There is a big big BIG rumor going around right now that Maxis has got SimCity 5 in the works. Now as you may recall, Mr. Adequate and I are rather devout fans of this series, so upon hearing this we did some digging around and discovered this very roughly translated article (from German) as well as pictures which, from what we can tell, are concept art.
Very lovely concept art! (All dem delicious curvy roads)
Supposedly we’re going to get confirmation and more details in the coming weeks, so in the meantime all we can do is speculate and feverishly hope that this isn’t going to turn into Spore or SimCity Societies.
What do you want to see in SimCity 5? Besides more Arcologies, I mean. Because we always need more Arcologies.
A sentiment I’m sure many other gamers share is the belief that we could do it better. “If only I were in charge” we think “the latest installment of X would not have been so casual and dire!” Well, I’ve been bouncing around a videogame idea in my head for some time now, and I’m thinking that when I finish my current novel – not too far off now – I’m going to switch away from writing and begin learning how I might make this thing. I thought I would throw the idea out there to see if anyone has any ideas they might like to add to it, or general comments! Anything welcome!
My working name for this thing is An Ancient Evil Has Awoken. The twist is that said ancient evil is you – the objective of the game is to use your malevolent powers to wipe out the human race, evolving from newly-awoken small-timer to Eldritch Abomination. My design document at the moment proposes three main avenues of attack; the inducement of natural disasters, the use of psychic abilities to mess with human’s minds, and finally the use of supernatural events like Biblical plagues or creating zombies or things like that.
I envision the game to play as something between a cross of Pandemic and Populous. You would acquire your resource – tentatively called Terror – through things you do, as well as a slow trickle from the natural disasters (As in actual natural ones) and expend it on causing more death and mayhem. The world would be divided into a number of zones, and as the humans begin to grow aware that things are not right, they would develop more effective defenses against you and eventually could find a way to either destroy you, or to save themselves some other way. Of course the idea of a malevolent god out to destroy humanity is going to be a bit scarier than just bad things happening, so you’ve got a major decision to make; are you overt, increasing terror but making humans more able to resist you, or covert, which gives you a much more constrained ‘budget’ but lets you work in relative peace.
It should be possible though to do things in a variety of ways, and the player should fundamentally feel they are in control of how they are destroying the world. Ideally you would be able to cause an obscene amount of global mayhem without ever doing anything overtly recognizable as supernatural or weird. An economic crash here, a war there, and in the end you can just step in to finish off the survivors.
Pretty much a game where you play as this guy, yeah
What say you, fellow malevolent omnicidal lunatics? Any ideas, thoughts, comments?
It’s the motto of Dwarf Fortress: Losing is Fun. And it’s one you need to take to heart with that game, because until you get the hang of it (And even after you do) you’re going to lose, a lot. But that’s not quite what I’m aiming at here. In conventional games you may often die a lot as well, but you’ll come back at the last checkpoint or save and carry on.
What I am thinking of, however, is something fairly unique to strategy gaming, which is to say, losses that don’t end the game, but rather that are just a part of the game, a thing you endure, carry on from, and ultimately recover from.
But does that happen? See, in a ‘regular’ game like, say, Halo, when you die you just come back from it. You try again. You succeed, or not, and that’s that. In a game like DF you may lose a lot of work, but in these cases the loss is indeed part of the fun. It comes about because of a silly mistake, or because of hubris, or because you just got bored and wanted to watch the world burn. But in a strategy game losses are different.
Decisions, decisions
In the real world of course no country is in permanent ascendance. Not even Rome enjoyed uninterrupted growth, and Rome eventually fell, as all powers do. So a strategy game must surely account for this as well. Yet in my experience, when you lose a city in Civilization or are forced to cede provinces in Europa Universalis III, it doesn’t feel good. It does’t feel like it’s part of the proper flow of the game. In a strategy game you do expect to be in permanent ascendance, and to not be is irritating and may well turn one off playing. I recall reading an interview with Sid Meier years ago where he said his original intention with Civ had been for your civ to go through periods of contraction and decline, but he found it was far from enjoyable to have it work like that.
Partly I think this is a case of momentum. In a strategy game, when you gain something, that something goes towards helping your empire grow. Overextension and the like are rarely simulated, and almost never simulated well, and in fact when that is attempted (As in the Magna Mundi mod for EU3) it often comes off as very arbitrary and pointlessly constricting.
How about you? Am I alone here, or do others feel the same and dislike accepting losses? Are there examples of games which do this well, and don’t make it feel arbitrary or unfair?
You know, I think I’ve identified another hook that strategy games tend to have for me. It’s something I’ve noticed I feel in such games for a long time but have never really connected it in a logical sense to a reason of appeal.
That is quite simply potential. Think about when you begin a game, especially a 4X like Civilization. Think about how you see almost nothing of the world, just your immediate surroundings, unblemished by human actions, and beyond that the dark mystery of the unknown. Your first, tiny, puny settlement, protected by a handful of clubmen. You send out a scout and begin gradually cranking out buildings and units, gradually expanding.
I don't have a relevant pic, so have this cat hugging this kitten.
It’s that exact moment right at the beginning, the moment of seeing the potential but not yet being able to achieve it, that I love. Or at least is the first half of what I love. You begin planning, mentally placing future settlements, looking at how to fight a defensive war, scouting out your neighbors, all that sort of thing. The entire game is before you and it is a quantum, Schroedinger-esque value at this moment. It is not yet a game, but the potential of a game. Over at Flash of Steel, a good while ago, Troy Goodfellow wrote an excellent piece that is related to this. As he says it’s not that things are complete unscripted, in fact a lot of things are constrained by various rules and/or in-game costs, but one of the core aspects of a good strategy game is that it is fundamentally a story, or a series or collection of stories. The story of how the Iroquois conquered the world, or when the Cold War went hot, or whatever it might be.
And that pregnant moment in the first few turns of a good 4x where so, so many stories are possible, and you get to wrestle with your rivals to write one – that moment is truly delicious. Much later you will look back across a cultivated, irrigated, networked empire that has left no tile untouched in the quest for dominance and efficiency, and the story of getting from A to B is there to see. Some things will be obvious, like the masses of farms and mines. Some a little more subtle, perhaps, like how all the cities in the southern end of your Persian empire have French names. But all there to be seen and remembered. The potential has been realized, and now you have a completed game, and the memories of playing it.
A core aspect of this is the ability to affect the world itself, which may be why strategy games (and management/sim games) seem to scratch this itch most effectively for me, as opposed to the more typically narrative-led genres. It’s not just the transfer of territory, but also the utilization of that same territory once you own it. Not just the achievement of a prize, but the use of the prize. It’s an inherent strength in strategy games I feel; until you achieve your ultimate victory you’re always looking for more efficiency, how to get more gold or credits or beakers or whatever, using your past conquests to become ever-stronger.
Also, when Troy Goodfellow said “No action game has ever made me want to be a writer. Some strategy games have.”, that could have been me saying it. In fact my book, which I am currently editing, was originally intended to just be an AAR of Space Empires V, but it rapidly blossomed far beyond that.
I’m not a huge fan of most racing games, though of course there are exceptions like Wipeout, Rollcage, and Burnout. However the apex of the genre is without question Gran Turismo, which might not necessarily be to my taste in genre terms, but which has one incredibly strong appeal that really does tempt me.
You can customize everything. This game offers the kind of spergy detailed control and tweaking that really should make Strategy gamers think twice about our claims to be spergy over details. The same sort of thing appears in the NASCAR games which my dad used to play; you can customize the shock absorbance of each individual shock… thingy… look I’m not a car guy, that’s not the point.
The point is why don’t we have this sort of thing in other genres? I’m 100% behind racing game fans having a game like GT, it’s only good. I just want to know where the game that lets you design a train with that level of detail is, or an airplane. And then we get to the things I really want to see personally, which starts Gran Turismo crossed with Wipeout. Can you even fathom that level of detailed control and tweaking over your nifty little Auricom F-3600 AG racer?
Of course if you recall my recent post on different ship design methods in 4X games, you can probably see where this is going. Yep. I want a game where you can tweak the voltage that runs through the coils of your gauss cannon. I want a game where you can change the total range of movement of your ion thruster nacelles and get different effects. I want a game so incredibly complex that it makes Aurora look small-time.
I also want a game where you can do this with mechs. Armored Core is nice, but I don’t just want a bunch of different components, I want to modify each and every component individually. When will the world realize how desperately it needs to fulfill my unbelievably specific requirements?
So, as you’ve no doubt gathered if you’ve been reading this blog for a length of time, I’m a fairly big fan of Paradox’s grand strategy games such as Europa Universalis. My favorite however is probably Hearts of Iron II: something about it just really, really appeals to me, and I’ve had weeks where I play nothing but that game or one of its innumerate mods.
All kinds of hilarity
So you’d have thought Hearts of Iron III would be a pretty big thing for me, right? So did I. Then I played it.
I really can’t put my finger on what it is. It’s not a bad game, though it had the usual panoply of Paradox bugs on release. It does a lot of interesting things and objectively looks like an improvement over its predecessor. I don’t want to be some kind of old stick-in-the-mud but at the base of it, it’s not enough like II for my tastes. It took a long time to get into II, and now that I’ve got it all figured out I’m somewhat reluctant to move on.
But I can see the appeal of III. So I’m giving it another try! This time I’ve said screw the base game though, I’m going to dive straight into a mod that does stuff I like, so I’m rolling with the Historical Plausibility Project, which seeks to allow plausible in-game outcomes based on what happens without being either too sandboxy or hewing too closely to reality. Exactly how I like my Paradox.
What I REALLY want is Silent Hunter with Admiral Rarity, though there is an Equestria mod for Vicky 2
So let’s see how this goes! Have you guys ever had a game which you know you should like, but don’t? Have there been games which you’ve had to try several times before you get into them? Are there some you’ve just given up on, and retreated to a preferred predecessor?
The other day Mister Adequate and I were on Sporcle doing quizzes together, which is a fun little pastime that we do on occasion. We had discovered the mother lode of strategy game related quizzes and were having a blast doing things like trying to name all the Civilization IV techs in 14 minutes and whatnot, and then we discovered one particular quiz that was called “Name Every Sim Game” or something.
So we took the quiz. We knew full well that we weren’t going to remember every single Sim game, but we wanted to see how well we would fare anyways, because we both have a huge soft spot for the Sim series. We did pretty well; we probably got about 75% or so, and then at the very end we eagerly went through to see which ones we had missed. It was standard stuff that we should’ve gotten; SimRefinery, Streets of SimCity, Sid Meier’s SimGolf…
…
…
Wait, what?
Sid Meier’s SimGolf.
Sid Meier’s SimGolf.
It’s actually a thing. That neither of us knew existed. Quickly we scoped out the Wikipedia article:
Sid Meier’s Sim Golf is a computer game created by Sid Meier, Firaxis, and Maxis in 2002.
Okay, so, let’s get this straight. Firaxis and Maxis got together. And made a game.
Firaxis and Maxis made a game together.
But instead of taking all the strategic turn-based depth of Civilization and combining it with the sandboxy micromanagement of SimCity to make the ultimate civilization simulator… they made a golf game.
Have a picture of our exact reaction.
And then we were confused for the rest of the day.
I can’t keep a Minecraft world or a SimCity city going for more than a couple of days. Or even hours.
I don’t know why! It’s not like I CAN’T keep a city in SC going for a while. Actually, one time I had one going for a really long time. That was in SimCity DS, which only allowed you to save one city at a time, and I played that particular city religiously over the course of about two or three months. I enjoyed the micromanagement and little improvements I could make to an already developed city, and the only reason I finally stopped was because I got to a point where my entire city inexplicably decided to become a fire hazard for no reason, and no amount of fire stations would solve the problem, and I just couldn’t be bothered to fix it. So I quit playing.
Actual blurry phone picture I took of my city when I was in the middle of that marathon a couple years back. It has a weird colorscheme for zoning: yellow is residential and red is industrial, if I recall correclty.
For some reason, that was the last time I’ve really been able to “get” into a single city like that. I’ve been playing a bit of SimCity 4 here and there over the past few months. And you know, I know how to set up a good city. I know where to put the zones, the power plants, the roads, and everything else you need, and perhaps most importantly, I know how to actually make money in the game.
But, every time, I’ll get to a point where I’ve played ten, maaaybe twenty in-game years and then get bored and delete it all and start a new city.
It’s certainly a change from the aforementioned SimCity DS, where I played that one city for something like 150 or 200 game years.
I’m not sure why this happens. It happens in Minecraft, too. I start a new Minecraft world… well, I was going to say every couple of days, but truthfully I really only play Minecraft a few times a week. So I’ll start a new Minecraft world every week or every other week or so. I honestly have no idea why. There’s just something so very enticing about a fresh slate.
(Terraria, on the other hand, has had me hooked in the same world for weeks now, so maybe that’s a sign that my attention span is actually lengthening now!)
Does anyone else have this problem, or is it just me?
Here’s a thing that bugs me about videogames that take place over a long period of time; They run on the assumption that what held true in our world will hold true in that way. Absolute monarchy and aristocracy begin, and these are gradually or violently reduced in favor of either constitutional monarchy or republicanism. Divine Right gives way to consent of the governed. Religion begins as a dominant force for the entire planet, and gradually declines in importance. It’s true that most games allow you through some means or other to maintain your previous status quo, but the assumptions are always the same – later technologies unlock new governments and these are superior to previous ones. You can run a theocratic state in Civ but if your rivals are a police state or democracy, they’re likely to outproduce you by some measure due to the bonuses they get compared to yours.
Now, in the first instance, I understand that even making these value judgments can be a pretty tricky task if you’re making a game which offers a number of governmental forms, and every single thing you add to that can complicate it considerably. Let’s take Communism as a working example. Superficially it’s easy to see why a Communist state would get a bonus to industry – Stalin forced the USSR from peasant serfdom to industrial superpower within a couple of decades, and Mao attempted the same in China (Though it was Deng Xiaoping’s free-market oriented reforms which have unleashed the Middle Kingdom’s current surge in wealth). Hoxha’s Albania and the DPRK regime both put military production before any other consideration. Our real-world historical examples of it are industry-centered, militaristic, and vary from merely autocratic to incomparably vicious.
If it was like this, we'd all be Red.
The question is, does this demonstrate what Communism has to be? Or is this how it is perceived because that’s how it worked out in our world? I would argue no, that much as I am opposed to it as a system, it wasn’t a fait accompli that it would turn out as it did. Had it taken hold in a heavily industrialized country such as the UK, France, Germany, or the USA, had the Mensheviks taken power in 1917, had the CNT-FAI won in Spain and resisted Stalinist control, we might well have a very different image of what Communism is.
My point isn’t to defend Communism. I’m merely using it because it’s an excellent example for what I am talking about, which is that game makers rely overly on preconceptions rooted in our reality’s experience to inform them of how things work in their games. More interesting, I feel, would be a more gradual, evolving system, where you didn’t choose your form of government so much as evolve it over the course of the game by reacting to events and conditions. The closest example to this I am aware of is Victoria II, where different political groups have various objectives, and different ones are allowed to do different things (So the reds can build factories all over the place, whilst radical liberals can’t fund any, for example) but even so, it feels somewhat thin, perhaps because it takes place over a relatively short time period.
I would, in any event, love to see a game on the timescale of Civ or even Spore where the development of not only your country, but its ideologies and most of all, what those ideologies actually entail, changes over the course of the game. For another example, consider that during the Renaissance and Enlightenment it was argued by many (very pious) people that to understand the universe in a scientific manner was not only in accordance with being a good Christian, but indeed a form of worship in itself. The argument (Grossly oversimplified; I’m no theologian) was that as God had created everything, everything was holy, and thus understanding anything had to be an act of worship in itself. What if such a perspective had taken hold even more strongly and become as universal an attitude towards Christianity as the doctrine that Christ died on the Cross? I doubt the current perspective that religion is dogmatic and myopic whilst secularism is the route to a more accurate understanding of the world would be as deeply entrenched by any means. So yes, what I'm saying is that no current game is spergy enough for me.
The problem is, of course, that this is an immensely complicated field. Even working on the experiences of our actual history, we have a huge amount of different experiences to draw on. When you implement “Democracy” in Civilization, is it the democracy of Athens? Is it a democracy where only the landed elite can vote? Is it constrained by constitutional checks and balances? How do you model a unicameral vs. a bicameral system? Is the President the Head of State only (As in the Irish Republic) or the Head of State and Head of Government, as in the USA? And what influence does this have on how the respective countries are run? These are all just individual factors of a single potential form of government. How they all interact, how they might all evolve over the course of centuries, is certainly a daunting thing to tackle in even the densest academic text, nevermind a videogame.
But ultimately, isn’t that what more ponderous strategy games are about? You’re not just drawing your lines on the map, you’re creating a country, wrestling with competing concerns, trying to do five things with the resources to do three of them properly, listening to the concerns of different groups in your society and deciding how to react? I admit it might be something of a niche game, but I think there would be room for something that really went into the evolution of political systems, religions, and social ideas in videogames.
If we’re going to improve videogames, then we need to do something which might seem a bit counterintuitive – we need to look at games which got it wrong. Que? Don’t we need to look at what went right and emulate it? Well sure, but we also need to look at what went wrong, and why. Sometimes this is very obvious, of course, and needs very little investigation. A game with a bad control scheme is always going to suffer, for example, regardless of the rest of its merits. More interesting, perhaps, is to look at games which fall into that very broad, but very overlooked, category of “Yeah it’s not bad I guess”. Mediocre, average, adequate, the games which don’t get many people excited, don’t do anything too amazing, and you probably won’t want to buy new but when you find it cheap a couple months later, won’t necessarily be a bad purchase.
For me, Spore is a first-class example of a second-class game. It had all the ingredients for being a classic; a legendary designer, a man who has literally invented a genre; his development studio, Maxis, responsible for some all-time greats, as we have discussed on this very blog; and that video from 2005, the video, the one which got us all so ridiculously excited.
This. Looked. Awesome.
And Spore, in the end? Spore was a much less interesting game. It looked like it was going to revolve around evolution and development in a really meaningful, enjoyable sense – you would experiment to figure out what worked, you would have different things that were beneficial depending on what kind of critter you were building, all sorts of things like that. Vehicles would have utility depending on how you shaped them, and buildings might to some extent as well. None of this was true, at least not beyond the cellular stage, where placement of parts did make a difference, and gave us a taste of what we were hoping for.
Then it all came crashing down. Your creature’s strengths and weaknesses weren’t determined by the design at all, just by the stats of the body parts you acquired. Which wouldn’t have been a bad compliment to the designing by itself, but replacing it wholesale? Nope. Oh, and the huge, cohesive world which it seemed like we would have to roam and explore and hunt over, with a dynamic ecosphere? In actuality other creatures just hang out near their nests, in groups of 10-15, and do nothing beyond that. The tribal stage was much the same. Rather than the Populous-esque experience which we were hoping for, it was a very simplistic, very easy affair. Not high crimes in itself, again, but contrasted against the potential, thoroughly disappointing. This is after all Will Wright we are talking about. And how we awaited the City/Empire stage! Oh my, this was going to rock. A cross between SimCity and Civilization! Who among us hasn’t dreamed of such a thing? But alas, t’was not to be. The design by this point had become completely aesthetic. Even the cursory customization of the previous stages was essentially gone now. There were no items to add to increase your buildings’ durability, for example, or to make them produce more money, or anything like that. The city building aspect was merely a simple puzzle game, revolving around where to place buildings in the grid. The empire was hardly more developed, though at least they made the concession of having different ways to take over other cities. Did I mention that once you reach a certain point you can just hit a magic button and win the stage?
L-R: EA; Our Dreams
Then you go to space. Space, space, space. It was always billed as the top dog of the Spore stages, the thing which everything else was building up towards. So maybe it was okay. We can take it, the other stages aren’t really bad, they’re just not great, not what we were hoping for. Well clearly they spent all their time on the Space stage, making it the best it could be, right? … right? Guys?
Who is responsible for subjecting our eyes to these... horrors?
Well, it is big, at least. The space stage in Spore is massive, that can’t be denied. If only there was much to do in it. If only terraforming was an interesting and involved process that was at least somewhat different according to each world’s unique situation. If only you could go and do stuff without being called back to deal with a crisis every ten minutes. If only the design of your spaceship mattered. If only you could make choices between speed, fuel, armaments, armor, etc. If only, if only, if only. And that’s really the story of Spore – taken by itself it’s not a bad game. What is there is fun enough to play a bit of, and the designing is at least visually engaging and somewhat enjoyable, even if not consequential. But even without Maxis, without Will Wright, without that video presentation, the potential is so clear, and it falls so far short. The end result is an extraordinarily shallow experience, which has very very little replay value, in a setting which feels exactly the opposite of what was hoped for – it’s not a big dangerous world you must struggle to adapt to and overcome, it’s a world designed specifically for you to play around in. Which would be fine if there was a lot for you to DO, except the sandbox is so lacking in sand, or a bucket and spade, and I think the cat peed in the corner of it. Now I accept that hype is playing a part here, it can’t not, but that only raises the question of why they thought moving so radically away from the GDC ’05 model was a good idea. Before Spore came out everyone was going berserk over that video.
So yeah, Spore: There’s a reason I list it as my most disappointing game ever. Which again, is not to mean worst – it’s worth picking up if you come across it for a few bucks, and it’ll keep you entertained for a few hours quite happily, maybe more depending on how you take to the designing stuff. But for me, for what I was hoping for? It falls so far short I don’t even know quite how to express it. It really breaks my heart to see something with so much potential fall so far short.
