Moonstrous

Pat Mooney is a writer and designer living in New York City. He is interested in the balance of usability, engagement, and immersion, and storytelling systems of all shapes and sizes.

[moonstrous]

Game of the Month: Valkyria Chronicles

Valkyria Chronicles, published by Sega for the Playstation 3, is the rare sort of game that straddles three different genres at once.  As part of the same action I can find cover from the enemy on the tactical map, sneak a unit carefully through brush for the perfect position, and peer through my soldier’s eyes to line up a well-placed shot—before I pull the trigger with a roll of the dice.  It's an ambitious (if quirky) combination of shooting, strategy, and roleplaying elements, where success on the battlefield depends equally on clever tactical positioning and leveraging your squad's unique traits.

The game takes place in a kind of clouded mirror of history, with the fictionalized continent "Europa" on the eve of its second World War.  Players assume the role of Welkin Gunther, a student-turned-reluctant-soldier conscripted to help defend his tiny nation of Gallia from the (evil) empire. The plot is pretty standard fare, but it manages to be compelling thanks to some incredible production values.  Valkyria Chronicles' 1930s aesthetic comes alive through the richly detailed charts and photographs that serve as the game's menu, with interface elements carefully modeled after authentic period documentation.  During combat the player issues orders from an illustrated topographical map, and watching the game transition seamlessly from map screen to the cell-shaded third-person view is one of the game's deepest pleasures.

Though battles are turn-based, Valkyria Chronicles enters a pseudo-realtime mode when the player (or the computer-controlled enemy faction) activates a unit.  Each member of your squad has a limited number of movement points based on their character class.  Scouts can cover large distances to capture objectives, whereas Shocktroopers are slower but pack a heavier punch—and crucially, are more resistant to enemy crossfire.  Even when it’s not their turn, soldiers can automatically attack the active character if it comes within range.  Charging into an open field without proper intelligence is a death wish; you’re constantly avoiding shots, searching for cover to duck behind.  But unlike a traditional shooter, the player is responsible for the actions of the entire team.  As your soldiers level up, defeating one challenge after another, you start to develop an affection for your favorite units.

This is nothing new by itself—strategy titles like the venerable X-Com have agonized players with life-and-death decisions over their squadmates for years—but Valkyira Chronicles links the player to their soldiers in an almost intimate way. Each soldier is brimming with personality; friendships with other units, bonuses in certain missions, and unique lines of dialogue (including a short soliloquy on death).  Despite its vivid colors and snappy characterization, there’s something curiously morbid about the game.  Though Valkyria Chronicles’ main story is unremarkable, these small narrative details express a view of warfare that’s relatively unique for a console title, with little of the hawkish urgency found in modern military shooters.  These soldiers are average people thrust into an extraordinary situation, and their struggles help to communicate the cost of war on a personal level.

Game of the Month is an ongoing series that examines critical issues in game design.  Through close readings of prominent, innovative, and experimental games, I hope to explore their structure and aesthetic significance.  The current Game of the Month is Valkyria Chronicles.

[wayscape]

Wayscape is an web-based map system for massively scaled roleplaying.  We built Wayscape as a tool for living world campaigns; an online environment that’s shared between many different groups of Dungeons and Dragons players.  Gamemasters can push updates to the map in real time, allowing players to leave their mark on the world.   Our flagship campaign setting, Shrouded Isles is a Celtic-inspired world based on 19th century folklore and faerie tales.  It’s a land of ruins and wild things, a place where people are small and stories are very large.  We’re ramping up for a public playtest and we’re always looking for more testers, contact us if interested!

[moonstrous]

Escape Hatches

My VT is under fire from two sides.  As I yank the throttle into reverse, my foot hammers on the dodge pedal to sidestep one salvo of enemy rockets—but my rearview camera feed flashes as another barrage slams into my mech from behind.  I’ve blundered into a trap, and my enemies are strafing closer, flanking me.  I can’t change course fast enough, and now my VT’s dodge is on cooldown.  They move in for the kill.

For one agonizing instant I glance down at the control panel, searching in vain for a solution, when I hear the shriek of my VT’s alarm.  Damage critical.  Red lights flash all around me as the mech sounds its death rattle, both in Steel Battalion’s heads-up display and on the controller’s embedded LEDs.  My eyes dart to the far corner of the dashboard where the emergency button blinks urgently, cordoned off by a black-and-yellow caution label.  I flip the hard plastic casing and press the Eject button, the game’s display filling with smoke and static as the pilot’s capsule detaches.  I live to fight another day.

Steel Battalion joins a select number of games that raise the specter of the player’s own mortality.  Like ZombieU and Dead Rising (which both deal with the struggle for self-preservation in a post-apocalyptic setting), the game maintains a stranglehold over its own save data.  To die in a mission brings a player face-to-face with a kind of oblivion; watching helplessly as their progress is erased from the console’s hard drive.  Survival horror games with self-destruct saves often have an element of basic strategy, limiting resources like health kits and ammunition to encourage careful exploration.  While Steel Battalion has a finite supply of in-game currency, it seems more concerned with bringing the player into the cockpit than punishing costly mistakes.  Lunging for the Eject button offers a heart-pounding instant of adrenaline, though the campaign does not change substantively as a result.

The game’s mission structure is partially to blame here.  Steel Battalion’s levels are utterly sequential; to play the 3rd mission, the player must first complete the 2nd mission, and so on.  If you fail a mission (and manage to Eject in time), you’re quickly returned to the level select screen and have to sit through the same mission briefing all over again.  Steel Battalion simply doesn’t want to acknowledge the player’s failure.  Even missions that are supposedly urgent—your superior officer likes to drone on about matters of national security—are instantly restarted, as if nothing had happened.  Linear progression is really a crutch in this case, one that robs a lot of significance from the Eject function.  I think Steel Battalion might have been better served by a generative or hub-based level system, allowing the narrative to react to catastrophic mission failure.

I’m reminded of a similar mechanic in the Total War series, which features a two-level strategy system.   Players must capture and control territory using a handful of Generals; subordinate characters that can govern provinces and maintain public order.  However, Generals are also powerful units on the battlefield.  They can bolster the morale of nearby troops and can often turn the tide of a fight with a heavy cavalry charge.  Knowing when to commit your General is a fundamental element of strategy in Total War, because if a General dies in battle, he also dies on the campaign map.  It’s a decision that often carries a heavy price, a meaningful choice the player has to make.  In Steel Battalion there is no decision.  When the alarm sounds, you hit the Eject button or you perish.

But what if that alarm was a warning, instead of a declaration?  If it played when you reached 10% health, not seconds before your VT exploded?  There’s a missed opportunity here for a powerful risk/reward mechanic, daring the player to tempt fate.  When ambushed by those enemy mechs, my first reaction was to lunge for targeting joystick, holding the reticle steady as I pulled the trigger.   Just a few more seconds, I thought.  I can bring them down.  If the red lights flashed at that very moment—DAMAGE CRITICAL—I would have stared down the threat of my own annihilation, white-knuckled hands clutching that insane controller in a death grip.  And returned fire. Game of the Month is an ongoing series that examines critical issues in game design.  Through close readings of prominent, innovative, and experimental games, I hope to explore their structure and aesthetic significance.  The current Game of the Month is Steel Battalion.

[moonstrous]

Game of the Month: Steel Battalion

Thanks for checking out Game of the Month!  Working with the New School Game Club, I’ve selected a handful of interesting games to use as case studies for this blog.  Every week we’ll post our observations of the game’s mechanics, narrative, or unique characteristics, as well as drawing parallels to other noteworthy games.  The chosen game will also be on display at Game Club meetings, so the community can have chance to experience it firsthand.  We figured we’d start the series with a bang, so last week folks got a sneak peek at this month’s game, Steel Battalion!

A simulation game produced in 2002, Steel Battalion holds the distinction of being exclusively playable on the original Xbox console.  Unlike most other 1st-generation Xbox titles, it’s impossible to emulate Steel Battalion through an Xbox 360—because the game is built entirely around its proprietary controller, a massive 40-button fabrication complete with a three foot pedals and flashing LEDs.  This behemoth is the cornerstone of the Steel Battalion experience:

Steel Battalion falls into the mecha genre of action sims, the same family as games such as Armored Core and MechWarrior.  The player controls a mechanized artillery platform (the game refers to these as VTs, or Vertical Tanks), armed to the teeth with enough high caliber weaponry to single-handedly carve a swath through the enemy force.  Because the available inputs on a traditional controller are sorely limited, most console releases in this genre tend to adopt nimble control schemes and an over-the-shoulder perspective; games such as Zone of the Enders, which handle almost like third-person shooters.   Not so for Steel Battalion!

This game proudly displays the influence of the sophisticated simulation games so popular among PC enthusiasts throughout the 1990s, and as far as I know Steel Battalion is the only console title ambitious enough to try it. To get a better feel for the game, we have to take a closer look at the intricate dashboard (the word “controller” is almost too limited to describe this thing) that came bundled with every purchase of Steel Battalion.  The dash is built from three weighted hard-plastic blocks, and it carries a terrific sense of presence.  Unit designations and serial numbers are etched into the corners of the plastic, and the buttons are all labeled in military shorthand, some of it practically indecipherable at first glance.  The number of options at your disposal is staggering, an effect that is only possible with a full keyboard (Microsoft Flight Simulator springs to mind) or a controller of this size at your fingertips.  Here’s a closeup of one of the panels:

What commands do the Function Switches activate?  Is the Override button context-sensitive?  Does Tank Detach jettison ammo or fuel, and does this affect how the VT handles?  Steel Battalion is not very forthcoming; it lacks any kind of meaningful tutorial, the manual is next to useless.  Rather, the game presents itself as a fixed object, a blinking array of switches and dials that begs for the player to investigate.  Steel Battalion is inscrutable, and challenging, and I expect that’s by design.  After all, you wouldn’t expect a novice to take to the cockpit of a 20-meter mecha with all the grace of an ace pilot, would you?  Not without a brutal training regimen.  

Game of the Month is an ongoing series that examines critical issues in game design.  Through close readings of prominent, innovative, and experimental games, I hope to explore their structure and aesthetic significance.  The current Game of the Month is Steel Battalion.