I love Tower Defense games (perhaps too much). I love miniaturized strategy games. Thronefall, which is an absolutely expertly crafted and executed game, should be catnip for me.
Instead it mostly gave me bad anxiety and I don’t think I’ll play it again. That’s weird. Why’s that!
Before I say any more, you should know that none of this is a slight on Thronefall. It’s got overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam for a reason. I booted it up and started exploring and immediately understood why: it’s charming as heck, controls super smoothly, has you make interesting* choices right out the gate, and is clearly built to be played and replayed.
Quick aside: Interesting* Choices
What’s an interesting choice, you might ask, and if you’re a game designer you might have a hundred rebuttals and clarifications on the infamous Sid Meier quote ready already. For the purposes of this thought, I think of an interesting choice as an element that satisfies all of the following:
- Not too many options. If there’s a hundred things to choose from, you’ll get overwhelmed and won’t be able to keep them in mind. There’s a reason 3 is a magical number in games.
- There should be clear changes in state resulting from the choice (for the purposes of this framing, I’m not thinking of aesthetic choices as meaningful)
- The player should be able to form a prediction in their mind (if I choose this option, XYZ will happen)
- The player should be able to falsify said prediction in a reasonable timeframe (that means attributability but also resolution should be clear)
- The player should be able to learn from their mistakes and make better choices next time a similar situation arises.
That last one’s particularly important. I’m going to say that a choice that occurs one time in a game cannot be meaningful, and I’m sure there’s a bunch of counterexamples I’m not thinking about, but I’m going to say it anyway.
Anyway.
At the risk of falling into my 4X rant, interesting choices are one of the main reasons that the endgame falls apart in Civilization games. There’s too many of them (what will you build in any one of your 27 cities? How will you move your 146 units?), their outcomes don’t really matter (most of Civ is building systems of compound interest; by definition, the closer you are to the end of the game, the less those systems matter), and in the wash of everything else that’s going on in the endgame it’s very hard to say if your choice to build yet another nuke in your capital over, say, an earlier research lab in one of your newish cities really made any difference at all.
End of aside.
I could pick at that asterisk and try to figure out why the choices didn’t really seem that interesting to me. I could say that the actual town building part just didn’t appeal to me. Those are both related to predictability: I couldn’t tell what context my decisions would live in. What’s coming in the next wave? Is it a gradual escalation of threat or a sudden jump? Are there new enemy types that require new approaches? (Spoiler: there’s an enemy type that just ignores all your units and goes straight for your buildings, and that’s caught me off guard for sure) But I don’t think those speak to my core problem with the game.
Sure, not knowing what’s going to happen next and being asked to make questions along the central axis of invest into the future vs build power in the now wasn’t great, but as I said the game was made to be replayed. I’ve also played so many similar games that I came with a bunch of preconceived notions, such as “threat rises slowly and steadily” (lol no), “each wave is at least as powerful as the last” (there seem to be literal nothing waves in the middle of maps sometimes?), and “I should probably try to evenly spread my efforts between income and defense until the end is in sight, at which point I dump everything into power now.” I’m sure these apply to some degree, but they often steered me hilariously wrong.
But that’s not the point.
I think the primary point here is that my enjoyment playing tower defense games comes from enjoying a certain type of friction that this game isn’t interested in. Essentially, I enjoy tower defense games most when the partial success outcomes of overcoming the central friction is “how close to my protected area did the enemy come”, and not “how many enemies got through”. That seems weirdly specific and arcane, but I have a few theories why I Am Like This.
At the core of tower defense games that allow partial failure is an odd snowballing problem: in the traditional tower defense game, you make income mostly based on the enemies you killed. When an enemy goes through and hurts your core or whatever resource pool you’re defending, not only do you lose health, thus moving you closer to total defeat, but you also tend to lose potential income. You didn’t kill that baddie, so you don’t get the gold they would have dropped.
So while the aesthetics of the game present one friction (try not to lose all hearts! You’ll lose some!) the way I play these games, there’s a whole other friction (how close did you come to taking any damage? Did you take damage? You’re probably fucked.)
That sounds way less nuanced and fun than the game the actual devs made, huh? Yeah. That happens. Unfortunately, once you release a game it no longer belongs to you, and how people play it isn’t up to you.
I also suspect that another big factor comes into play re: my enjoyment for Tower Defense games, and it’s one of those ineffable feelings that we Germans have a perfect word for: Wuselfaktor. I guess it translates roughly to “the factor of small things moving around and being busy”. To put it another way: I really enjoy watching the creeps make their way through the labyrinth while my towers blast away at them. No decisions to make, no execution to master, just sit back and watch the machine you build work.
So those are the two main reasons I think Thronefall plain doesn’t work for me: its core friction is “how much of your kingdom do you lose in a given night” and even though the penalty for losing income buildings seems low (you just don’t have them the next round, then they come back automatically the round after), it pings the part in my brain that doesn’t ever want to lose income or health in a tower defense because it senses the snowball effect of lose now so you lose more. Secondly, Thronefall’s a really active game. You’re constantly moving your ruler around to fight monsters directly and there’s an awkward faux RTS system where your ruler can pick up summoned units and deposit them where needed. The tensions here are brilliantly designed (to annoy me): your movement speed isn’t great, being away from the front is awful because you lose what is potentially your primary source of DPS against the enemy, and units move awkwardly and slowly, with no clear communication of what they will do if they encounter an enemy while you’re repositioning them: do they engage? Ignore? Engage until you pull them too far away?
Fun may be subjective?
Not to blow your mind or anything, but it seems like different people might enjoy different things? I can appreciate how clean and efficient the design of Thronefall is and it’s absolutely no surprise to me that it has the fanbase it does, but every design decision manages to find the optimal way to turn me off the game. And that’s fine! There’s too many games as is!
This does suggest to me that I’m going to need to build a tower defense game myself eventually and try out some of these theories. But that sounds like work.