Cortex Command

A pretty bad game, honestly. In a troubled state of development since at least 2006 or so, it’s not hard to see where it messed up. The surprisingly-buff code king Data built up an incredibly granular 2D engine, capable of satisfying any tech fetishist’s wildest, wettest dreams. Shots would leave actual indents in walls - a determined robot could tunnel from base to base with little more than an assault rifle and a few hours of peace. Limbs can be shot off with the unit hobbling or reacting appropriately - everything gibs magnificently into big piles of squishy rubble.

Of course, when it came time to make the game for this princely engine, what resulted was a strange action-strategy thing that worked on no levels and offended on every level. You couldn’t effectively control your non-active units, you couldn’t effectively control your active unit, base building was tactically facile and tedious to boot. The game was best played as a lone ranger, a one man army up against hordes of AI units. Free to enjoy the gibs and the almost pornographic physicalisation of everything.

And yet, despite this, people came to play in droves. These were the early days of early access, before anyone had been properly let down just yet, so the constant promise to finally make the game good was forever just around the corner, lurking potentially in every new build. Modders started to emerge, coming to add hundreds of custom units, weapons and tech to the game. A fairly flexible structure for the engine, and the game underneath it, meant you could load up the game with as many different custom units as you saw fit (generally accompanied by many hours of toil trying to fix the resulting crashes).

What was interesting here was the simplicity of how it all worked. Mods were flat data files - no custom code could be used (not for a long while anyway), no breaking outside of the systems that governed the game could be permitted. A standard human was little more than two thighs, two shins, two feet, two forearms, two upper arms, a torso and a head. Add armour plating and helmets to taste, specify his walk cycle and how much he costs. No code required. No code permitted.

Tech Wars

This was oddly self-balancing, in a sense. Every unit and every weapon was subject to the cold realities of the physics engine. Of course, it was always possible to have a grenade that shoots out a million tiny explosions and huge rustic chunks of shrapnel (which costs -10000 gold on top of that), but there was a surprising amount of intuitive nuance in modding if you were willing to reel it in a little bit :

A heavy unit is much less susceptible to impulse-based weaponry, but tends to comically sink into the dirt with every step.

Bullets with a low “sharpness” value will bounce harmlessly off enemy armour, but be incredibly damaging to more organic areas. Too high a sharpness value and the bullet will pass cleanly through enemies, doing less damage than you’d be hoping for.

Heavy bullets have a better chance of leaving a dent in armour (bringing the armour plate one increment closer to its “gib limit”, eventually shattering it to pieces and leaving your foe exposed)… …but are all the more susceptible to gravity.

Too high a muzzle velocity on your firearm and the bullet might just be going too fast for the collision detection to accurately handle.

Make bullets last too long before despawning and you run the risk of the shot wrapping completely around the (typically small) maps and plonking you right in the back of the head.

Recoil was calculated using the mass and velocity of the bullets fired. Newton’s third in glorious motion. A naively overpowered shotgun that fires 100 heavy pellets at a time would typically fly from the user’s hands on firing, rip his arms off completely or send him flying backwards a few feet into the ground.

Even semi-realistic ballistics data could be plugged into the system, forever settling debates like .45 versus 9mm as they apply to clone-based capitalist interplanetary conflict. Even more interesting were the strange clever hacks to bend the rules of the system - the right tweaking of values could get particles to deal negative damage, essentially acting as a portable medkit. But these tools had to penetrate the flesh to do so, creeping up towards that gib limit - overuse of these medkits would cause arms, legs and torsos to explode at random. Early “forcefield” systems would erode large holes in the ground over time. The act of modding the game started to become a richer game than the actual executable - Kerbal Space Program, but with a lot more ultraviolence.

And as more and more modders came along with their own unique brands of “factions” - cybernetic ninja, space nazis, some warhammer stuff, different approaches to these unique problems started to get matched against each other. A faction that relied on impulse-based weaponry - concussion grenades, heavy but soft projectiles, might easily blow most of the vanilla units away (quite literally), but instantly become useless when matched against big, heavy units. Those big, heavy units are as susceptible to the laws of gibbing as anyone else - an “acid launcher” that fires a fountain of extremely slow, heavy green projectiles with high sharpness would quickly eat through that fancy armour, provided you got in close.

What eventually happened, outside of the silly gimmick mods at least, was an arms race. A genuine, organic arms race, full of creativity, diversity and the type of “character flaws” generally reserved for edgy protagonists and Metal Gear REX.

Eventually, Lua scripting came to the mods. While this opened the way for more interesting tech, this richer system had none of the self-regulatory measures that the pure physics-based system had. Hits could be shrugged off with one line of code, lead effortlessly poured out with others. The modding stopped being a game, a fun bit of experimentation on how to effectively blow stuff up, and started being a craft. The much-vaunted v1.0 of the game eventually happened, with a big layer of confused metagame on a confused core game, and things generally dried up.

Loadout

Loadout is the hot new free shooter that everyone’s talking about. The bold revival of the arena shooter! F2P done right! I installed it and dicked around for an hour or so, never actually getting into a match due to some well-considered matchmaking. What I saw instead was harrowing.

The big draw here is that you build your own guns. Unleash your creative spirit, as dictated by a pay-to-win system (grind to win is pay to win, folks). How it works - you put a “spread barrel” on the bullet gun. Now you have a shotgun. Or you put a “light assault” barrel on it. Now you have an SMG. Everything else is a tweak of damage versus fire rate versus hipfire accuracy - you know, like you see in every other game since COD4. There is no creativity here - you can take one look at the weapon crafting and determine within 2 seconds what it is you want, now you get on that treadmill and grind for it, boy. Don’t forget to level up each individual part for 2% extra damage a pop, now! Aren’t you feeling engaged yet? Oh, forgot - you can have rocket launchers as well. Big, dumb rocket launchers that you can’t rocket jump with. Welcome to the utterly chewed-up and spit-out revival of the arena shooter.

There’s a dark autistic corner of my brain that gets utterly tickled at the thought of a really rich and interesting weapon creation system. I’ve been playing Armored Core games for as long as I can remember (not 5, it’s crap, haven’t played verdict day yet). Cortex Command, a deeply flawed and directionless game, somehow managed to do it right for a while by throwing just about everything to physics and trying to approximate real-world dynamics - at least, if you can edit a bunch of INI files.

The goal of a designer is to distill big, hairy, real world systems and draw interesting decisions and mechanics from the result. The goal of a designer is not just to constantly juggle sets of numbers against each other in the interests of fairness (and to keep people buying up those weapon parts), but to create and consider the systems that govern and enrich those numbers. Cortex Command might be quite a failure, but it’s an infinitely more interesting failure than Loadout will be a success.