Start with a wooden sword, end with a crystal sword. Often, the hero's journey is reduced to material progression. It's a narrative device that doesn't easily translate into a mechanical choice or consequence. But that can be hard to model in games – 'press F for epiphany' – without taking away player agency completely. In the traditional hero's journey, the hero must surrender wealth, status, or power in order to attain what they really need (love, self-respect, spiritual enlightenment). We climb the tech tree, we level up, we collect bigger and bigger weapons because of a widespread assumption that growth is an inherent good. Perhaps gaming's roots in the toy and consumer electronics industries are one reason for the emphasis on growth the constant hankering for bigger, faster, more. It can be seen everywhere from the chase for highscores to the consumerist dreams of The Sims, who buy better things in order to enjoy better lives. The idea of perpetual growth underpins much of our society, but games seem uniquely committed to it as a medium. In order to escape the usual flow, and stagnation in the design, these games would have to rethink their core mechanics completely. Crusader Kings II checks expansion with rebellious vassals, who have their own ambitions, independent of the player's.īut all these attempts to make the player feel like David when they're clearly Goliath – to give them a heroic arc – are ultimately unsatisfactory, because they're trying to escape the fundamental principles of their genre.
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Endless Legend's long winters curtail growth. Stellaris breaks up its galactic-scale bloat in the mid-to-late game with robot uprisings and invasions from deep space. This problem of a stagnant endgame is well known to designers, and most modern 4X games attempt a solution. The intent is to inject that early game dynamism into established empires, encouraging them to, well, rise and fall. Rise and Fall, the first major expansion for Civ VI, makes bold moves to enliven the endgame, like introducing Dark Ages and “city loyalty”, which makes your cities more liable to defect but also gives you a chance of phoenix-like rebirth into a Heroic Age. That means that sooner or later, in every Civ game, you'll reach a point where the challenge is gone but there's still a long grind before you reach the point at which you have enough capital cities, culture points, rocket launches or religious conversions to win the game. Invest, improve, reap the rewards, invest again. Stateless barbarians and rival empires are the only existential threat. Through the Civilization lens, raw economic strength is success. But in Civilization VI, like many games, you're the star of the show – and there's nowhere to go but up. Historically, stagnating empires tend to fragment and collapse. However peacefully you try to play, you're often straight-jacketed into a utilitarian-psychotic view where all resources and people are just raw material to be assimilated, Borg-like, until the whole map is monochrome.īut as the early excitement of exploration and expansion ebbs to late game stagnation, the fun runs out. Whether your aim is world conquest or cultural hegemony, victory in Civilization and many of its cohorts depends on domination. That problem is perpetual growth, and it plagues many 4X games.
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Civilization VI: Rise and Fall wants to solve a problem.