FTL Analysis: Intro

 

FTL: Faster Than Light is a game I'm not sure how to summarize. This is less to do with the unusualness of its raw gameplay -I could readily describe it as 'Star Trek: Star Fleet Command meets Space Trucker gameplay to produce an actual goal for the Space Trucker framework' and not even necessarily need to explicitly refer to it deliberately utilizing roguelike elements- and more to do with my very mixed feelings on it as a game.

In a lot of ways, I like the game. There's a solid core idea there that could've been amazing, and even with the flaws the game is burdened with it's still possible to enjoy a run. Its art is simple and pleasing. Its music is consistently very good. Its exact gameplay focus is, if not unique, certainly not anything I've seen another game try to focus on -even games clearly inspired by FTL change the conceptual focus to arrive at something fundamentally different. Crying Suns is a very clear example, very obviously inspired by FTL, but where FTL's combat has you managing your crew fighting fires, repairing damage, running from danger zones in their ship, etc, while entirely cutting out the concept of tactical maneuvering, Crying Suns instead has you playing a capital ship that does most of its work with fighter craft maneuvering in the field that you control in an RTS way, while your ship provides limited fire support from shipboard guns, with the inside of your ship represented only very abstractly.

In a lot of other ways, I'm frustrated enormously by the game. The game falls into a classic trap of being a Player Vs Enemy design that's conceptually 'your foes are the same as you' but then raw mechanics have the AI functionally ignore many concerns in a way that causes many tools to be much less useful for the player than for the enemy. By a similar token, the game doesn't adequately account for how different consequences are for the player than for their enemies, often seeming to not even try to do so. Also by a similar token, the AI quietly cheats on a number of topics, such that an intuitive grasp of the game will lead one to believe depth exists where it actually doesn't because a strategy that seems like it ought to work on the AI simply doesn't. This is all made worse by the game being extremely opaque on a number of topics; it's easy to spend quite a while suffering under the illusion that the AI actually is playing by the same rules as you, because key information is hidden such that things like the AI cheating isn't obvious at a glance.

Perhaps most frustrating is how the game's reality falls far, far short of its potential. The game has a wide variety of tools that theoretically provide a lot of room for variety and depth, but then it hamstrings this potential with very bizarre decisions that leave many of these tools in various forms of 'you shouldn't use this if you can avoid it'. There's 26 different player ships to try, but there's a bizarrely large amount of repetition in there while really obvious niches go unfulfilled for no clear reason. (And many of the ships are, to be blunt, essentially unviable) The game wants the player to avoid picking fights they can't win as an important design conceit, and then very carefully ensures that the player has essentially no ability to gather the information necessary for such decisions, among other examples of the game directly undermining its clear design intent.

I can so clearly see how FTL could have been a truly great game, and it makes it so much more painful that it... isn't.

Nonetheless, there's enough worth discussing to justify this series -especially since one of the game's flaws is being very opaque on certain topics that really should've been made clear. Gives me something useful to do for people interested in the game themselves.

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Next time, we get to the first proper post of this analysis series, getting into FTL's weapons with the obvious starting point: lasers.

See you then.