I Need Me Some Low-Stakes RTS
Reminiscing about fy_iceworld
Man, is it good to be writing some Substack again. I apologize for the long absence - I’ve been so busy with my son after returning to work that I haven’t made time to sit down and play some good ol’ fashioned RTS. And when I’m not actively playing, I usually lack the inspiration to write anything.
Fortunately, my wife and I decided to do a trip to visit my in-laws, and in my time off I finally have some time to write. The funny thing is, I think it’s fair enough to say that even when I’m working and taking care of my son, I do have time, here and there, to game; moments when my son is asleep and I’m actually caught up on everything, and yet not so tired that I’m immediately inclined to take a nap. Unfortunately, when such moments arrive, the last thing I want to do is sit down and play ladder, boot up co-op, or even skirmish against the AI.
It’s a bummer! It’s not that I don’t want to play RTS; it just feels too high-stakes. And in those rare moments of free time, I don’t feel like I have the energy or mental capacity to handle it.
Do you remember fy_iceworld? It was a custom map in Counter-Strike 1.6, typically setup as either a continuous or round-based Deathmatch. You spawned, you grabbed a gun off the floor, you got as many kills as you could, and you died. Drop in, drop out - play as little or as long as you’d like, immediate ramp up, quit anytime, fun and simple.
I loved me some fy_iceworld back in the day. It was the ultimate form of low-stakes, fun-for-fun’s sake gaming. And I can’t help but observe that there is no equivalent in real-time strategy - and I wish there was.
The Stakes Are Too High
Look, I get it. The nature of strategy games is that players carefully make decisions that pay off down the road, or, more generally, lead to a desirable outcome - a tech traversal or a unit composition or an economic state or a timing attack or so forth. That setup is at odds with drop-in-and-out “pub”-type gameplay that you frequently see in first person shooters.
But I wonder to myself - particularly upon observing that the success of StarCraft II’s co-op hinged partly on downplaying strategy - whether the genre would nonetheless benefit from a high-quality, low-stakes, come-as-you-go-type game mode. When I say “low stakes” I mean that the outcome is low stakes; that it doesn’t really matter whether you win or lose, and in fact, you’re really just playing to play, to enjoy the moment-to-moment action in a spare 10 or 15 or 30 minutes.
No one wins in fy_iceworld - everyone just plays.
And the more I think about it, the more I realize that quite a lot of factors come together to make drop-in-and-out gameplay so special. One is the lack of a need to establish context - there’s no “beginning” to a game of deathmatch, and no real end, either. Counter-Strike, for instance, has an explicit reset after each round, which is typically every couple of minutes. Games that lack this mechanism do generally have some kind of map evolution as players pick up the best weapons and positions, but even this is fluid and self-cleansing. A good game of Deathmatch is dynamic and ever-changing; you can drop into an ongoing match and find your footing pretty fast.
RTS games (perhaps due to the technical limitations of lockstep simulation) generally don’t feature this type of game mode - whether it’s ranked or coop or custom games, there’s a clear starting point with a fixed set of players, and it’s generally bad for the game if one or more players drops out before the conclusion. I think this pushes designers to develop a clear pacing - beginning, middle and end - rather than designing for a continuous and dynamic flow, because the latter just doesn’t quite exist, at least not right now.
Related to this problem is the aforementioned point that earlier decisions impact how well you’re doing now. Setting aside the material problem that this means RTS needs to be consumed as a fixed block of time (beginning, middle, and end), there’s also a psychological pressure to perform right now, because you understand that not doing so sets you up for failure down the road. The lack of any sort of reset mechanism or map evolution or that sort of thing, in combination with the game having a clearly defined ending point, sets up a higher stakes gameplay scenario, and that, for me at least, is not as relaxing and easy to get into.
Think back to the last time you played Halo or Battlefield or any other type of “drop in and out” game. Didn’t you just try stuff to see what would happen? “Oh I bet I can make this jump if I time it right”, “let me try to surprise them by coming from this direction”, “what if I only use this gun?” RTS games are too high stakes to do this kind of thing casually, because you only get one shot at a fifteen or twenty minute game. If you make a bad decision and blow your game, well, that’s it - see you in 3 days when you have another block of free time.
A related third problem is that because there’s one outcome that everyone in a game is moving toward - a win condition that rests on the pyramid of decisions you’ve made since the start of the game - there’s a basic lack of joy in fighting battles compared to winning battles. It’s crucial in strategy games to take efficient engagements (either directly in terms of cost-efficiency, or indirectly in terms of your economy being larger and being able to afford more losses). But the result is a desire to avoid confrontation unless you think you can win. This saps the joy out of simply playing to play, and reorients the game around winning.
It might be plenty of fun to watch stuff blow up, but if that’s game-ending, well… that sucks!
What Can Be Done?
In sum, I would say there are three related problems to making low-stakes RTS work:
context - needing to ramp up on the current game state (what came before and what’s planned next) to play effectively
stakes - the snowball effect of current gameplay affecting later gameplay puts on continuous pressure to perform
outcomes - the emphasis on efficient engagements saps the joy out of brawling and orients players toward winning rather than just playing
I actually think the lack of a properly low stakes custom game is both surprising and fascinating - to me it says a lot about the RTS audience that very popular custom games like Direct Strike still end up nuanced and complicated and not super easy to get into. But I also think it’s natural to cater to power users who like your game mode a lot; such people are eventually going to demand more depth and stuff to do, and by taking and responding to this feedback, you end up iterating toward a more complex game.
But I also want to return to the more basic point that drop-in-and-out gameplay is not technically supported by the genre more broadly. If it were easy for a custom game maker to make a map where players come and go, I think we’d see a ton more innovation in this space. And so what really needs to happen is that developers need to make this kind of gameplay easy to build, which would enable game modes catering to drop-in-and-out gameplay to naturally emerge.
I would guess that the evolution of RTS game engines away from lockstep simulation could open a big door here. And if the developers go far enough to make it simple to setup “pub”-type servers, I could imagine a variety of fairly interesting game modes; stuff like Castle Blood but without the progression systems, or a simple round-based mechanism in which there’s a new round every couple of minutes (similar to CS) with, say, 15 seconds of decision-making or base building followed by a couple minutes of action on the map. This would be really fun!
None of this is to say that ladder or co-op or skirmishes or all the rest aren’t good; rather it’s to say that there’s a (potentially large) opportunity for game modes that are much lower-stakes. I think these would keep players engaged with the genre in times in their lives when they can’t sit down and grind ladder consistently or don’t want to commit to a big block of time just to get a game in; they just want to play some RTS!
Now that all being said, I get that I’m biased because that’s where I happen to find myself in my own life; maybe the opportunity isn’t as big as I imagine. On my side, I’m happy to say that with a return to regular distance running and DIY projects around the house, I finally feel like I’ve emerged from “survival mode” and am more or less back to living a normal life. Playing computer games (and regularly writing on this Substack) are the only parts of my pre-child-life that I haven’t yet fit back into my personal schedule, and I feel pretty good about making that happen.
Of course, that’d be a whole lot easier if real-time strategy had its own version of fy_iceworld. But until then, I’ll find a way to make it work. :-)
Until next time,
brownbear
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