Like many children of the ’90s, I have fond memories of discovering the Pokémon game series. I was at a friend’s house, watching over his shoulder as his lizard-like monster duked it out with a fearsome simian beast. My friend threw a Poké-ball to capture the foe and add to his ever-growing collection. On his way to becoming Champion, my friend’s Pokémon companion leveled up and “evolved” into a massive dinosaur with even bigger stats and better moves. I was hooked. I played off and on through elementary school (hampered only by the fact that I didn’t own a Nintendo system).
When I played the series again as a young adult, I was surprised by how different the game felt. As a child I viewed the game as a journey of discovery and mystery; now, though, the adventure of the games was stripped away to reveal a complex network of strengths, stats, and optimization tweaks. Pokémon was apparently nothing more than a tactics game! I played with fresh enthusiasm, sinking a triple-digit amount of hours into acquiring and training the best team I could find.
Finally my team was ready to challenge a schoolmate. I was summarily crushed into dust, all my aspirations as faint and grey as the sprites of my poor Pokémon. Diagnosing my loss, I learned that there were entire Internet fora dedicated to mastery of Pokémon battling, and that all my efforts in training my team were doomed from the start by a set of hidden, quasi-random stat modifiers that every Pokémon is given in-game. I may have wanted to become “the very best there ever was”, but RNG gave me no chance.
Years later, in the throes of 2020’s quarantine, I found myself in a similar situation with a new game: Divinity: Original Sin 2. This high fantasy tactical RPG was a thrilling tale involving an amnesiac skeleton ascending to godhood and saving the world, but the combat was as difficult as it was engrossing. I found myself consulting wikis to eke out every bit of experience points I could; I reloaded save upon save to start my battles on the perfect footing; my “lawful good” avatar slaughtered towns of innocents in a gross violation of his character, just for the meagre EXP payout.
there’s an implied promise from the game designer that if [the player does] what the game tells them to do, it will be fun…
Mark Rosewater, head designer of Magic: The Gathering
I’ve realized a tension exists between the tactical components of a game, which make the game mechanically fun, and the story-telling components, which make the game emotionally fun. Most games incorporate both elements to some degree, but there are several recipes for mixing the two:
- Strategy is the core of the game and can be fully optimized, and if players can customize their storytelling experience, it is usually cosmetic. Examples: Into the Breach, Fire Emblem, XCOM
- Strategy and self-expression mixed in similar amounts, but in such a large decision space that solving the game tactically is impossible. Examples: Magic: the Gathering, competitive emulated Pokémon, League of Legends
- A role-playing game with strategic elements only incorporated as a vehicle for storytelling, viscerally conveying the player’s achievement and progress. Bosses that were unassailable at level 1 become trivial at level 10 — look how far you’ve come! Examples: Pokémon to a 10-year-old, Divinity series on low difficulties, some pen-and-paper RPGs
- A mixed tactical/role-playing game where the player’s ability to optimize is harshly constrained, through randomness, lack of information, or difficulty. Examples: This War of Mine, survival simulators like Kingdom, games with permadeath, games where certain stats are hidden, and games before the advent of Internet wikis.
- If strategy and storytelling are both emphasized and unconstrained, players will ignore one and focus solely on what advances them in-game, which is usually tactics.
Recipe 5 is the trap that befalls mainline Pokémon games and the Divinity series. It is fully possible to optimize for tactics in these games, yet the role-playing elements directly compete with tactical resources.
In Pokémon, NPCs tell players repeatedly that their Pokémon’s strength flows from their love for their Trainer, and the player’s villainous opponents wax eloquent about Pokémon as their slaves for battling. But players do not level up in Pokémon by befriending their pets — they win by battling, and battling alone! It is theoretically possible in-game to breed the perfect monster, level it up to 100, interact with NPCs to properly train its hidden stats, explore every nook of the game to find the right items, and create a team with 5 other Pokémon just as carefully coddled. But this activity is actively disincentivized by the story of the game, as well as the game’s mechanics — for example, Pokémon moves necessary to clear new routes for exploration are nearly useless in battle. In short, it is a miserable, tedious experience requiring 100s of hours of gameplay to create even one battle-optimized team of Pokémon.
Divinity, on the other hand, makes it pretty easy to optimize — all the player’s stats can be shuffled and changed indefinitely, and merchants will carry everything the player needs to re-spec. One can become a hydromage, or a necromancer, or a spearbearer at will. However, as I explain in my essay on tactical heuristics, true tactical optimization in Divinity favors only a small sliver of all available actions. Every optimized character needs points invested into Rogue, Aerothurge and Polymorph classes to gain access to vital extra-turn and teleportation abilities, if they wish to survive combat. If it makes more narrative sense for my burly Dwarf to be a pyromaniacal hammer-wielder, then I will suffer tactical losses as a result. If it makes more tactical sense to murder bystanders for their EXP, players will do that even with their righteous Paladins and Clerics. Optimizing Divinity‘s tactical experience is possible, but it robs the narrative experience of its richness and resonance.
Make the fun part also the correct strategy to win.
Mark Rosewater
The tactical layouts of Recipe 5 games allow the player to embark on a path that is possible in-game, but at odds with the parts of the game that make it fun. To someone like myself who has entire chromosomes of DNA solely devoted to optimization, it is incredibly frustrating that optimization cannot be achieved without hours of tedium, or that slightly sub-optimal strategies are drastically less likely to succeed. That’s how I know I’m playing a tactics game that should have been a storytelling game.
I wish the Pokémon games had been designed with a “New Game +” mode that gave the player complete control of their Pokémons’ stats and movepools, so that I could optimize without hours of grinding. I wish Divinity had a more rigorous class system, so that the must-choose abilities were off-limits, and I wish that it weren’t possible to re-spec over and over to adapt to the boss battle du jour. Both of these design changes would bring the fun parts of these games to the fore, and eliminate design choices which create tedium and cognitive dissonance.
Unfortunately, no one has handed me design reigns to make those changes, so I am left with some homebrew solutions. Stipulation runs like the famous “Nuzlocke rule” in Pokémon (you can only use the first Pokémon you catch in each area, instead of re-rolling for better stats) turn the series into Recipe 4, where I can optimize freely within a heavy set of constraints. Ironman runs (no reloading prior saves), or permadeath runs (no “extra lives”) can introduce the same effect. In Divinity, toggle down the difficulty to create Recipe 3, making story-driven teams tactically viable. Finally, one can simply play with the Internet off — optimization of these games is often solely enabled by the wealth of information found online. Discovering tactics by oneself can be the best part of a gaming experience.
Playing only the fun parts of these games can restore the sense of wonder to a game. And worst-case, there are plenty of other games out there that are more likely to suit your interests. I can’t play Pokémon any more — it’s too frustrating no matter what I stipulate — but I just use that time to play more XCOM!
I close with the wise words of Mark Rosewater, whose “20 Lessons, 20 Years” talk has been profoundly influential for me:
…make sure that what it takes to succeed at your game is the very thing that makes the game fun.
Mark Rosewater