I’m going to write down some thoughts I have on stakes and tragedy in FTL and Jagged Alliance 2. Hopefully you’ll find some of it interesting even though I’m rambling on quite long to give you some context. Just my 2 cents, you have been warned.
One of the games that I have a love/hate relationship with is FTL. It has a lot of interesting choices to make, feels like you can get better at it through experience and I like that everything has consequences. I’d consider it a high-stakes game because you can lose members of your crew or even the whole ship quite easily and you can’t just reload an old savegame. That adds tension and can make for some interesting emergent narrative that is unique to your experience. For example you could be in a situation where the oxygen generator room has a hullbreach, the system is damaged and the ship has dangerously low O² levels. You might have no choice but to send two people into the vacuum from which one might suffocate, but you need to make that sacrifice or else the entire crew will suffer that same fate. A little tragedy like this can make for an interesting part of the unscripted narrative that unfolds in your personal gaming experience. Moments like this have a higher chance to stick in your memory and become the things you’d tell other people about when you talk about a game. So much for the positive side of it. What I really don’t like about the overall FTL experience is that due to the balancing and length of the game it can easily end up like this: You start another FTL run, play a few hours, all is going well, then either you suddenly encounter a ship that your loadout can’t counter well, or you have bad luck with the RNG or you die at the final battle because it is balls hard, even on easy. I did finish the game 1 or 2 times on easy but usually my attempts at playing the game end with being super frustrated because my ship had just exploded. I even wondered several times why I’m coming back to playing this if most of the times I end up so frustrated.
There is something about the high-stakes in games that makes them engaging for me. I love the concept of FTL, but I think the way this is designed is far from optimal.
Let’s look at another game: Jagged Alliance 2. I started playing it around ~15 years ago when I was still going to school. I’ve spent days on it, constantly quicksaving and reloading to avoid any tragedies like my mercenaries dying. I consider JA2 a high-stakes game at heart that gives you the option to play it as a low-stakes game by exploiting the savegame mechanic. I still think this is a valid playstyle. You keep rewriting your history until all your mercs are the typical 80’s action heroes that never gets hit and kill hundreds of bad guys each. The resulting narrative may be satisfying but ultimately boring. The game is still pretty difficult by the way. I think I couldn’t get past the tanks one sector before entering the final city. At that point the difficulty makes a sudden jump and I was not equipped to handle this. Ultimately I gave up and started another playthrough a few years ago.
This time I finished the game, was quite happy that I finally managed it despite the rather harsh difficulty. When I learned about the JA2 v1.13 community patch/mod a while later I gave that a go and finished the game once again. The mod makes inventory and weapon management a whole lot more complex (some might say unneccessarily complex) and that gave me some more complexity to play with that didn’t interfere with my playstyle.
The next variant that I played was JA2 Wildfire. For those that don’t know, Wildfire is still basically the same game, but everything is a little different. There are changes to balancing, leveldesign, items and most importantly: the RNG is seeded. So if you save, take a shot and miss, you can reload a 100 times, you will always miss. I’ve read several reviews where people said that they hated this about the game. Presumably because they all had the same “lazy and safe” playstyle that I had back then. But to my surprise I really liked how that changed the gameplay experience for me. I would save at the beginning of my turn, then try things out and reload if I couldn’t get to another satisfactory beginning-of-my-turn situation. Because the RNG was seeded that meant I could repeat all the same actions that worked the previous time and then do something different were I screwed up last time. For me it was a rather satisfying experience, almost like playing a puzzle game where you don’t have perfect information and not all the rules are clear to you. I think there is great potential in a third person puzzle shooter where you can stop and reverse time to find a solution for epic John-Woo style shootouts, but that’s something for another thread.
When I finished Wildfire I went back to JA2 v1.13, can’t remember if I’ve finished the game another time back then or not. I still liked that one a tiny bit more for the added complexity of inventory and weapon management and the wealth of usability features that were added. When I went on vacation 2 weeks ago I brought my laptop and intended another v1.13 playthrough but when I sat on the train I realized I had forgotten to copy it on my usb stick. I only brought vanilla JA2 v1.12 and I was disgruntled that I had to go back to the by comparison “boring and simple” version of JA2.
So I was thinking I’d do a little experiment to explore what it does to my gaming experience when I make a tiny modification to the parameters of my playthrough. I comitted to only reload when I did something that I really didn’t intend to do and accept all deaths of my mercs as part of the narrative. I played with the settings: novice (still more than hard enough for me given the circumstances), realistic (no monsters in the mines), lots of guns and save anytime (also because I remembered the game to be crashy and I wanted to be able to quit playing anytime). I expected that I wouldn’t like playing like this and I was all but certain that it is not actually possible to finish the game like this. I was very wrong on both accounts! It ended up being the most engaging and memorable playthrough of the game for me!
The first one to die was my IMP custom character and I was very sad that he died. At that point I had to fight the urge to reload really hard because he died in such a stupid way. It was the first time that I chose to withdraw from a sector because my mercs were wounded, outnumbered and outgunned. So I chose to retreat and leave the sector as soon as I could, failing to treat the wounds of my merc first. So even though he had health left he bled out on the journey because he wasn’t bandaged. It might have worked out in a city where a sector change only takes a few minutes, but I was in the woods and it took over an hour. Well, I learned a lesson from it. Ideally the game would have had informed me of this problem before I left the sector. But with a game that lets you save and load at anytime a little less hand holding really is ok.
So I hired Lynx to replace my lost merc and had my next big setback when I attacked Alma, the city with the military facilites. Here Lynx died, Grunty was unconscious and bleeding out, Ira and Igor were badly bleeding, Barry was still on his feet but also wounded. With a lot of suppressing fire I bought myself some time and in theory could have saved all but Lynx. But I didn’t bring enough medkits and mid-treatment I ran out of bandages. Ira and Igor were unconcious too now and the only one still able to leave the sector was Barry. I sent him back to safety in the neighboring sector, watched grunty bleed to death and then the game told me that Ira and Igor had been captured by the enemy. A spark of hope in this very tragic incident that could have ended very differently if I had just brought enough medkits. I realized at that moment that through the ruleset of no reloading I had unlocked a source of complexity that was inherent in the gamedesign since its creation, but that I never got to experience because the game also (unlike FTL or other Roguelikes) gave me the tools to effectively make a wide array of mechanics and items almost meaningless. At this point I’d say saving and loading is a very important game mechanic, one that I never put much thought into. The game gained a lot of emergent narrative for me through this new style of playing. In addition to the backstory already present there was now this story of the one lucky merc that survived the bloodbath but was depressed about losing his friends and hoping to one day rescue the two surviving ones from imprisonment (And the story about how the incompetent commander aka myself, has screwed up that mission through simple missmanagement ^^). And a while later I actually managed to find the prison, rescue them and they fought many battles together until Igor finally died when he was shot by a tank. Playing with permadeath gave every decision more meaning, made the overall experience way more exciting and when something worked it was also a lot more rewarding because now it meant something. Victory was no longer a given, it was uncertain. Of course I regretted many more deaths during the course of the game and it wasn’t always easy to accept how I had again fucked something up that I should have know better. Or when someone died because an asset looked like a merc should be able to look over it but in reality he couldn’t (happend once in the hedge maze level). I reloaded once early on in the game when I left skyrider behind and he got killed in the swamps. That was one of the moments where I hat meant to sent him with the others, but the squad was full and I didn’t realize it. If I had not been able to reload and fix that input mistake, it would have sucked pretty hard to no longer have a pilot for the rest of the game. So I can’t really say that the golden solution for the save/load problem would be to just enforce every death as permanent. Another time I reloaded after wasting a bunch of explosives on an indestructible door (which imho should not exist in the context of the game), but that wouldn’t have had much consequence either way.
What I didn’t like about the whole experience was that once I reached the final city and had to fight tanks for the first time the game started to feel like I have to tear down a brick wall by smashing puppies against it. You have all these characters with backstories, friends, foes, emergent narrative that come from the gameplay itself and you start to put a price on their lives because those become the choices that you have to make. Who gets the next rocket launcher and tries to take out the tank? I never had found a good safe strategy against tanks because I had never played this way and now I was forced through a harsh trial and error process that cost many mercs their lives. And that is with my experience of having played through the game and variants of it multiple times before and playing on the easiest difficulty! Imho the whole balancing would not work for a beginner if the high-stakes gameplay was enforced as in FTL.
But that kind of opens up a dilemma. How can you get a player to go for the richer experience that has more frustrating moments but more than makes up for it by the added complexity, engangement and “fiero” moments when he is victorious? I think this is something worth having a discussion about because on the one hand Roguelikes or Roguelites (or whatever you want to call them) have a lot going for them but the concept also has a lot of drawbacks.
What I find especially good about how stakes and tragedy in JA2 are handled compared to FTL is that in FTL it is very likely that you end your play session at the point where you are the least happy about your progress. In JA2 you are much more likely to stop playing after you fought a hard fight but in the end won a new sector. Every death of a crewmember in FTL has very little emotional impact and doesn’t do thaaat much to enrich your narrative, but in terms of winning the game it is a significant loss because you can’t always just buy new people. In JA2 the death of a merc has a much higher emotional impact because everyone has a backstory and character, everything has context and the narrative that can emerge from the death of a merc can be more interesting imho. Often you will be faced with the choice to let one merc bleed to death or risk the life of one or two mercs for a chance to save him. In terms of winning the game it’s not that big a deal, at least for the first dozen or so people that you lose. Yet while playing to me it feels in JA2 the stakes are a lot higher and I’m more engaged because you more frequently experience permanent loss during combat, whereas in in FTL most damage you can suffer is reparable except for dying crew members or your whole ship exploding.
I’m not yet sure what exactly they are, but I feel like there are a few valuable lessons to be learned from these two games and I wonder how I could handle permanence, loss and tragedy in my own gamedesign the best way. I want the constant tension of having something of value to lose permanently, but I don’t want the sudden game ending loss that comes as a frustrating surprise more than anything else. I want everything to be well integrated and have a context that enriches the emergent narrative and player experience, but I’m not sure yet how to handle it. Also now I really want a metagame as JA2 has it, where you don’t fight your battles just because they are missions from your todo list, but because they are the key to certain goals and you have choices on where and how to engage.
I’m very interested to hear your thoughts on this. 
