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I sincerely am not dogging on anyones work. Nothing could be further from the truth. Trust me I know what it's like to spend an inordinant amount of time on a game modification only to have 14 people play it. I am only trying to be straight with my opinion. If anyone comes away from this feeling defensive, then you've jumped to that conclusion on your own. Do what YOU want. This is merely one mans opinion.
Believe it or not, there are a lot of the same things happening with Civ3 mods as has happened with mods for many other games. my personal experience with this comes from shooters.
It never fails that the most popular mods are the ones that are simple to build and play, yet change the game significantly. Counterstrike/Halflife is a good example. Excessive/Quake3 is another good example. HeadHunters/Q1 is yet another.
I say counterstrike because of its early days when it used the standard HL weapons, and it didn't have 400mb of maps and textures. Excessive is fun as hell, different from straight deathmatch, but requires NO initial download at all. HeadHunters Quake 1 added actual THOUGHT and different tactics to deathmatch.
Conversely, the giant download, big production mods either 1) die on the vine, or 2) lose fans during the way-too-long and delayed development cycle or 3) require an graduate degree of some sort just to understand, nevermind set up... and then don't admit to being a newb. Anyway, I THINK i see some of the same things about to happen here.
Some Q3/UnrealTournament players, that like Single Player (sp) play, have been slobbering for simple sp action, doom style. . . run thru the level, hit a button, the end. Problem is that every single player project that is/was out there has been some epic Final Fantasy-esque storyline demanding models, textures, 5000 maps, etc... and they either die quietly or have taken forever.
So with this in mind, I come to this board, as i have many times before, and i see the same trend happening... large, unwieldy dev teams with lofty goals. By no means am i saying that it's foolish to pursue such, cuz i did the same thing. But it seems that ppl forget that big goals require big investment. and on a free project, big investment = big clock.
Personally, I would like to see . . .
- small easy to play, short game scenarios/mods. Something with a handful of units/techs that could be completed in a short evening... 3 hrs.
- original scenarios (see below). Civil war and WW2 battle recreations have become very yawn.
- something other than 'perfection' mods. for Q3 there are any number of 'real world' or 'classic' or 'professional' or 'tourney' mods that merely tweak the original game (rockets that fly in real-world scale, real-world machine gun damage from 14 different machine guns) as opposed to actual modification that changes the goal of the game.
here's some ideas. If i've mentioned someones idea here, it's purely coincidental.
- a mod/scen that the player CANNOT win, but the goal is to last as long as possible.
- fully replacing terrain with other original 'scapes' like a starmap for settling an area of the known galaxy... or oceanscape and a flooded world scenario... or an apartment building and the players are competing roach colonies...
- A Warhammer 40k scenario could be a particularly bloody as well as short scenario every time you play it.
- player runs a Gibsonesque Megacorp, and the terrain has been replaced with Cityscape. Mountains become Skyscrapers, etc, and the goal is to dominate the world, but full frontal assault may very well incite full frontal attack by all (save allied) AI.
I'm just trying to brainstorm here. I've had Civ3 for about a month now, and have managed to play it all of a couple of times. I have a particularly groovy idea that would require a decent amount of art, but would be logistically easy to build. I would start messin with it if the link to "art for dummies" tute worked )=
Anyway, let's just say that i'm a bit disappointed in the scope of mods currently in dev... mods that i'm aware of anyway (= IMO Civ3 isn't a wargame, it is a tactical game that is simple, unlike traditional hexgrid tactical games. there are infinite scenarios that can fit under the 'tactical' moniker that don't involve literal war.
::Monsto
Believe it or not, there are a lot of the same things happening with Civ3 mods as has happened with mods for many other games. my personal experience with this comes from shooters.
It never fails that the most popular mods are the ones that are simple to build and play, yet change the game significantly. Counterstrike/Halflife is a good example. Excessive/Quake3 is another good example. HeadHunters/Q1 is yet another.
I say counterstrike because of its early days when it used the standard HL weapons, and it didn't have 400mb of maps and textures. Excessive is fun as hell, different from straight deathmatch, but requires NO initial download at all. HeadHunters Quake 1 added actual THOUGHT and different tactics to deathmatch.
Conversely, the giant download, big production mods either 1) die on the vine, or 2) lose fans during the way-too-long and delayed development cycle or 3) require an graduate degree of some sort just to understand, nevermind set up... and then don't admit to being a newb. Anyway, I THINK i see some of the same things about to happen here.
Some Q3/UnrealTournament players, that like Single Player (sp) play, have been slobbering for simple sp action, doom style. . . run thru the level, hit a button, the end. Problem is that every single player project that is/was out there has been some epic Final Fantasy-esque storyline demanding models, textures, 5000 maps, etc... and they either die quietly or have taken forever.
So with this in mind, I come to this board, as i have many times before, and i see the same trend happening... large, unwieldy dev teams with lofty goals. By no means am i saying that it's foolish to pursue such, cuz i did the same thing. But it seems that ppl forget that big goals require big investment. and on a free project, big investment = big clock.
Personally, I would like to see . . .
- small easy to play, short game scenarios/mods. Something with a handful of units/techs that could be completed in a short evening... 3 hrs.
- original scenarios (see below). Civil war and WW2 battle recreations have become very yawn.
- something other than 'perfection' mods. for Q3 there are any number of 'real world' or 'classic' or 'professional' or 'tourney' mods that merely tweak the original game (rockets that fly in real-world scale, real-world machine gun damage from 14 different machine guns) as opposed to actual modification that changes the goal of the game.
here's some ideas. If i've mentioned someones idea here, it's purely coincidental.
- a mod/scen that the player CANNOT win, but the goal is to last as long as possible.
- fully replacing terrain with other original 'scapes' like a starmap for settling an area of the known galaxy... or oceanscape and a flooded world scenario... or an apartment building and the players are competing roach colonies...
- A Warhammer 40k scenario could be a particularly bloody as well as short scenario every time you play it.
- player runs a Gibsonesque Megacorp, and the terrain has been replaced with Cityscape. Mountains become Skyscrapers, etc, and the goal is to dominate the world, but full frontal assault may very well incite full frontal attack by all (save allied) AI.
I'm just trying to brainstorm here. I've had Civ3 for about a month now, and have managed to play it all of a couple of times. I have a particularly groovy idea that would require a decent amount of art, but would be logistically easy to build. I would start messin with it if the link to "art for dummies" tute worked )=
Anyway, let's just say that i'm a bit disappointed in the scope of mods currently in dev... mods that i'm aware of anyway (= IMO Civ3 isn't a wargame, it is a tactical game that is simple, unlike traditional hexgrid tactical games. there are infinite scenarios that can fit under the 'tactical' moniker that don't involve literal war.
::Monsto
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