Leaving This World Behind

Growing up, I used to love playing the latest flash games on the family pc and even then I always had a penchant for strategy games. Whether it was a tower defense game like Onslaught 2 or Gemcraft, a mini-Grand Strategy game like Feudalism or The Imperium, an RPG game like Hands of War or a base defense game like Epic War 2 and Stick War, I loved them all.

One thing that changed my mindset on these games was a site called Kongregate. Kongregate gave players the ability to earn achievements playing and completing these games which would track across games.

It was at this point, I became a completionist. The site combined achievements from different games together that were linked by a theme into quests. This meant that sometimes you might play a game you otherwise might not have to complete a quest. You might also play on harder difficulties or push yourself to try and get particularly difficult achievements.

I think it was at this point that the rewarding aspect of playing games really unlocked. The sense of pride one felt at completing a difficult achievement or finishing a quest was real, even if the real-world impact was not.

As I got older, the types of games I played were different. I almost exclusively played FIFA and Call of Duty on PlayStation but my love for strategy, in the form of Manager Mode & Ultimate Team, and achievements, in the form of Pro Clubs and Call of Duty challenges, remained unchanged, undaunted.

This was partly because, under the yoke of my parents, it was a tough sell convincing them to buy more than one game a year. Once I started university and had access to my own money, this dynamic changed.

There’s a saying that a rock placed as just the right spot can divert an entire river. In 2011 there was a massive PlayStation outage for multiple days and in compensation they offered gamers a free game, Infamous. Playing Infamous, a full fledged open world game with a compelling story, after years of just playing two games, was the first game I’d played in which your decisions affected the world around you and the ending. It was refreshing and made me yearn for more.

The first game series I bought was Assassin’s Creed. I credit it with activating a nascent interest in history that was birthed in my teenage adoration for the Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series and has persisted to this day. Especially in the early games, the merging of the ancient and the modern was executed beautifully to create a really compelling storyline.

The later games became less interesting to me as the gameplay became more RPG-like. I really hated Origins for the sole reason I wasn’t able to kill an enemy from behind cover if their level was two levels above mine, which to me was antithetical to what the series was.

Searching for another game to fill the gap, I went and bought the Witcher 3. It’s hard to overstate how much I fell in love with this game. I never thought the gameplay was all that special but there was something in the character dynamics that felt so real. I remember getting the bad ending in my first playthrough and being so genuinely devastated that instead of playing the expansions I replayed the game from the beginning.

My new-found love for the Witcher universe lead me to decide to get a gaming PC just so I could play the earlier games. I ended up buying a PC from PC Specialist for $750 which had a 1080Ti Graphics card, which was good enough to run most games I wanted to play. I had no intention of buying new games, I felt like there was a whole universe of old games I needed to catch up on!

I did end up playing both the early Witcher games and also reigniting my love of reading, reading the entire series of books that were the prequel to the games.

I played a lot of great games over the coming years, too many to name, but particularly special ones to me were Skyrim, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Dishonored 2.

In a sense, many of these games to me were an elevated sense of the pick up and put down experience of playing games as a child. These were stories you experienced over the course of 50-60 hours but once the game was over you were finished. With the notable exception of replaying certain bits for 100% achievements (did you doubt me for a second?).

So while during this period I may have allowed myself to become all-consumed, it never threatened to be permanent.

The first game that threatened this fragile status quo was a Grand Strategy game called Crusader Kings II. It was not the type of game I had become accustomed to playing but after watching a streamer I really liked play it, it felt like a game in which you really could create your own story.

I loved the game. It was a sandbox game. You could do whatever you wanted. There was seemingly no limit to what could happen to your character in the game ranging from the mundane to the supernatural.

That was also the biggest issue. There was no limit to it. The all-consuming nature in which I had become accustomed to delving into stories was now threatening to engulf me. There seemed to be no end to it.

It wasn’t with a bang that it ended, but a whimper. By this point I had played likely nearly 1000 hours, substantially longer than I’d played any other game. After this many hours, most of the events, even the rare ones, have likely to have occurred to you before and having played many different campaigns with many different start dates and various different goals, there comes a point at which you feel like you’ve experienced everything the game has to offer.

Before I go into the game this blog is about, I want to go on a little interlude that will give more insight into my psyche when it comes to that which I find meaningful.

As you might have gathered, I have an addictive personality. When I find something interesting, I will completely immerse myself in it, to the absolute exclusion of everything else. When the new Harry Potter book had come out, I had read it within twenty four hours. I would lie on my bed reading all day, and as late as I could stay up until it was finished. I did not want to do anything else.

I had always avoided mobile games for the sole reason that it felt too accessible. I liked the fact that I played video games when I was at home, but I could leave the house to hang out with friends and work. On my commute, I could sleep or read depending on how late I stayed up gaming the night before.

This changed during the second wave of the 2020 pandemic, when I started playing chess online on Chess.com. Pretty soon my life had devolved to little else. Working from home only heightened this problem. There was a point at which, as soon as my working day had finished at 5pm, I would go straight to bed, wake up at 10/11pm and play chess until 5am. I would then sleep until 9am, work until lunch, nap over lunch, and work until 5pm.

For about three months, this was my life. My rating would initially improve but as I played later into the night, it would slowly devolve.

I eventually had to quit completely and delete the app from my phone.

Later, I was able to develop a more healthy relationship, and actually improve at the game. I eventually set a target ELO of 1500 at which point I decided to quit the game for good. I probably had more room to grow, but I had started to feel like the time I was investing in the game wasn’t a useful way to waste my life.

Anyway, back to the main story. When I had started to get bored of Crusader Kings II, I had started to look around for a game that I would enjoy. When I found it, I knew. I knew from the start. To buy all the DLC’s of a Paradox Interactive game is no small task. It might set you back $100-200 depending on when you buy it.

When I bought Europa Universalis IV, I bought all the DLC’s with the base game.

One thing I had loved as a big fan of the trials and tribulations of the western Roman Empire was that during the time period of CK2, the Byzantine Empire was the major power. In EU4, Byzantium was a rump state, about to be finally annexed by the Ottoman Empire and the dream as a Romaboo was a complete restoration of the might of Byzantium.

This was the hook.

I still remember my first playthroughs of the game were so frustrating. The game was so hard. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t win battles despite having greater numbers. I couldn’t understand why my economy was always in the red.

Yet, the more I played the game, the more I loved it. I had never played a Grand Strategy game, nay, I had never played a strategy game that was as complex, nor as difficult as this. The AI was genuinely a threat. If you didn’t pick the right allies, or grow fast enough, they would come and curb-stomp you and ruin your playthrough.

This wasn’t me playing on ultra-hard difficulty, this was on Normal.

There was so many different buttons in the game, it made CK2 feel like the flash games I used to play as a kid. There was no tutorial, you had to learn by figuring out what worked and watching playthroughs on YouTube.

There’s a reason why its a common joke on the EU4 subreddit that 1000 hours signifies a player has completed the tutorial. If I’m honest, even by my final playthrough I don’t even really consider myself that good at the game. The game is almost like chess in the sense that skill curve really feels exponential. There are playthroughs you see on YouTube/Reddit that are borderline inhuman, relative to even my best games.

The other thing that made the game so infinitely deep, even relative to CK2, is that most nations feel unique. Many nations have their own unique mission tree, with their own events that correspond to their actual or hypothetical alt history. There is so much I’ve learned about history where my initial interest was piqued from EU4. There is so much I’ve learned about the geography of the world through the game. I’ve even developed an interest in modern day geo-politics as a result.

Beyond nations feeling unique, how you play a nation can be completely different based on your goals. Due to fact that many nations are able to form other ones if they meet certain requirements, how you play a nation can be completely different in different playthroughs. The game is not deterministic and the amount of difference that can happen in different games can be astronomical.

As an example, as England, you can conquer Ireland and form Great Britain to set up a colonial empire like the real world. You can also retain your possessions in France, win the Hundred Years War, set up personal unions over Spain and Italy and become the Emperor of the HRE. You can become a naval and trade hegemon, controlling trade through the English Channel.

Yet, you could even move your capital to the New World, form the USA, conquer the New World and set your sights on reinvading the Old World. Hell, you can even release and play as Mann as an independent state and conquer every island in the game.

What really hit the nail in the coffin for me though was the achievements. EU4 has nearly 400 achievements. Beyond the one hundred or so basic ones, many of these constitute a playthrough on their own. They made the game really interesting as it turned a sandbox game in which you can do anything into a game where you may be forced to pick a particular nation and play it in a specific way.

It is also hard to explain how difficult some of the achievements are to someone who hasn’t played the game. There was a point at which I had fifty achievements left and I genuinely did not believe I was good enough to get the rest. The achievements have to be done in Ironman mode, meaning it is not possible to save your game, say if you were about to start a risky war.

There are five of the achievements are marked on the wiki as Insane. One Faith and True Heir of Timur I never found that difficult, but Mehmet’s Ambition, Eat Your Greens and The Three Mountains were incredibly difficult.

I saved The Three Mountains till the very end. I think it is the hardest achievement in the game. You have to conquer the entire world, starting as a nation with a single province off the coast of China. Your only two neighbours are Ming and the Shogun. A direct engagement with either and you’re fighting 10x your army size.

Prior to me completing the achievement, the only world conquest I had done was the standard easy world conquest as Austria using the HRE vassal swarm. Even then I had only completed it with 25 years to spare.

There were several points during that final campaign that I didn’t think I’d be able to do it. Compared to an Austria world conquest where you’ve conquered all of Europe by 1600 (if you’re slow like me), and you’re by far the undisputed number one Great Power, my Ryuku only spanned East Asia, and Manchuria.

In a sense, it was the pinnacle of my entire 3000 hours playing EU4. I had to pull out all of the tricks I had learned in that time.

In the late middle game, I needed to fight multiple wars on multiple fronts, and peace out at exactly the same time so I could release vassals and keep land adjacent to where I wanted to fight my next war.

At the end of the game, I was facing a Great Britain with 750k troops just chilling on their island. I couldn’t rely on my vassal swarm. I needed to actually feed in infantry into battles to optimally reinforce.

It really felt like I had completed the game, in every sense.

Yet, it also felt like I had completed gaming. EU4 was everything I had ever wanted in a strategy game. It combined so many of my interests into one, and it delivered. I learnt every trick there was in the game, and I was able to do something I once believed to be impossible.

It’s not that I won’t play video games anymore, but I do think it is the right time to move away from it being such a big part of my life. I think I’ve completed that portion of my life. I used to think that all my time playing video games was a waste of time, but it made me who I am today.

Our past shapes who we are today. I believe that modern video game technology can be fused with passionate history story-telling to bring history to life in a way that we’ve never been able to do before. I’m no longer going to sit on the sidelines and be a passive observer to other’s creations.

Creating is Resisting.