Hello Simon,
sorry to see you off the moderator's suit, i hope that whatever held you off the .org for a time has been positively resolved.
:bow:
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Originally posted by econ21
I don't think there is a contradiction between making the game you want to make and also wanting it to appeal to as many people as you can.
You bet there is; the only difference is that the commercial strength of the Civilization series comes from sticking to its particular genre.
This is the road that CA should have followed - had they had the guts to actually stand by the unique mix of TBStrategy and unique realistic RT battles they had come up with in all respects and levels: aesthetically, gameplaywise, controls and interface.
TW had its own standard, which it abandoned with RTW as the developers themselves mention in the interview linked above. The idea was to create a hybrid that would literally, to use the developer's words "attract as many people as possible". This hybrid of playstyles and games within the game, inevitably sacrificed depth for breadth. The battles were simlpified, the pace was quickened to appeal to action oriented casual gamers and RTS players. fatigue was considered unimportant enough for its index in the unit cards to be altogether droped and never appear since - you now have to mouseover to get an indication of fatigue. The point of view was moved closer to the action, in order to admire the gore and an "RTS type" camera was introduced. Every conceivable effort was made for the game to look, feel and play like other popular games, as the Civilization series and classical RTS games like AoE and warcraft/starcraft.
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As Mike says, the former comes first, but given that you are doing want you want to do, you also try to get other people to like it. As the blog states, the key is quality and accessibility.
What Mr Simpson claims is that CA balances the two, although it gives an edge to quality; but the immense amounts of bugs, dumbing down of the battle engine, increasing of the complexity of the campaign game as per request of the majority of the SP casual gamer fanbase that CA targeted and claimed, without an equivalent increase in AI compeence and poor game balance indicate that this is not actually so.
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A lot of "hardcore" artistic material (paintings, music, literature, film etc) can also appeal to a wider audience.
Does it? In my experience the only artists that ever make the transition are those that put suficient water in their wine and aim right from the start for the mainstream. People who are listening to Cabaret Voltaire and The Residents, watching Jim Jarmusch films and read Brett Easton Ellis because they really like it are few and far between.
However, i do agree that it is possible to have "hardcore" games that due to their very nichness and quality do appeal; EB is a good example, but there are others too. I agree with you that this would have been the optimal way for TW to evolve, but it didnt; CA is unwilling to control the admited "overambition" with which they approach their releases; basically they consistently bite more than they can chew because they just have to accomodate more and more SP features and graphical updates to keep up with the gargantuan expectations of sales they and their publisher clearly have. It is well known that people who are aiming for quality are ready for commercial sacrifices, but Mr Simpson is stating the exact opposite in his blog; that they are not and that they want the fanbase to give them better reviews on metacritic user, because they might hurt the sales and sales will hurt the quality, that very same one the game did not have to begin with.
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I also echo the point made by another poster in the thread on the earlier blogs - it is not clear to me that ETW (or RTW) are particularly casual. The strategy layers are much richer than STW and MTW, and slow the game down considerably. The naval combat in ETW has a similar effect. I've been put off getting deeply into ETW at the moment because I just can't commit the time. I think STW and MTW with their Risk type strategy layer allowed one to get more quickly into the action (the battles) and would appeal more to the casual player.
It is actually absolutely clear; just not for you because you happen to like the added complexity in the SP part of the game that you mostly enjoy and think that it is depth; but it isnt. At least not rigorously defined chess-like stretegic depth. If it was then chess "actions" (as in taking a piece) that are performed even faster than MTW/STW make chess the most "mainstream" of the lot, with RTW/M2TW the most "hardcore" ones; however popularity of the games and the type of players they attract prove you wrong - its actually the other way around.
This is because it doesnt matter how fast the action is in doing the move that determines the strategic depth but the layers of principles and counterprinciples that you have to consider before making the move. For example in chess you have to consider material/tactics and then strategic considerations such pawn structure, piece mobility, king safety, positionsolidity, pawn storms, poison pawns, passed pawns, tempo, development etc.
In STW/MTW factions are in contact in a series of adjacent areas and similarly to chess, any action at any side of the board such as an attack with a large stack is bound to alter the dynamics of the situation as the region(s) from whence the attack came from will be weakened and be potential targets for counterattacks. Measuring such dynamics as well as the odds that govern them in the ensuing battles was where the strategic depth was in STW/MTW.
In RTW/M2TW this simply does not happen because there is no contact anymore, the same balance dynamics happen now over broad areas in a sea of hexes that the AI cannot navigate. In most cases it is sufficient to have a full stack that conquers city after city aided by the attrocious multi-retrain feature; the AI is always deploying his forces in the campaign map the same way he deploys in the battlefield: piecemeal.
I agree that it would have been interesting to see what would have happened had CA made the mp campaign or had the AI been up to the challenge, but none of these actually ever materialized. The only thing that happened is that people like you, say that RTW/M2TW has more layers, but so what? The AI either does not keep up with the complexity or does not even know complex features exist and all you are left with is more exploits against it for the player.
In actuality however, you say all this because you are the kind of player that likes a TW-Civilization hybrid and is happy with where the series went, generally speaking. This is why, unlike many other veterans you enjoyed RTW. From your persepective what you say is true. From mine it isn't.
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Well, it's relative. Relative to most historically flavoured strategy games - say Civ4 or Age of Empires - RTW is very accurate. I learnt a lot about ancient history from RTW. Just seeing the map and the factions was an education for me (something you could not get from a Civ or AoE type game). I was surprised playing RTR and EB how much RTW got right. For example, I knew little about the pre-Marian Roman army, but RTW depicted it fairly well. Most of the stuff in your list of grumbles about with RTW is pretty minor IMO (incinerating or flying men, pigs, arcani, dogs, screeching women etc don't impinge on my game experience much). You didn't mention the Egyptians though, who I admit were an abomination.
I agree with you; no doubt every TW game has been - if not a great pool of knowledge at least a great incentive for knowledge. CA always had a soft spot for gimmicky units, and to a certain degree this was acceptable; however by the time Rome came out, this was supercharged in order to appeal to all these people that make in pure bliss video after video of "3000peasants vs 100spartans" or "beserkers versus legion" etc. I cannot say that my resentment is with historical accuracy, it is definitely though with historical plausibility: the respect with which an era was represented and how this was felt and translated in the gameplay. As such, the abundance of gimmicky units and unrealistic gameplay parameters was in my (and others') opinion, nothing sort of ridiculous, and motivated by profit only - unless you wish to argue somehow that these had to do something with hardcore TWers; you were around when Rome came out and i'm sure you remember many feeling let down.
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...but neither provides anything similar to the experience of TWs battles. I suspect this is partly because modelling a TW battle is very expensive and requires commercial success, as the blog points out.
I agree, neither does. But i am 100% convinced that this is not so due to only the money injected in resources - STW/MTW battles are hailed from the specialists of the genre, TW mpers, as top of the crop for years now, as you know better than me, in terms of depth of gameplay. And yet they were far cheaper, i'm sure we'll all agree, than the simulations CA is producing today. Yet they are better than ETW, and vastly better than RTW/M2TW.
I said it in the other thread and i'll say it again: quality of the final result is not linearly prportional to budget and resources. This is simplistic and outright false. If Mr Simpson was arguing that an overambitious commercially and large production is proportional to budget and resources, i would have agreed; but that's not what he's saying.
