Against the Storm: A Confused Mix of Strategic Challenges - Complete-ish Gameplay Commentary

so glad devin is the high priest of the anti-roguelike temple. these roguelike enjoyers have had it too good for too long

"It'd be cool if the game held back some mechanics."
It does. You are playing on the easiest dificulty (Good choice, it's there to make learning easier), and on higher dificulties (Fourth dificulty? unlocks rainpunk engines and blight) there are additional mechanics.

When you enter a new teritory the game tells you what kind of resources you are likely to find and how much soil there is to be had, so you can use that to decide the buildings to pick. Diferent biomes with diferent trees have pretty major diferences in resources available, and the trees have diferent bonus resources. You always get wood, but you can get amber, copper, fiber, extra wood, roots, insects, eggs and more depending on the tree.

It might feel like the game is demanding everything to be perfect, but it really does not. There are 5 dificulty levels and then 20 prestige dificulty levels, and that is where actual perfection is required, but you can play a much more casual game. Figuring things out and optimizing is the meat of the game, and it offers plenty of it. The multiple mechanics provide many angles from which to push the player to need that optimisation.

Lorewise, the world is fucked. The rain is magical and the world actively hates you. The Main City and The Emperess are the only things keeping the civilization a thing, and you do not really know what is up. You are the guy they send out into the world to gather stuff between the storms to keep the city going for another cycle, no permanent habitation out there in the rain is really possible. Later on you unlock Foxes, who kinda tried living out in the rain, and now they all have mutations that are kinda cancerous looking.

Every day a fall asleep to your newest video. I think I may be addicted to your voice and I am scared....

First off, as always, a pleasure to listen to you and you always manage to provide insights that I often haven't thought about myself.

As we've talked about previously, roguelikes, especially the traditional ones (i.e. DCSS, Brogue), tend to play their full hands quite early on, or you could say that they "front-load" a huge portion of their content in a way. No unlocking, no need to "grind," a lot of it is right there from the beginning. This makes the randomness pretty important in order for the player to feel like they aren't just doing the same thing over and over again. And, consequently, these games also tend to have a huge amount of content to rectify this. So every new run it feels like you're seeing and learning something new.

However, a new brand of roguelikes in more modern times that the community affectionately calls "rogueliTes," attempts to rectify some of the former's potential issues but also introduces new ones in turn, depending on who you ask. Against the Storm falls under this category. For example, you often mention needing to feel that sense of progression in order for your playtime to feel more meaningful, and that's where meta-progression comes in. It holds onto a lot of its content in an effort to make it not so "front-loaded" but makes you have to unlock it instead through various means. As some have probably already mentioned, you haven't quite seen the full game yet, and a lot of the stuff the developers do/add tend to be balanced around some of the higher echolons of difficulty. Of course, this is where traditional roguelike players tend to get cranky, as they feel that you shouldn't have to "grind" through the game in order to experience it in its entirety from the get-go.

There's the also an old roguelike discussion that stems from way-back-when (and honestly applies to nearly all games if you think about it) that basically talked about player choice and how difficulty (and RNG) affects that sort of stuff. If the game is quite easy, then your range of choices of how to beat the game expands significantly. That's the bright side of it, as it promises massive player choice. But on the negative side of things, if you can do whatever you want and still win, then the choice you made doesn't really matter. As you put it, maybe things start to feel a bit "watered-down." In contrast, a harder game means you're much more limited in how you beat it. On the bright side, this means that your choices do matter, because you have the "correct choice" vs. the "sub-optimal" or even "incorrect" choice. Your choice may have been the difference of winning vs. losing. This obviously ties into the negative side, having your options limited like so is often seen as a bad thing. And obviously, if there is no RNG, then you just simply, deterministically pick the superior choice, whereas with RNG thrown into the mix things may get a bit more interesting, as you have to decide what the best choice can be depending on the circumstances.

RogueliTes, such as AoS, tend to lean more into the former. A lot of modern rogelite developers are terrified of players calling their game unfair for obvious reasons. In AoS, though, especially from prestige 10-15 onwards, things can start feeling pretty intense. As soon as Prestige 1, for example, you need 20 reputation required to win, which means your settlement has more time to hum along a bit more before the game ends, and the choices that you feel weren't really mattering before might suddenly feel a bit more significant. I think the developer's intention here is to have new players start on the easier difficulties so they can learn what the buildings do, what the production chains are etc. because as you said, you sort of just have to pick randomly to start when you know nothing.

And to continue a discussion we've had before, there's the topic of game length. Your average game is usually upwards of 10 hours, but once you've beaten it you've pretty much seen everything. Traditional roguelikes are more along the lines of 5-10 hour experiences, and perhaps even longer if we consider outliers like Cataclysm: Dark Days ahead, but with the added caveat of probably seeing new things, or getting into new tactical situations when starting a new run. This is where I previously compared something like a traditional roguelike to a 4X game, because you can probably say the same thing there. And then there's the more modern roguelites, where runs tend to average about an hour, give or take a bit. But again with the added caveat of seeing new things each run potentially. However now we add metaprogression (which is probably why roguelites are shorter to begin with), which keeps on adding slight variances until you finally unlocked everything, however long that takes. Whichever is the most appealing is obviously up to the player, in the end, but it's clear that roguelites have become more mainstream than their ancestors. I guess my point here would be, it'd be interesting to watch you give a more traditional roguelike a try, but since you like Hades (at least I remember you saying this, maybe I'm wrong..) I imagine that you probably DO like roguelites, but perhaps you need a bit more meaning in your gameplay, like more story, which obviously AoS lacks. There was also the fact that Hades, IMHO, is much harder at its baseline than AoS is on the lower difficulty levels.

As for the game having super positive reviews, well I think you were onto something there. Here's my opinion, though: If you don't like AoS' brand of city builder, well, many types of pure city builders exist. You mentioned this, but not in relation to the positive reviews. If someone doesn't like it, or that they won't stick with it, they may just leave a positive review because they can see the game is well put together or that the developers are passionate etc. etc. At some point it becomes hard to leave a negative review for a lot of people if the reasons they don't like it start to feel a bit more personal, as I'm sure you could relate to. There's also the positive feedback loop aspect back at it again, if they see the game positively reviewed, more people are probably more likely to do so.

Nevertheless, should you choose to read this, I hope I provided an interesting read! As mentioned, I certainly enjoyed the video, and I'm glad that you at least got a little bit of enjoyment out of the game. But now, onto the next!

Although I agree with your analysis about the RNG, the biggest thing that smooths out the randomness is the traders. Your can always get anything you want in any town by producing whatever you can locally and then trade for everything else.

One "proof" the RNG doesn't matter is that there are playthroughs from other people where they do things like "always pick the option on the left." That shows that you don't really "need" any choices but they are there to give you an overwhelming advantage until you get used to the game. Then, you can increase the difficulty to start removing the advantages. That being said, I definitely agree that for new players a lot is given at once and then you immediately start increasing the pool before you've even scratched the surface of what was already there. Maybe they don't want players to think it is a mega grind to progress? Or maybe they're indirectly saying you shouldn't ever have all the things in your head anyway 😛

As an Australian I actually love the constant rain the game has; it’s the best thing going for it to me.

Interesting thoughts on rougelikes: I’ve always said the same about free to play

I actually stopped because I was building cities, even after winning and taking screenshots at the end ^^

Didn't realize how much I missed the totalbiscuit vibe

The issue with this game isnt the randomness or even the fact its a roguelite.

The issue with the game is the way progression conflicts with new player expectation. Since the definition of a roguelite directly impacts a games progression system, you can handwave and say the issue is "its a roguelite" since it involves the deeper progession issues

The way the game works is that its a convuluted logistics game, but its not truly complicated, it has a lot of horizontal space, its a mile wide and a couple inches deep.

You only needto understand logistics at the basic demand level: Food, building, fuel, and then to win yiu get amber and whatever your glades tell you to get.

So thats the basic premise, rng or roguelite hasnt jumped in yet, you have a demand, and you are given choices on how you think you should meet the demand. Like any strategy game, the rng now jumps in to give you an excuse to need tp choose, but the fundamental issue is the horizontally built system in logistics

The issue is a new player isnt tutorialized on the horizontal nature of the logistics system. I think its a great system, because it does away with the arbitrary "research" filler resource in so many games that pads out progression.

The progession within a match is determined by your commitment to fufilling a logistical service "i.e I want to make a kiln next becauseI want to use up my wood for coal, and get some jerky"

If all buildings were unlocked from the word go, you would have the dwarf fortress problem of not only finding the right building would be arcane, but know what or why to do next would be a mystery

Really I think new players overcomplicate the game, each step in difficulty and metaprogession points to a new concept to focus on for your next run

Each blueprint is telling you what you should build next, and each order is literally telling you what to do next, like a hint system.

If you havent gone up in prestiges you may not get it, but when you get to the point villagers eat more, you will dial in on complex food as an objective, and all this complaining about roguelite and rng will disappear, who cares if the level is handcrafted or not when the problems and goals couldnt be any clearer?

Beans.

Hey, are you the guy narrating Kings & Generals videos?

You sound exactly like the narrator for kings and generals

I get the feeling that Roguelikes with long gameplay loops appeal to people more interested in "control" (for lack of a better term,) than narrative drive: basically, taking a chaotic situation, fixing it, and then moving on because they get bored once things are stable. It's the kind of player who starts a game like Baulders Gate 3, puts it on the highest difficulty, and immediately rerolls all of the characters for optimized classes and stats.

Problem is, these are always niche players, and so where they say, "I did everything I wanted to, so I don't see why this city matters anymore," most other people would say, "okay, that's the end of the player's story, but what's the end of the city's?"

nice

Was zoning out playing another game with this in the backround and then I hear "...we still don't have that meat or jerky but I can just be racist.", made me do a double take with my ears 😂

Do you consider FTL to have been made worse by it's nature as a roguelike? I feel that's one of the best examples of the genre

The problem with Roguelikes is that nothing matters, and when nothing matters gameplay gets repetitive and boring. We humans like to build things or a legacy that last, and roguelikes is like building a wall to minutes later someone destroy it. Its not fun, but there are people who like to watch paint dry, soo of course rhere are people who enjoy roguelikes...

Your game design analysis is very insightful. I learned a lot with you, tho Game/Sound design is my hobby, someday it will be my career, and my dream will be to work with you one day.

If anything is a symptom of a “Protestant work ethic” then an inability to have fun is probably it.

no Terra Invicta?