Kenshi
☞ Like many sandbox games, Kenshi pulls in people who spend a lot of time thinking about how the world should work. Half are decent; the other half are fascists. So if you look into it, maybe avoid any comments sections you come across.
This video by Rosencreutz (a very good video essayist if you're a compulsive map-painter) made me think about Kenshi. It isn't hard to make me think about Kenshi. Steam says I've spent 388 (and a half) of my finite life hours on Kenshi. Contrary to the topic of the video, Kenshi doesn't have vampires in it (unless...), but thinking about vampires in games also means dealing with the fantasy adventurer as a game conceit:
[Re: VTM: Bloodlines] You are told ghosts are real, and it's something you blow off. Okay sure, there are ghosts in Skyrim too, and you can stab them through the chest. And then you experience the ghosts, and it's a threat you can't just badass your way through.
A big part of VTM is that there are things bigger than you. And those things aren't even monsters or individuals, they're organizations, complex webs.
Speaking of Skyrim ghosts etc.: as much as I think some of the criticism of Fallout 3 results from it being a popular target, I have to admit that it and every other Bethesda RPG that's not pre-modern high fantasy get weird in their refusal to deviate from the Elder Scrolls template. You're driving a sword and sorcery adventurer through the post-apocalypse or through space, and the demands of that structure impose limits on these stories that their settings otherwise don't seem to imply. Ranged Touch talked about this too.
Kenshi is one of those games made by enthusiasts of an, if not simpler, certainly earlier milieu partly as a reaction against this tendency. As the Steam page says,
You are not the chosen one. You're not great and powerful. You don't have more 'hitpoints' than everyone else. You are not the center of the universe, and you are not special. Unless you work for it.
You may be tempted to dismiss this as edgy posturing. I'd also be tempted to do that. Referring to HP with scare quotes is certainly a choice considering that Kenshi gives every character eight discrete HP bars, several of which you can improve in various ways until you have more than almost everyone else. It's fine given that a computer game is fundamentally a bunch of math and I don't care about suspension of disbelief anyway, but the naked artifice of "'hitpoints'" has not been overcome here.
Kenshi does succeed at positioning the player character as something other than the lone hero, it's just that it doesn't do this through sheer difficulty. The early difficulty gate of Kenshi, like that of Dwarf Fortress, is easily kicked open once you know the game. The way Kenshi overcomes the hero problem is by making your characters live in a society, and it achieves this in a few ways:
- You don't play a character; you play a crew. It's true that "you are not the chosen one" in that you are not, strictly speaking, one. Even D&D-indebted party-based RPGs often designate a main character, and losing this character is a hard failure state. Kenshi asks you to create one or more characters, but unless you fully run out of party members, the game continues in their absence. The difficulty, such as it is, isn't about puzzle-solving or manual dexterity, it's a set of incentives pushing you to build a community--superior numbers help in a fight beyond what any individual's stats might suggest, and a bigger party makes it much easier to both prepare for and escape from bad situations. You can eventually get a lot done with a solo character, but you benefit more per unit of time invested from assembling and training a squad. And while some of this could apply to any given hard RPG, your unforgiving dungeon crawlers and so on, a "party" in Kenshi is potentially two dozen or more characters filling a variety of combat and non-combat roles. You're the badass adventurers and the village they come home to.
- The world is populated by other crews. The most enduring threats aren't planet-eating godmonsters, they're the empire of libertarian samurai cosplayers and the genocidal white guy theocracy. These two factions police enormous territories and can basically always overwhelm you with superior resources when fights don't happen on your terms. The few major, world-altering strategic decisions in any Kenshi run include whether and when to go to war with these groups. They're strong allies if you can power-RP your way into stomaching their ideologies, but they're positioned as nuisances if not outright enemies for most newly-generated characters (they'll attack you for arbitrary reasons and are the two big factions that do slavery), and it's generally more fun to treat taking out their cities as a progress goal. Either way, though, your interactions with them usually aren't interactions between your one character and a boss-level NPC waiting in an empty room, they're interactions between organizations.
- Your crew benefits from being part of the world. Basebuilding in Kenshi is very flexible, and you may be tempted to rush out into the desert and set up your weird little compound as soon as you can afford the materials for it. In most parts of the map, this is a mistake--at best you'll be chased away every few days by bandits or various and diverse ninjas. Until the mid to late game, you're better served by setting up in or near a town and making use of its economy and its guards. You'll have an easier time in the wilderness once you've made some friends who can send squads to defend you.
The point being, I guess, that this is one way an RPG can decenter the hero mechanically without letting the horror convention of a disempowered player controlling a vulnerable protagonist dictate the whole experience. Kenshi has limitations--absent much in the way of gamified conversation, your main mode of interacting with its world is violence. But I also think there's something to take away here re: how to convey ideas through systems rather than by overburdening NPC dialogue with exposition and/or forcing the player to build a charisma-based character. Maybe, instead of NPCs talking about supply lines with complete strangers apropos of nothing, supply lines are simply present in the world, and interacting with a trade caravan impacts the material wealth of the people along its route.