The Tactics of Social Simulators

At the end of a battle we all just want to crack a beer with our bros and smooch a hot person.

What’s the right way to build a social simulation? For a long time, Bioware, had fairly limited, but more often than not, highly polished interactions with companions. It’s why people remember Garrus so fondly, despite the fact that he isn’t much of a conversationalist by the halfway point of the first Mass Effect. In Mass Effect 2 has little input when approached for a shockingly long time besides his iconic line about calibrations. Bioware rarely deploys repeatable activities too. If companions run out of material, so be it. There are of course instances, like Dragon Age 2, where the focus is so heavily on the main crew that even within a cruel 17 month development timeline, Hawke’s little band of misfits vibrantly interact with each other’s lives to a surprising degree. Still, there is a limit to how much you can go visit Varric at the Hanged Man, or pop-in on that mopey pretty boy elf in his mansion of ghouls. Even when Merrill moved in with my Hawke, it’s not as if I saw a ton of their domestic life.

This isn’t the only way of doing a social-sim of course. Look at Tokimeki Memorial’s systemically driven high school life, Persona’s highly regimented schedule, or The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa’s aimlessness. Or… Marvel’s Midnight Sun’s maximalism.

Prior to picking playing I heard folks say this is Firaxis’ tactics meets a smidge of Bioware relationship management. I was lied to. There is a lot of hanging around with the crew. Sitting at the bar, training together, celebrating birthdays, joining clubs, chatting about trauma, playing video games, lounging by the pool, choosing outfits, bickering roommates, group texts, and more. So much more that there’s hardly any time to do all those tactical battles and save the world. Is this not just Firaxis listening to my desires for a big AAA game that fully inverts the earlier days of Bioware where social-sim was the spice sprinkled on top of the save the world steak?

By the time that I put 35 hours into Midnight Suns, ⅓ had been spent on bashing baddies. For the developers of the “recent” XCOM titles, that is surprisingly low. I can not overstate just how much social-sim there truly is. For the first 15 or so hours I felt like I was running into constant tutorial pop-ups about some new way to hang out with Peter Parker or Nico Minoru. Hell, 35 hours in I’d done only one of the “invite companions to a special location” events. Each place can only be visited once and each companion can only be taken once. That’s a lot of pressure. Ya gotta make sure each time is special.

This isn’t to say every social interaction is chock-full of compelling dialogue or meaty characterization. It’s formulaic. The realities of game design at this scale and budget demand clever shortcuts. The favor quests have no voice acting for example. Hangouts follow the same three act structure every time. It’s all very mechanical. They are all more ways to boost friendship levels, which leads to combat bonuses. Even so, little bits of flavor do come through. This isn’t me being all that critical. It’s the trade-off. It’s what you do in this style of game unless you’ve somehow got the best, most forgiving publisher in the world who’s willing to drown your development team in all the money, time, and resources you need to make elaborate and truly bespoke material. The industry has rarely created such situations even before it was in the midst of a horrendous crash. To me this is no different than the conversations around voice or non-voiced protagonists or opening up companion romances so that everyone is essentially pan vs keeping them defined and limited. Do what works for your game and its design realities. For Midnight Suns, the buffet of material is the point. It’s the wow factor and I don’t really mind how visible the seams are.

The comparison many, myself included, have reached for is Bioware, but even in their most chatty and chillout games, there is still a whole lot of combat and world exploration. The stuff the gamers show up for, all that capital G “Gameplay” ™. In truth, Midnight Suns also has plenty in common with the aforementioned Tokimemo, or especially, Sakura Wars.

Sakura Wars, the 1996 Sega Saturn game, from Red Entertainment is an homage to the anime of its era. It’s mecha with a dash of magical girls. Its dedication to the bit is fully committed to. The narrative is broken up into “episodes.” Save screens appear throughout as commercial bumpers, a relic of a bygone era of television. The usage of bombastic musical themes play right on time with the hero or villain’s arrival in TV anime style. Hell, a sizable portion of the on screen happenings are drawn by Production I.G., a powerhouse of 90’s and early 2000’s anime. The pacing of storytelling is anime. The day begins mundane for the characters as they hang around their headquarters. It’s an all female theater group known as the Flower Division who are secretly part of the Japanese military, which itself is a incredibly unique setup. All the while the plans of the villain of the week bubble in the background, while interpersonal drama and exaggerated physical comedy play out. In the last few minutes the bad guys strike and it’s up to the heroes to save the day. That’s where the tactics come in. Episodes often end as the day winds down. The nightscape of Tokyo comforting the heroes who just fought a hard won battle.

Midnight Suns also has a daily structure to it, though more defined, considering some Sakura Wars episodes can span multiple days. You, as Hunter, bum around the hideout of the Midnight Suns, The Abbey. Interpersonal happenings happen, and then eventually it’s time to pick a mission and head out to fight evil doers. Naturally, the heroes save the day, returning home to socialize and rest their weary bodies. Rinse and repeat at a pace replicated like episodic television.

Sakura Wars is of course a dating-sim on top of its broader visual novel trappings and tactical combat. By no means am I the first to call the chat-em-up parts of a Bioware game to be a visual novel but it’s hard to deny. Depending on who the players chooses to smooth talk, different scenes and narrative outcomes play out. The shared DNA is obvious, but a VN like Sakura Wars is more structured in what you’re going to see at any given moment. One episode is about the new arrival of a girl who loves martial arts. Another dives into the tragic backstory of the most senior member of the Flower Division and her time spent in the Russian military. Then Resident Evil happen??? This structure doesn’t hold true across social-sims as you look at games such as the aforementioned Tokimemo that let the player schedule their own dates and choose activities to focus on each week.

If Midnight Suns is filled with scenes where you can see the assets swapped around, the first Tokimemo leans even further in that direction and the hard calculus of its numbers based dating. It’s a mechanics heavy game and the systems driving the romance are much more clear than something like Sakura Wars or Mass Effect. Midnight Suns finds a middle ground between these poles. The material benefits of spending time with and befriending any of your companions is spelled out, but you’re still getting new, emotionally driven dialogue each time.

I can’t help but speculate what modern western games with social-sim aspects can learn from the visual novel genre. Especially as cost of development skyrockets, funding opportunities become more scarce, and jobs less secure. Is there room in the mainstream sections of western developed games for tighter design visions that visual novels provide? What if Bioware had decided to make a lavish dating-sim back in its golden era? Could a team like Larian with all of its massive financial success and player goodwill pull something similar off? We’ve seen the rise of the western / Anglo developed visual novel and adjacent titles in the last decade. Some of them even come from folks who used to work at the AAA level. The Banner Saga, Stray Gods, and Eternal Strands are recent examples, all with key leadership coming out of Bioware. Of course Japanese titles with heavy visual novel aspects have also made in-roads across all parts of the gaming world. Persona, Fire Emblem, and modestly successful series like AI: The Somnium Files or Danganronpa.

There’s something about the tactics genre that balances so well with the social-sims. I think about Fire Emblem and Valkyria Chronicles here too. The methodical combat is of course a spike in intensity compared to wandering the halls of the Abbey or the Flower Division’s theater. Still, these seemingly disparete sections meld together in my mind. Maybe it’s the breathing room afforded by the slower pace that allows for both ample conversation between companions without having to jump to a cutscene or worry they’re going to get cut off if they enter a new room. Maybe its the affordance towards headcanon conversations too. In the heat of Mass Effect, the scripting demands your focus. The flashy events and dire circumstances driving the player and companions through the moment dominate player attention and imagination. Maybe it’s the fact that I play games in a languid manner. Taking my sweet time to do anything and everything at all, and so the transition from hanging around the Abbey to duking it out with Hydra in a card-based tussle, my mind is never forced to truly shift modes. Melding seamlessly between the strategic mech punches and sultry smooching.