Anyone still really Enthused about MOO3?

[strategy]

Originally posted by GP
Change your strategy than. Wait for the XP to come out, so you get a complete game. Wait for reviews, etc.

Not an easy thing to do, but its what I'm doing right now with Civ3, wise from experience. It's also one reason why I haven't bought a new game for the past two years or so.

[TCO]

same here, strat.

Games aren't that great anyway. Get only the good ones and wait until they work...

[kziti kat]

I am about excited about the prospect of the release of MOO3 in 2002 (2003?) as I am about the prospect of visiting my dentist on May 29.

They have a good track record concerning releases though... If I remember correctly MOO2 came out 6 months after its initially published release date. With all the bickering, nitpicking, and dumbing down of the game I have lost interested if the game - period. I don't care if it EVER comes out!

[Stormhound]

Now there's an odd set of coincidences...are you getting fillings done on May 29th also, like I am?

[kziti kat]

No, just a checkup (but I do think one of my fillings will need to be replaced - blah)

I am serious about not looking forward to the release of MOO3. At one point I was truly excited about seeing the continuation of the MOO saga, but at this point I am just plain worn out from what I have seen happen to the game. If you knew how much I liked MOO 1 and 2, then you would realize the debth of my dispair. MOO2 is in the top 3 of my all-time favorite games. I'll wait and pick up MOO3 at the bargain bin if at all.


How's the job search situation going Hound?

How's the little lady?

kat out

[Stormhound]

The job search is going, but that's about all I can say for it. It's a lousy time to be an out-of-work mainframer in these parts.

Not all is bad, though.

The little lady is doing OK.

I got to see Ep2 last night, and seeing Yoda handle a light saber is worth the full price of admission.

Also, I'm starting a HackMaster campaign tonight, so I'll be getting my GMing fix once again.

[Ozymandous]

Hrm...

Originally posted by madmario


Clearly you think I am being "overly wary." I do not.

Could be, just as you think I am flaming people while I do not.

[/QUOTE] No. I mentioned two games appropriate to this forum and that required little explanation. Of course there are other dissapointments! For instance, while I liked Black and White, I was very dissapoined by the support for the game -- months for a patch. It was produced by EA (you could ask Richard Garriot about EA dissapointments). SFC command II was a terrible dissapointment - hello dynaverse II? I also thought the later patches to simgolf screwed the gameplay -- although I never went back so maybe it was fixed. There are others. Furthermore, I am dissapointed by the number of poor games on the market that I don't buy. I only indicated two because I didn't want to list a bunch of off topic games.[/QUOTE]

I agree, there are a lot of bad games out, but just because there are bad games does not mean this game, or any other will be poor. A =! C you know.

Well, why don't we just close apolyton. Why bother talking about what we like and don't like? Why bother having a forum before a game comes out?

You missed the point of my original post. Sure, talk about games all you ewant but too many people seem to fixate on ONLY the bad, or what they think will be bad, features. THis seems to be a common thread on these message boards. That was my point.

Anything else you think I said, well, that's not what I said or meant.

I have found at least one other person here who thinks the "classic" games are getting older and older. I am here to talk with people like him, not argue with you. I think that is a potentially interesting tidbit of conversation.

Surprise, I am not here to argue either, my original post (if you'd like to go back to check for yourself) was a general comment about why do people here seem to want to fixate on the suspected bad parts of the game, when no one outside the developers know anything about the game other than rumors and tidbits. Do I think the game is perfect, no, but I thought it might be refreshing to wait and see, and meant to make the point that if others took the same attitude they might be a little happier.

We are just talking about what we have. My biggest issue with your post is that you make personal attacks instead of just adding to the discussion. This problem of course isn't isolated to you, but that is another topic.

Hrm, when did I attack anyone? I made a general comment, and *you* responded to my general comment so I continued the discussion with you. If you found insult in my views on what you said then I apologize, but don't try to make this a finger-pointing exercise because I did not post to you or anyone initially, and you were the first to respond in a personal manner (i.e. directing your post to me directly) to begin with.

At this point I know very few facts about the game. I know a few facts around the development of the game, and having read accounts around other games, I am skeptical.

Fine, I am glad you have doubts, but just because you have doubts doesn't automatically make you right, the same as someone with no doubt, who thinks this will be the best game ever, is correct either. We don't know how the game will be yet so any claims either way are purely opinion.

I didn't find the gameplay in CIV3 to be terribly different. There was culture, but culture is basically another weapon of expansion. Diplomacy was refined -- nice. But it was also primarily a tool of expansion. The game-play was very similar. ICS still was the way to go. Expand and do not invest in a handful -- invest as broadly as possible. Numbers. The various forms of winning boiled down to a similar formula with a little twist at the end. I felt that there were only a handful of effective ways to play the game -- maybe there were many subtle differences, but I didn't feel like it. Everything was about get bigger. There wasn't a way to come back from behind, certainly not for the computer. There was little incentive to not expand effectively and quickly.

Well when you boil any "empire-building" game down to it's simplest form, essentially the key to all of them is to expand as quickly as possible. So in that case you are correct. However, to hard part is surviving until you get enough resources to beat the AI empires, this is the whole goal of Civ3, as with almost any empire building game.

Oh, and with Civ3 there is a way to come from behind, it's basically give the AI whatever they want until you can play catch-up and win. That's how people who beat Deity level without "abusing the system" play from what I have heard.

If you think there are only a few ways to win, well, have you ever played Civ with onyl 5 cities? With never building a culture producing building? With a modified civ that doesn't have huge bonuses?

There were other dissapointing elements to CIV 3 for me but that's a whole other thread.

Ah, well, sorry Civ3 was not what you wanted. A lot of people like it quite a bit, but with all things there will be some who like it and some who don't. I don' think that means it's not bad (judging by how well it's selling), just that some have diferent expectations (and usually howl the loudest when their expectations aren't met!)

A game that did not dissapoint me was EUII (I did not buy its predacessor, though). I fee there are a number of valid ways to play that game. It was also different from other games to be interesting and intriguing. Goals are different for a minor state, like Ragusa, than say England -- but I can have fun playing either of them. Now, that isn't to say I don't have any issues with the game -- I do!! I bring it up to point out I am not a misanthropist, err misgame-ist, err.. umm, impossible to please.

I don't think I ever implied you're impossible to please, just that as a gamer it helps if you know what your expectations are going in and sometimes give a game a chance when it's not what you expect but might be good anyway. Buying games are like watching movies, if you go in expecting to know exactly how everything will go, don't be surprised if it doesn't turn out how you thought and ae disappointed, but if you go in with no pre-concieved ideas you'll usually be less upset by however things go.

If I knew the perfect answer to that question, then I wouldn't be buying games. I would be making them. But different might be different valid strategies vis-a-vis pervious games. Like, if you could play a perfectionist culture, and have it be as effective a an expansionist one. Or if you played a mercantile state. Or if you could comeback somehow. If the game was less, well, linear. Choices. Give and take. Hard choices. Nuance in those chioces. Micormanagement is a big deal too. It's a very hard balance to strike in terms of design, I am sure.

Hmm, good points. Now imagine trying to make a product that over a million people will think has all these options and you'll see the daunting task of designing a game (or any mass produced product). Not that I am making excuses, but for example, I have heard so many people complain that all of the features in the editor aren't built into Civ3, whenthat's what the editor is there for, to allow all of those million people to customize the game to suit them. *shrug*

Sure. That these "classic" games are getting older could simply be me suffering from nostalgia. Certainly. The industrty is changing though. It has changed a lot, and it is changing all the time. Are these linked? I think so. Look at how many bad games come out that I don't buy -- that I hope no one buys. How do they sell? Why do they sell? How do they make money?! However it is, it is different from how and why games sold in the past.

Heh, no idea on who buys the bad games, casual gamers maybe? People with more "disposable" income? Parents buying for their self-centered (Me! Me!)) kids? Who knows. I do agree with you that games seem to have changed, much like Star Wars for example. Back when technology couldn't keep up there had to be a good story, now that technology is so wide-spread and easy to use there seems to be an over-abundance of "fluff" and eye-candy. Now if game manufacturers would give us an old fashioned well though out and written game with good eye-candy and controls, that would be fantastic.

On a related note, how was it that CIV 3 was released missing a major gameplay element -- air superiority? Am I supposed to imagine that was simply a mistake? What would have happened if it was a new game from an unknown developer?

Ah, it wasn't missing, it was there, just broken. Was one of the first things they fixed in the patch. You did stick around long enough to see that fixed I hope, otherwise, no wonder you were so upset with the game. And yes, that was a mistake, which was fixed. If it was "missing" then it would have been something missing from the design of the game, not included but not functioning, which is a bug. If it were a small developer, if they had released a patch that fixed it right away, then they'd still have a solid product, which is exactly what Firaxis did/has done.

Yeah but we're here talking about games. That's the point of these forums. I don't care why people are here! I only care about their ideas. You also spoke in very broad terms about people on the thread. I find personal attacks to be weak in terms of ideas.

And I find insinuations of wrong-doing just as lame, i.e. as explained above I didn't "personally attack" anyone. So people can't have an idea different than yours that isn't an attack?

I agree with some of yours sentiment, but personal attacks are just lame.

So is trying to minimalize what someone says by claiming they made a personal attack.. *shrug*

[madmario]

Re: Hrm...

Not much left here, but...

Originally posted by Ozymandous
Hrm, when did I attack anyone?

"Go out and get a hobby" suggests both "go out and get a life" and "you don't have a hobby here," both of which are personal attacks, not addressing ideas.

Otherwise, we generally agree -- although you made some blanket statements about responses in the thread I called you on, because I don't believe your chracaterization was just (certainly in my case).

Well when you boil any "empire-building" game down to it's simplest form, essentially the key to all of them is to expand as quickly as possible.

I had hoped it would not be the case in MOO3, based on a variety of earlier design ideas (HFOG, IFP, other elements). Whether or not that will be different I will have to see. To give an example of something different, that is not always the case in EUII, but it is sometimes. EUII isnt a TBS, however, it is similar to one.

I feel like you are arguing that my issue is one with the genre of TBS. That may be the case. Maybe that's why TBS has generally waned in popularity.

Oh, and with Civ3 there is a way to come from behind,

not for the AI, and not generally. The winning human tends to stay that way. Once you break into "winning", the rest of the game is just dressing.

MP may be different (also of course a dissapointment, and something that was not handled with complete disclosure).

If you think there are only a few ways to win, well, have you ever played Civ with onyl 5 cities? With never building a culture producing building? With a modified civ that doesn't have huge bonuses?

of course artificial restrictions can make it more challenging. I can also play people in chess without my queen. Still, the gameplay isn't something terribly innovative complared to other iterations. Expand by building this, or expand by building that. Research is linear-- there are subtle differences, zig or zag, so there -is- some nuance, to be sure. Certainly the UI was vastly improved -- big kudos there. I can give the game to any semi-geek and expect them to have a good time.

IG also did some funky stuff with the SE box, to my dissapointment. And while your point about Air superiority being "fixed" later is plausible, I don't understand how the game was published with such a huge bug unless it was ignored for financial reasons -- and further why the mending took so long. I suspect it wasn't implemented as a feature -- a major feature. MOO3 has the same publisher. Once bitten--twice shy. I had well moved on by the time they fixed it. I might go back but I loaned my copy to a friend so he wouldn't feel pressured to buy it. That was about a month after the game was released. -shrug- Haven't asked for it since, nor felt the urge to.

And of course, CIV3 sells really well. I'm not sure what that means. It's not really a topic for this thread, although it may be related to the way those very "bad" games actually make money. I just used CIV3 as an example of an identifiable dissapointment, and one that people would understand easily. I didn't mean to get into a discussion about it. I wasn't trying to howl loudly (if you meant that). I used CIV3 as an example.


-mario

[tishco]

i'm looking forward to medieval total war more than moo3 at the moment, and gta 3