Saturday Summaries 2018-04-21: ProcGen Edition

I've been thinking about ProcGen (or Procedural Generation) again recently as it continues to be a major force in modern video gaming, and of Indie games in particular. Simply put, it's when a designer decides to relegate a certain amount of level design or treasure/NPC/enemy allocation to a randomized system, creating a doubly beneficial outcome of a game that never offers players the same experience twice, and one that requires less design micromanagement, saving the designer a considerable amount of crunch time. It's also the backbone of the "roguelike/lite" - less so permadeath, which many roguelikes find a way to mitigate with bonuses that carry over to new games, or basic ASCII graphics, which was simply a holdover borne of "programmer graphics" necessity - which is itself a subgenre construct that has proven very versatile for what it can be paired with: RPGs (the original Rogue), platformers (Spelunky), Zelda action-adventures (The Binding of Isaac), real-time strategy games (FTL), turn-based strategy games (Into the Breach), and so on. All have a significant degree of ProcGen in there that helps define what those games are.

In my view, ProcGen is best employed when it's within a controlled system. This is because ProcGen is a chaotic force that can deeply unbalance a game if the parameters aren't carefully considered. I played an RPG this week that, like Diablo and a number of other RPGs with ProcGen, randomizes the contents of its treasure chests. However, it wouldn't do to randomly give players the best items in the game accidentally, and so it curates its treasure chests to some degree, offering level-appropriate rewards for the areas in which those chests are found and perhaps removing certain critical items from the pool which are instead placed in specific pre-determined locations. The randomization factor makes every new chest a discovery (and, if you really wanted to be a degenerate, an opportunity to save-scum next to an unopened chest and keep opening it until you get something sufficiently valuable and/or desirable) but the limitations ensure that the difficulty curve remains intact. Other ProcGen-enabled games tend to offer short playthroughs, so they use the randomized factor to create what is essentially multiple very different experiences within the same basic framework to boost longevity. The best ones do so by changing your strategy depending on what you've found or, more frequently, what you haven't found: A playthrough of The Binding of Isaac, for instance, can diverge in many ways depending on how lucky you are with power-ups and cursed items. I've also been playing this A Link to the Past Randomizer, which adds ProcGen to a game that didn't originally have any, and while I love that I have no idea what to expect next the difficulty has been all over the place as a result of not having the correct items for different dungeons of the game.

I'd liken ProcGen to harnessing lightning: it's a powerful force that requires careful attention, lest you end up destroying the vessel you've built for it through too much chaotic interference. I've known games that were demonstrably worse with ProcGen, because it wasn't channelled correctly or felt too arbitrary as a result of its inclusion. In most cases, ProcGen doesn't beat a carefully considered pre-generated world where the designer has taken the time to ensure a proper difficulty curve and fair distribution of power-ups and equipment. However, when used correctly, it not only offers the player a diverse range of experiences but also takes the design load off of the already overworked Indie game designer who has plenty on their plate already without an extra six months of level design. I can't begrudge its inclusion, and I still think there's capacity for new directions to be taken with the system and further tweaking to ensure its presence is a welcome one. I just hope its practitioners continue to employ it in moderation.

Speaking of moderate bordering on the overworked, here's this week's blogging:

• The Indie Game of the Week this time was Eschalon: Book I, the first of a trilogy of traditional single-character top-down turn-based RPGs that's a clear love letter to the genre as it was back in its pre-3D days. Despite its leisurely pace, the game's featured plenty of challenging encounters and a number of clever ideas for its character creation process. I've grown fairly attached to it and am taking the time to explore and knocking out the side-quests as they become available, but I'd like to move onto some other games before too long. (I said the same thing about Infinifactory, though, and I'm still plugging my way through that.)
• We also have the third part of our A Link to the Past Randomizer run, which put Garflink in a precarious position as it grew increasingly unlikely that we'd be prepared to navigate the Dark World once we ran out of Light World locations to visit. With only one region and one dungeon left to go for some progression-vital items, I'm slightly concerned I might have to comb the world for more chests in hidden caves and pits that I've forgotten about. Eggs very much in one basket going into next week's double-bill.
• Meanwhile, in another region of the SNES landscape, the SNES Classic Mk. II feature took a trip to pirate island with Goof Troop and reminisced about the utterly ridiculous Parodius. Both have their own surprises - the first that Capcom decided to make a Disney-themed Pirate Ship Higemaru, not one of their most well-known arcade games, the second being one of the earliest shot-for-shot game parodies - and both have unsurprisingly held up well, given that Capcom and Konami were at the peak of their craft back in the 16-bit era. I'm sure this feature hasn't seen the last of those two.

Addenda

TV: The Expanse (Seasons 1 and 2)

For a time, I was considering watching Star Trek: Discovery next as I'd been looking for a new sci-fi show to sink my teeth into, and then the new season of The Expanse came along with various accolades along the line of "TV's most well-plotted and ambitious sci-fi show is back" and I figured it was kismet. ST: Discovery and its relatively cool reception can wait a little longer - there's definitely no shortage of quality TV to watch out there, given all the new distribution venues getting into the prestige TV game.

The Expanse, based on the novels of the same name by "James Corey" (a nom de plume for a two-person author team), is a sci-fi show that presents a near-future version of the Solar System split into three factions: Earth, which has all the power and resources and has grown somewhat complacent because of it; Mars, whose people have a burning frontier spirit and fierce independence and would rather spend its resources and time terraforming the planet into a lush utopia than squabbling with the "old world"; and the Belt, a gaggle of stations and other spacebound installations mining the asteroids for valuable resources both Mars and Earth desperately need, though the working stiffs out there are treated little better than chattel by the Earth and Martian governments. You get the sense from the outset that the three factions have an uneasy alliance with one another, made more profound by their emerging differences: for one, people born and raised in the zero-gravity ships of the Belt or the reduced gravity of Mars cannot easily live within Earth's gravity should they ever visit. This fragile peace is threatened further by a grand conspiracy that emerges around a mysterious, invasive, molecular bioweapon that proves difficult to keep under control.

The show focuses on a few characters, which it follows in a style similar to Game of Thrones (along with a lot of other stylistic similarities which I feel are mostly deliberate) by progressing their storylines little by little in an alternating fashion, and occasionally has them intersect with others. The nominal protagonist is James Holden, an officer on an ice-transporting frigate named the Canterbury who ends up stranded with a small ragtag team: Naomi, a talented Belter engineer; Amos, an Earther soldier with a fatalistic outlook; Alex, a hapless Martian pilot who is usually given the thankless comic relief role; and Shed, a doctor and field medic with a dubious past. We also have Joe Miller, played with hard-boiled charm by Thomas Jane, a detective on the Belt's Ceres Station who becomes drawn into the show's overarching conspiracy by a missing persons case, and Chrisjen Avasarala, the shrewd deputy undersecretary of the Earth-ruling government who follows her own trail of clues while staying one step ahead of the conspirators that would silence her should they ever decide she knows too much. It's a very layered show, and because it's a serial it's difficult to talk about it without giving too much away.

I only meant to watch the first season, but I'm so hooked that I'm halfway through the second as well. It's a "hard" sci-fi show insofar as it pays attention to the laws of space travel without too much in the way of unbelievable futuristic tech like hyperdrives or transporters or warp engines or the presence of aliens (well...), and while it can be a bit slow-paced I find myself appreciating it all the same because it makes those bursts of sudden action or eventful game-changers all that more impactful. I've always preferred sci-fi when it takes its time to get to where it's going; the best spacebound sci-fi movies in my opinion are the slow-burners like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Moon or Silent Running. The Expanse has been dark, it's been violent, and it's been shocking, but it's also careful to give itself some breathing room between the more challenging moments. As the series has progressed, we've met more characters in both focal (that is, the camera starts following them instead) and peripheral roles, and it's always rad when those divergent plotlines end up encountering one another, effectively merging their stories for a time. I think the cast is overall excellent too, though there's a few characters I don't particularly care for (including the protagonist Holden, with whom the show is clearly aiming for a Jon Snow hero type, full of brooding, wounded vulnerability), and I'm deliberating over picking up the novels so I can see where the story goes next once the new season has ended. At any rate, it's precisely what I was looking for in a sci-fi show, though once I'm all caught up I could do with something a little more lighthearted...

Movie: Atomic Blonde

Atomic Blonde has a lot of shared DNA with Keanu Reeves's John Wick, between Wick's co-director David Leitch and a similar pulpy, gritty vibe, which is what drew me to the movie originally. However, after watching it I can appreciate that it's going for something marginally different: the type of twisty espionage thriller that keeps the audience guessing right up until the end. Charlize Theron is the eponymous atomic blonde, an MI6 operative named Lorraine Broughton who is tasked with finding a priceless microfilm hidden inside a Swiss watch somewhere in Berlin. The complicated part is that this particular Berlin exists in 1989 days before the Berlin Wall is due to fall, and an agent of the KGB presently has it. What's more, Lorraine's contact is the Berlin section chief of MI6 (played by James McAvoy) who has run out of operatives and has gone native in order to survive, becoming unreliable as a result. Lorraine faces conflict on all sides throughout her stay in Berlin, frequently contending with the KGB on her tail, a duplicitous associate, at least one other interested party (to say the least if you've seen the trailer), and having to factor in a secondary secret objective to root out a pernicious mole that has been leaking information to the Soviets.

The spy stuff is fun enough, as is the way the movie soaks in the atmosphere in 1989 Berlin with various great musical choices both on-the-nose (Nena's 99 Luftballoons, in its original German) and appropriate for the movie's era (The Clash, David Bowie, George Michael, Siouxsie and the Banshees, A Flock of Seagulls, etc.), but I was there because I heard the fighting scenes were something special. This movie can be brutal. A protracted fight scene halfway through the movie has Lorraine taking on four or five KGB operatives in the middle of a botched operation to help a nervous Stasi agent (played by The World's End's Eddie Marsan) defect to the west. However, they're all almost as skilled a hand-to-hand fighter as she is, and clearly stronger. The way Lorraine gets beaten down and can barely stand after the last opponent, a scary-looking dude with a bleached top that has bested her once before, really lends credence to the idea that most movie fights are complete bullshit, and the only way someone like Lorraine can win against those odds is through a combination of resourcefulness and luck. It's a really excellent and tense fight, though a little tough to watch with how hard those blows appear to connect, and the peak of an already nail-biting sequence.

It's definitely a little more energetic and vibrant than a typical Cold War espionage thriller, but nonetheless beholden to the conventions of same due to its deferential relationship with genre movies from that period. Definitely a little more punk and modern by design, of course, but there's still plenty of wires hidden in clothing and double-crosses in shadowy alleys and fake passports to go around. I feel like it could appeal equally to those looking for a stylish John Wick action thriller and those looking for a suspenseful spy movie with a sting in the tale, if not perhaps fully catering to either. I had a great time, though.

Game: Final Fantasy XV

I really haven't made as much progress in Final Fantasy XV as I'd have preferred, with all my free-time this week poured into watching The Expanse and getting further with Eschalon: Book I and Infinifactory, but I'm still inching closer to the point where the game suddenly gets all railroad-y for its final stretch (I've tried to avoid spoilers, but some stuff filters through by cultural osmosis all the same). Soon I'll have to decide whether to pause the story progression for more side-quests and exploration business, or press on with the plot and come back for the above alongside all the high-level post-game dungeons.

Since I don't want to talk about story stuff for fear of spoiling anything, I'll talk about the combat some because it's finally starting to click for me. There's a certain Wii game that's not quite a Final Fantasy but about as close as you can get without that brand: Mistwalker's The Last Story. That game, like Final Fantasy XV, has a real-time, team-based combat system that merges seamlessly with traversing the overworld. It has an optional "wait mode", which pauses the battle and lets you consider your options, but will for the most part invoke the player's situational awareness as the means for success. The chief difference between the two games is the role that the protagonist plays. In The Last Story, Zael carries a special brand that allows him to aggro all enemies in the vicinity, the idea being to run interference so your strategically placed team can pick off enemies hot on your tail. In Final Fantasy XV, conversely, Noct is relatively weak and relies on his companions to take the brunt of the tank work, allowing him to surreptitiously fly in with devastating warp-strikes and blindside attacks to finish the battle quickly. I'm actually finding that despite being exact opposites, both scenarios are equally compelling, as they give you different directives to follow and different concerns to be wary about.

For the most part, the combat's fairly mindless. You wade into a pack of monsters, maneuvering yourself to attack them from the rear for the not-insignificant damage boost that a flank provides, taking into account where your companions are at all times. You can strategically switch weapons - some of which are ranged, which provides more choices for the distance you want to take - and there's a suite of "cooperation" moves that your companions have, giving you three more options to fall back on in the middle of a fight. The game also has summon spells, but they're highly conditional because of their overpowered effects: for instance, one particular summon won't arrive unless the player is in their "danger" status, which occurs when Noct loses all his health and needs reviving by a companion. They're also designed to not activate if it's been too soon since the last, just so you aren't tempted to try sequence breaking a little with some tougher foes and relying on your nuke button to win battles for you.

Unlike The Last Story, which had the good grace to bow out around the 20 hour mark lest it run out of ideas for combat scenarios and outstay its welcome, a lot of Final Fantasy XV's battles are fairly repetitive. You fight what feels like the same pack of pointy wild dogs about a hundred times when exploring, and the game's more distinctive foes - the bombs, the imps, the enemy spellcasters - only appear at night, which isn't worth staying up for due to the low visibility. You do get your fill of these "daemons" in the game's many dungeons, however, if nighttime exploration isn't your bag. The combat's been fine, like most of Final Fantasy XV's systems and conventions, but not exceptional. I suspect when this is game is through, it's going to take the place of Final Fantasy XIII as the game in the series I'm the most ambivalent about. Still, there's enough new ideas that work in this game that there's no reason to think the next one won't be better, building from the lessons learned.