Day: June 19, 2023

Deceive Inc

Deceive Inc is out. This game’s been on my watch list for a while, mostly based off playing the demo a while back. I’ve managed to rack up 30 hours so far, and I’m ready to give my thoughts. I do like Deceive Inc, and I recommend it. BUT.

In what feels very appropriate, I don’t think Deceive Inc is actually the stealth game it might first appear to be. Or, at least, it’s not quite a stealth game at its core. So let’s talk about that.

Deceive Inc’s Deception

Deceive Inc falls into a lot of genres. It’s a multiplayer stealth action game with battle royale and hero shooter elements.

However, it’s the shooter part that I really want to focus on. The shooting is the most important game mechanic underpinning everything else in Deceive Inc. It’s not what you’ll be spending most of your time doing, necessarily, but it is required for victory. Which brings me to my one big point: if you do not like first person shooters, you will not like Deceive Inc.

If you do enjoy first person shooters, though, you will find this one of the most interesting and unique takes on the battle royale genre that’s been done so far.

More on that later. For now, let’s talk about the general flow of a game of Deceive Inc. Players take the role of spies infiltrating one of several expansive maps, attempting to escape with a briefcase, while avoiding being killed by NPC guards and other players.

I won’t be talking about the AI guards much from here on out. They serve the same purpose as AI in Hunt: Showdown. They’re not actually much of a threat except that drawing their attention them will alert other players to your presence.

Note: Between when I started writing this, and it getting put up on the blog, Deceive Inc has added a new class of NPC called the Elite Guard who are noticeably more lethal. Still not a threat on their own, but absolutely can become a problem in larger firefights.

Fortunately, avoiding the NPC guards is incredibly easy. Deceive Inc has a disguise system called cover. Cover lets a player copy the appearance of any character they can see and stand next to. As long as you have cover that matches the appropriate area, guards will never shoot you.

Author Note: The actual functionality for cover is incredibly interesting. The character other players see doesn’t actually mimic your movement 100%. Instead, it just faces the direction you last moved. This means that you can look around wildly without giving yourself away as a human player. You can also walk backwards to watch behind you, while giving the impression you’re looking in the direction you’re moving.

Cover is broken when you shoot or get shot enough, or if you’re seen for too long in a forbidden area. For example, a staff member cover won’t last long in a guard area.

The primary threat to success is other players, and the actions they take. I have a whole side writeup about the meta strategies currently in vogue.

What Deceive Inc Does Well

Deceive Inc absolutely nails the 70’s spy aesthetic. Every map and character feels like they just stepped out of a portal from the James Bond or Austin Powers movies. There’s a fun but not overwhelming retro-tech theme, and the sound effects and music fit incredibly well. (Casino map when Sweat Bandits?)

My personal favorite, Larcin.

The gunplay is solid, if a bit unusual compared to many other shooters. Time to kill is fairly high, and takes some getting used to. So do some of the behaviors around aiming. Each character also only has a single gun. But in the long run, the biggest difference from most shooters are the activated abilities.

Deceive Inc also has one of the best respawn mechanics that I’ve ever seen in a battle royale. There’s no respawn or bleed out. Instead, downed teammates can always be revived as long as they don’t leave the game. The catch is that each respawn brings them back with lower and lower max health. This rewards quick pickoffs and disengaging, but it’s still always possible to stage a comeback.

The spy and sneaking mechanics are fun and flavorful. Unfortunately, for reasons I wrote about in another post, really trying to blend in and be stealthy isn’t quite the best way to play the game. Even so, the sneaking absolutely sell the fantasy of being the high tech secret agent. The devs have indicated that they’re trying to make the game be a bit more punishing of run and gun, and have released patches to encourage that, so we’ll see how it goes in the long run.

Friction Points and Annoyances

In-game, I have very few annoyances with Deceive Inc. That said, I would really like to be able to see kill replays, and would love to see damage breakdowns upon death. Even after playing for 25 hours, I still often don’t understand how I was spotted out and killed. This makes learning really hard.

In addition, there are a bunch of small things in Deceive Inc that aren’t explained super well. These include various status effects, debuffs, and how specific weapons work. The information is present in the game, but it’s just not super easily exposed. The most recent update added a glossary which I like, but it could still do a bit more.

Out of the actual gameplay, I have one big complaint, and a few minor ones. The biggest complaint is the matchmaking.

The matchmaking is bad.

I recognize that a small player base leads to tradeoffs in order to keep queue time down. That said, getting matched into someone who has played 15 times as much as me feels bad. Getting matched into a whole team of players with that much time played felt even worse. The lack of death breakdowns and kill replays means it’s not possible to even learn from this kind of absolute butchery.

Also, I don’t love that in a game I already paid $20 for, there’s a battle pass on release. Blah blah, server expenses, blah blah, live service. But look. I already gave you $20. C’mon.

Conclusions

Do I recommend Deceive Inc? As long as you enjoy first person shooting mechanics, yes.

Everyone I’ve played this game with so far has enjoyed it, and played more with me, which is ridiculously high bar all things considered. It definitely has pain points, and bunch of unique mechanics that can make it a bit difficult to learn, but I’ve never played anything quite like it.

Guns in Deceive Inc

Author’s Note: This was part of my writeup on Deceive Inc. Partway through, I realized that a 7 paragraph diatribe about gun balance and the current meta might not be the most relevant for deciding if you want to buy Deceive Inc. That said, I still think this post does make an accurate observation about why Deceive Inc plays the way it does.

Deceive Inc sells itself as a stealth game, but after playing a few rounds, it becomes clear that isn’t entirely true. The dominant strategy used by very high level (300, the level cap) players is much more based around fast movement, while ignoring the stealth aspects of the game to a certain extent.

I think this happens because the guns fairly high time-to-kill. Across the characters I’ve played, and had my friends play, here’s a short list with some approximate damage values:

WeaponBody ShotHeadshot
Sniper Rifle3575 (Charged)
Shotgun4550 (ADS)
Pistol10-1520

For reference, a player starts out at 100 health, and some in game upgrades can push them up to 115 health at max.

But the important part here is that there is no way to one-shot kill a full health player. Which I think I think makes sense when you game out a bunch of other factors:

Since Deceive Inc is a battle royale, there is no respawning. You have to play carefully offensively, and defensively. Players want to blend in, and they want to be paranoid of anyone who sticks out. In addition, it’s a fairly small player count battle royale, withonly up to 12-16 players in a match.

So if weapons could one-shot, be it a shotgun at close range, or a sniper headshot, the dominant strategy I think becomes something like “Engage anyone suspicious, and try to one tap them.” If the player is correct, and did spot a disguised human, they instantly win the combat, can disengage, and have permanently removed a threat from the game with very little risk to themself.

If they’re wrong, they’ve made themself a target for anyone else nearby to get one-tapped, and also wasted ammo. But because of the risk of being spotted, I still think the right choice is to blast first, ask questions later. And this encourages a super passive playstyle of taking the minimal number of risks at all points in time, to avoid being found and nuked down.

But weapons don’t one shot. So even if you spot someone else out first, and engage them first with a surprise shot, it’s still very possible for the player who is stronger with the gunplay mechanics to turn and kill you.

This is why I can only recommend Deceive Inc to people who like first person shooters. Playing well against other humans requires winning gunfights. And winning gunfights requires strong FPS skill mechanics. Even though most of the game is spent engaging with the stealth mechanics and trying to avoid trouble, without gunplay skills, you just can’t win.

The Frustrating Intersection of Live Service and Narrative Progression

I don’t like putting direct statements on this blog. First of all, they can be traced back to me, and second of all, big bold statements have a way of being wrong. Saying something “can’t be done” is the sort of thing some fans view as a challenge, and saying something can’t be done in video games is really just begging for it.

But I really wanted to open this rant with “Live service games and narrative progression are fundamentally incompatible.” I’m not going to. Instead, I’m going to say that I think “Live service games and meaningful narrative progression are two things no one has managed to combine yet.” And I’m going to spend the rest of this rant talking about that.

Also, all the games I’m going to be using as examples? I like all these games. I have played a ton of them. I wish the thing I’m about to rant about didn’t get in the way of me liking them more.

(One of the many) Problems with Live Service Games

Usually when I rant about games designed as live service (that is to say a continually updated game), I tend to ranting about their monetization and progression systems. This is because an “always online” live game needs to generate revenue, and provide players things to work towards. Those two needs tend to lead to design decisions that don’t prioritize fun.

Today I’m going to ignore that, and talk about something else. Let’s define a few terms for the purpose of identifying my frustration. Here’s how I’m defining these terms for this writeup.

Live Service: Any game designed to be played repeatedly without narrative end. These games are often played in individual matches or games, with progression and interaction systems designed to turn the game into long form play experience. MMOs would be a classic example of this, but as I’m not into that genre, I’m going to be using Hunt: Showdown, Dead by Daylight, and Inkbound for my examples.

Narrative: The elements that make up the “reason for being” for the state of the game. They can be flavor, they can inform mechanics, they can be inconsequential, but they are still present. When I say narrative, I mean everything that forms the explanation for the game’s in-universe existence.

Progression: The advancement of the plot or the story toward a conclusion or resolution. I’m going to use the idea of Hero with A Thousand Faces, because it’s popular, well known, and I’m not a English major so I don’t have a better structure to model my issues.

Terminology Defined, Let’s Get Ranting

Live service is, to put it bluntly, designed to make a great big pile of money forever. It’s cheaper to make a single game and sell it over and over, than it is to make a new one. The most charitable analogy I can make is that it’s like a sports field, or a perhaps a playground. It is, in theory, a fun space to exist within, where a set of skills can be practiced and honed. But—critically—it does not have an ending.

You don’t beat a playground. You don’t “Win” all of soccer. And that’s fine. Lack of narrative structure and lack of payout is not the thing that annoys me here. I have never once played a game of Rocket League, and found myself wondering about the universe of Rocket League, its lore, and how they get those rockets on the cars.

But that’s because Rocket League has never tried to sell itself on some greater narrative to set up the context of the game. Neither did games like Quantum League, Split Gate, or multiplayer Halo.

But some games do have a much heavier narrative and story.

Example 1. Dead by Daylight

Unlike Rocket League, Dead by Daylight does have a “story.” Or at least it has “lore.” A mysterious being called the Entity pulls murderers and randos into an infinite regenerating set of trials in order to feed on their suffering. Each of the playable characters has a (tragic) backstory, and each of the killers has a (tragic) backstory. Over time, more and more information about the Entity’s realm has been added, more information about the killers and their crimes have been revealed, and more characters have been added. We’re left to wonder about the nature of the Entity, and if the survivors ever will truly escape.

Spoiler alert: No. No, they won’t. Because Dead by Daylight is going to run until one of two things happen.

  1. The heat death of the universe.
  2. It stops making enough money to be worth running.

Probably the second one. And when that happens, the game will be shut down, probably with a sort of last slow signoff.

Dead by Daylight will never do an update where the survivors turn and defeat the killers once and for all. There will be no meaningful plot explanation. The purpose of Dead by Daylight’s lore is support the gameplay, and purpose of the gameplay is to sell copies of the game and microtransaction skins. And because the gameplay succeeds at doing that, it will never change in a meaningful way.

In the case of Dead By Daylight, I find this moderately frustrating. I can observe all of the interesting story and lore, and know that it is ultimately pointless and will never have a meaningful payout.

Example 2. Hunt: Showdown

Hunt: Showdown uses a remarkably similar structure for its setup and lore. A mysterious entity is re-animating corpses and creatures in the Louisiana Bayou. Players take the role of hunters, competing to execute the more threatening of these supernatural creatures, and escape with the proof of their defeat, all in exchange for a big payout.

Again we see the same structures. In-world justification for why the monsters keep reforming. An elaborate and hinted at backstory for each character and creature. “Story” events that are used to introduce new characters and temporary mechanics.

And again I have to ask myself the same question every time I want to engage with this lore: when will the Bayou be purged of zombies? When will the characters experience consequences for their behavior?

Answer: Never! Not gonna happen. Because Hunt won’t run without the hunting. The loop will continue until the servers shut down.

Both of the examples so far annoy me, but they don’t actively hurt my enjoyment of the game itself. Instead, they just make me less willing to engage with something I would otherwise enjoy: the lore and worldbuilding. I know that the mysteries will never be fully solved, so any effort I spend to engage with it will never pay off.

The third example is a bit different.

Example 3. Inkbound

I haven’t done a writeup on Inkbound yet, despite having played 30 hours of it. So yeah, I like Inkbound. I really like Inkbound.

In those 30 hours of Inkbound, I have killed and seen every single enemy or challenge that exists in the game. This is fine, because Inkbound spices it up by providing a truly ridiculous number of unlockables, quests, and challenges.

And it’s those quests that are starting to frustrate me. The game implies that part of the reward of the quests is learning more lore about the world, how it got to the state it’s in, and how it will get out.

Except, again, because this is an unfinished live service game, I am incredibly skeptical that I’m ever going to see that payoff. Instead, everything is starting to feel like I’m being run around for no particular reason, with no real payoff at the end. I’m starting to get annoyed that all of the information I collect may not ultimately serve any real purpose in the greater structure of the game’s narrative.

What makes Inkbound different from the above two is that the implied story progression isn’t a meta-narrative. In theory, it is the actual story that I as a player am contributing to, and progressing. But as a somewhat savvy player, I am beginning to feel that it’s unending busywork designed to fit the structure of the live service game.

Also, before someone says “Well, it’s a roguelike, they can’t have a meaningful and compelling story because the nature of the game requires a constant reset of progress, and looping structure,” I would like to gesture Hades. So I’m pretty confident roguelikes can have a strong narrative.

Conclusions and Takeaway

Having written all this down, I think I might actually have two different sets of problems. One is the frustration of eternally incomplete lore.

The best example of that might be Team Fortress 2 or Overwatch. Games where gameplay doesn’t advance or impact plot or story in the slightest, but they still have worlds I find simultaneously fascinating and recognize as utterly subservient to a structure of perpetual revenue that will never offer the conclusion I might want.

The lore and tone for these games is eternally captivating and enthralling. But it’s like being hooked by an endless fishing line. There will always be more mysteries, more questions, more information, right up until there isn’t, and the game shuts down.

My second problem is that of pointless lore progression as a reward. I didn’t care that Inkbound’s story wasn’t progressing until I was told that I could progress it. That I could make a difference. That I could defeat villains and advance the plot. I didn’t care that I couldn’t slay the spire until I was given that sisyphian task.

I resent being told that I should take a world and story seriously, that I should care at all about what happens, when the creators clearly don’t have any intention of doing so.

Finally

I’m not saying all live service games do this. I’m not saying that doing this sort of thing is some inherent failure of a game. But after seeing it across a large number of games over the years, it makes me wary of caring or investing myself in the start of a story that might not ever be planned to have an end.