quests, and the actual number of people to deal with.  No modder wants to try and develop a new AI package for CDPR games to make all those individuals at least have something they can do if approached by the player as that is a level of design that is hard to create.  Skyrim has mods that put in new NPCs, allow them to use existing NPC AI packages or even tweaks or creates new packages for those being inserted into the game world.  What is a very close to impossible concept to do in TW3 can be done in Skyrim via mods.  The mod community will even go so far as to create NPC interaction systems to allow for new dialogue to happen between NPCs based on what already exists for them or lines from the same voice actor used for different characters.  This allows for brand new NPCs to interact with existing ones or even those from other mods even if they aren't intended for that new interaction AI package.  Novograd is lauded and appreciated by players and critics in TW3 for its bustling population, even if it is only window dressing.  Highly modded Skyrim is rarely talked about even as mods add in populations, housing, interaction systems between NPCs, new stories to be told and a way to seamlessly allow systems to work together between mods.  Skyrim modders will not get the same level of credit as CDPR, and rightfully so, yet there is value to those wishing to learn how to  install mods to alter their game to make it more enjoyable to play even when the game engine, itself, is not that polished but is open to modders.

From Paradox a game like Crusader Kings 2 may not seem like a typical RPG that is all about tactics, inventory and a personal story crafted for the player by the developer.  Yet, for all of the lack of direct control the player has over the personal affairs of the character they are playing, there are stories that are told via events, changing a character's Ambition and Focus, and just what the player wants to accomplish on a given run of a game.  Paradox packs a lot of content into the game that is semi-random and requires certain criteria to be met to get an unfolding story.  If a player is unhappy with the religion of their character, then take a Theology focus and perhaps a piety based Ambition, or write a book that covers religious concerns.  During the modest chain of events a set of incidents involving the Focus, Ambition and/or project will happen which will lead to a major decision branch for the character.  It is possible to become a mystic, a heretic or even switch to a different religion entirely via this path.  It does take a decent Learning skill, but as long as it isn't at zero the player will get some major choices to make that will change the path of their character, their dynasty and the world.  These are actual RPG elements in the game as the player has to determine just what sort of person their character is based on their Skills, Traits, Stats, and the setting they are in.

Modders see the variable type and number of stories along with triggers and then start to mod the game to change game mechanics, add in stories and events, and otherwise flesh the character the player is currently running.  I refer to CKII as a Grand Strategy RPG: a grand strategy game with RPG elements.  Modders are now starting to flip this around so that the character they play can actually leave their title behind, leave their liege behind and start to travel the world and emphasize the RPG aspects of the game.  By enabling a system of being able to play without the requirements of being landed or even requiring a direct blood lineage link, CKII becomes an RPG first and it is set in a Grand Strategy game.  While the mods backing this are still in development, it is a real attempt to make CKII into a game that allows much wider freedom of choice for those that want to do different things with their characters and develop a system that isn't tied to 'winning' or 'losing' at the highest level but leading an individual life and that of one's family without worrying about being landed.  It is required to start out as a once landed individual, but after leaving the title behind the family crest and ability to be landed in other countries is available, though that may not be the reason the player wants to travel.  It is possible to accept or refuse those major titles just like it is to accept or refuse jobs in a country.  Perhaps being a wandering Court Physician is what the player wants to do.  Or become a virtual tourist picking up small jobs here and there for enough coin to live on.  As the era of CKII is one of great poverty, a little bit of coin can go a long way to sustaining a character and family.  There is a lot to be worked on with the mods covering this concept, as CKII becomes an automated system for an RPG game, almost entirely ditching the strategy game entirely as a focus for the player.

Creativity in using an existing game engine and the way it runs is at the heart of modding, and the modding community across many games and companies put their skills to use changing things in ways they desire and the results vary by game engine and original game, plus the support or lack thereof, from the game designers.  Finding flaws with games is something every player will run into, be it table top games, games using miniatures to depict individuals or troops in combat, all the way to modern computer based games across many genres.  Game designers have little time to devote to 'finished' games, unless their company is structured around evolving an existing game with input from their player and fan community.  That impetus to try and make a game 'right' or to do something different with it is one that drives the modding community forward.  The results vary from the minor, like changing the color of clothing, to the major which includes developing new world spaces, NPCs and stories done with amateur or not for profit voice acting.  What a game starts out with may not be what it ends up looking like when modders get done with it.  If you want to replace dragons with flying railroad engines, then that can be found on the ridiculous side of things.  The total conversion of a game to a different genre is also something that can be done with time and effort towards a goal, a vision or just thinking 'what can be done with this game to really change it?'

The greatest beneficiary is the player community and the gaming world as a whole.  By showing what can be done with a game, modders can take single player games and change them into multiplayer ones and demonstrate what the existing game can and cannot cope with.  Change a game's genre via modding means that the flexibility of a game engine is utilized, perhaps in ways the original developer couldn't even conceive of being done with it.  That pushes the envelope of what games can do outwards.

Yet, by and large, modders don't make games.

Modders make games better, different, and work on singular visions and ask 'can this be done with this game?'  From the basic to the absurd, modders show just what can be done with games across the board.  The amount of ingenuity, skill and drive seen in mods and the modding community across all games means that even as companies falter and fail, their games may live on as platforms for new content.  This is, perhaps, the best lesson we can learn from the modding community: drive and vision require skill and patience to achieve the end goal of a mod.