u/StrategosRisk

Source: http://classic.battle.net/scc/OS/motm2001.shtml

It's a long story. AMA about it.

I’ve been playing Marathon, which has you explore and scavenge a mysteriously failed space colony as a posthuman mercenary “Runner” on behalf of shadowy corporate factions. Having not played live service games before, besides a ton of Survival mode in Tom Clancy’s The Division during the pandemic, I realized many sci-fi shooters have similar post-apocalyptic premises. ARC Raiders has your titular survivors evading the titular robots to gather resources on a post-disaster Earth. Outriders has the titular explorers fighting to save a doomed mission. Defiance has Ark Hunters search for alien salvage on a post-xenoformed Earth (for once, the arks are not from fleeing humans). In more mystical space fantasy, you’ve got the Guardians in Destiny and Freelancers in Anthem looting and shooting for the purpose of building a new civilization / figuring out what went wrong with the previous attempt. Even way back in Phantasy Star Online you play a Hunter, a merc trying to piece together why the first colony ark was lost and blah blah blah. Going beyond multiplayer online shooters, you’ve got vault hunters in Borderlands, vault dwellers in Fallout, and so forth.

None of this is really copying so much as convention. In the end, most adventure game stories end up more or less as D&D, so sci-fi games also dungeon crawl. You had a previously productive state of affairs that got torn up by alien monsters or internal sabotage or mysterious forces, and so you’re picking through the remnants. It’s a simple excuse to go adventure- not in completely untrammeled wilderness, but a frontier that was settled a little before it all went bad. Or in the ashes of a fallen civilization. Even sci-fi stories that don’t take place after the end of the world (or rather, after a Space Rome) have similar setups. Starfield (which to be fair, has barely a setting) makes you scout seemingly empty planets that pirates have already infested. Star Trek is about hopeful exploration yet has many an episode that visits a colony Where Something Went Wrong. Even the Mass Effect series had Andromeda, which has you colonizing a new galaxy… after being woke up after the first wave mysteriously failed, blah blah blah. See the Feral Historian’s video on Mass Effect: Andromeda. What else is there- Outer Worlds?

Why SMAC?

It’s fun to imagine the individual, personal story of someone living in a grand setting, especially as richly imagined as Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. The view from the ground level beneath the god’s eye view of 4X. That’s probably why a GURPS tabletop RPG supplement was written for it, after all. Command and Conquer: Renegade and the cancelled StarCraft: Ghost both tried to depict their sci-fi RTS settings from a commando on the street level. Coincidentally, around the release of SMAC there were many hybrid action-RTS games where you played a hero unit that could also command armies: Battlezone, Uprising, Battle Engine Aquila (see Jarboe Gaming’s recent retrospective), even the Dynasty Warriors series. I think it’d be neat to explore Chiron from the perspective of a doomed Scout, getting stuck in xenofungus and experiencing sanity effects as mindworms swarm you.

In praise of SMAC’s setting

Alpha Centauri is worth expanding upon because it is, to use a corporate buzzword, “t-shaped”, possessing both breadth and depth. In terms of the research tree it’s a veritable sci-fi kitchen sink. From Blade Runner replicants to Star Trek replicators and transporters to more near-world hard sci-fi tech, it’s got it all. (Its main oversights, imo: non-Ogre giant robot mechs and the dinosaur park that rival Civilization: Call to Power had). So the game basically mines the entire genre for ideas. Yet it does so with a distinct style, filtered through sci-fi influences even including a Frank Herbert novel that isn’t Dune. Well-written quotes and excellent voice acting aside, even its naming can be immersive: there’s something uniquely cold and dehumanizing about bio-robots called genejacks, or the recycling tanks. Its world-building is full of evocative sketches that border on the mystical: Gaian acolytes, an A.I. programmer/parent titled “wakener”, a torturer who is a Baron. (Or is that a personal name?) So there’s the depth.

I don’t want to glaze, as the young people say, SMAC too much. But it’s definitely up there as far as sci-fi video game writing goes. (Interestingly, its peer if not superior Homeworld is also deeply influenced by Dune - I guess Herbert really is the Tolkien of sci-fi, and to ape him is to elevate one’s game.) But I also think SMAC is t-shaped in that the original seven factions are both universal archetypes and timelessly iconic. They all take inspiration from real world civilizational values or principles. They are all led by memorable characters. In trying to come up with the basis of a future history, I’d say Firaxis really succeeded, certainly better than its spiritual successor did- they’ve created strong core concepts that are potentially extensible. Take a tiny tidbit from the novella-length fanfic “Joe” - a net beacon fire alarm is described, created by Morgan SafetyTech “over 150 years” ago. You can easily imagine Morgan Industries rolling out millions of Morgan subsidiaries after subsidiary for millennia. In terms of scope, SMAC aspires to be a mirror (darkly) to real history. So with all that scope in mind, why not imagine individual adventures and personal quests.

Fanfiction

A few of my contributions to the Racing the Darkness SMAC worldbuilding project by u/trenacker explore the unaffiliated, the independent, and the factionless who dwell in the cracks between Chiron’s kingdoms. Suffice to say in a setting that nearly doubles the amount of factions and adds in tech from Inception-style dream-spelunking to personal androids, there’s a whole bigger Planet to get lost in. So here’s some that fit what I’m going for.

Smacers: “Scroungers, Malcontents, Antisocialites, Criminals, Exiles, Rogues” - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl meets Destiny imagery to describe independents who abandoned the conventional “baser” urban life to live hardscrabble frontier lives. Survivalists who reject comfortable society and their home faction’s ideologies for a solidarity of the outcasts in scattered settlements and a semi-nomadic lifestyle. The lumpenproletariat of Planet, these vagabonds eke out a bare existence by selling maps of their free explorations, illegally logging former-planted forests, and most of all trading in alien artifacts. Some raid the factions, others trade with them. They’re a wildcard, but more like the city-states of Civilization than the barbarians.

Alien Artifact trade: Given how precious artifacts are in the game, occasionally changing the fate of entire faction’s games, doubtless there would be a cottage industry of treasure hunters, field researchers, illegal dealers, counterfeiters, smugglers, and so forth. Also, continuing the STALKER analogy.

Muckers: The actual Civ-style barbarians. Two flavors of mindless madmen demented by Planet’s residual psi effects upon fragile, post-traumatized, human psyches. Ruiners are unwary campers, usually smacers, who sleep over at monolith sites or other alien ruins and are driven bonkers by eldritch cosmic forces. Or those kidnapped by the same and then indoctrinated into their gibbering folds. So pretty much Monolith from STALKER. In contrast, Wreckers are those who dwell in the ruins of Unity, here strewn across the land instead of at one crash zone, some even in sealed compartments that detached during Planetfall and landed safely. But the inhabitants refused to step foot outside, remaining in their prisons, out of the delusion that the planet does not want them there, nor any human. Both types of Muckers are a grave danger to grave-robbers and salvage crews alike, and when they go amok, to nearby smacer communities or bases. Besides being barbarians or human mindworms, they also are equivalent to the NPC mobs guarding dungeons in just about any action video game.

Border Marchers: There’s a fantasy total conversion of Europa Universalis IV named Anbennar which takes place in a vast sprawling D&D-inspired world with a rich history. In it there’s an area that’s vaguely equivalent to the post-fall of Rome, the heart of a long-gone empire that is being reclaimed from an orcish invaders by bands and guilds of adventurers, who can go on to found entire nations. A bit like real-world conquistadors, but through the genre lens so they are not necessarily purely about subjugation nor even war; there’s many types of quests besides combat, after all. Anyway the SMAC equivalent here is state-sponsored independent missions for self-organized settlers pushing their faction’s borders ever further, bumping into rival powers’ own settlers. Typical frontier dynamics based on history ensue, from trade unauthorized by the metropole, to cross-border reiving, to these “marchers” setting up border baronies or “captaincies.” Deviant, even heretical, ideologies abound.

Base Jumpers: I haven’t yet written this section yet, but I like trenacker’s idea of Planet being littered with abandoned bases, the products of vendetta, mindworm incursions, probe sabotage maybe, or just plain disease and the other hazards of colonization. So there would be yet another class of adventurer-urban explorer who specializes in looting them, and those who prey upon this subculture. To bring it all back to Marathon, these freelancers traipse through the haunted remnants of the factions’ failed dreams, sifting through junk for priceless equipment and actionable datalinks that might allow their faction to survive the next mission year- or to get a fat energy payoff for contract fulfillment.

Civilization and its Fringes

The leading strategy game themed podcast Three Moves Ahead discussed in their review of Civilization: Beyond Earth: Rising Tide the deficiencies of that game’s empire-building, of how it’s artificially-kneecapped (around 43:00 mark). I love how the philosophical question of “what is the purpose of any city in Civilization anyway”, if not to secure strategic locations with which to extract resources from. Alpha Centauri is mentioned in the exchange, and even the idea that thematically future 4X (planet-based) games usually just don’t work, SMAC just manages to be an exception from an earlier time before the genre was set in stone. (“The setting might just run counter to the fun you can have” compared to historical expansion.) It’s a pretty interesting conversation about how Beyond Earth actively discourages big empires, but also how it’s building from Civ V’s precedence of doing the same (“a weirdly recession-era Civ” where you have to always make hard choices and can’t have it all). Troy Goodfellow concludes around 51:30 that in trying too hard to avoid infinite city sprawl, C:BE combines the three game design choices of 1) too much repetitive combat against aliens, 2) meek and non-aggressive AI sponsors, and 3) making it so that you can make do with only 4-5 cities, they accidentally made a game that is actively anti-expansion.

But before, at 49:52, Rob Zacny says that without the ability to build big empires, you end up having a lot of dead ground between civs, you don’t have those “strategic no-man’s lands” where expansion, tension, fun occurs with rival polities butting heads into each other trying to civilize the howling wastelands. It is in those ambiguous spaces and peripheries between factions, where I imagine these freelance scout types would dwell, quest, and kill in.

Anyway, go check out Marathon while it’s still online.

Or, perhaps, Kenshi.

A lot of mecha media really center on the machines as decisive game-changers and exceptional compared to other vehicles, even when they're going for a realistic and/or gritty vibe, everything from Mobile Suit Gundam to Battletech to Titanfall. (Ironically, I think Patlabor, at least based on what I've seen via the second movie that everyone loves by the Ghost in the Shell guy, is an exception to that rule since Labors really are treated like any mundane vehicle, and the opening sequence even has them getting ripped apart by insurgent MANPADs).

I chose Battlefield 2142 as a setting that showcases that because as installment in a military FPS series that really emphasizes combined arms warfare, the walkers are potent but no more important than any of the various tanks, hover-tanks, speeder buggy cars, or aircraft you can pilot. While they are one of the signature elements of the game, being on its marketing material, BF2142 walkers can be easily taken out with explosives in its soft underbelly, and far less important than say the flying aircraft carrier Titans in the game.

I think this portrayal of mechs happens most often in strategy games. Consider the Goliath of StarCraft: they're cool but they're far less powerful than the mighty Siege Tank. They're really an anti-air platform and for supporting Marine squadrons. I think giant robots also appear in Command and Conquer (both Tiberium Sun onwards and Red Alert 3), and they're but one of many war machines there. Well, maybe not the Shogun Executioner.

I'm not sure if Warhammer 40,000 counts- on one hand Dreadnoughts are just one of many things the Imperium brings to the battlefield, but on the other the Titans there are absolutely a decisive force. Ditto for Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander- both RTS series have perhaps the most vehicle types of any series mentioned in this post, but also I think there's some giant robot mega-boss type super-units? I don't know. I know the classic (proto-)RTS Herzog Zwei definitely doesn't count, because you lead your military from a mecha hero unit that you fly around yourself.

The AMPs from Avatar count because they're just barely militarized versions of the power-loaders from Aliens that James Cameron just imported from his other movie. The "Ape" and "Duck" Marauders from the Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles CGI-animated cartoon kind of look like them, and also fit what I'm going for.

This website was online for decades until Lycos shut down all of Tripod last week. I managed to find it while searching for stuff to preserve. So I'm mirroring it here. What a wealth of pictures, music, even video!