Going Rogue: Mortal Glory

I’ve been writing Going Rogue for six months now, and so far I’ve focused on games that I deeply enjoyed and that succeed according to these metrics. But this is an analysis column, not a game promotion column, and we can’t truly understand why things work unless we also examine things that don’t really work. Allow me to preface this by saying that this is not a referendum against the designer or against the love, care, and enthusiasm that goes into this and every indie game. But you can appreciate the designers and their vision while also recognizing where there’s room for improvement.

I chose to look at Mortal Glory because it demonstrates the sorts of missteps that I made as a beginner and that are very natural for other beginners to make as well. As a teenager, I made paper games inspired by Pokemon and Wasteland. But, to my frustration, my games never captured the “it” factor that made the originals compelling.

Let’s dig in and see what we can learn.

The Game

Mortal Glory is a gladiator manager sim. You recruit a stable of elves, wizards, and other fantasy staples, outfit them with longswords and enchanted rings, and send them out to duel against other teams in a square-grid arena. The Emperor assigns special objectives like completing the match in a certain number of rounds.

If you’re getting a DnD vibe from this, you’re not wrong — Mortal Glory’s DNA is deep in classic fantasy, reinforced by its retro pixel art, with portraits and arenas that would look at home in Pool of Radiance. The combat, too, is reminiscent of a classic TTRPG.

TTRPGs are fun. But they’re also a very different experience, and design elements that worked well in that context don’t necessarily carry over.

Simple Math: B

Classic TTRPG design necessarily requires math that you can do in your head or with a pencil, efficiently enough that you don’t erase a hole through your character sheet and quickly enough that the other players at the table don’t start giving you the stink eye (not that I’m speaking from personal experience or anything).

Mortal Glory’s stats are in that same vein. Characters have five base stats that begin as single-digit integer values, and which are used to calculate secondary stats like hit points, speed, and mana. Hit points usually don’t go over 100. Not necessarily instant mental math, but reasonably calculable.

More of a problem are the percentages. A value like “8% critical chance” becomes difficult to calculate when you’re trying to work out whether a 8% chance of doubling your base damage is better than getting +1 to your base damage. But this is more connected to the problem of determinism.

Deterministic Outcomes: C

Rolling to determine attack outcomes goes way back to the first wargames, and is a solution to a basic problem: If the outcome is purely deterministic, then the stronger guy will just always win, and that’s not fun, especially in a PVP game. This base mechanic carried forward into TTRPGs and then into video games in the same format: Choose your move, and then roll a die (real or simulated) to see if it worked.

But the farther we move away from tabletop wargames, the less well this mechanic works. Single-player computer games allow for intricate, tactical, and precise scenarios, and the more tactical the combat becomes, the less randomness is needed to shake up the outcomes, and the more annoying it becomes when a bad roll derails your plan.

Mortal Glory takes somewhat of an intermediate path: Your base attack has deterministic damage, but you roll to dodge and critical. Both of these, however, are common enough that overall the outcome is not reliably predictable.

Compared to other games in this series, it’s immediately noticeable how much less strategizing I do as a result. Since precise tactics often don’t pan out, the best strategies tend to be basic ones like “focus fire on the weakest guy” and “keep the support character in the back”. Perfectly valid strategies, of course, but it’s tough for that to keep my interest for dozens of runs.

Tradeoffs: C

On the surface, my paper games had all the mechanics of the games I liked: Attack, defense, hit points, mana, and so on. What were they missing? The answer is tradeoffs.

Mortal Glory also struggles in this area. The special moves are generally stronger than the melee attacks, and they have cooldowns, so the best move is essentially always “special move if you have it, otherwise use your melee attack.” The Emperor’s desires and demands do add some variety, but for the most part they don’t add tradeoffs — there’s still, generally, one clear best move in every situation.

The real tradeoffs take place in between battles as you choose how to allocate your limited winnings between a wide range of options — recruiting new heroes, training your existing heroes, buying weapons and armor, and healing injuries. There’s never quite as much as you need, and your choices — recruit two weaker heroes or one stronger hero? — become highly consequential. Still, an interesting overarching strategy doesn’t make the combat itself more compelling.

Geometry: C

Grid arena combat, my old nemesis. This is another design standard that comes to us from the early days of tabletop games. And yet when I dig down into the design issues that those games suffered, a lot of it comes back to the grid.

There are two main issues with grid combat. The first is redundancy. There are so many spaces in a large grid that, necessarily, many of them are mechanistically identical. For instance, attacking an enemy from the left or the right typically doesn’t yield a different result. This creates situations of false choice where the player may have dozens of options (like which pathway to take across the map), but none of them have any affect on gameplay.

The second, larger, problem is inefficiency. Put succinctly: Moving. Is. Boring. Every turn the player burns just covering distance is a turn they spent not doing something cool or fun, and boring quickly turns into infuriating if, say, an enemy keeps sniping you while you’re trying to get to them.

Both these problems are on display in Mortal Glory. The arena is quite large — 10x12 — with a scattering of pillars as obstacles. Character movement can be as low as 1 square — rarely above 6 — meaning that the first couple of rounds of every fight are spent schlepping your way towards your opponent, and you repeat that in every fight. It’s common to close the distance only to not have enough movement left to attack, or to waste your turn so the opponent can come to you — either way letting them get in the first attack.

Worse still is the knockback. Many attacks send your character flying three or four spaces, making it easy to get caught in a spiral where you get knocked back, spend your turn moving, and then get knocked back again. A recipe for frustration, right there. On the flip side, building high-mobility characters and then just dancing around the enemy is a pretty surefire way to win — and not a very fun or satisfying one.

Overall Grade: C+

Of course, subjectivity conquers all: At the end of the day, I did enjoy Mortal Glory, and while I don’t see myself returning to it a lot, I don’t regret the time I put into it. Still, I think there are some notable areas for improvement, particularly areas where it clings to classic modes of gameplay that don’t work as well in this context for various reasons.

But you know what? If you enjoy the game — and plenty of people did — that’s more important than how the mechanics stack up on a technical level. They’re all good games, Brent!

Metaprogression: Lean Game

Thus far I’ve mostly discussed games that include metaprogression elements to help the player grow stronger over time — the overall trend in the genre seems to be in this direction. Still, there’s no question that games without assistive metaprogression are the classic roguelike format, and they have their own virtues. There’s certainly a special sense of accomplishment in winning after many tries when the game doesn’t offer you any hand-holding at all. And this is the category that Mortal Glory falls into: The unlocks include

As for our honorary award, you know what aspect of the game I really thoroughly enjoyed? The sound! One of the funnest details is how, as your fame grows, the stands gradually fill up with spectators who cheer, whoop, and “ooh” when you cast spells or deliver knockouts. It’s a great, juicy way to up the drama and excitement.

Honorary Award: Best Sound Design

And that’s my look at Mortal Glory! Now that we’ve gotten a look at some examples of mechanics I don’t think work so effectively, I hope that’ll give us a stronger grounding to get back to looking at why the games that do work are so effective.

Next month’s title has been in early access for ages but finally comes out in April — and it’s one of the most-played games in my library. Best of all? It’ll probably be new to you! Be sure to check it out.

More Going Rogue

Tetra Tactics
Iris and the Giant
Fhtagn Simulator
Meteorfall: Krumit’s Quest
Monster Train