A couple weeks ago, as I was moderating a panel on the future of strategy gaming at PAX East, one audience member asked why so many strategy games have a problem with endgames. Namely, why has the player usually won the game long before it ends?
Designers Jon Shafer (Civilization V) and Chris King (Victoria II) fielded the question and made some good points about the challenge of designing endgames, but what kept nagging at me was that I didn't really agree with the premise of the question. To me, it sounded like there was something else going on that would make the finale irrelevant.
"I have a question for the questioner," I said, after everyone had weighed in. "Do you reload when things go wrong?"
He froze, then offered a weak smile. "Eh, um, yeah, I do." He shouldn't have been embarrassed to admit it, though: a lot of people do the same thing. And it's ruining strategy.
No Fate
If the heart of a strategy game is interesting decisions, it is their consequences that give those decisions meaning.
Strategy is different from most other genres. The outcome is not supposed to be predetermined. The player isn't "supposed" to win any more than you're supposed to win every time you play chess against someone else. That's why strategy games are so infinitely replayable: there is no script. If you make an incredible comeback, that's not just a plot twist. You did that.Defeat is the price we pay for that freedom. You come to the final stages of a Civilization game and realize an AI faction is on track to win, and there's not a damn thing you can do. You're basically sidelined while another nation launches a spaceship. Or you never even make it that far, pulverized into dust during the Bronze Age because you gambled that other civs would leave you alone while you built libraries.
My treacherous brother ruined my plans, but created a great story in Crusader Kings 2.
When we start rigging outcomes by reloading after suffering setbacks, we are cheating ourselves. If the heart of a strategy game is interesting decisions, it is their consequences that give those decisions meaning. When I see my relationship with Montezuma plummeting, and notice more troops appearing on my border, do I scrap everything and start getting ready for war? Or do I gamble that his attack is a few turns off, and I have time to research a more advanced army unit that could make mincemeat out of his forces? This decision could mean the game. But if I know that I can just reload if it goes bad, it means nothing.
There's a bigger problem, however: strategy games don't work if players are fixing it so that every event works out in their favor. Not only will the ending be boring, as the combined effects of all their unnatural luck and skillful play slowly overpower the game balance, but this kind of behavior actually encourages lazier design. The types of designs that make cheaters of us all.
Another Victory Like This and We'll Lose the War
On intermediate and harder difficulty levels, Creative Assembly's Total War games give the AI factions significant economic and recruitment bonuses, allowing them to sustain far larger armies than a player can. Set the difficulty a bit higher, and they get massive morale bonuses and a strong predisposition to hate you. It's not hard to see that high difficulty settings in Total War are predicated on the expectation that players are reloading to achieve perfect victories, or else are simply superhuman.
Quicksave and quickload are not conveniences, but a game mechanic.
It's hard to say whether Creative Assembly is reacting to player behavior or causing it with punishing difficulty settings. But either way, Total War turns into a tedious slog on higher difficulty settings, where you end up playing the same battle two or three times until you win a decisive victory. It implies to players that quicksave and quickload are not conveniences, but a game mechanic.Reloading until I luck out and kill everybody with one samurai ruins the fun.
Wargames and RTS campaigns have always been rife with hyper-difficult missions that tacitly encourage constant saving and reloading. The Panzer Corps campaign rapidly escalates the difficulty to a point where it's unbeatable unless you know exactly where and what all the hidden enemy units are, and know exactly what forces to deploy. Wargame: European Escalation plays with a similarly stacked deck.
The danger with this approach is that players can no longer trust that they have been handed a fair challenge. When every scenario is the Kobayashi Maru, you start saving after every step until you find a winning solution, no matter how difficult it would be to pull off in a single continuous playthrough. That behavior doesn't just stop when we quit -- we take it with us into the next game we play.
Players can't allow themselves to have a bad game, because it means hours upon hours of tedium and frustration.
It surely doesn't help that many strategy games are absurdly long, and demand far too much work. Nobody wants to be halfway through a 200-turn game of Paradox France's Pride of Nations and realize that the best possible outcome is a middling finish. Who wants to spend every turn checking on 50 different factories, a dozen armies, and a half-dozen colonies just so you can figure out exactly how mediocre you are? Games like this demand such an investment that players can't allows themselves to have a bad game, because it means hours upon hours of tedium and frustration.Panzer Corps demands fast, blitzkrieg victories, but good luck with that unless you reload.
The Fix Is In
This is no way to play a strategy game, and to get away from it, we need more developers to encourage fair play. Unity of Command, for example doesn't even allow players to save mid-mission, but the missions are so short and the game is so good that replaying a mission a few times is hardly a burden. I'm even more excited about the "iron man" mode in XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Players will still have a choice of difficulty levels, and then they can choose to disable player saves. That will free me from the worst temptation of the squad-tactical game: save-spamming my way through a hard engagement so that I don't lose any of my hard-won veterans.
Saves have always been a hard problem for PC games to solve, no matter the genre. But ultimately we need to stop playing as if victory is the only acceptable outcome, and we need games to stop reinforcing those bad habits with unfair challenges. When our response to the fortunes of war is to hit reset, we are might as well be playing a Call of Duty campaign.