New review @ Games Domain 2.5/5

[Gargantua]

Review

[Grumbold]

You get a couple of pages of backhistory between chapters of instruction in MoO3. Why is this freaking so many of the reviewers out so much they feel obliged to focus attention on it in even a small review? Is there nothing more worthy of a sentence, like espionage, diplomacy, racial hatreds or the existence of a council where you can pass laws perhaps?

Interesting that the same chicken-and-egg discussion pops up again here about advisors. Anyone who wants to bash the game seems to leap up and say "see, see, the knew they'd made it too complicated, thats why they had to make advisors!" None of them seem willing to acknowledge that advisors may have come first and were the entire reason that the game was allowed to become so complex.

[kalbear]

Well, I agree with the reviewer that in terms of information layout, the way they chose to do it in the manual was poor. I would much rather have had the 40-page backstory all in one section so that I can quickly look up what I need to know while playing.

On the viceroys: I do think it's a bit annoying that you can't turn them off totally. Some people like to MM, and some people like to have the ability to MM, even if the viceroy will do an outstanding job. That you can't turn them off alltogether is bad.

Mostly, though, this review worries me because of his statement that the game feels like it doesn't have any soul. That's what I felt about SE 4, despite all the myriad options and whatnot, and Brett is an excellent reviewer and one whose opinion I respect.

[General Ludd]

I would hate to play a game that these guys like, every complaint they make is about something I look for in a game.

[Cymrean]

exactly

[General Ludd]

By the way, I think the manual design is great. the way they split up story and game mechanics allows you to easily read through the manual form start to finish learning about both the history and game mechanics at the same time. This is the first manual that I've actually read.


If you want easy and quick reference there is a 12 page long table of contents, and you can quickly use the search command in the pdf format, ofcourse.

[Cymrean]

I have already planned my first moo3 day. I will sit with the box nearby and read the manual from start to finish Wonder whether the translation will be good enough... I'd prefer the english version but paying about 20$ more is not acceptable for my account

[Grumbold]

I agree Osweld. If you want to know one particular fact, then the index will take you to the right page fast. Thats what indexes are for.

I get the impression that the backstory is interleaved into the rules explanation because unlike many games its actually kind of important. If it had been a 30 page introduction then almost everyone would have ignored it, assuming it was the same "In AD 2101 War was beginning" intro of all the other space games.

[darcy]

You get a couple of pages of backhistory between chapters of instruction in MoO3. Why is this freaking so many of the reviewers out so much they feel obliged to focus attention on it in even a small review? Is there nothing more worthy of a sentence, like espionage, diplomacy, racial hatreds or the existence of a council where you can pass laws perhaps?

It's not a reviewer's job to walk through the feature list. A reviewer describes his gaming experience. If his experience is overshadowed by an intrusive yet irrelevant backstory which he feels gets in the way of enjoyment, it's very good style to focus on that.

That's why Chick's review was so good, he has an excellent way of sharing his overall impression of a game. It's perfectly alright to ignore the parts of the game you didn't feel strongly about, and focus on the parts you _do_ care about.

[Grumbold]

On the contrary in order to inform the reader the reviewer should at least let us know that major game components exist. I distrust a review(er) who found nothing to say about so many parts of the feature set. It questions whether he even found them. I'd like to see a comment, even if it was simply that they found absolutely no purpose in sending spies/making resolutions/diploming with other races because they didn't work.

His experience read like an RTS. I had trouble building stuff. I had trouble reading the manual. I had trouble kicking butt. Some of my pieces wanted to ignore me because the pathfinding is crap. Review over!

Which parts of the backstory are irrelevant in your opinion anyway? I find it all pretty useful to know.

[Corentor]

If you want to know the game features, visit the websites. If you want to know what people think of the game, go read reviews.

Reviews are not meant to be a broadcasting platform for a game's features, it is a broacasting platform to describe how a particular player felt about playing the game, what he liked and what he didn't like.

[Yodasplat]

Originally posted by darcy

It's not a reviewer's job to walk through the feature list. A reviewer describes his gaming experience. If his experience is overshadowed by an intrusive yet irrelevant backstory which he feels gets in the way of enjoyment, it's very good style to focus on that.

That's why Chick's review was so good, he has an excellent way of sharing his overall impression of a game. It's perfectly alright to ignore the parts of the game you didn't feel strongly about, and focus on the parts you _do_ care about.

In a sense I agree with that. That's what reviewers give you: their impressions and their level of enjoyment of the game.

Again, a reviewer is just a guy that has to pump out reviews for a magazine/web site. For some games it doesn't take much to explore the full "depth": Quake, Half Life, Unreal... you shoot very UGLY things that move towards you and sometimes spit/fire/claw back at you.

If the game in question is a bit more complex and requires lots more time to be explored fully, then of course the review will not be positive.

I bring as an example Ghost Recon: it was bashed by some reviewers because it was "too frustrating": you would get killed by the first shot, you couldn't run fast enough ... etc. Well GR is a successful game in spite of some bad reviews. Why? because reviewers are in a hurry. They can't spend an HOUR an half just to finish one short mission where you are lucky if you get to kill 10 enemy soldiers total and you spent most of the time crouching or lying down on the ground hearing noising and trying to spot people in the vegetation/fog before the spot you.

Same here. This is obviously a game that requires a lot of effort. I wouldn't take the word of game reviewers just because ... they are reviewers. Quite the opposite in fact.

I would trust more the review of someone like Mr.Quick that apparently spent many weeks researching/playing the game and gave us an exahustive report on the qualities of the game.

His preview (I cannot emphasize this enough) is really what we should rely upon to get a feel for this game.

[Corentor]

A whole lot of you seem to be confused as to what a review actually is.

It is not meant to be a compiliation of features in the game. It is not meant to appease fanboys. It is not a run down of every single component of the game nor even a significant number of features in the game.

A review is supposed to summarize in the writer's opinion, should the reader buy the game, supported by evidence and examples as to why the writer feels that way.

Which reviews should you trust? The ones you should trust are the ones that comment on things in the game that you care about. If a reviewer slams a game because of frequent bugs but you don't care about haivng to reboot your computer 10 times during play, then that review is essentially pointless because the things the writer disliked about the game do not matter to you.

Also, just because a professional reviewer has to play more games than the average fanboy review (a la Mr. Quick), does not mean that his opinion is any less valid. Yoda's comments about Ghost Recon gettings slammed is completely off the mark. The real reason why Ghost recon got slammed by so many reviewers is because most people, reviewers included, don't like being killed in one shot and sneaking around for 10 minutes just to complete a mission. Time pressure had nothing to do with it. Those people just don't find it ammusing to fail the mission because the AI got lucky and hit them with a burst.

Now you may find Ghost recon a great game. It also probably means that you don't mind dying with one shot and sneaking around for most of the game. But does that mean your point of view is more legitimate than the other guy's. Should a quake player or a UT player rely on YOUR assessment of Ghost Recon? I think the answer is obvious. But while you may be spitting at the reviewer for his comments on the game you love, that reviewer probably saved several hundred people 50 bucks on a game they wouldn't have liked.

Which makes Rantz's comments about TChick not being objective and all the other fanboy's mocking the various "negative" reviews so ridiculous.

There is no ONE TRUTH about MOO3. Learn to live with it.

[booje]

This is too bad since I really respect Gamesdomain and their reviews though I don't always agree with them.

What worries me more about this review is that there seem to be some flaws with the entire concept of the game.

Take MOO 1 for example, empire building where you have control of maybe 50 planets. Empire-wide transparancy with planets and individual ships.

Now MOO 2 was really a revamp and refinement and exapnsion of the whole concept. While a great game concentrating on mostly "more of the same" it exposed micro-management flaws with the original game concept.

So MOO 3 has decided to take the micro-management problem head on by de-emphasizing it all together and focusing on the big picture. Tons of features which might be of dubious gameplay value are also added. Problems arise when the game is months into development and not much code has been developed.


Hmmm.... Still gonna get it and play it for hours anyway!

[Ray K]

From the review:
---------------------
Still, you never get the feeling that you've got a handle on what's taking place on a grass-roots level. Which is probably what Quicksilver wants, in that this is supposed to be a space empire game and not an extraterrestrial version of The Corporate Machine, but that then begs the question of why so much detail was crammed in here in the first place.

This is what I am most concerned about.

Why create such a complicated economic model when you are forced to have the AI run it through viceroys?

All that does is add an unnecessary layer between the player's actions and what happens in the game. A simpler model with no viceroys/governors/etc is a proven concept.