At the time of writing, Seasun had recently announced that their latest high-profile game mode, Splash Roulette, would be removed at the end of the patch cycle that it had debuted in, the equally-high-profile Hearts In Harmony half-anniversary event. Being essentially a carbon copy of the critically-acclaimed indie game Buckshot Roulette, it seemed like a sure-fire success.

So what went wrong?

Well, there are the obvious problems. The gameplay was too slow because of how long the animations were, and the grind to get all of the rewards was a slog. But even after some updates to the game, adding a setting to speed up animations and cutting down on the ability to be taken out from full health with no counterplay, player sentiment was evidently still negative enough for it to be removed altogether. This is because despite these changes, it was still possible to play a perfect game and lose, making it still a frustrating experience at times.

Zooming out, this lack of player agency can be observed to be a running theme with some of the other game modes that Snowbreak featured in this update, and potentially a concerning sign of things to come. So really, what’s the deal with recent event game modes? Let’s take a look.

What is Player Agency?

Simply put, it’s the ability for you, the player, to influence outcomes, specifically the outcome of the game you’re playing. Having agency means that the things you do matter, and that if you play well, you’re rewarded for it. It’s why learning how to dodge and weave around a boss enemy’s attack patterns so you can take it down feels so rewarding - you put in the work to git gud, and this is the payoff.

So what happens if you take it away?

Exhibit A: Let’s Go, Heimdall!

Let’s start things off on a positive note. Let’s Go Heimdall!, the Fall Guys-inspired chibi platformer game mode introduced in September 2024 with the Azure Paradise update, is admittedly not my cup of tea. I really wasn’t looking forward to grinding through the rewards ladder again after not particularly enjoying it during its first appearance. But despite this, I found myself having a better experience this time around, thanks to the new “skill mode” match queue that gave you the ability to make your character run faster, dive forward, or even throw bombs at other players. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it was enough to make me enjoy the game mode much more (which I was able to directly contrast with the base version thanks to me initially not noticing that Snowbreak resets the queue selection every time you boot up the game).

Is it a placebo effect? Maybe, considering that the sprint ability basically has no cooldown, being available right after your previous sprint activation ended. But having the extra button to press sure makes you feel like you have more control over your character, and by extension, control over your ability to get the upper hand over the other players in your match. That is to say, even just perceived extra player agency was enough to make the game mode more enjoyable, at least for me.

Exhibit B: Starward Defense

A brand new game mode released with this patch, you take the role of a turret gunner defending the line against hordes of enemies and commanding your faithful companions to assist you. Or at least, that’s how it works in theory. In practice, the damage your turret deals is simply pathetic, very quickly being outscaled into irrelevance by enemy HP bloat and outshined by the units you bring along. This reduces the majority of your impact to just selecting units to bring and picking out buffs for them, with attempts to provide a direct contribution to the combat effort being about as effective as fighting a forest fire with a watering can.

Making matters worse, all of the units you bring run on their own set AI with no way of controlling them yourself. This is quite a shame, as some units have great skills but awful targeting. Even among so-called “S-tier” units, it’s never fun seeing the Steel Ball tossing its molotovs off into orbit as enemies attack the wall, or the Phantom Shot Adventist targeting a lone enemy when there’s a group of them just behind that it could hit with its multishot. But there’s nothing you can do about that, and combined with your turret’s horrendous damage output, you’re effectively reduced to being a spectator as your units (mis)use their skills.

Needless to say, it sucks.

What makes this all the more frustrating is that there are turrets in Snowbreak that don’t suck. In fact, there’s one in the game mode running right alongside it, in Defense Line Zero, with an existing set of upgrades that allow players to effortlessly get MVP damage shares in matches. It honestly feels a little too strong, to the point that there’s little reason to fight enemies with your actual operative. But in a single-player game mode like Starward Defense where the turret is the star of the show, it feels like a no-brainer to copy it over.

While we’re at it, having the option to manually control your units would be nice. Imagine if you could have the Blessing Envoy’s black hole follow your crosshair, sucking enemies in to be hit by your turret shots (that hopefully actually do damage). Make it so the things I do actually matter. Is that too much to ask?

Exhibit C: Splash Roulette

Finally, we arrive back where we started. Splash Roulette, for all its fixes and changes, still has scenarios where you can play the game perfectly and still lose. On its own, this is all good and well; sometimes you lose. But you also have no breathing room for this to happen, as a single round loss ends your run. Meanwhile, each character has to be defeated three times, giving them two extra chances to send you back to the main menu.

Of course, this is also exactly like how the game this is based on, Buckshot Roulette, works with its Double Or Nothing mode. Or well, almost exactly. In Buckshot Roulette, it always becomes the player's turn whenever the gun is reloaded, regardless of who fired the previous shot and how they did it. This provides the player with a massive initiative advantage as they always get to be the first to use newly distributed items when the gun is reloaded, and the first to shoot and control the tempo of the round. This arguably balances out the fact that the AI opponent has two more lives than you, something that Snowbreak's implementation does not have.

But the other issue is that outside of a few Steam achievements, Double Or Nothing has no grind involved; you just play for high scores and laugh off your losses. Meanwhile in Snowbreak, winning rounds was important to being able to progress through the rewards ladder in a timely fashion. When the objective is not to shoot for a high score but to get through a grind, losing progress becomes much more frustrating. This is especially so when it’s due to factors outside of your control, a lack of player agency.

So How Do We Fix This?

There are other game modes in this patch that had issues. Battlefield Sigma’s scoring stages depended more on the buffs you brought along rather than how well you played with them, reducing the game mode to just grinding the mind-numbingly boring buff farming stage over and over until you collected enough of the metaphorical Infinity Stones. Defense Line Zero makes you highly dependent on everyone performing their roles, with the ability to do your own role suffering if your teammates slack off (have fun playing Gatherer if your Attacker and Shooter teammates let every enemy through). Even the Star Master fishing competition is largely just up to being lucky enough to get a big catch.

The common theme throughout all of these issues is a lack of player agency. It doesn’t matter how good your shooting is with the Defense Line Zero turret, you’re still going to have an awful time without a competent Gatherer bankrolling your upgrades and ammo resupplies. And it doesn’t matter how well you reel in your fish, someone out there is going to beat that catch record in a fraction of the attempts.

It feels weird to have to write out how these individual issues can be fixed, in part because they just seem so obvious. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the solution to feeling useless in Starward Defense is to make the turret actually do damage, or that giving the player extra lives in Splash Roulette would make the rewards grind less frustrating. But what’s less obvious, however, is how to address the apparent bigger problem causing this to keep happening. There are many possible contributing factors: poorly thought out game design, a lack of playtesting, or simply not understanding how their own game works. Seasun would do well to figure out how to give players a sufficient amount of agency, and understand what makes for enjoyable gameplay experiences - lest they end up yet again facing the wrong end of the water gun.