I give up.

“Adding a Surrender option could tempt players to bail out at the slightest setback, removing focus from the game and potentially introduce even more toxic behavior.” 

I really can’t believe a company as veteran as Blizzard would be this naive. I called this the minute I knew there was no surrender option in Heroes of the Storm. Removing the surrender option from the game won't change people's attitudes. It'll just make them change how they are toxic. People will just go AFK at the spawn. No one will play a game they believe is unwinnable.

I’ve railed about Blizzard’s decision to not include a surrender option for months now, though. I disagree on a fundamental level that “no game is unwinnable,” not necessarily for mechanical reasons or because of a substantial early lead, but because for a game to be winnable, you have to have A) people capable of recognizing, admitting, and correcting the mistaken behavior that led them to be behind (a rarity online where people would much rather blame everyone else than recognize that they may possibly be culpable in a loss) and B) people willing to put in the extra effort to make such a comeback possible. The latter is more common and, I will admit, I was on the winning side of a SUBSTANTIAL comeback yesterday that was very gratifying.

But I’ve also been on the losing side of such comebacks and they are heartbreaking.

And that’s the other side of my argument. Sure, it’s a pain to have half of your games end in surrenders. But a surrender is only frustrating for half of the players involved...the winning side. And even then, it can be a huge boost to your ego to be in a position where you’re stomping someone so soundly that they feel surrender is the only legitimate option. Still, I’ve had my share of groans where I’m playing well and just getting into the rhythm and the game ends. But I’ve also typed my share of “let’s just surrender and try this again, shall we?” after a domino-effect of terrible mistakes led to a game that is just frustrating. And that’s the big thing. While it’s a mild nuisance for the winning team to have to stop a full-on stomp, it can be absolutely game-ruiningly infuriating to be on the receiving side of that stomp. Maybe I just want to throw in the towel and start again fresh.

So why does Blizzard feel the need to remove the option altogether and force me to coincide with their personal philosophy? If I believe, like them, that no game is unwinnable, I would never try to surrender. Sure, Heroes games are typically shorter, but I can recall quite clearly several games that I was 99% (because I can never be 100%) sure that we were going to lose at five minutes (we’ve all been there. One player AFK pushing in a lane, refuses to help with tributes/seeds/skulls, there’s no way to win when one or two players refuse to play with the team) but the game goes out to 30 or even more minutes because the enemy team just haaaaaaaas to get that last objective or just haaaaaas to push down all of the keeps. We’ve all been there too. Not only are we losing but now, because Blizzard feels like “no game is unwinnable,” we have to sit there and have our noses rubbed into it to boot. That’s not fun at all. And it’d only be marginally less fun for the enemy team (who would still enjoy the thrill of victory) if we were allowed to surrender. I’ve also often heard that it’s annoying to have people throw up a surrender vote and start yelling at people after one bad play 20 minutes into a League game. And I agree. That is annoying. But that person is NOT going to turn into the picture of determination just because surrender isn’t an option. Removing the surrender option from the game doesn’t remove an annoyance from the game. It just forced the toxic players to find their outlets elsewhere. And actually, if surrender was an option, you’d have an easier way to at least divest yourself of said toxic player. I’d rather surrender a potentially (but unlikely) winnable game at 20 minutes and not have to listen to a guy call me a fag who should uninstall and shoot himself than be forced to listen to him while his avatar sits on the spawn point while the enemy team finishes us off at their leisure.

I’ve always said this, but taking away options is rarely a good idea. Maybe just make it very, very difficult to surrender. Obviously putting the surrender option at 20 minutes wouldn’t work in Heroes where the longest games are very rarely 30. But they could put it at 15 or even 10. But more to the point, if you make it so everyone has to agree to the surrender, you’re ensuring that only the most terrible stomps (or a premade) will be required for such a surrender. Perhaps you could put in a 12 Angry Men system where the vote, once initiated, remains on screen and one player can argue their point to try and convince everyone. Maybe if everyone (or even three or four out of five people) vote no, the surrender option goes away for the rest of the game. Blizzard is a smart company. They can figure out a way. But taking away the option, as you say, only encourages people to surrender in worse ways, by going AFK or, worse, just feeding the enemy team more kills...generally while lambasting and just generally being toxic to their entire team. And those people are going to make a miserable situation even more miserable.

How failing a quest made me love Darkest Dungeon

So I'm going to tell you a story. A story about a game. A game you should buy. It's not a perfect game, nor is it the flashiest or most polished game. But it is an amazing game, and a game that perfectly encapsulates one part of gaming that I love but don't see very often.

So, on to my story:

My ragtag party of adventurers was traveling through the ruins beneath Hamlet, a town that was once picturesque but has been overcome by a malaise of madness thanks to my relative, who squandered the family fortune seeking out the hidden power beneath the town. In doing so, he unleashed a Cthulhu-ian horror upon the town, which brought with it madness and despair.

Thanks, dude.

Anyways, it's my job to basically run an adventurer screening agency and send groups of four cannon fodd--errrr...heroes into the dungeons, clear out the nameless horrors beneath and make the place habitable again. In this case, my group was fairly solid, but not very experienced. We had Reynauld, the kleptomaniac crusader ("I'll just be taking this... ...for Jesus."), Dismas, the hard-headed and surprisingly heroic highwayman, Omand the apprentice plague doctor and the faithless vestal Mustel, who wielded the power of the Gods even without true belief.

The group was doing pretty well, traveling through the depths, cleaning out the catacombs of the undead like some crazy cross between the Ghostbusters and a zombie plumbing service, as they were hot on the trail of the apprentice necromancer who was to blame for the infestation so they could hand him his eviction notice (the bum wasn't paying his rent, I had no choice). But the journey was taking its toll on their minds. The malaise of madness (remember that?) is a constant strain on their squishy adventurer brains and the challenges of the ruins began to become too much for them. Reynauld was the first to snap and started to become abusive to his fellows, questioning what right they, faithless heathens, had to be battling the legions of the dark. Dismas began to see plots and ambushes in every shadow...and in his own allies. Omand the plague doctor started to become engrossed in masochism, using himself as guinea pig for his unsound experiments, and, by the time they'd set up camp for their first night in the ruins, Mustel too gave in to her own special brand of madness, babbling incoherently about the invisible light of the sun and stars, though I suppose she couldn't have been too right in the head from the start if she was wielding the power of heaven while not actually believing in God.

That night was particularly tense. An insidious trap brought Dismas to death's door just before they set up camp, so I set Mustel and Omand to setting his wounds. It took some time, however. At first, he was wary of them, dismissing the vestal's prayers and claiming he would have no part of the plague doctor's "mad experiments." They eventually managed to bind at least some of his wounds, but it took a prohibitively long amount of time and they weren't even able to get to Reynauld's own crippling injuries...likely because they didn't want to go near him considering how verbally abusive he'd become.

Serves him right. No one likes a jerk, Reynauld.

Shortly after the group settled in for the night, spread out throughout the room, either not trusting or not liking their fellows enough to spend the night anywhere near them, they were awoken by an ambush. Fortunately, their training and natural skill was enough to keep them from being killed in their sleep, but it was a difficult battle against cultists and more skeletons...a battle that proved to be too much for their already broken psyches.

Mustel continued to try and heal Dismas, to call upon prayers that even she wouldn't believe would work due to her faithlessness, but he was having nothing of it. "I see what you're plotting," he said, waving off her attempts. It was after one of these attempts that he took a blow that finally felled him...ironically, for all his paranoia, he didn't see it coming.

Seeing his ally fall sent Omand spiraling into his own masochistic malady. Somewhere between euphoric bliss and jealousy, he cried, "HE WHO HEALS IS TRULY IMMORTAL!" and cut himself to prove it.

It turns out he wasn't immortal after all.

Shielding his still-babbling ally, cursing about his fellows' ineptitude the whole time, Reynauld managed to finish the battle all but single-handedly...but the damage had been done, two were dead, one's mind completely lost and, in the most pragmatic sense, her usefulness at an end. The ruins had broken my "heroes" and they were forced to retreat...not entirely empty handed for they had found some dusty relics and a small amount of coins, but I still had a freeloading necromancer in my dungeons that I will need to organize another party to clear out before his big skeleton block party this weekend. Hopefully they will prove to be of tougher stuff than the first.

But I doubt it.

This horrific scene was the tipping point that made me go from liking Darkest Dungeon to loving Darkest Dungeon. Through a series of numbers, random (and sometimes repetitive) dialogue and a stress mechanic that is both surprisingly simple and yet has potential for infinite depth, Darkest Dungeon doesn't so much tell a story (it does, but it's a pretty basic story we've all heard before...not bad, but not exactly innovative) as invite you to tell your own. I love it when a game incorporates random elements in such a way that gives you the tools to craft your own tale. Dwarf Fortress does this beautifully, though if infinitely (and some might say prohibitively) more complex. Sure, everyone who plays the Darkest Dungeon will, at some point, go after the apprentice necromancer as I did, some with greater success and some with lesser success. But each of those attempts are going to be different. Perhaps this guy over here will have managed their heroes' stress better so they didn't all snap (or maybe they all snapped in different ways or at different times). Perhaps that gal over there didn't lose her heroes to insanity but to the mundane...a skeleton's axe or a trap. Or maybe, just maybe, you'll find your adventurers overcome with a sudden surge of heroism rather than madness, and their courage will be an inspiration to their fellows, enough for them to carry on their duty to completion. The random element can often be the difference between success and failure and it is quite often completely out of your control.

This is not a game for the faint of heart. It is prohibitively difficult at times (because, as I said, a lot of the success and failure involved in the game is random) and almost painfully unforgiving. It also may not be a game for those who lack imagination. I suppose there is a sort of mechanical challenge to the game, something meant to be studied, broken and beaten like any other mechanical challenge, through aggressive management of mechanics and numbers...but I think approaching the game like that is doing it a disservice. My above story could have gone very much like this:

My crusader, highwayman, plague doctor and vestal went into the ruins dungeon for the apprentice necromancer quest. Since I hadn't done any stress management for them from the last quest they were on, their stress scores were high and they eventually maxed out. My crusader got the abusive state, my highwayman got the paranoid state, my vestal got the irrational state, my plague doctor got the masochistic state. The paranoid state made it hard to heal my highwayman. He was killed by a skeleton. My plague doctor was dropped to zero hit points and killed himself because of his masochistic state. I won the fight with my two remaining characters and left the dungeon.

Strictly speaking, that's what happened in a mechanical, gameplay sense. And it's boring (well, ok, playing it wasn't boring, but it's not the sort of edge-of-your-seat story that's going to be fun to tell at parties). But if you have the imagination to look at the sometimes-random, even nonsensical things the game does and take a moment to think a little deeper about it, then Darkest Dungeon is a game that will engage you for countless hours, long after the mechanical challenge has ceased to entertain you (whether because you beat it or it's too difficult). It'll engage that part of  you that used to play make believe in the yard, to pretend you were a pirate or a cowboy or an astronaut when all you really were was just a spastic kid who'd eaten too much sugar running around the yard. Sure, there's some joy to be gained from the strictly mechanical, overcoming what is a pretty unforgiving and difficult dungeon crawling roguelike game, but I think it really will speak more to those of us who can still allow an experience not to hold our hands and slap us in the face with a story, but an experience that can take us out of the ordinary and put us in a place with a bag of tools to tell one ourselves.

If you're still capable of that sort of wonder, or if you're simply a fan of dungeon crawlers and roguelikes in general, then I can't recommend Darkest Dungeon enough.

Darkest Dungeon is currently available for Early Access on Steam for $20.