Do you agree with Will Wright? Is Civ 4 too daunting?

[greenday_234]

Well you should have seen the way I played it. I found a little loophole where you could get married and get their net worth, and then there would be an unfortunate fire.

[Urban Ranger]

Ah, all right. You are pardoned

[Sirian]

Originally posted by Locutus
FPS games are all about speed and reflexes.

Surely you know better.

You're just -trying- to bullbait me. to see if I'm still out there lurking in the fog somewhere. Start dissing FPS games with stereotypes and cliches, and Sirian will pop up before long to object.

Where have I been hiding? In the depths of Oblivion, of course. There are at least as many tactics involved in a single combat in Oblivion as there are in a battle between two stacks of units in Civ. The strategy levels are comparable, as well. True, you need some command of the controls, requiring both reflexes and speed, but anybody who asserts with a straight face that no tactics or strategy are needed in FPS is baying at the moon.


Writers discovered that there are two ways to tell a story before they figured out an alphabet: you can speak in first person, or in third. Games are played from first person, or from third. Games are stories, after all.

Games can be played in real time, or in slices of frozen time, and most real time games have some moments of pause or some way to pause. Multiplayer games tend to be an exception, though.

You've got your FPS games, like Doom, and your TPS (Third Person Shooter) games, like Diablo. Shooting at stuff trying to kill "you" is as old (in video games) as Space Invaders. The only reason First Person came along later is that it required more computing power. Much easier to stick icons out there and move them around in third person than to craft a credible first person experience.

Really, though, all those old CRPGs ("computer role playing games") were merely shooters. Pools of Radiance? Turn-based third-person shooter controlling a small "party" of "adventurers". Woop-te-doo. Turn based gaming was the rage in the 80s because the tech was not there for real time games of the same magnitude. Third person games were the rage because the tech wasn't there for first person.


The mistake some make is to think that first person, now that it can finally be done well, will erase third person, or that real time will erase turn-based -- or even that mass market will erase niche markets. They're wrong, of course -- as wrong as anybody who disses first person as automatically dumb and twitchy. Surely many first person games ARE dumb and twitchy, but twitchy is a function of real time play (TBS games are even more twitchy than FPS games) and any game can be dumb.


Simple is good, except when it's not. Sometimes it's simply wrong.


- Sirian

[Senethro]

The problem with FPS games and micro-RTS (Warcraft 3) is that there is a physical skill exclusion limit. If you can't physically play well enough then you'll never see strategy because its simply not necessary. If someone can kill you from a positional disadvantage then there is no need to get clever.

The people who claim that RTSs are full of "cheap rushers" are the people who've never seen the 6th minute of a game because they can't play well enough.

There isn't really an equivalent boundary of skill in FPS games, but the difference between people who aim for the centre of the torso and those who aim for the head is close enough.

[Sirian]

Originally posted by Senethro
There isn't really an equivalent boundary of skill in FPS games, but the difference between people who aim for the centre of the torso and those who aim for the head is close enough.

You're on to another subject now: realism vs game balance. "Head shot" shooters are a subgenre. They are a big subgenre, but I've played first person games without this mechanism, and generally enjoyed them more. For that matter, not all first person games involve guns and soldiers. Many put the player in various kinds of vehicles, and the gameplay for these is not caught in that narrow band of gameplay.

There is skill to playing anything competitive in MP, but single player can be more things to more players. The limits are drawn by designers, in the stories they choose to craft. All of the major genres have critics who dismiss the entire genre out of hand, unfairly. That would include Will Wright's Sims genre. Everything with a large following has significant quality imbedded. Various dismissals, including many in this thread, are more a statement of taste than one of analysis.


- Sirian

[Solver]

Sirian, get out of Tamriel already and start commenting on more threads here . And drop by the Oblivion threads in the Other Games forum .

[Sirian]

"Other Games Forum"? Bah. I was willing to talk about Oblivion in the GalCiv2 forum, WITH the GalCiv2 players, but when they moved the threads for being in the wrong place, I went back to RB. ... I'm just a simple guy, you know. I'll look through a subforum or two, but six or ten? Forget it. You won't believe I'm saying this, but there can be such a thing as "too organized for your own good".

Besides, I'd rather play than chat. ... Going to go fire it up here shortly, after I grab a quick snack.


- Sirian

[Solver]

Come on, "Other Games" here would mean you'd just have to visit two subforums - that and this one. I've been wanting to read what you have to say on Oblivion ever since I exited the sewers myself, and you're denying me the pleasure .

[Silver14]

Here's the link to the Oblivion Thread.

Got to make it easy on him Solver.

That thread hasn't been to lively lately anyway.

[Solver]

I have decided to play no/very little Oblivion until I upgrade. I have what's essentially a low-end PC, which struggles running Oblivion, so it basically looks worse than Morrowind. Fortunately, there's Warlords for me now, and in 5 weeks there's the football world cup, so I'll hardly have a chance to play Oblivion anyway - which is good because I'm planning an upgrade somewhere around then .

[Soltz]

For what it's worth, there are similar discussions ( or arguments ) going on in MMORPG forums with the hard-core gamers arguing that "World of Warcraft" is a dumbed down game.

[armchairknight]

Originally posted by Solver
Well, there IS a big difference between Chess and Civ. Chess has far simpler rules. All the rules of chess can easily be layed out on one page; you can't do that with Civ. Then again, Civ has (theoretically) more strategic depth. I mean, professional chess players play the first dozen turns by heart, all those openings have been tried and tried to death, and are thus known and have been analyzed a ton.

So chess and Civ are quite different. Chess is a completely brilliant game, though.

The point I think Zoid was making in comparing Chess and Go with Civ is the relative difficulty in achieving mastery. While indeed Chess and Go are simple mechanicly, very much unlike Civ as you've noted, they are deceptively difficult to master. Like Civ. All three games boast millions of players, so I do not believe that any of them are too daunting by any means.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Sirian
Where have I been hiding? In the depths of Oblivion, of course. There are at least as many tactics involved in a single combat in Oblivion as there are in a battle between two stacks of units in Civ. The strategy levels are comparable, as well.

Since I haven't played Obliviion I can't comment on this. What I can say is, if you need that kind of strategy and tactics in a RPG something is wrong...

Originally posted by Sirian
True, you need some command of the controls, requiring both reflexes and speed, but anybody who asserts with a straight face that no tactics or strategy are needed in FPS is baying at the moon.

I won't call knowing whom to shoot first and using what to shoot tactics

Originally posted by Sirian
Games can be played in real time, or in slices of frozen time, and most real time games have some moments of pause or some way to pause. Multiplayer games tend to be an exception, though.

Not real real time. It's just a continuous flow of time, or condensed time.

Originally posted by Sirian
Really, though, all those old CRPGs ("computer role playing games") were merely shooters. Pools of Radiance? Turn-based third-person shooter controlling a small "party" of "adventurers". Woop-te-doo.

Not that simple. A lot of the old CRPGs are quite complex and involves more than killing monsters. A prime example being Ultima IV.

This has a lot more to do with game design than anything else. You should know that.

Originally posted by Sirian
Turn based gaming was the rage in the 80s because the tech was not there for real time games of the same magnitude. Third person games were the rage because the tech wasn't there for first person.

Battlezone, anyone? I'd say this has more to do with game design than computing power. Some games, even non-shooters such as Bane of the Cosmic Forge, used one-point pespective from a first person pespective.

[aneeshm]

I've always wanted to say this : "If games were television serials , then The Sims would be a soap opera ." .

[VonSharma]

I started civ3 completely clueless, but like people have said, if the desire is there, you'll figure it out, just like riding a bike or chess or whatever.

At this point, I'd be willing to put down $250 right now (I'd be willing to give up goin out for a few months), and I'm sure almost every other civ fan would as well, for development of an even more insane Civ5 a couple of years from now (as long as I don't have to blow another $250 on a graphics card =P. And those youngins or new players who happen to hear about civ and like the idea of the game, or hear about the devotion of the underground cult following of Civ, will find their way into the fold.

Simcity 2000 was awesome, but civ is infinite times more satisfying to play (after you could turn a profit and reach 90k pop. in Simcity, the game got less addicting very fast)