Rebel Galaxy Outlaw

My first reaction on sitting down to play Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is that it is impressively similar to Wing Commander: Privateer. We’re not just talking about general mechanics and atmosphere here -- if you start out on “Veteran” difficulty, your ship loadout is pretty much part-for-part identical to the Tarus we started with in Privateer. Many balance numbers are copied exactly -- the costs to join the guilds, for example, are exactly what they were in Privateer, as is the cost of buying your first afterburner system.

I still list Privateer as one of my favorite games of all time, so, I’m not exactly disappointed to see this. But, I am impressed by the audacity of releasing a game in 2019 that cribs so heavily from a classic 90s title. I mean, for comparison, there’s been a number of attempts to “remake” Master of Orion 2, but all of them actually introduce fairly major core gameplay changes. RGO, in comparison, feels at times almost like an expansion pack for the original Privateer, one that includes a slew of new story missions and a few expanded mechanics, but doesn’t really change the core of the game. (Indeed, if you compare RGO to the Vega-strike based “Privateer: Remake” project, RGO is actually more faithful to Privateer in some dimensions than “Remake” was, which is... impressive.)

I suppose that while the core of Moo2 was pretty clearly imperfect, the core game loop of Privateer was actually always pretty darn good at doing what it was designed to do. The main issue with Privateer, from a practical perspective, was that if you knew what you were doing, you could go from a dirt-poor nobody on the edge of space to one of the best equipped mercs alive in about... 4 hours. The first hour is a huge amount of fun, as you desperately scrounge up the core components needed to turn your garbage scow into something vaguely surviviable. The next hour is a bit of a grind, as you upgrade to tier 2 parts. And the last 2 hours are pure tedium, as you endlessly repeat the same safe, high-value missions to slowly make the climb towards peak equipment, a process that’s only really bearable because you can still remember how much fun you had in hours 1 and 2. If you know the game well you’ll start in on the campaign missions somewhere around hour 3 -- but, there’s a tricky balancing act here. Play the campaign missions too early in your grind, and you’ll face impossible odds. But if you wait until you’ve nearly maxed out your ship’s components, roleplaying the whole “down on his luck smuggler” thing becomes less plausible -- as you’ll be playing through the story with a character who has no real need for money.

If you want to make a version of Privateer that takes more than a few hours to play through, there’s a couple important precedents. One is Freelancer. There the choice was made to remove Privateer’s “autopilot” feature, so that players actually felt the distance between different locations. The motion system and combat rules were all carefully redesigned with the goal of making that core change to the gameplay loop work -- and Freelancer succeeded in being a very compelling version of the same basic experience as Privateer. Slower paced, more thoughtful, and not quite as satisfying over short periods, but still tons of fun.

But the route that RGO is taking to extended gameplay times is closer to what Privateer 2: The Darkening did. Try to draw out combat by making frequent use of waves of new opponents. Force the player to complete combats against hostiles rather than just running for the docking ring or jump gate. These are design choices that make sense if you’re aiming for something that feels “action packed” rather than “meditative”.

This may be a question of taste, but for my part, I think that if you’re going to try to change the rules of Privateer so the game takes longer, including Freelancer-style extended journeys through deep space is the way I’d prefer you do it. You only need to be a few hours in before the combat in RGO starts to feel boring -- find an enemy ship, hold down both triggers until they’re dead, rinse and repeat until you hear an all-clear message. The sights and sounds of the dogfights are cool for the first hour or two, but you’ll soon learn that in many situations, your eventual victory is assured as long as you just keep holding down those 2 buttons, and that realization makes the whole experience way less compelling.

That said, while the designers have clearly pushed things a bit in a Privater 2 sort of direction, the core game balance for RGO remains “broken” in about the same way as Privateer 1 was -- once you’ve collected a top-shelf afterburner and a powerplant to back it you’ll be largely free to run around the quadrant doing cargo missions or whatever else while leaving hordes of frustrated pirates behind you. Yes, gates and docks are locked by hostiles, so pure pacifism won’t work as well as it did in Privateer 1, but, most of the harder, “grindy-er” fights do happen in deep space, which means they are indeed “skippable” provided that you’re in a ship with a nice set of engines.

And as with the original Privateer -- the experience of building up to the point where you can move around the map safely is good for a few thrills. But eventually you realize you’ve got a huge bank account, no particular need for money, and 20 hours worth of campaign missions left to play through.

Compared to Privateer, how are those campaign missions? They’re not a total flop, but we’re not talking about Mass Effect levels of immersive storytelling here. I find myself playing mostly to see what sorts of additional fun extras may be concealed behind the endless procession of 0-credit story missions. And, if that’s your motivation, the best bang for your buck is actually the bountiful vista side missions, rather than the main story.

I have had fun playing RGO. But, I’m also left feeling like, if what you really wanted to do was to mine what was special about Privateer, doing a “remake” that’s this faithful may not actually have been the best way to go about it.

If you’re going to recreate the balance of Privateer this closely, maybe you’d be better off repackaging it in a rogue-like shell, with perma-death and a progression scheme that’s tied into the idea of completing multiple playthroughs?

I mean, as things stand, the first hour or two is a frantic scramble for survival, and can be very satisfying in small doses. But after that the game feels increasingly like a grind. So... maybe just re-playing those fun initial hours a few times over would be the best way to enjoy this content? You could then take all that careful world-building and dialog that went into the campaign and spread it out to keep those replays feeling fresh and interesting. I think that might be the outline of a great game, and it’s a game Double Damage is close to having made -- maybe even a game that could still be made out of RGO’s pieces once the modding tools are released.

As it stands though, my impression of RGO is that it’s a well-funded passion project where the low-level execution is good, but the high level vision is quite sloppy in places. To take another example: the radio stations certainly seemed like a cool concept. And the music was a high point of Rebel Galaxy, so I expected the sequel to do even better on that front. But, the rhythm of gameplay in RGO is actually a lot about jumping from one autopilot cut scene or jump-gate animation to the next, and each time you start a cut scene (even if you choose to skip it immediately), the radio will cut out. If you do get into a firefight, the main things you’ll hear will be the crash of guns and explosions, not the background rock. Your radio turns off when you dock at a base, and you’ll spend a fair amount of time docked at bases. So, while I’m assuming the music they’ve collected for the radio stations is probably pretty sweet, the gameplay loops you end up playing mean that you rarely get to listen to more than a few choppy excerpts of the songs. In a Freelancer-style motion model, with long thoughtful cruises across space, the radio stations would be awesome. In a Privateer-style model, however, they end up feeling sortof wasted. Despite playing for 30+ hours, I feel like I haven’t really had a chance to “hear” most of what’s there.

In short, the radio stations feel like a feature that really belongs in a different game -- but Double Damage decided to include them here because they had the time and the money and thought they’d be cool. They don’t actively make the game worse, but they don’t really feel like they fit with the rest of the experience.

I guess the bottom line here is that game design is hard. Not simply because gathering the time and money and will to make a finished game is a huge struggle, but also because there are endless smaller and larger choices that go into making one of these things, even when the game you’re building is positioned as a fairly faithful “remake” of a classic. Talented, well-intentioned designers will often end up making a collection of choices that, once everything has come together, don’t actually add up to a great experience. These are treacherous waters. It’s very easy to aim to create one sort of experience and miss the mark, in part because the systems involved are so complex that you never more than half-understand exactly what it is that you’re creating.

The main place where the creators of RGO seem to have fallen short is in the core puzzle of how to pair Privateer’s equipment grind with a deep campaign story. The equipment grind, by itself, is a fun if short game. A story campaign is really a seperate animal though, and if you’re going to keep the player engaged in both, you probably do need to do something kludgy to make them mesh. Freelancer, again, had a fairly good (if awkward) solution here -- a complex set of locked map areas gating different sets of ships and equipment, so that core equipment grind was repeated 3 or 4 times, with stretches of campaign progression linking the experiences.

Double damage doesn’t seem to have put much effort into that meshing problem though -- and the result is a game that feels disconnected from itself. Depending on how you choose to play, it can be a fairly short, satisfying equipment grind followed by a long slog through apparently pointless story missions. Or, if you decide to focus on the campaign from the start, it can be a fairly difficult arcade-style space combat game, one that includes the strange necessity to sometimes take a break from the campaign and grind up to the next tier of equipment.

Either way, it’s an “ok” sortof experience at best. Which is a shame, because there’s a lot of love and attention to detail in evidence in this thing. But the carefully crafted components Double Damage is working with feel like they could have been assembled into a much stronger whole.