I’ve spent much of my idle time in the past few months thinking and reading about historicism in fantasy. Several articles and many more drafts have emerged from the effort, but I still don’t feel like I really have a solid thesis yet. One metaphor always springs to mind, however: games. Games have an inherent advantage in depicting the complex systems that drive history, since they allow players to actually interact with models of those systems. Game of Thrones is so called for a reason, and it’s no coincidence that it’s also a watershed for the genre’s historicist ambitions. The conversation around those ambitions is complex, as I explored in my last piece. But right now, I want to start exploring the game metaphor itself.
I wrote a review the other day of Nicola Griffith’s Hild, and to discuss its ambitions to systems fiction, I made illustrative comparisons to two medieval history video games, Crusader Kings 2 and Age of Empires 2. I realized that, for all the pining I’d been doing for better systems fiction in fantasy books, I’d completely neglected to explore the medium I was raising up as a model. I maybe played enough medieval strategy games for a lifetime when I was a kid, but now I have a new lens and apparently the free time to do a new writing project. So when Endless Legend was 50% off in this summer’s Steam Sale, I picked it up and dove in. If time allows, I’ll do the same for a few other candidate “historical systems” games in the future.
My goal with this series is to compare fantasy games on offer right now against the ideals I’m looking for in historicist fantasy. Those entail:
Moral relativism - Easy to spot, and a gimme for straight historical fiction games. The game doesn’t present any side as good or evil.
Outcome-agnostic - The story should emerge from gameplay, not funnel players toward pre-written endings.
System independence - Whether the game focuses on markets, class structures, or warfare, those systems should feel like they have trajectories beyond the player’s actions.
Immersive details - Historical systems aren’t strictly reducible to their numerical representations; the game should use art, flavor, and gameplay to provide that lost richness.
Endless Legend
Like all games of its ilk, Endless Legend’s core loop is accumulative. Your pools of labor, technology, buildings, and resources grow throughout the game, allowing you to finance strategies that put you above other players in military, diplomatic, or prestige metrics. There’s something about EL’s loop, however, that had me compulsively focused on efficiency and growth in a way that has more in common with incremental games than strategy. “Incremental” games, if you’re not familiar, involve repetitive clicking and/or waiting to accumulate points which can be spent on upgrades that function only to increase the rate of point accumulation per click/second. They follow an exponential growth curve and can theoretically progress to infinity.
In Endless Legend, you have to manage several resource accumulation rates, not just one pool of points. However, the chief use of each resource is to buy upgrades that increases the rate of accumulation of other resources. Food creates workers who produce resources. Science unlocks buildings that increase worker efficiency. Industry builds those buildings. Dust (Fantasy Money) expedites construction of buildings. Together they form a spinning wheel that might favor industry one turn, food the next, but always feeds back into the same pool, buying things that add modifiers that spin the wheel even faster, increasing one meta statistic: accumulation per turn. At whatever speed your wheel is spinning, you can siphon resources to fight wars; the faster it turns, the larger and better-equipped your army can be. Focusing on different resources moves you toward different victory conditions, but the path to them is always the same: spin the wheel faster than your neighbors. That loop is intellectually vapid but obnoxiously compelling. Figuring out the best parts of the wheel to emphasize at different parts of the game is a tough optimization problem, and while I’m sure your instincts improve over time, solving that problem is not what playing the game is about. Playing the game is about clicking the next turn and watching those modifiers go up, getting the thrill of exponential accumulation.
That spinning wheel is, arguably, an apt metaphor for capitalism. But as a representation, it’s like the derivative of an already simplified and abstracted economic model. It captures not at all the intricacies of the markets, or the resource extraction cycles, or the ecological responses to those cycles. There are either no Malthusian checks on growth (mineral reserves are infinite), or they’re abstracted at such a scale that the interesting moving parts are irrelevant (population growth slows if food is neglected). The loop is completely lacking a sense of meaningful interactivity between its elements. If you neglect a resource, you can slow your wheel to a dribble. But you can’t exhaust your supply of timber, or lose your labor force in an attack or pandemic. Since every production module is so transparently a list of modifiers multiplied by available labor, it’s hard to see how things could really go off the rails without careful management. The systems don’t project any deeper complexity outside the summary-scale view the player manages.
The map is full of distinct ecoregions and interesting fantasy landscape features. Paying attention to the flavor gets me wanting to give the game another chance every time--not because it’s good, since it’s mediocre at best, but because it seems like the developers are trying to check all my boxes. But rather than actually enriching the game’s production system (I hesitate to say economy) they are quickly crushed under the needs of the wheel. The only way you can interact with landscape features is by expanding your cities nearby, so they are only relevant when siting new cities. They can’t be destroyed, exhausted, or propagated. And their benefits and costs just amount to more production buffs, modifiers to help you spin that wheel faster. Their flavor is irrelevant. The same applies to the indigenous creatures stocked on each province.
Presumably because EL is a fantasy game, rather than a historical one, there is a narrative woven over the systems, based on “quests.” Many of these “quests” are trivial errands, moving units around within territory you already control. Others are arbitrary benchmarks in the production system with no clear narrative justification at all, things that feel more at home in a tutorial module. The factions have no clear moral relationship, which is a refreshing surprise. And the goals and worldview of each faction are taken seriously--though the endgame for each can optionally involve constructing the same mega-temple, for some reason. All the factions seem to be confronting a global Ice Age, something cribbed directly from Game of Thrones but perhaps not too objectionable for that. And from what I understand, this is enacted mechanically too, since winters last longer and come more frequently as the game progresses. It still feels a bit shallow, though, particularly since the way each faction responds to it is to construct a massive MacGuffin.
Maps in EL are procedurally generated for each game, and each faction starts in the same situation: wandering the wilderness, about to found a new Empire. This is standard for the genre (Jon Shafer’s At The Gates offers a noteworthy exception), but not inevitable or perhaps even desirable. Aside from the generic ancient ruins, there is no built history in the landscape. The factions have backstories, but not deeply ingrained, historical relationships with each other. The world is dying of magical climate change, but in a sense it is always brand new. Creating particular maps deeply inhabited by the factions, detailing the landscapes they were linked to and the conflicts and alliances they had with other factions, could really enrich the experience, playing up the vaunted (but ultimately shallow) asymmetries between faction playstyles.
Overall, Endless Legend looked a lot more appealing than it really is. The superficial, easy conditions are met, but the systems are shallow and don’t provide the sort of political “gameplay” I’m interested in. The lore is abundant but mediocre, handicapped by its ahistoricity and the limitations of the resource accumulation loop. It makes a poor playground for exploring any historical forces in a meaningful way. It’s also unhealthily effective at compelling long play sessions without providing much entertainment or stimulating choices in the meantime. :<
Verdict: Not the systems-eye-view Thrones-like it kind of looks like it might be.