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Reviewer's summary:
Call me Kassandra, but this is what I suspected all along. Apparently the original Moo3 design, the Empire Simulator, was a huge, unplayable numbercruncher. And it's still there, but in order to make it playable, there are now lots of helper AIs that play the game for you.
The original MOOs, like Civilization, worked because the basic rules were simple, the output was in little intuitive icons and, most important, it was clearly defined and easy to understand how each player decision affected the empire. Good games are all about choices, and choices only matter when you see the impact they have on the game.
If Tom is right, Moo3 will be a failure, because QS failed to understand what made Moo1+2 great. The chance for Tom being right is unfortunately high. Look at his other reviews; you will notice that, among other things, he exposed both Dungeon Siege and Morrowind as what they are.
In many ways, this is the anti-Sid Meier school of design, a throwback to the complex wargames where much of the calculations are running under the hood and it's your job to just shut up and move the pieces around, leaving all those numbers alone to do their own thing. There's no clear correlation between your actions and whatever outcome the game eventually spits out, so you're left with the feeling that you might as well just click the 'turn' button a few times and see what happens. Three hundred turns later, the game's over.
There's no denying Master of Orion 3 is a complex game. Complexity itself isn't a bad thing, but poorly organized complexity can be the kiss of death. What's worse is poorly organized complexity that serves as a substitute for gameplay. This is exactly what you get with Master of Orion 3, an indecipherable pile of dense self-absorbed data that completely fails to understand why we loved our first MOOs.
There's no denying Master of Orion 3 is a complex game. Complexity itself isn't a bad thing, but poorly organized complexity can be the kiss of death. What's worse is poorly organized complexity that serves as a substitute for gameplay. This is exactly what you get with Master of Orion 3, an indecipherable pile of dense self-absorbed data that completely fails to understand why we loved our first MOOs.
Call me Kassandra, but this is what I suspected all along. Apparently the original Moo3 design, the Empire Simulator, was a huge, unplayable numbercruncher. And it's still there, but in order to make it playable, there are now lots of helper AIs that play the game for you.
The original MOOs, like Civilization, worked because the basic rules were simple, the output was in little intuitive icons and, most important, it was clearly defined and easy to understand how each player decision affected the empire. Good games are all about choices, and choices only matter when you see the impact they have on the game.
If Tom is right, Moo3 will be a failure, because QS failed to understand what made Moo1+2 great. The chance for Tom being right is unfortunately high. Look at his other reviews; you will notice that, among other things, he exposed both Dungeon Siege and Morrowind as what they are.
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