Is It Possible for Long-Form Games to Have Good Endgames?

[bkbroiler]

I always kind of wondered in a Spore style approach to a builder game might be novel.  Start at a low, almost atomic level of development (manage this village), and upon reaching a goal state pull the focus up a tier where your former world is now a component (manage this county of villages).  Every time you demonstrate mastery you're pulled higher out of the current minutia and into a more complicated system made up of those previously mastered parts, while still being able to take along and apply the lessons you learned at the earlier stages (manage this state, this country, this planet, this galaxy).  Maybe you even provide incentive to dip back down into the lower levels now and again, both as a pacing mechanism and to create novelty.

 

It'd be a hell of a balancing act to pull it off, mind you.

That's what I'm picturing, and it sounds awesome. Do you still think at the end it would get boring, though? I mean, even people who but hundreds of hours into games like Civ and Sim City and CK2 say they don't particularly like the endgame. Should there be some sort of crazy win condition that lets you go out in a blaze of glory? Or is there no way to make the "end" of an inherently open ended game interesting?

[neonrev]

Its not exactly endgame, but the Silent Storm games (turn-based, squad management in a WWII setting) introduce mech-type things about midway through, about once you've perfected your small arms tactics and gotten people spec'd out. It's a dramatic ( but non-nonsensical, mind you) turn in the story and gameplay, and I found having to completely switch up my approach and deal with a new way of engaging enemies (it encourages more aggressive advances and heavy weaponry, instead of the stealth and long range engagements that are more useful until then.) with my old squad and recovered equipment pretty interesting. It feels artificial and out of no where, but it made the endgame a new sort of war instead of a dull conclusion to the old one.

[Entriech]

That's what I'm picturing, and it sounds awesome. Do you still think at the end it would get boring, though? I mean, even people who but hundreds of hours into games like Civ and Sim City and CK2 say they don't particularly like the endgame. Should there be some sort of crazy win condition that lets you go out in a blaze of glory? Or is there no way to make the "end" of an inherently open ended game interesting?

 

I think we need to specifically look at what it is about this genre of games that makes the end of them so unappealing.  Then we look at the part of the genre that is fun, and figure out why that doesn't translate into the end game.

 

Let's talk about something like Civilization.  What're some of the things about it that make the early game fun?  

 

There's a sense of exploration, as you slowly scout out the neighboring terrain and other players.

The number of units you need to control/keep track of is low and easy to process.

The strategic decisions you are making are near-term, less numerous, and payoff relatively quickly (what to build, what to research).

Military engagements are reasonably simple, involve low numbers of a limited scope of units, and resolve quickly.

Power disparity between players is reasonably even due to being close to the start of the game.

 

And how does that change in the late game?

 

There's no more exploration, typically by this point the entire map has been revealed.

The number of units you need to keep track of and control is very high.

The strategic decisions you are making are more long term, but more numerous, and take longer to pay off.

Military engagements can either be complex, involving large numbers of units, and can take some time to fully resolve.  Or they can be very lopsided affairs that require little decision making, but a lot of attention (in terms of executing the crushing of an enemy).

Power disparity between players is great.  This can either mean you lack the power to have agency, or that you're so powerful the game presents no challenge.

 

I think Civilization's great flaw is that it never removes the burden of those early game decisions from you as your empire expands and the game grows more complex.  Because I do think the decisions/information in the early game that are interesting become too numerous and monotonous in the late game to be any fun.  It's kind of absurd that at some point in Civ you start playing on a global scale, but you're still telling this town to make fighter jets, and telling that boat to move over there.  You end up as kind of the most micro of managers, and it blows.

 

I think the Civ series would benefit from a mid-late game meta-map swap, condensing your territory down from 20 cities into 3 or 4 countries or states and doing the same for the other players.  Condense individual units into armies.  Keep the building and research decisions low in number, and quick to pay off.  I think you can streamline the number of decisions being made without reducing the challenge or complexity of that stage of the game, because in the regular game very few of the many decisions you'd make in a single turn are salient or interesting.

[Gormongous]

I think the Civ series would benefit from a mid-late game meta-map swap, condensing your territory down from 20 cities into 3 or 4 countries or states and doing the same for the other players.  Condense individual units into armies.  Keep the building and research decisions low in number, and quick to pay off.  I think you can streamline the number of decisions being made without reducing the challenge or complexity of that stage of the game, because in the regular game very few of the many decisions you'd make in a single turn are salient or interesting.

 

Ugh, that would be so cool, especially if the game procedurally named the states based on terrain features, Great People, or other in-game events. Your suggestion brings to mind one of the most common complaints about Europa Universalis IV on the Paradox forums, that the casus belli and warscore system designed to model small-scale conflict in the fifteenth century is unable to deal with million-man armies and overseas wars in the eighteenth. It would be neat if most long-form strategy games had "pulse" events that occasionally wiped the old systems from the board and replace them with simpler but thematically related systems in order to cope with the mounting scale of the game. Crusader Kings 2 kind of does that organically, just by making counts and barons not plot against you once you become too powerful for them ever to have a chance, but it still falls down a lot, probably because it wasn't a deliberate design goal to reduce pointless interactions.

[sclpls]

The problem with Civ in particular is that even though everyone that has worked the series is aware of the end game problem, they also know that if they were to end the game by, say, the Renaissance, the community would lose their mind.

 

It is weird though because you hit the nail on the head about too many decisions later on in the game, and yet a lot of 4X games, I'm thinking of the space 4X games in particular, that have none of the baggage of a series like Civ, still end up committing those exact design blunders, only worse.

[bkbroiler]

Everything Entriech says sounds fantastic. A game that could pull that off while still allowing you to make new meaningful and interesting decisions with your larger nations would probably be played for years and years to come.

 

For 4X games, I think it just comes down to the normal gameplay happening on such a large scale that it becomes extremely micromanagy. Like in Master of Orion 2, you're just endlessly queuing up buildings you don't really care about are building another thing at another place and then crushing your opponent.

[Entriech]

I think that with some 4X games, and I'm thinking of particular Gal Civ 2 here, automation might be another good solution to the problem.  If you could abstract some of the micromanagement away so you could focus on the goal you're pursuing, it might keep things running along.

[Gormongous]

I think that with some 4X games, and I'm thinking of particular Gal Civ 2 here, automation might be another good solution to the problem.  If you could abstract some of the micromanagement away so you could focus on the goal you're pursuing, it might keep things running along.

 

Yeah, I was going to say that a good "governor" AI fixes the problem on a very basic level, but it's not particularly satisfying to write off whole swaths of your empire to AI control and I can't help but remember Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which had great governor AI 99.999% of the time and wouldn't stop churning out Soporific Silksteel Sentinels the other 0.001%.

 

Speaking of, for some reason, I feel like SMAC had a very good endgame compared to contemporary 4X games, which granted were mostly from Firaxis anyway. If you didn't go for an early Conquest or Green Conquest victory, there was this mounting fever-pitch with the Diplomatic, Economic, and Tech victories. Part of that was because Planet started going nuts, which meant that there was more to keep your eyes on than your increasingly close objective, but it was also just the way the factions themed the endgame, where things would split along philosophical lines and they'd declare themselves for or against you. It was like the "realm divide" that Creative Assembly's always wanted in their games since Rome: Total War, but in a way that actually engaged the player and actually worked. I'm beginning to think it's hard for other developers to copy such a holistically successful product like SMAC, though.

[Denial]

 

I'll second the notion of having more power being a good endgame. Currently I only have the Metal Gear Solid series and Metal Gear Acid games coming to mind.

 

I'm thinking of Far Cry: Blood Dragon, where

you get an absurdly powerful beam weapon and a level made largely of explosive crates, then a cyborg dinosaur mount with a laser gatling gun, and finally kill the big boss in a cutscene.

[Entriech]

peaking of, for some reason, I feel like SMAC had a very good endgame compared to contemporary 4X games, which granted were mostly from Firaxis anyway. If you didn't go for an early Conquest or Green Conquest victory, there was this mounting fever-pitch with the Diplomatic, Economic, and Tech victories. Part of that was because Planet started going nuts, which meant that there was more to keep your eyes on than your increasingly close objective, but it was also just the way the factions themed the endgame, where things would split along philosophical lines and they'd declare themselves for or against you. It was like the "realm divide" that Creative Assembly's always wanted in their games since Rome: Total War, but in a way that actually engaged the player and actually worked. I'm beginning to think it's hard for other developers to copy such a holistically successful product like SMAC, though.

 

I agree!  I think that SMAC had an exceptional end game, as far as that genre goes.  You're entirely right that if you weren't pursuing some kind of conquest, the implicit time limits placed on you by the planet going bananas really lent that late game a sense of urgency.  I think it also helped that the scale of the game stayed reasonably small.  It was a long time ago, but I don't remember having much more than 7 or 8 cities to manage, and maybe double or triple the number of units.  It was manageable, is what I'm saying.