Last week I wrote about Sanctum
2 roughly a day before something amazing, something momentous, something mellifluous,
happened. I wrote about Sanctum before I
played it with other people.
A refresher: Sanctum 2
is, in and of itself, a perfectly enjoyable "in the thick of it"
style tower defense game where players can, if they so choose, climb right into
the middle of combat and throw their weight around, or snipe from afar, or leap
back and forth. Whatever you choose, Sanctum requires tower construction on
some level: its maps are mostly wide open spaces, and when they're not they
present cute little natural chokes just begging to be cut off by a well placed
tower base (read as "wall").
All of this tower building business is complicated by limited resources,
a very limited number of inventory slots (ONLY FOUR KINDS OF TOWERS?!), power-ups
that can be selected, multiple "classes" and shuffling secondary
weapons. Oh, and levels that iteratively
alter the game's mechanics in a way that makes it harder and harder for a lone
player to manage until, finally, at the end of things, you reach levels where
you're asked to defend multiple approaches leading to a single node-entity with
extremely limited resources, and it becomes readily apparent that Sanctum 2, especially at its highest
levels, it meant to be a game played with friends.
So how does Sanctum 2
manage that relationship? It can't just
throw people into the mix and throw out more baddies - that would make the game
almost unplayable as it scales up, and fundamentally shift the mechanics of the
towers in a way that eliminates the usefulness of such wonderful bits of design
as "The Violator." Likewise,
it can't just let four super tough space-bros/ladies play through waves
together - that would make the game way, way too easy, a la Iron Brigade. Sanctum's solution is ingenious.
Players don't share resources. The first player to join a
game receives all of the tower bases for the team, and gets to throw them
around. Then each player starts with the
normal amount of starting resources. At
the end of each round, each player receives a share of resources, including
tower bases and credits, so they can build new stuff. They can spread them around however they
like, and if they really cock it up other players can pull up their buildings
and repurpose the materials therein. It
makes for a potentially passive-aggressive play system, but the end result is
that there are a shitload of towers in the world, and that everyone gets to
build something somewhere. Towers, in
general, aren't actually anywhere near as tough as a single player, however; in
fact, in most of my single player games, I'm doing more damage than all my
towers combined, and I'm getting more kills.
I'm kind of a big deal in single player.
Less so in multiplayer games. In multiplayer games, damage scales to the
overall player count. That assault rifle
that was doing 2100 damage per crit in single player won't be breaking 800 when
two of your buddies are in game with you.
I couldn't tell if you towers undergo a similar tune-down, or if enemies
just have higher damage thresholds; that's kind of an academic debate, in my
mind. The point is that more people
build more stuff and do less damage per person. It's a brilliant stroke of
design, one that simultaneously forces cooperation to occur while also
alleviating the pressure on individual players.
It's a strange mechanic, one that increases the importance of
communicating and cooperating without decreasing the necessity of individual
participation (particularly when tower resistant enemies or enemies who require
a weak-spot tickling appear) in each round.
It also changes the resource bottleneck of the game. In the single player modes, I often find
myself running out of money to build towers, but I've often got plenty of tower
bases, more than I know what to do with.
In multiplayer play, it's quite the opposite: I was discussing, then
arguing, with friends about how best to channel enemies through our
base-system, rationing out tower bases and carefully trying to complete walls
that seemed to be creeping up at a snail's pace compared to how they pop up in
single player. But the towers! There hasn't been a map, aside from perhaps
the first one after the tutorial, where we didn't max out our tower
supply. Likewise, most of the games that
we played after maxing out our tower supply ended with us standing next to a
massive array of maxed out towers that were, in turn, just eating up our money
as we put our towers into "overcharge" mode.
It was a bit odd, but the effect was pleasant: the kinetic
rush of smacking down enemies in the nitty gritty, popping their corpses and
chaining explosions with other enemies in turn, transformed into a more passive
rush of creation: rather than watching lumes blow up, I was watching towers
grow up, then grow up way past where I thought they could ever be. I felt like a proud new dad who was watching
his weird kids become adults. I also
felt like my friends, who were both getting their feet wet in the game and
demonstrating dramatically different learning curves, paces and interest foci,
were never lost by what was going on, even though the mechanics they were being
asked to consider were expanding rapidly.
There was enough to do, enough to play around with, and enough of a
safety net to account for mistakes without completely removing the stakes
behind play: players can die, they can fuck up, the node can get smacked, but
the structures can bounce back.
The end result is a series of game mechanics that
simultaneously exist as a framework for fun, individual exploratory play and
involved, collaborative, cooperative play.
There aren't many co-op games that manage the latter: Left4Dead, obviously, is a great one, Dawn of War II's Last Stand system is
another. Call of Duty's Zombie minigame does it to some extent, but it does
so, partially, by making the penalty for minor fuck-ups cataclysmic. That's where Sanctum 2 differs from other co-op experiences: there's no sense of
pressure, no vector of blame directed at the weaker players. If you fuck up in Sanctum 2, it's a deeply personal experience. You miss an important shot, you biff a dodge
and get smacked by a Walker Warrior.
Your punishment, your shame, is all internal. Your buddies don't hear about you dying, they
just keep fighting, keep working through it.
In Left4Dead, you'll be
shouted down for "fucking up the mission" and in Last Stand you'd be
excoriated for breaking the survival multiplier, but in Sanctum, you're just
moving out of the fight briefly, watching your friends struggle without
you. There's nothing aggressive about
it, nothing that actually enforces any kind of external penalty for
errors. Sanctum gets it: it knows you know what you did, and it's going to
let you sit and think about it, but it's not going to lose its shit. It thinks you're smart enough to feel bad on
your own.
The implications of Sanctum
2's co-op mechanics don't readily manifest as something that can be
transposed to other game systems, unfortunately. There's something about the specific
risk-reward of both tower defense games and Sanctum's
particular approach to the genre that strikes me as difficult to
translate. Something about the frenetic
pace, the parsimonious resources and the long, idling set-up periods all coming
together make Sanctum 2 very, very
singular. Even Orcs Must Die 2, which has a similar notion of pacing and
development to it, lacks Sanctum's
oomph (not to mention its beyond-two-player cooperative mechanics). Will Sanctum
2 generate a new era of cooperative games that consider learning curves,
learning systems, and multiple threads of progression in their generation of
mechanics? Will Sanctum 2 lead to the development of more co-op games where casual
and obsessive players can stand side by side, fight off round after round of
critters and then high five at the end?
Time will tell, but I'd certainly like to see a tower
defense renaissance or a co-op renaissance develop around this undervalued gem
of a game.
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