FTL has an airtight premise. You are the commander of a federation starship. The depraved rebels will destroy the Federation unless you get there first, give your superiors the intelligence you've gathered, and successfully defend the Federation from the rebel flagship. You won't be strong enough to defeat the rebel flagship unless you upgrade your ship extensively during your journey to the Federation, but the rebels are in hot pursuit -- so you have limited time to spend in each star system. You want to make each leg of the journey last as long as possible, so that you can gather scrap, weapons, ammo, and systems for your ship. But you can't spend so long that the rebel fleet catches up, because while it's possible to escape the fleet, it's also costly.
In practice, FTL is a space exploration game where all roads lead to combat. Its rhythm is simple but compelling: when you arrive in a new system, you see a map of all the nodes available therein. For reasons that are presumably explained by the game's fiction, you can only make faster-than-light jumps to existing nodes within a system. Depending on your ship's upgrades, you generally have a pretty limited idea of what's waiting for you at any particular node, but it usually breaks down into three categories: shops, randomized events, and ship-to-ship combat. We'll tackle those in reverse order.
Combat in FTL is a tightly designed, thoroughly enjoyable little action puzzle. There are several categories of weapon, most notably lasers, beams, and missiles. Lasers are good at knocking out shields for a limited time, and, once the shields are down, they can do solid damage to a ship's hull. Beams are usually stopped or significantly weakened by shields, but they do tremendous damage to hulls if they can make it through (because they can hit several rooms in a ship at once). Missiles ignore shields and damage the hull directly, which makes them very powerful, but you have a limited supply, and you're almost certainly going to need them for the endgame, so you want to use as little as possible -- destroying a ship with nothing but missiles is usually far too costly to seriously consider.
So, in practice, your goal in any given encounter is to avoid damage while knocking out your opponent's weapons and shields (usually in that order) so that you can quickly finish the fight at the lowest expense possible. You mostly do this by charging up your weapons and then using them all at once, though missiles can hasten this process by crippling essential systems on the enemy ship. There are a number of fun complications having to do with management of your ship's energy (almost every system on the ship uses energy from a shared pool, and the game is designed to encourage you to work with as little energy as possible) and your crew. So, for instance, I usually begin a fight by turning off the life support system, which means that my crew is very slowly smothering throughout any given fight. I use that energy to pay for additional shields or weapons. Of course, if a fight goes on for too long, I have to turn life support back on in order to save my crew. I might also need to turn on the medical bay (always a bad sign) or provide extra power to engines so as to avoid an incoming missile.
As you grow more capable as a captain, you learn to turn off any system that isn't being used and switch it back on for exactly the amount of time you need it. One extremely useful strategy involves defense drones, which protect your ship from incoming missiles -- if there isn't a missile on the way, these drones are useless. So you learn to pause the game, switch them off, use that energy in shields or oxygen or whatever, then, when you see a missile launch, pause the game, switch the drone back on, let it shoot the missile, and then immediately turn the drone off again.
Meanwhile, your crew is needed to man the ship's various systems, (they provide bonuses to the performance of shields, weapons, etc.), but you also need them to do repairs, fight off boarding parties, and put out actual, literal fires. BUT BUT BUT, you have to be extremely careful with your crew, because they are fragile and difficult to replace. The many urgent demands on your limited resources, and the simple interface that allows you to make very granular decisions about how to allocate energy and crewmen, makes even the simplest fight truly tense and potentially ruinous.
Critics of the game have tended to argue that FTL is too difficult, which I think is basically right, but not nearly a precise enough description of the problem. The game's defenders talk past these critics by claiming that because FTL is basically a roguelike in space, players should expect it to be extremely difficult and, at times, almost impossible to win. For my part, I think that FTL's failings as a roguelike are actually the problem -- while the game attempts to achieve the exponential tension I described in my last post by allowing you to continually upgrade your ship, the rapidly approaching endgame scuttles this effect. And while FTL does trade in emergent narrative through randomization, its particular form of randomness is often clumsy and ill-considered -- and the stories it tell are always basically the same.
Consider the random events that often take place in nodes without combat. In a text box, the game describes a situation -- you detect one lifeform on an otherwise barren planet -- and allows you to risk your ship and crew by inserting yourself into the situation, or to (basically) bugger off. If you get involved, you might get a new crewman, a weapon, a ship system, or some scrap! But you might also be slapped with some hull damage (which you are desperate to avoid) or lose a member of your crew (even worse). And here is the thing: unless you have an upgrade or a crewmember that unlocks a special blue option, you have no idea what result your decision will have. And you can't know, either, because it's genuinely random. You can look up the probabilities online, and certainly some situations look worse from the outset than others, but ultimately it's luck of the draw. But you pretty much have to participate in these events if you want to do well in the endgame, because you need each jump to be as productive as possible in terms of scrap and equipment.
This mechanic is, in a word, irritating, and it betrays a misunderstanding of how the best roguelikes use randomness to create interesting gameplay scenarios and unexpected narratives. That is to say that while roguelikes often pressure you into submitting to risks with random outcomes, it's usually your fault when this happens. Explaining further requires a detour to explain one of the finer points of roguelike mechanics:
In a roguelike, monsters hemorrhage treasure. Some of the treasure is useless, some of it is actively harmful, some is best sold, and a small subset is actually useful to your character. At first glance, you have no idea which category any given item falls into. Take potions, for instance. At the beginning of each playthrough, a roguelike will randomly assign descriptors to each type of potion -- potions of healing might be assigned the color silver. Potions of poison might be assigned the color blue. Because your character is new to the dungeon, if he picks up a silver potion here and a blue potion there, he has no way of knowing which is which. He can either "use-ID" a potion -- that is, drink it and see what happens -- or he can find a scroll of identify and use that scroll to learn what the potion is. The latter method is always safer, so experienced dungeoneers in games like Angband will carry as many scrolls of identify as possible. However, sometimes you find yourself in a situation where using a potion without knowing what it does might be your only ticket out. It's that or you die. So you drink the potion, hoping for a salutary effect, and instead it blinds you. So now you're fighting an overpowered hydra AND you're blind. Whoops!
This system never feels unfair (at least to me) because it makes so much sense: running around in an evil labyrinth quaffing every mysterious liquid you find is clearly the path to ruin. And it's not as if drinking a potion is always going to have a random result: the identity of each potion is randomized, but it does indeed have an identity, and once you know what a silver potion does, you know what all silver potions do, forever. If you see an enemy using an item (a sword, for instance, or a wand) your character automatically makes a note of the outcome and remembers it for later use -- if you see an enemy switch from using one kind of weapon to another, for instance, then your character will know the first weapon wasn't cursed (and is therefore possible to put down once you've picked it up). If you see an enemy drink a potion of haste, then you'll recognize its effects and be able to identify potions of haste in the future.
The point is that while each item is created randomly, using the item does not have a random effect. You just don't know what it's going to do! You can find out, though, using scrolls, logic, or by risking a use-ID. (Use-ID is more useful in some games than in others -- in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, it's probably how you'll identify most items, but in Angband, you should basically never do it past the first couple floors.) It's up to you to manage your situation such that you aren't forced to resort to items you haven't identified yet, and if you fail to do so, that's on you.
FTL is different. The same event will have radically different outcomes even in the same playthrough, and there's nothing you can ever do to get more information about an event. Either you roll the dice and live with the results, you happen to have special equipment that guarantees success, or you skip the event all together. This is an irritating, unsatisfying decision where no outcome feels like it has anything to do with your ingenuity as a player. Either you gamble or you don't. (But eventually, if you want to win, you're going to really need to gamble.)
So FTL is in some key ways more random, and less interestingly so, than most traditional roguelikes. But, because of the way the game (and especially the endgame) is structured, it actually needed to be much less random. It really can't afford to screw with players in the way that games like NetHack and ADOM do, because when you have bad luck in FTL, there's very little you can do about it. In traditional roguelikes, you can recover from most any encounter you survive: if a monster doesn't kill you, then you can generally teleport to the surface, heal up, buy some new gear, and go about your business. You can grind for experience and better items until you have a means of solving the problem that got you into trouble. You have the time. In FTL, you definitely don't. The pressures of the pursuing rebel fleet, and of the approaching endgame, mean that you don't have time to grind. And anyway, you need all of your scrap to pay for the fuel, missiles, drones, upgrades, weapons, and systems that you will definitely need to even maybe potentially survive the endgame.
Here we should take another (briefer) detour into roguelike terminology. In their later portions, most roguelikes grow much more demanding in terms of requiring your character to have particular equipment that will allow him to survive specific dangers. In NetHack this is called an ascension kit. This is probably my least favorite aspect of roguelikes! It means you have to spend a lot of time grinding and scumming for random drops that solve certain problems. I don't like doing that! But it's okay, because a) some roguelikes are designed to mitigate this problem, and b) you're not going to make it that deep anyway. Really, you're not. You don't expect to beat a traditional roguelike, or even to see the final boss. Anyway, I sure don't.
FTL is different. Like The Binding of Isaac, it's designed so that you can play through the whole game in one (somewhat lengthy) sitting. A competent player will eventually be able to reach the endgame more than half the time. This changes things! Suddenly, you're focused on reaching that goal. Not reaching that goal makes you (makes me) feel stupid. And the game's final boss, which is extremely difficult, is going to crush you unless you have a means of defending yourself from each of its three devastating strategies. (You also need several excellent weapons to pierce its shield and damage its hull.) None of the available ships begins equipped to counter more than one of these strategies, so you're going to need a pretty elaborate, very expensive ascension kit to beat the boss.
As in any roguelike, whether or not you can assemble that ascension kit depends on whether or not you happen to randomly get the items you need. But unlike other roguelikes, you don't have time to grind and search for anything you miss. You pretty much definitely need a drone control system, for instance, but most ships don't have one from the start. And they're expensive! And you don't know which stores are going to have it! But you can't just run around with hundreds of units of unused scrap (which is both the game's currency and the resource you use to upgrade your ship) waiting to maybe possibly run into that drone control system. But you have to. And then, once you've got that figured out, you need to find the schematics for a defense drone (preferably a mark II defense drone).
Now that you've got that figured out, it's time we talk about how your crew is going to repel half a dozen invaders. And once you've worked that one out, we'll need to discuss missiles.
The minute-to-minute gameplay of fighting ships and exploring space is in itself a lot of fun. But the metagame of preparing for the final boss is an irritating burden. And you're going to fail anyway.
Here, FTL's self-appointed defenders would point out that roguelikes have always been nearly impossible to win by design. This is true! But it misses the point. Most roguelikes don't put nearly so much emphasis on the endgame. And, more to the point, losing is fun in most roguelikes.
Losing is fun because it's always such a weird, stupid, specific scramble, where hilarious stories are made. You find a lonely orc, who gets lucky and wounds you more than expected, so you start running away, but you make a wrong turn, and encounter a horde of orcs, which are led by a unique boss character, who paralyzes you, and then the horde swarms you, so now you're in big trouble, and when you're not paralyzed anymore you're nearly dead, so you read a scroll of teleport, which randomly moves you to a new location . . . at which point you materialize in the middle of a dozen snakes. These deaths make good stories. They're fun to tell other people about. They're a big part of why you play.
Catastrophe can take a number of forms in FTL, but it always ends up looking pretty much the same: some other ship, maybe the final boss, blows your ship up because you weren't prepared. There are a lot of reasons you might be under-prepared (many of them being simple bad luck) but that's what's going to actually do you in. This isn't very interesting, and it's not very fun. It often makes me feel that I've wasted my time by playing.
The lack of variety and flavor in the game is perhaps its most crippling problem. Roguelikes run on flavor. Finding surprising magic items and special named gear is a real thrill. Reading the flavor text (histories, poetry, and gags in the descriptions of items and monsters) adds a surprising amount to the experience, even though most of it is usually not very well crafted. Dwarf Fortress is, as best I can tell (I haven't played it myself, though I will do so soon) essentially an extremely complicated engine devoted to the generation of story and flavor. FTL isn't like this. It doesn't sprawl. What it has is focused and polished, and that focus makes for a game that can be a lot of fun. But it's important to understand, when developing a roguelike or roguelike derivative, that the embellishments are not secondary to the game mechanics. They're a huge contributor to the game's success, a central reason that said mechanics work.
It's also worth noting that while FTL begins as a very tense experience, much more so than most roguelikes (because of the pursuing rebel fleet), it actually grows less tense as you play, most of the time. In Angband or similar roguelikes, there is exponential tension because of your character's continuous growth and accumulation of loot. In FTL, because you know what you need to survive the endgame, and because your enemies have a tendency to throw themselves at you suicidally, you often find your chances of winning diminishing as you play the game, even as your crew grows more experienced and your ship superficially improves. I've found that I usually grow less invested in a ship and its crew over the course of a game, rather than more invested, so that the tension gradually dwindles. This is really too bad.
I don't mean, by any of this post, to say that FTL is not a good game. It is! It's pretty great, actually, and I'm glad I bought it. (One of the great things about these independently developed games by small teams is that they're often priced such that you can buy one on a lark, have some real reservations about the gameplay, and still feel entirely satisfied with your purchase, which in this case I am.) But I do think that it has very real problems, and that these problems are rooted in an incomplete or flawed analysis of what makes the roguelike genre work in the first place. If the game had a little more sprawl and variety to it, if its endgame were more flexible, and if it were better at generating emergent narrative, I think I would still be playing it ten years from today.
Maybe they can make that happen in FTL 2.
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