Grey Goo: Teaching

So I recently discovered that Grey Goo was being sold for 1.99$ on Amazon (And still is, as of this writing!) and snapped it up; Universe at War is one of my favorite RTSes ever, in spite of its flaws, and Grey Goo not only comes from the same studio but the website intrigued me, even as I had concerns. Playing through Grey Goo's campaigns got me thinking about a few different things, and I'm going to be doing posts about these things.

This particular post is about a major failing of the campaign. To be clear, I enjoyed playing the campaign, and look forward to playing through it again on higher difficulties once I have a computer that doesn't chug while trying to run the game on super-minimal graphical settings, but that doesn't mean the flaws aren't there.

The flaw is, of course, a lack of education.

Education?


Digression time: historical RTS campaigns served two primary purposes. The first and most obvious of these purposes was to tell a story, and this is usually what people focus on when they talk specifically about the quality of a campaign rather than the quality of the gameplay, which will often be framed more in terms of the multiplayer.

The second purpose, however, is to educate the player on various aspects of playing the game, ranging from the basics of how to interact with the game at all ("Here's how you select units. Here's how you tell them to attack enemies. Build a Refinery so you can gather resources. Here's how you build units and buildings.") all the way out to walking the player through more esoteric uses specific to individual units. Naval or aerial transports will be introduced in a mission where your ground units can't reach the enemy on foot, or where they can but the game has provided a poorly-defended back door into the enemy base; the former introduces you to the idea that transports can get units places they can't reach themselves, while the latter introduces you to the idea that such transports can be used to strike where the enemy's defenses are weak, even if your units can technically walk to that location on foot.

Grey Goo does have a system clearly intended to explicitly educate the player, whereby new units, buildings, and concepts cause an exclamation point to appear in the upper right of the UI, which when clicked upon will provide a basic explanation of the unit, building, or concept. Some of these explanations are even actually useful, such as the explanations on how to construct the Hand of Ruk and Alpha; both units have fairly finicky build requirements that are not made very clear by the game's UI, while the explanations not only provide a textual explanation but also show you what your setup should look like. As a concrete example, I actually didn't realize the Human faction could attach all four tech attachments to their Large Factory until I saw the explanation on how to build the Alpha, and more specifically its little video depicting building one of the Tech Attachments first and connecting the Large Factory to the power grid via that Tech Attachment.

However, the majority of these clickable explanations are basically useless. They provide an extremely vague, often one-line description of the unit's role ("Effective against armored units", for example), which generally tells you either nothing at all or only tells you something if you're already fairly grounded in RTS conventions and so know eg what a 'scout' actually does of use in an RTS. (And yes I know the 'encyclopedia' says more, but the majority of the text in it is narrative in nature, and often unhelpful even then: a lot of Goo units narrative description is 'it used to do X. Now it does Y. Its design basically hasn't changed')

Worse and more importantly, the actual mission construction ranges from 'not very educational' to 'deliberate self-sabotage'. A particularly egregious example is when you first get access to air units in the Beta portion of the campaign: the enemy base has serious anti-air defenses, and meanwhile there's a backdoor for ground forces to let you entirely bypass their even more serious anti-ground defenses. The 'lesson' this map design teaches is that air units are worthless and you shouldn't waste time and resources on them, when it should be set up so that air units are extremely helpful to securing victory. It's not even specifically a problem that the enemy base has strong AA, but rather that the game doesn't provide a ready and intuitive avenue for using your ground forces to clear that out, which would teach the basics of how weak air units are to AA and how effective they can be if you surgically remove the AA beforehand.

A more subtle issue, one that's a problem at the overall campaign level, was how in the Beta campaign you were pretty much always fending off constant waves of attackers, while in the Human campaign your base was generally left largely unmolested while your failure condition was something placed far outside your base. I didn't think too much of the Beta campaign doing its thing while going through it, as that's just stock RTS design, but once I was in the Human campaign it was just jarring: the Beta are extremely well-suited to defending locations far beyond the bounds of their basic base region, being able to build walls anywhere they can currently see and then mount units on the walls to create what amounts to turrets, while Humans are set up to be poor at defending afield but good at defending close to home, as they have powerful base defenses that don't consume pop cap but their base construction is bounded by the need to connect it to a power grid that hooks into their HQ building. So instead of their campaigns educating you on how the Beta are quite capable of sealing off and protecting Extractors far from their main base, or helping protect allies, while giving you a taste of how competent Human base design is a tough nut to crack in a direct assault but at more risk of being sieged in the actual sense of being cut off from outside resources... the campaigns train you to essentially ignore your base defenses when playing Humans and play very defensively as the Beta!

Even more broadly, if you took my strategy in the Human and Beta campaigns and translated it to skirmish play, it would boil down to 'spam tanks and to a much lesser extent artillery, and throw in an Epic unit at some point'. You get few opportunities to fight non-scout aircraft in the Human and Beta campaigns, rendering the dedicated AA units essentially irrelevant, and while the first Beta mission with aircraft is the most egregious when it comes to discouraging aircraft usage, none of the other missions does much to encourage messing around with aircraft, and subtle factors like limited space to build in often makes them questionable in their utility outright. Your own scout aircraft aren't very useful because most of the map is probably under AI control, and since the AI doesn't plan in a meaningful sense scouting them out isn't useful the way it is against human players. Etc. The overall result? I didn't see much point to building these various more specialized units, and indeed when I tried they basically always underperformed significantly, with no missions designed to let them shine.

This problem of education is striking to me, for reasons requiring a bit of a digression.

I referred to Universe at War earlier. As it happens, I was in the middle of a bit of a binge of playing Universe at War when I discovered that Grey Goo could be bought so cheap, and in this binge I had the thought that Universe at War really feels like it's not a complete game. It's handled sufficiently well that even though I'd played through the campaign four or so time before this particular binge the thought never crossed my mind, but each successive campaign has fewer story missions, fewer cinematics, less narrative of any sort, and overall more design problems of various sorts, most pertinently that the Novus campaign is the best at educating the player on how to use the faction and the Masari campaign is the worst at doing so. (Those being the first-not-counting-the-prelude and last campaigns, respectively) Even more blatant, out of the game's nine Hero units, only two are units the AI knows how to use in their entirety, and two others are units the AI will never build on its own and has no idea how to use if either of those Heroes are forced upon the AI! More subtly, there's a lot of design wonkiness I've thought about over the years that I'm not going to get into in this post that seems like the sort of thing that would normally have been ironed out in playtesting.

The point of this digression being: I'd just recently guessed that a big part of why Universe at War does such a poor job of educating the player is that the game isn't actually complete... and here's Grey Goo actually doing an even worse job than Universe at War did! Which is odd, because Grey Goo doesn't give me the 'not actually complete' vibe -I have suspicions of what drove some of its flaws I'll be getting into in other posts, but game was rushed does not appear to be one of them.

It's especially weird because Petroglyph Studios makes a point of defining itself in no small part as being founded by ex-Westwood Studios employees, and Westwood Studios are the people who pioneered the kind of education-through-mission-design I'm talking about!

To be entirely fair to Grey Goo, every RTS that has ever existed (Ignoring cases where the campaign is barely more than a series of skirmishes) has had issues with the campaign not really mapping properly to the multiplayer. There's really blatant stuff like having the player start every mission with fairly minimal forces and needing to take on much larger, already-established bases, while in actual multiplayer everybody starts out in roughly comparable conditions, and more subtle stuff like how Engineers get to show off all kinds of cool utility in the campaigns of Command & Conquer games that are unrealistic or impractical in multiplayer. You're not actually going to steal someone's Construction Yard, advance all the way down their faction's tech tree, and thus combine all the powers of GDI and Nod or whoever; if you have the time and resources to dump into this kind of silliness without being squashed by a human opponent, you already have everything you need to squash said human opponent with your own faction's technology alone; Engineers are useful in multiplayer, but not in the way C&C campaigns make them seem.

Still, it's puzzling to me that ex-Westwood Studio employees have seemingly gotten so much worse at using the campaign to educate the player.

(To be entirely fair, it seems to be a general trend that modern RTSes are either unaware of or deliberately dismissive of the art of teaching the player multiplayer principles via the campaign, such as how Dawn of War II's campaign is so radically different from its multiplayer that it's practically a different game)

Next time, I'm going to be talking about the plot -what I liked about it, what problems or wonky elements it has, and what thinks I'm just not sure what to think. There will be major spoilers for the story and setting, obviously, and I'll even be covering the DLC campaign.