Earning your Playing Time

One of the biggest things sports tries to hammer in is that it's a meritocracy.  The best players get to play and get paid the most.  For a lot of players, they need to work their way up as a rookie to earn their playing time through practice, and performing in the little bits of time they have.  Even then, though, they still typically have to sit behind players with more experience who have more skills than they may have.  Why do sports games, the games that try to simulate these sports, not follow that track?

Well, the easy answer is that it's not fun not playing for weeks at a time, as your character never makes it into a game.  Sports games have adopted a "Skip until I'm in the game" option, which can speed this process up, but still, you end up staring at a menu a lot.  But still, realism!  It accurately emulates the sport!

It'd be nice if more games took this approach though.  A lot of sports games don't.  I've had the same exact issue happen in the last 4 iterations of FIFA career mode, NBA 2K (to an extent), MLB The Show (To an extent), and the Madden franchises the most.  The biggest budget games for their sport, and they drop the process of growing into a useful player on a team, instead opting to treat you like a superstar out of the gate, when your stats and abilities don't match that.

For example, I started two careers in FIFA 20, just to test this.  Both times my player came out of the generator around rating 66-67 on the 100 point scale.  One was an attacking midfielder for Minnesota United, and the other a striker for Borussia Dortmund.  For MNUFC, I ended up starting over a higher rated player who was, at his time of signing, the biggest signing in club history.  For Dortmund, a major world power team, and I was starting above their striker who was listed at 80, and above the team's veteran star who could play striker, Marco Reus (88 rating).  On both teams, my rookie is listed as a "rotational" piece, which, y'know, I could buy for MNUFC, since the quality of play in MLS pales compared to European leagues.  It's just a shame the player I was starting over was listed as a "Critical" piece of the team.  For Dortmund, I was listed as a Rotational piece again, instead of like, Prospect, so... neat. 

EA in particular seems wary of letting players site.  Then again, they tend to not have many interesting things happen on the periphery of the actual games.  In the last Madden game I played a few years ago, I had a rookie running back who ended up starting ahead of a pro bowl running back who was coming off a great season.  I know when EA talks about how accurate of a simulation they claim their games are, they're referring to the on-field product, but man, it's so disappointing to be a player who shouldn't be playing, but you're actively making your team worse. 

NBA 2K isn't much better, but they at least try.  In 2K they'll at least sit you on the bench, but you'll still earn some playing time.  The downside is how they just like... judge how you earn more playing time.  You earn playing time by upping your team chemistry and performing at or above your expected level.  You can increase your chemistry on the team and game score by successfully setting a ton of picks for your team.  My 67 rated Shooting Guard is the Sixth man on my team, the first player off the bench and plays more minutes than anyone besides the starters, because of this system.  This is less than half way through my rookie season.

MLB the Show gets closer, due to the nature of the Minor Leagues in baseball.  You first start off in your team's AA affiliate, and try to work your way up to AAA, then the main roster.  Again, though, nobody dreams of playing for Erie SeaWolves in AA or the Reno Aces in AAA, so you can kinda speed through this process.  Three months into my AA career, I was called up and finished the season with the AAA team.  Next season, I'm on the Spring Training roster for the main team, which isn't surprising but if I performed there, I could end up on a major league roster in my second season with mediocre in game stats.

Maybe the key to this is to play at a higher difficulty, but I'm currently playing at a level that's comfortable when I'm playing the game normally, where it provides a challenge.  For some reason, in these career modes, that slips away more and it becomes easier to, I don't know, game the system in a way that takes a lot of the struggle out of it.  There's no putting in extra shots at practice to impress the coaches.  There's no like... I don't know how to put this.  The balance feels really off, and it's kinda disappointing that you can't really get a mentorship under a teammate.  You can set protoges and mentors in the GM mode of NBA2K, but it wasn't quite an option in the career mode. 

I could very well be in a minority.  I like the idea of working from the bottom to get your starting time in these games, but it always feels so unearned.  Guess I'll keep trying til something hits the mark. 

Embracing Both Sides of the Coin: Competative and Casual

For the past month, I've been hanging out in a Smash coaching Discord server.  While there, I've been playing friendlies, getting periodic coaching sessions, and streaming some of their weekly tournaments for them.  I have had interest in the more competitive side of the Smash Brothers series, but recently, well, after watching Frostbite 2020, I decided I wanted to improve my play at the game.  I started by joining my the Discord for my local Smash scene, but never made it to a weekly due to my illnesses at the time, and my work schedule, because I would get off work after their weekly tournaments and meetings started.  Then everything shut down, weekly meetings stopped, and I found myself looking at coaching servers for the first time.  

Super Smash Brothers is an interesting game.  Ostensibly, it's a party game.  Chaotic free for all battles for up to 4 (or 8 in new iterations) players featuring your favorite characters from a wide variety of game series.  Stages will undergo transformations, or you may fight along an auto scrolling version of Super Mario Bros. famous 1-1, tossing Pokeballs, bob-ombs, and even shooting the Super Scope at each other.  It's a wacky, messy, hilarious mess for you and your friends.  It was time to settle those schoolyard questions of "Who could win in a fight, Mario or Link".

Like the Pokemon series before it, you can peel back the light hearted surface and find a rock hard core for a competitive game.  With these two games, it's fascinating to see how different the game most people play differs from how the competitive scene plays them.  Some of the biggest differences between the two are the things that don't get used.  Both games have certain aspects of them banned for use in competitive play, narrowing the list of options available to you.  In a Pokemon game, you may be limited by how many Legendaries or Mythical pokemon you may use, while in Smash all but around a half dozen stages are banned for use for a variety of reasons.  

The purpose of bans is to either make the game more fair, or to remove options that could polarize the whole competitive scene for that game.  If something is an automatic use for each and every team type, then it can restrict the types of teams that see play.  Likewise, if a set of stages unfairly punishes slow characters, you would see fewer slower powerhouses, as the stage could cost them games.  Of the remaining stages, they are either neutral in terms of matchup equality, or they slightly favor certain types of character playstyles.  Nothing too drastic or hard to deal with, but it can give a slight edge if you're losing a set and you need to pick a stage to get back into it.  Since the stages are so varied and in some cases volatile, the stage list is incredibly small compared to what's available.  

All these restrictions and rules can seem claustrophobic and unnecessary to people who don't want to engage with that scene.  After all, why would you turn off all the items in Smash, and only play on 7 stages?  Why would you cut out over half the game, just for a competition?  Why go through the headache of tailoring and fine tuning your team with perfect stats, natures, and moves, instead of just leveling up your favorite to 100 and using all damaging moves to roll enemies?  

Well, because you can.  And this is what's wild to me about both Pokemon and Smash.  They're both easy breezy enough to pick up and play with no stress, or you can theorycraft and get as deep into the execution part of it as you want.  Do you want to just take your trusty Charizard and roll through the game?  Hell yeah, go for it.  Want to craft that perfect para-flinch Togekiss that will try to rob your opponents of over half their turns?  The power is yours.  It's really a testament to these games' design that they can support both of these playstyles so well.  You can get as much out of them as you want, and that's appealing to some people.  Competitive play and speedrunning have a lot of similar DNA.  A lot of times, people will get into a game they love and try to get as much out of it as they can.  And that's really cool to me!  At some point, when you finish your first playthrough, you think to yourself, "Man, I want more of that" and you look and see what else the game has to offer.  It's neat to see.  

While I'm here, I'm also going to give a narrative shoutout to Dark Souls.  It's a very similar thing in that aspect.  You can take the game at surface level, but if you want, you can get deep into the interpretive nature of the lore.  While it's not something I'm into, or could pay too close attention to for a variety of reasons, i will say making a game where that's possible is a feat unto itself.  

Connecting League of Legends to Sports

One of the things I like to think as a strength is my ability to explain new technologies to older generations.  I've been adept at comparing the new to something familiar to them that they can recognize.

So with that in mind, I'm going to try to bridge a gap, this time between traditional sports, specifically basketball and American football, with one of the most popular eSports in the world, League of Legends.  I'm choosing these specifically because of my experience with both.  Sorry DOTA, just never played you so I don't know exactly how different you are from League.  I'm going to try to speak in broad terms, so you can at least understand a few things if you see a League broadcast when on Twitch, or randomly on TV.

In broad strokes, League of Legends is a 5-on-5 team based game where the goal is to destroy your enemy base.  The map is laid out in three lanes, with some winding pathways between them.  The map's general layout looks like this.

It's a lot to take in, but for now, just notice the dirt paths extending from the bases in the upper right and lower left corner.  The one that covers Left and Top part of the map is called "Top Lane", the diagonal path is "Mid Lane" and the path that covers the Bottom and Right part of the map is "Bottom (or Bot) Lane".  While we have the map here, the river running from Top Left to Bottom Right is also a path people can walk on.  We'll touch on the non-dirt path stuff later.

The game is broken down into a few unofficial phases.  The Early Game usually fills the first 10 to 15 minutes of the game, the teams keep to their standard formations, and this acts like the feeling out phase.  Teams will kill the enemy monsters that automatically spawn at each base, and build up money and levels so they can gain new abilities, level up those abilities, and buy items.  Teams also try to go for kills and destroy the other team's protective turrets, so they can advance in the lane.  The Mid Game occurs when teams start to mix up who is in what lane, and start going for map objectives, like the Dragon or Baron, which I won't cover at this time, but I will say they can give some benefits to the entire team that kills them.  The end game is when both teams are starting to reach their full power and big team fights break out, and lasts until a team's base is destroyed.

One of the first concepts you may hear about is the "meta".  This exists in traditional sports, in a way, but is never called that really.  A meta, short for metagame, is a description of what strategies are in right now.  In a game like League of Legends, the meta includes things like your team's strategy for the game, the characters they choose to fulfill that strategy, and even how they make character bans at the beginning.  In basketball, the current meta has slid more towards the Space-and-Pace style of offense, and the most in demand role player type is the 3-and-D wing, which is a sharpshooter on offense and a solid defender.  The meta in a game like League of Legends can change multiple times per season, due to patches the developers release, which can drastically increase or decrease the effectiveness of a specific character.
There are 5 roles typically filled on a team.  They are named after the lane or area they occupy.  The roles are: Top, Mid, ADC (Attack Damage Carry, or just Carry), Support, and Jungler.  I'll go over these roles and the types of characters fill these roles, and try to compare them to popular sports positions.

Top Lane

League of Legends Typical Roles: Tanks, Bruisers

NBA Equivalent: Rim Protector, Shooting Big - i.e. Rudy Gobert, Karl-Anthony Towns

NFL Equivalent: Pass-Blocking Specialist, Pass/Block Tight End - i.e.  David Bakhtiari, George Kittle

The top lane can form the backbone of your team.  A tank role is a character who specializes in having a lot of health and defensive abilities, either for itself or for their allies.  They also can have abilities that makes it harder for the other team to hurt the rest of their team.  They want to put themselves between their damage dealing teammates, and the damage dealers of the opponent.  They can also try to use those abilities that slow or rehabilitate the opponent to help secure an advantage.  They can be hard to deal with in a 1-on-1 scenario but a coordinated team effort can render them ineffective, as they don't usually have the ability to deal with many opponents at once.

Bruisers exchange some of the defensive staunchness for a bit more attack power or enemy impacting abilities.  In a game of basketball, this could be the difference between having a Rudy Gobert and a Montrezl Harrell.  Harrell gives up some defensive power in exchange for being a pick and roll threat. They still offer some rim protection, but they're really there to be an extra threat on offense.  Your more offensively tilting big men, like a Karl-Anthony Towns, can help shape your team and provide unexpected range from an unlikely position, which can allow you to do some different things than a worse shooting big man can.

For example, Towns could allow a team to play a 5-out team, with 5 good 3 point shooters filling all positions, which can force the defense to stretch thin.  This can be done in League of Legends as well, through a 1-3-1 or split push late game setup.  In a 1-3-1, typically your Top Laner, and the ADC count for the 1's and they go put pressure on two separate lanes, while the other 3 members team up to fill the last one.  The pressure those two solo laners put on the opponents defense can cause the opponent to be out of position for the bigger group, and it can even allow a single person to cause significant damage to the opposition's defenses.  This type of strategy requires specific team construction, and to have the flow of the game give them the opportunity.  In terms of the NFL, this is similar to disguising your blitz's pre-snap.  You show that you have some pressure coming from somewhere, but you try to confuse the offense as they try to figure out if the linebacker is coming up the middle, the safety on the outside, or if they're going to drop into coverage and try to undercut your slant you just tried to audible to.

Mid Lane

League of Legends Typical Roles: Damage Dealer Solo Lane
NBA Equivalent: Two-way player, Iso scorer - i.e. Paul George, James Harden
NFL  Equivalent: Target Receiver, Shutdown Man Cornerback - i.e. Calvin Johnson, Jalen Ramsey

Your midlane is another solo lane, but this one focuses more on damage output than top lane would be.  Mid and bottom lane are typically your main focuses early game, and help build your first arm of your late game damage.  Mid lane is a good target early game by the Jungler because slowing down that player can help your team gain a significant advantage, as your solo mid laner will be able to safely attack the enemy monsters for money and experience.  This can snowball into an advantage, if you can get a level lead, as you will be able to dictate the pace of the game in your lane.  Attacking midlane can be a risk though as they usually have the damage to at least threaten the additional attacker.

Mid lane can be a pretty versatile position.  You can have characters with abilities that can stun or root your opponents while still dealing damage.  This would be like a good all around offensive and defensive threat like a Giannis Antentokounmpo or a Kawhi Leonard.  They can still get their own buckets, but their presence can open the game up for other players.  Alternatively, they can also go the full offensive approach, like when James Harden or Luka Doncic try to carry a game on their own.   In football, you would think of this like your big target receivers.  They have the ability to carry you to a win, but can also act as a smokescreen or distraction to let someone else break out.  Whether this is acting like a fade to clear out a safety for someone to come underneath, or stopping to block for a running back screen.  A good mid laner can have an impact on the game without racking up big stats themselves.

Attack Damage Carry (AKA Carry)

League of Legends Typical Role: Late Game Carry, Sustained Pressure

NBA Equivalent: Closer, Volume Scorer - i.e. Kobe Bryant, Steph Curry

NFL Equivalent: West Coast Offense, Big Play Threat, Pass Rush Specialist i.e. Adrian Peterson, Aaron Donald, Khalil Mack

It'd be unfair to call the ADC, or Carry, the primary damage dealer of the team, but it may not be inaccurate.  Midlane, toplane, and your jungler can all do their fair share of damage, but no where else is the job of compiling the counting state of "Damage Done" more supported on the Carry.  The Carry starts off in the bottom lane, with the Support character.  Early game, it's job is to deliver the last blow to the enemy minion waves coming through lane, harry the opposition's bottom lane pair, and secure kills when it can.  Late game though, these guys become some of the biggest threats on the battlefield.  Carries typically scale well with their item purchases, meaning they get a lot of bang for their buck.  Some characters are weaker in the early part of the game, due to their skills not being as good until they level up, or they're more item reliant, but once the late game rolls around, if they weren't kept in check, they can be a force to reckon with.

Your Carries and Mid Laners tend to make up your backline.  Think of this like your baccourt or backfield, while your more defensive minded characters get in front of you.  In a team fight, you can either coordinate as a team to take out the defensive wall first, then mop up the enemies who aren't as saunch, or you can try to break the back line by flanking, forcing enemy movement with abilities, or by simply outranging them.  By taking out the back line first, you can increase the odds of your own team's survival by getting rid of the biggest threats.  You can think of this option like throwing a screen right past an over-aggressive defensive end.  You take them out of the play entirely and try to gain an advantage elsewhere.

Support

League of Legends Typical Role: Healer, Buff teammates, Debuff enemies.
NBA Equivalent: Pass-First Point Guard, Defensive Disruptor, i.e. Chris Paul, Kyle Lowry
NFL Equivalent: Game-Controlling Quarterback, Middle Linebacker i.e Peyton Manning, CJ Mosley.

The support works in the bottom lane with the Carry.  By calling the support the quarterback is both an exaggeration and an accurate definition of their role on the team.  It's an exaggeration because in football, the quarterback is a prestige position.  It's the most visible, highest paid position on the team and often considered the most important position in the game.  Supports are, as their name indicates, supportive.  You won't see huge flashy plays from them, or high kill numbers.  They may even have the most deaths on the team, as they may not have many options for surviving an enemy engagement.  They are important because they can serve as the eyes for the team, and their players typically perform as the team's "Shotcaller", sometimes splitting this role with the Junglers.  The Shotcaller will dictate the pace of play for the team, and call out strategic decisions.  They are the strong, driving voice of the team, instead of having 5 people shouting over each other and mixing up targets.

Beyond their player's ability, the characters themselves are good at coordinating for their team.  Supports typically place the most vision wards on the map for their team.  These wards act like little watch towers, hidden from the opponent, and can reveal opponents passing through an area, or near an objective.  If you look at the map above, you can see there's a lot of unknown territory between the three lanes.  On the map, every character has something called vision.  It's the radius around them that they can see in the open.  You share vision with your team and the allied monsters on your side.  So if everyone was in the middle, you could still see what your minions in the bottom lane were doing, and see if an enemy is attacking them.  Wards let you place these little towers that can act like another point for your team to watch from.  If you look at the river in the map, there are two big caverns.  Powerful monsters will spawn in these areas so by putting a ward near the pits or in the pits, you can keep an eye on the monster and see when it's clear to make the attack yourself, or you can try to interrupt an opponent trying to take them for their benefits.  

Besides managing a share of the team's vision, they can use their abilities to make the enemy easier to kill, by slowing them down, stunning them, or knocking them around, or by extending the life of their allies through healing, boosting stats, or shielding.  Sometimes, taking down the support is key for turning a battle, because the team without a support can lose a lot of their Crowd Control, which refers to conditions inflicted by moves such as Stun, Slow, Root (trap in place), Knock up, knock back, or being pulled.  Basically, by taking away a team's ability to control the battlefield, you can battle in more favorable conditions.  Because they're so supportive, they may sacrifice themselves, figuratively and literally.  They forgo the glamor of a high kill count to setup someone else.  They may jump in front of some attacks to take the damage for the Carry or Midlaner.  Support characters also need to make do with less, typically.  Since they're not killing the minions in lane, instead opting to let the Carry get them, as they improve more with items, Supports tend to suffer through gold shortages from time to time.  They can purchase items from the match shop to increase their passive gold gain to offset this, and earn some bonus gold from assists, but they are typically left behind in terms of money to buy items.  This is why champions with strong effects on their abilities are important, rather than ones that get more bonuses from increased stats.  There's just not enough gold in a single lane to support two carry types.

Jungler

League of Legends Role Type: Roamer, Assassin, Backup Tank

NBA Equivalent:  Stretch 4, Multi-positional Defender i.e. Kevin Love, Draymond Green

NFL Equivalent: Big Play Quarterback, Free Safety. i.e Aaron Rodgers, Earl Thomas.

The jungler is responsible for all that territory between the lanes, including the monsters that inhabit those woods.  Normally, the Jungler will stay in the jungle on their side of the map, which includes their base to the river, but will occasionally wander into the opponents jungle, to try to hinder them by killing their monsters for their own gold and experience.  Junglers are also good for securing early game kills.  Since they wander from area to area, it's easy for them to coordinate with any of the lanes to try to secure a 2-on-1 or 3-on-2 advantage.  Winning these fights can set your team up for future success.  It's like hitting a big 30 yard pass play on the first play of a drive.  It helps set you up for future success and keeps the opponent on the back foot.  Vision is important, so Junglers will also drop down wards.  This allows their team to try to track the opposing Jungler, and if the other characters decide to move for an attack.  It doesn't do much good if your 2-on-1 attack swings in the opponent's favor of a 3-on 2.  

The jungles themselves are full of different types of wild monsters.  They aren't allied with any team, so they can be killed by whoever.  In each jungle, there are two stronger enemies that provide benefits to whoever kills them.  These creatures provide what is called Red Buff and Blue Buff, named after the visual effect that surrounds the person who slayed them.  The Red Buff makes your regular attacks slow enemies, deal additional damage, and regenerates your health faster.  This is great for Junglers, as it can allow them to stay active for longer, meaning they don't have to return to base to heal, and it can help them slow down enemies trying to retreat from their sneak attack.  The Blue Buff on the other hand, increases your Mana Regeneration, so you can use your spells more, and your Cooldown Reduction.  Cooldown is the period between when you can use your skills again.  So if a spell has a 4 second cooldown, you need to wait at least 4 seconds to use it again.  Cooldown reduction typically comes in a percentage amount, so a 10% reduction would reduce the previous example by .4 seconds.  Not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but big when things get frantic.  It's kind of like the inverse of a shot clock or play clock.  These bonuses have a set duration, and if you're killed by an enemy player, their character gets the buff for the remainder of it's duration, unless they are killed and pass it on.

Junglers fill a lot of roles, depending on their team composition.  The role allows for a wide variety of play styles and character types to fit whatever your team needs.  Having a player that is versatile in the types of characters they can play can really help during the picks and bans phase, and can help with a variety of team compositions.

The Rest of the Game

So we've covered the main players in the game, and how they can relate to other professional sports.  I want to quickly touch on some terminology and concepts that will come up over the course of a game.

Picks and Bans - While your team of players is set going into each match, the characters they play is not set.  First, teams will alternate banning 3 characters each.  This allows teams to remove characters that are powerful on the current patch (The current game version the game is being played on.  The game is updated on a frequent basis which can change the characters in minor or major ways), or characters that cause the team's normal strategies problems.  They may also ban characters they know a specific player on the other team likes to play.  After the 6 characters banned, the first team will draft their first champion.  Then the other team gets two picks in a row, then the first team gets 2, then the second team makes their third pick.  Then, the second round of bans occurs.  The team that banned and picked second in the first round will now ban first.  They ban one character, then the first team will ban 2.  Then one more will be banned by team 2.  Then, the final round of selections occurs to fill the remaining two spots.  Here, Team 2 picks 1, Team 2 picks 2, then Team 2 picks the final pick.

THe purpose of this is that during the starting phase, Team 2 doesn't get the first pick, nor the first ban.  This allows them to have the first pick of the remaining pool after the second ban phase, and the last pick, which can be used to counteract one of the opposing team's choices.  To wrap it up, I tried to just put it in a line.  B and a number shows which team is baning, and P shows which team is making a selection for a character to play.  

B1 > B2 > B1 > B2 > B1 > B2 > P1 > P2 > P2 > P1 > P1 > P2 > B2 > B1 > B2 > B1 > P2 > P1 > P1 > P2

Champion  Champ - This is generic name of the 134 characters in the game that the players can choose from.  Each has different abilities, roles, and stats that affect their viability in the game.

Meta - The meta describes what tactics or characters are currently popular.  For example, the meta in the NBA is space and pace with 3-and-D defenders.  The meta in League of Legends evolves rapidly, as characters are changed from patch to patch.  A character who wasn't ever played or banned may suddenly become banned in every game by a team because it becomes too powerful after a change.  The inverse can also occur.  

Objective - These typically refer to the Rift Herald, Baron or Dragon in the map.  Those two pits along the river I mentioned house these powerful creatures.  The one on the north side of the map will spawn the Rift Herald during the first 20 minutes of the match, and the Baron later.  The southern pit will spawn different types of dragons.  The dragons will give your team different permanent buffs, corresponding to the type of dragon slain.  The Rift Herald, when slain, give syou an item that makes a temporary allied attacking creature, and the Baron give you a team wide boost that makes you teleport to base faster, deal more damage, damage enemy structures faster, and enhances your minion waes when you're near them, making them more threatening.

Base - The areas in the upper right and lower left corner of the map.  The base is comprised of your Fountain and Shop area, where you can heal and buy items, your Nexus, which is your key objective to protect, 5 defensive turrets (2 at the nexus, 1 at the base of each lane) and your Inhibiters, which when destroyed, allow the enemies to periodically spawn powerful minions as long as that lane's Inhibiter is down.  To win the game, you need to destroy the enemy's Nexus.  

That's some basic information about how the game is played from a spectator's position.  There are more details, but this should hopefully lay some groundwork for understanding the game as it's played.  There is a lot of other information out there, but I wanted to make a basic Primer for understanding how the game works.  

The Idyllic Life.

I'm going to do it.  I'm going to bring up Doom again.  Doom 2 is one of my favorite games of all time.  The simplicity and speed of combat just feels great and satisfying.  The visceral action of Doom 2016 is a cathartic joy.  I like the Final Fantasy games a lot, games that feature assassinations, political intrigue, global threats, and universe consuming gods.  I enjoyed my time with Mass Effect, and humanity's fight for survival in the face of an otherworldly, uncaring enemy.  I like falling asleep to Stardew Valley and the peaceful simplicity of having a farm.

Clearly, one of these things doesn't quite match the tones of the other.  That's actually the point.  Sometimes, you just need a game that isn't going to tax you.  A game where the success and fail states are of your own choosing, and you know what?  That can be just as powerful of a power fantasy as playing the overpowered hero that saves the world.  

In Stardew Valley, your main goal is the repair of the Community Center at the center of town.  You repair parts of the Center by collecting specific crops, making specific goods, finding certain ore, catching fish, donating money, and so on.  You don't even need to do that.  You can just grow your farm, explore the mines, befriend the townsfolk, get married, and participate in the annual festivals.  When exploring the mines, you may run out of health, but there's no game over.  Someone helps you out, some money is lost for treatment, and you may drop some items.  With the pace and victory conditions in your hands, you can set it to be anything.  Do you want to grow a lot of different crops in a neatly organized system?  Cool.  Want to have a bunch of flowers everywhere?  Buy those seeds and get to work.  Want to have groves of fruit trees and relax under them?  Rad.  There is charm in taking things slow.

This brings me to Animal Crossing, an even lower stakes game than Stardew Valley.  In Animal Crossing, you typically just need to earn money to pay off your home loan.  The loan has no interest, you can pay back at your own pace, and your house can be expanded under the same plan, once you pay off the previous part.  To earn money, you will typically shake trees so they drop fruit, you catch butterflies, go fishing, or find seashells.  Sell them to your local shop, save some money for the loan, and buy that new stereo system the shop got in.  You can help out your local museum by donating fish, bugs, and fossils you find, so they can show off the species that live in your town.  Turning stuff in to the museum also gives you interesting information about the creatures too, so collecting fossils can teach you about the creatures who lived ages ago.  This low pressure makes Animal crossing a great game to play for 15-20 minutes a day.  It's almost meditative.  Grab the fruit that's regrown, and make your pass at the beach for shells, sell everything, chat with your neighbors, get a small smile on your face, and save.  Every time I picked up Animal Crossing New Leaf to go through a daily cycle, I leave it in a slightly better mood than when I started it.

These games have a certain power to them.  They act as a way to unwind from other games by bringing down the adrenaline levels, instead of spiking them.  You don't need to strain with them.  They flow like water from moment to moment, like a gentle stream.  I love having these games on hand as a way to unwind after a long day.  The types of people who like Doom or Mass Effect can like these games.  Everyone needs some way to unwind, and for some of them, the gentle rhythm of a hoe tilling the earth is just what they need.  

An Appreciation for the Grunt

After beating Halo 2, I had tried to find some words to write about it.  After all, it's this huge landmark game that helped define multiplayer shooting for an era, and it attempted to tell a large space opera-ass story spanning multiple games.  What I've come away with though is nothing to do with plot, or setting, but encounter design.  Halo 2 does what I love about Id-made Doom games: They utilize their fodder enemies excellently.

This dovetails nicely with some thoughts I'd been having lately about why I don't like the Plutonia Experiment wad for Doom, but I love playing Doom 2.  Halo was just the needed step to make me realize it.  What some games, and some wad makers for Doom do is they just keep escalating and escalating.  Halo 2 does this to a point, where all you're doing is fighting tough Brutes, but then you'll get a sprinkling of Jackals, or weaker Flood enemies mixed in.  Or it'll pull things back enough where you're facing a few Elites and some Grunts.

You can see why a game would just keep escalating.  You're nearing the end, you need to be challenged, you need bigger, tougher enemies to indicate this.  You don't need the weak enemies anymore, because you're past them, right?  Nah.  Your fodder enemies should be used throughout the game.  Early on, they serve as a way for you to get your bearing in the game, and later on, they can provide a sense of overwhelming enemy number, they can provide a change of pace from an intense encounter, and they can let you feel like an absolute monster by allowing you to tear through them.  If your game doesn't have a power progression, they can also provide just as much of an issue at the last level as they did the first.

The last point is a strong point in Halo's favor.  You're not really getting stronger as you play the game, so the enemies are just as threatening, but later on in the game, you know how they fight.  You know the best way to engage them, so even though your tools haven't changed much, you will can face them more and more efficiently.  This is similar, but not quite the same in Doom.  Imps are still a threat in Doom.  Their fireballs do the same damage in the first stage as the last, but your ability to deal with them increases as you progress through the game.  Doom makes some fascinating decisions with this, as your arsenal expands.  For some encounters, it'll be just as straightforward as early levels "Here are 3 imps in this hallway, rip and tear".  Others, they'll put them behind a wall and have them try to ambush you.  Other times still they'll try to overwhelm you with numbers.  Others still they'll sprinkle in a harder enemy with these fodder enemies, so you have to try to fight through the wave to get to the priority target.

You can still have your boss encounters, of course.  A level after Gravemind in Halo 2 that's a big ol battle arena room fits that bill, as does the rooms where you're circle strafing the Cyberdemon while dodging Imp fireballs.  These act like your large spikes in intensity, while the grunt type enemies can be used to give you a relaxation period between these moments of high intensity and chaos.  If all you're doing is escalating, it gets hard to catch your breath, and one thing that may be a cool encounter or setpiece gets overwhelmed by the next piece of explosive action.  For intense moments to hit, you do need to give them a few moments to breath and linger.  You need those rooms with either no enemies or weak enemies to help you come down off that elevated state. 

These varied encounter designs keeps a game engaging and prevents it from suffering from Escalation Fatigue.  You can see Escalation Fatigue in some RPGs where enemies who were bosses become standard enemies, because the game needs to show how strong you've gotten.  Good use of a game's entire enemy bestiary helps reinforce your games character and enemy design and lets you make more enjoyable encounters because it allows players to gain familiarity with what they're facing.  I love the way Halo handles this for the most part, and I was wondering why it kept giving me Doom vibes, and I think this is it.  Interesting encounter design drive my interest in Doom, and Halo scratches that same itch.

Halo 2 - The FPS Sweet Spot

Continuing with last year's theme of playing through influential games, I have started 2020 off with Halo 2, Bungie's landmark 2004 First Person Shooter.

I'm not sure if I brought this up before, but I don't play a lot of shooters.  With my vision, games of this nature can be tough to see and react in time.  Doesn't mean I don't like them though, as Doom 2 is one of my favorite games, and Doom 2016, which I played last year, was an incredibly delightful romp.  The more precise I have to be in a shooter though, the harder the game becomes.  Additionally, if enemies are similarly colored to the background it can be harder to see.  I've had some issues in Titanfall, Half Life and Call of Duty games, especially the multiplayer.

Halo, to its credit, plays more like a Doom game than it does modern First Person Shooters.  Aiming down sights isn't really a thing in this game, which is great for me.  Pair the not needing to enter a precision aim mode for most guns, and the fact that enemies have distinct outlines, and you have a recipe for a good shooter.  This isn't a unique thing to Halo.  Shooters have aliens, demons and monsters as enemies all the time.  How they execute on that recipe is important.

Halo feels good to play.  Part of what I like about this game is I can play it a lot like Doom.  The Covenant enemies you're fighting don't have hit-scan weapons, like the Marines, so you can see their shots and try to dodge them: Very Doom.  You don't need to aim down sites, and you can spend most of the game strafing and firing as you zip between points of cover, or dodge shots: still very Doom Like.  Iron Sights in modern shooters don't feel good to me because of how start and stop the games are.  Aiming down the barrel of your gun narrows your Field of View, Makes you move slower, and in general, seems to make you more of a target.  Sure, that's more realistic or whatever, and it can provide unique gameplay challenges of having to time your aims well to maximize efficiency, but for me, that doesn't feel as good as firing from the hip while moving.

As for the Dual Wielding in the game, it feels a lot better than in Goldeneye, I'll tell you that much.  The ability to use different weapons is fun, at the expense of losing the ability to throw grenades, which is also fun to do.  Taking a Plasma Pistol in one hand, and an SMG or Plasma Rifle in the other lets you wipe out a shield with a charged Plasma Pistol shot, then try to rack up damage with the other gun.  It's fun to do and it adds a nice bit of experimentation that I like. 

This game lets me feel like I'm playing a good hybrid of Doom and more modern FPS.  It isn't as breakneck as Doom can be, nor does it have the ability to just wipe an emey off the face of the planet with a single shot, but hey, most games don't give you the super shotgun.  It does, however, feel great to play and move.  While Doom is a frenetic dance of violence, Halo si amore considered waltz through the battlefield.  Weaving your way carefully around the enemies, flowing in and out at a steady pace. 

Quickly, I want to touch on the other bits of the game.  I've liked the music, for the most part.  Anything with the driving drums and bass is has been good.  Levels have been fine.  Enemy encounters are fun.  Driving vehicles feels better than Halo 1, but that could be because I'm using a controller now instead of Mouse and Keyboard, but who knows.  Plot is serviceable.

I'm really enjoying my time with Halo.  It's a fun space romp with good gunplay.  I can see why this became the defacto multiplayer experience for a generation.

See you Space Shepard

A few days ago I put a bow on the end of the Mass Effect trilogy.  I was streaming the game, and I had planned to do something else after I had finished the game, but as the credits were rolling, I felt so jumbled up, my mind processing, and feeling a bit shaky, I had to stop.  I needed time to process this.

I took to the discord with the friends who convinced me to play it.  Discussing my ending, talking about the side bets they had taken on my playthrough and talking about how controversial the ending was for some people, even with the corrected ending I had played.

Gonna talk about the ending and other things, so spoilers ahead.

I chose the Green Ending.  This was the only ending that made sense for the journey I had been on for the past hundred hours across three games.  Based on the information I had been given, the Red ending, the one that would have wiped out all of the Reapers, and all other Synthetic life, which would include the Geth and potentially myself, was out of the question.  I had spent several arcs stating that the Geth had evolved and changed to be their own sentient species.  After telling Legion that he was a person, that he was alive, and that the Geth were living, it would have been such a fundamental betrayal to do that.  Further cemented with a conversation I had with Garrus on the Normandy.  He was talking about the cold calculus of war.  Do you willingly sacrifice five billion people in one place to save ten billion elsewhere?  At that time, I had, optimistically, said that I wanted to do it without having to sight a death warrant like that.  These factors combined had me completely shut out that ending.

The Blue ending was the Control the Reapers option.  This is what the Illusive Man was after all along.  I had to eliminate this option as well, as I roundly rejected the Illusive Man at every turn when he brought this up.  Well, almost every turn.  At the end of Mass Effect 2, I gave the Illusive Man and Cerberus the Collector Base, as they had pitched it as a tool for fighting the Reaper invasion.  What better way to know how they work and how to fight them than a huge archive of their own information?  Come Mass Effect 3, and I'm out of the insulated bubble Cerberus had put me in to keep me from seeing how awful they were during the second game, and when the Illusive's Man real plan comes to light, I couldn't side with them any longer.  Nothing leashed stays that way forever, and trying to order around these ancient weapons of destruction feels perilous at best, no matter what the Catalyst and the Illusive Man said.  The Blue option was out.

That left Green.  A more harmonious one.  The one where synthetics and organics were altered to be some hybrid of the other.  This seems like a good happy ending, the Reapers stop, organic beings become better through this fusion, and synthetics start to understand humanity more.  Win win... except in a way... The Reapers still won.  Their goal was to wipe out Humans and other advanced species.  And they did.  I did.  Those humans aren't pure humans anymore.  Those Asari, those Krogan, Turian, Quarian, Salarians, Volus, Elcore, Hanar, Batarians and Geth aren't what they were anymore.  They may not have been killed, but the species have been permanently altered on a fundamental level.

This is the ending I chose. It's painted as an optimistic one.  All the different races and civilizations rebuilding after the initial Reaper invasion.  The Reapers assisting in the rebuild and providing access to their stores of information.  The world is changed, hopefully for the better.  Hopefully there is some sort of understanding that can now be reached due to the merging of Organic and Synthetic.

I like this uncertainty.  For a conflict this big, this dramatic, a clean solution that isn't tinged with some underpinning of sadness would feel wrong.  The ramifications of removing the Reapers would have been felt for decades, as the civilizations fixed the damage, even if they just magically went away.  The ending I got was optimistic, but it came at the cost of Shepard's life and altering all races in the galaxy.

One more part of the ending I want to touch on.  I like that if you even want to get to that point where you make this final decision, you HAVE to take a Renegade action, lest you be shot by the Illusive Man in the control room.  This series is about making decisions, and Mass Effect 3 absolutely hammers home the concept of making a difficult decisions to win this war.  If you played all Paragon up until this point, you could have ignored the first prompt, which would have resulted in a longtime ally being executed by the Illusive Man.  Then you would get a second prompt, with the gun trained on you.  If you ignored this Renegade prompt, he would shoot you, resulting in the Game Over screen.  If you believed in playing a pure Paragon shep, you need to stop your game right there, and say to yourself "My Shepard was unable to make the hard decision when it mattered most".  At this point, the fate of the galaxy is out of your hands and into someone willing to make that decision.

I had been playing a mostly Paragon playthrough.  I hardly took Renegade conversation options, and I let most Renegade prompts pass me by.  The only ones I can remember taking was the Thane loyalty quest in Mass Effect 2, when interrogating the guy, so we could get the information quicker, and the one to shoot Udina during the coup at Citadel.  I also took the first Renegade prompt at the end, to save the ally from being executed.  These were pivotal moments where I felt that action had to be taken and that trying to work things out with words would not have worked.

At launch, there were people mad that a Paragon option didn't exist, that you somehow couldn't talk yourself out of this.  That you had to take a Renegade option to see the end.  I wondered "Why should there be a Paragon option?".  Well, some could say, the game had presented Paragon options all along!  You never had to take a Renegade choice before.  That may be true, but why should the world bend to your Shepard who wants to talk instead of taking action?  At the point the issue is forced, we are at the final hand.  All cards are on the table, and everyone is all in.  And Shepard is meeting the one person in the Galaxy who is as confident in their own personal beliefs as they are in the Illusive Man.  To me, saying he should bend to your Paragon decision to stand down is the same as saying you should bend to his plan.  This is an unstoppable force versus an immovable objects, in terms of ideals.  The only difference is, the Illusive Man is also willing to take action where a Pure Paragon wouldn't.

The cold calculus of war.

Forcing you to take this prompt makes me think and realize that at some point, words aren't enough.  The rallying speeches aren't enough.  When push comes to shove, an action needs to be taken.  If you aren't able to pull that trigger, someone else will and they will be the one to dictate history.

If you haven't figured it out, I really like how this ended.  I love how it shows that everyone is compromised.  You can have all the idealism in the world, but if you don't have the action to back it up, it doesn't mean jack.  I won't play these games again, at least not for a long time, but I am satisfied with how it ended.  Shepard may have died, but he died for the people he believed in.  He died for the good that existed out there.  He died because everyone deserved a chance to make up for the mistakes of the past.