I was wrong about MOO3

[Ianpolaris]

Kalbear,

First of all thanks for the pleasent and in-depth response. I am quoting you and answering you point by point to be sure that I don't miss anything importat....so I apologize about the length in advance. Fundamentally on some issues, I think we are going to have to agree to disagree....but I note (judging from the consumer feedback on Amazon, Gamespot and others) that IMHO my feeling are probably more in line with the gaming community than some who would defend this "game".

Originally posted by kalbear
Ian - I asked what you thought were errors in the game that you felt could not be fixed by the modding community relatively quickly. And you still haven't really answered that.

I thought I tried, but let me try again by answering the rest of your post in order. Perhaps I was being unclear.

You say that it would take time to fix everything that is broken. What exactly is broken that the modders can't fix? Heck, what is broken that hasn't been fixed by the modding community already?

You can only Mod what the programers let you mod. That is to say you can mod the parameters of the game, but if the engine is fundamentally unsound or inflexible (or in the case of Moo III both), then there is only so much you can mod. I will explain in depth as I go. I also note that for the typical customer, you should never have touch the .mob files just to make a usuable game. If the Devs had wanted us to adjust those things, they'd have made an editor (like Civ 2).

The diplomatic AI is getting closer to being correct, and the biggest deal I can find (and this is a big deal, mind you) is the PD bug.

The PD bug makes missiles unbalanced...there is no reason /not/ to build anything but missile boats which is what they were trying to get away from AFAICT. It is also precisely the sort of thing you can not Mod out....it is an engine flaw. Can this be patched? Probably, but it will take a patch and not a mod...and patches cost the company MOO-la (pardon the pun).

What is so hard to do in the game that would take forever to do? Are you talking about design issues, bug issues, or something else?

I am primarily talking about design issues. There are things that people are calling bugs that are really design issues. The best two examples are the horrible interface and the total lack of numeric feedback. As I and Ellestar have indicated before, the lack of numeric feedback seems to be fundamental to the engine and thus beyond the scope of a simple patch. It is also our opinion (ask him if you doubt) that this was supposed to be a feature......which says volumes about the Dev team...and not in a good way either.

For example, if you believe that the interface is fundamentally unsound, then I believe you are right from your point of view; the interface is not going to fundamentally change from here on out. There might be shortcut keys/ways to get to the military queue, for instance, or to deploy a colony ship, but I don't see them doing significant changes to the interface. If that is what you see as a flaw, well, that's understandable.

Almost everyone sees the lousy interface as a flaw as well as the lack of positive numeric feedback. If those can not be patched (and you just indicated that you think they can not be...and I agree) then that's enough to kill the game right there, at least in the long term.

But on the other hand, you can do things like make every single planetary improvement buildable by the player through the planet queue, and thus make it so that the AI never touches them. I suspect the same is true for DEAs, but we've not found out how quite yet; they both use an invisible queue, and it's just a matter of putting them into a visible one that the AI doesn't have control over.

Even though I am only an amature programmer, even I know that is a /lot/ easier said than done...especially given the graphical interface and the design decisions that went into the engine.

Poor design decisions do seem to be there. There are many things I don't like and wish were different. That being said, there's very little of the overall game I find so hideously flawed it can't be fixed. Fleet compositions are hardcoded, true, but at the same time one can make new fleet types with different compositions. One can vary the levels that these are built and favored as well. Would it be nice to build various ones as you see fit? Yep, but a corrolary is to have a mod that has all the ones you want.

I think you are missing the fundamental point that Laz had made. In a strategy game, the player should be able to make any fleet composition and task force composition without altering how the AI builds it's fleets. In short if the player wants to make all Super-Dreadnoughts (setting aside whether or not this is a good idea), then he should be able to do that without hardcoding the AI to do the same. Choices==Strategy. If the player has no choices, then there are no strategic decisions. I thought I was clear about that earlier. Given the limitations of the engine this goes WAAAAAY beyond modding or even patching. Allowing the player the flexibility to make his own fleet of his own composition would require rewriting entire sections of the base code AFAICT.

As to listening or not listening to the BTs, I think they did release a game that wasn't well-polished. That doesn't mean they won't polish it.

I doubt that they will. The reason being is look at my points 3 and 4 above. Dev egos clearly got in the way (which is what usually causes 'Feeping Creaturism') and judging by the shifting deadlines that suddenly stopped shifting and the almost total silence from the Devs and Infogrames on the IG boards (and here), I strongly suspect that IG is dropping this game like a proverbial 'hot potato' and cutting their losses. If that is so, don't expect financial support for patches (beyond perhaps one three months from now). In short, if you bought the game and are hoping QS will polish it later, there seems to be a good chance that you will wait in vain.

Again, I realize you played MoO2 when it first came out and loved it, but I HATED it. It was a miserable game full of CTDs (something I've not had once, yet), various graphical errors, weird bugs with ship construction, lying interfaces, odd stats, and horrible imbalance right out of the box. It was playable, but it wasn't as fun as MoO was - it was merely prettier. YMMV, apparently - it took to 1.2 to make it playable; heck, 1.1 made it worse, and 1.3 was just wacky.

I started playing Moo 2 version 1.2 (out of the box), and while there were some balance issues, I had control of the game and the game was fun to learn. It seems as though the people that made Moo 3 hated Moo 2 with a passion....and thus made a mistake. In the general 4X community, Moo2 was (and is) considered a classic game. Pissing off a major part of your prospective customer base because of your personal bias (I am referring to the original lead developers) is stupid...and IG should have stepped in long ago to set him straight...if only from a marketing standpoint.

As for our opinions on Moo 2, I suspect we will have to agree to disagree. To me Moo 2 along with Civ 2 sets the standard against which all other 4X games are to be compared against.

I do see that it's a big disappointment to you, and I appreciate you being articulate about it, but I just don't see what's so impossible to change about the game yet.

*sigh* I do...and believe it or not I take no pleasure in that assessment. If the game were in fact fundementally fixable, I might actually get back to it (after it were fixed) and Moo 4 might actually be a possibility.

Then again, hell might freeze over too.....

-Polaris

[kalbear]

Ian -

We've already changed the planetary queue to include everything but DEAs. Everything. Want to build hydro farms? How about organic factories? We can make it put them in the military queue if we want to - and sometimes like in the case of autofactories, that's a decent option, as it lets you do AFx10. The hardest one so far has been spaceports. But there's only one person working on it, and only a couple investigating it further. So yeah, while I can see why you would be skeptical, I'm telling you -we've already done it. It's just a matter of time. Furthermore, I'm a bit more than an amateur programmer, and let me tell ya - the way they did these mods makes things stupidly easy to fix and change stuff as we see fit. Things are laid out in a pretty easy way.

Lack of numeric feedback is actually quite easy to fix. The primary problem there is the lying on the descriptions of techs, the various places that this information is hidden, and calculations that get done under the hood. Fortunately, the hood is pretty accessible. The encyclopedia/tech description mod gives numbers on all techs and all magnate races. We know how all the DEA calcs work. We don't know some of the intricacies of space combat values - like how ECCM vs ECM work, for instance - but again, it's a matter of time. We've been at it for a week now. That's pretty nice progress, IMO. Once we've figured out how the game works, putting those values in as text or even as variables isn't impossible or even hard - it's merely tedious. So while I do agree that the way the interface works can't be modded away, I do think lack of numeric feedback can be fixed, and fixed pretty quickly.

PD, at least for now, has a workaround that makes it at least usable - you must have missiles on your ship. It appears that PD works based on the max range of your weapons relative to when the missiles were launched - meaning that if they were launched immediately, you're going to be hosed. Missiles have unlimited range, and therefore make it so that you always are 'in range'. It's a dumb bug, but it's one that I feel can be patched without too much problem. It sounds like a couple simple logic errors and use of the wrong value somewhere. And once you do this (or if your PD is working) missiles become far less threatening unless you use them in huge masses. Even then, not so much. It becomes something like Honor Harrington books - ships of the line hanging out together and combining their PD. It's pretty cool to watch.

We've been able to change fonts, graphics for the UI, graphics for stars, pics for the techs. We can't change the interface hugely, this is true, but we can make it look much better and far more readable. Sounds are changeable as well. Voxels and diplomatic graphics are the hardest ones to get right, though it is likely we'll find a way to do it if we want to.

On choices == strategy and the fleet design syndrome, yep, that's a choice they made in the design. And I happen to like it. I know you don't, and I know others don't, but it's not like you're hampered by it but no one else is. Everyone has the same rules here. Heck, there's nothing stopping you from, say, making a carrier ship and putting it in a recon role or an escort role. Nothing at all. You can make nothing but recon ships that have huge amounts of ultraspinal mount weapons if you so choose. Or make them IF ships that don't IF. Whatever you want. It's there. You shouldn't have to work around it so hard if you don't want to, I agree, but the fact is that you still have that choice. Just because the choice isn't presented in a way that you find optimal does not mean the choice isn't there for you. If you want to make nothing but superdreadnoughts, you can without problem - just as long as you call them under different missions. There ya go, simple. Heck, if you do that the AI will build them in the right proportions for you as well for the various TFs.

And once again, we've already been able to introduce player-defined TFs of arbitrary size. Want a 64-size TF that consists solely of CA mission ships? You can do it. You can't do it in game - these are static things that are defined once, and that's unfortunate - it would be kind of sweet to be able to define your own TFs of whatever choice you like. But it's also another thing you might have to MM, and I don't think it gets you a lot of options or strategy.

Moo2 1.2 wasn't the first version out of the box - it came out months after the game was originally released. I loved MoO 1.2, and played it to death. But I hated MoO2 1.0 because of it's wasted potential and obvious failings. I still play MoO2 to this day - or did until last week, at least. So I don't think we disagree on MoO2, merely our OOBEs differed.

Dev egos, IME, never cause feature creep. It's almost entirely a top-down driven design system. Devs that I know like making a few features as good as they can, not the other way around. As a dev, it pisses me off to see this misconception thrown around. If you want to blame someone, blame the PMs that tell devs what features to institute. Alan Emrich was the lead designer - he's the one responsible for over half the features that were cut from the game.

A week is not that big a time in terms of devs working on something. It might seem that way to you, but it's not that big at all. Most folks are at GDF all this week, or they better well should be. Others are taking a break for a while. IME, they'll be back. I realize that you believe that IG doesn't deal with their games, but I don't think that's accurate: they have a history of releasing early product and then patching it to very decent status. That does hurt their initial sales, I'd imagine, but it does eventually produce a good game. If it's been this easy for the mod community to do things like radically change AI behavior, graphic appearance and information in-game, do you really think it'll be that hard for those with the proper tools to make the necessary changes once they know what to look at, thanks to the community? Also, the devs have been posting at IG, especially those looking into the various AI things - they're just not posting here, and really have never done so all that much. Apolyton is small fish by comparison.

Finally, I'd like to say something: It makes me mad when the diehards have to spend this kind of energy to make a game what it should be. It isn't correct and it isn't fair; I would much rather have volunteered my time 5 months ago then have to do it now, when rabid fans are screaming at everyone that they're stupid. It's a problem; a problem with our industry and developers. I don't like it, but the fact of the matter is that I do like this game, and every new change I and others introduce makes it that much better.

Thanks for listening and posting such eloquent arguments. If you're interested in finding out more about what the mod community can do, check out the fan modifications board. Just checked it out a minute ago, and I see someone's added how to add new techs to the game. Neat.

[Ianpolaris]

Kalbear,

At this point, I would actually have to see a working version of Moo III (and I think we both know what I mean by that) before I would ask my friends to give me Moo III back.....and even then I would only take it back for a day or two just to be sure that what needed to be fixed was.

You could be completely right. It is possible that Moo III might be adjusted to be a great game. However, given IG's attitude (or at least apparent attitude), I very, very skeptical...and as a Dev yourself, you should be too.

The game went GOLD after all on Jan the 25th....so the Devs have had five weeks to fix the problems once they knew what the final product was going to look (and play) like. Please don't say "they've only had a week, so be patient". We both know that that is a little white lie.....

-Polaris

Edit: As an afterthought, I want to add this: While I stand corrected on the 'cause' of feature creep (since you are a Dev I will take your experience to be more in line with the norm than mine), can we at least agree that Moo III does suffer from 'Feeping Creaturism'?

For that matter, it also seems clear that Emrich's (sp?) ego did get in the way at least at some point. The fact is that Moo 2 was a very popular game and was one of the benchmarks the Moo community was sure to compare Moo III against. Can we at least agree that thinking "you know better than the customer" is at best risky and at worst product destroying hubris? I am shocked that someone at IG didn't smack some sense into him years ago (or perhaps...warning: baseless speculation....that is why he got fired?)

[kalbear]

Well, yes and no, right?

We know that they didn't know about the anemic AI or the PD bug. We don't know about the various information stuff, but they've said they're going to do a new revised and heavily annotated manual here momentarily. What that means, I'm not sure. And I'm not sure how much they expected people to 'not get it'.

I think a lot of this caught QS by surprise. The BTs all lauded the enemy AI's aggressiveness and ability to attack well and often; apparently that got changed very late in the process and not well tested. The PD bug doesn't manifest itself for everyone apparently; that's another problem. While it's not great that they didn't catch these things in development, I'd like you to point me to one PC game that did catch these kinds of bugs before their first release in the last, oh, 5 years. The only one I can think of is curse of monkey island, and I"m not sure that's only 5 years old.

I don't like the practice either. But I know what's reasonable and unreasonable to expect.

[Ianpolaris]

Kalbear,

There is a difference between a few bugs, issues, and balance problems....which we both agree is endemic in the industry today....and releasing a product that is barely beta in quality and almost (and IMHO *is*) unplayable.

You are a Dev.....surely if a member of your team presented you with this sort of interface for the user, you would fire the offending programmer on the spot, no? I admit that I am only an amature, but I have seen first year Comp-Sci majors do that better.

In short, I think it is reasonable to expect a playable game.....with a few rough edges. What we got was far less....and IMHO looks like it was made by amatures. Can you as a professional Dev disagree? If so please explain why. That is an honest question....is there something here that I am geniunely missing?

-Polaris

[kalbear]

That's a good question. It's really hard to say. Keep in mind that most devs don't design the UI, they design the code that makes the UI work. So if a dev handed me a UI like this, I'd probably laugh at them for a bit because it was ugly, and go tell them to fix some bugs instead.

I'm not sure at all most of the blame should lie with devs of this game. I don't think it really should, IMO. I've never, EVER seen a planetary AI do this well in any game. It's absurd how good it does most things. Especially by comparison to anything else. But it's a problem, because people don't want to feel so out of control.

Combat is smooth at any zoom level with massive amounts of explosions and multiply independent effects going on. That's some good work. I know many think the graphics are ugly (I don't agree, I think combat is amazingly cool once you get into bigger battles) but the actual combat itself is well done.

Menuing itself is quite slick - animations are smooth, menus go well into each other, response time - with one BIG exception - is nice. The exception is the very finicky sliders, which should be fixed.

So, no, I'd not fire devs that worked on the UI. I'd fire the designers. Oh wait - IG actually DID that. What I wonder is why people didn't have these kind of gripes two years ago, when they saw the original mockups of the screens with about 40 different buttons instead of the 10 we have now. Didn't it look complex and unintuitive then?

Similarly, with information. Devs aren't responsible for writing the descriptions of tech. Or of how things work. Or the manual, or ship combat, or any of these things. It's obvious that they had a clear understanding of how things worked and why, and this information is there - but why is it that Natural Engineers describes "adds to manufacturing capacity" when it really adds to industry per pop? Why is the manual so horribly useless? Why is there no in-game help? It's not because the devs can't do it - look at the combat system and tell me that a 'onrightclick' event system is too hard - it's because someone out there said this is the design.

Devs obey design. Or they don't last long at a company.

So I see a lot of design flaws that have very little to do with the programming qualities of the game. I do disagree that the UI is horrific or broken - to be honest, getting into build queues for me is faster than it ever was in MoO2 now that I know ho to manipulate the planets screen better, for instance. There is a lot missing, but the fact of the matter is that this is an infinitely more playable game than most games released these days. It might not be to your preference, you might not like the design - and that's your right - but to say it's not playable? Dude, did you play things like Deux Ex? The only company that regularly does it 'right' is blizzard, and they are blessed by making very simplistic games that have a lot of depth, along with hundreds of developers more than QS ever did.

Saying it is barely beta means to me you've not played the game all that much. I've not heard of one undocumented CTD. None. I've heard of DX skin issues that were traced back to driver problems, and mod issues, but not one crash. Do you have any clue how astounding that is for a game of this magnitude and scope?

I don't want to keep making excuses for them, honestly, because I don't feel that they're needed. I don't like how the UI looks, but it's been that way forever. I don't like how diplomacy is confusing as all getout, but I have faith this will be changed. I don't like the couple of bugs I've seen so far, and they're workaroundable or fixable reasonably easily.

What's totally inexcusable is the amount of documentation and in-game help/information available to the player. For a game of this complexity, this is just flat-out WRONG. The PD bug is wrong but wasn't found in the process, which I understand. The graphics aren't stellar and the UI system could use some work, but it is what they said they'd have for hundreds of moons now and it's quite functional and usable - at least for me.

The documentation blows. That pisses me off that I spent a weekend fixing the tech descriptions so that they actually told you what the hell they did in game terms. Not that you know what the game terms are, since you have this information nowhere to be found, but it's something.

[Ianpolaris]

Kalbear,

Alright then....that goes to show you why I work for myself. I would quit before being shackled to a design like that......but I understand not everyone is so lucky.

Let's agree on two points:

1. The documentation (at all levels) is simply poor to downright non-existant which for a game of this complexity (in interface) is a sin.

2. The AI is so "good" (I would say pervasive but then we'd be quibbling) that the user feels out of control. IMHO and IME that is horrible for a game.....because otherwise why play?

As for IG being responsible for the design....again I will take your word for that. However, shouldn't the BTs have said something? For that matter shouldn't the Dev team have said something to IG about that?! After all, the Devs have to code it; if I were a Dev I'd be ahamed to have my name on such work.

As for Beta, you do have a point. If you read my review, I did comment that this is probably the most stable game I have ever played which is (I agree) saying a lot. However, why don't we say that the game looks completely untested, unpolished, and unfinished w/regard to gameplay. Can we agree on that?

-Polaris

[Arnelos]

I hate it when my ISP goes down for 2 days... you guys write way too much materials... I'm not going to bother to read it all.

What I skimmed sounds like just more typical argument here....

[vmxa1]

One of the problem that is common in applications documentation is that the people that write are often uninvolved with the app. They get the 411 from teh devs. This is fine, but the devs know the app and hence tend to not look at it from the view point of a user that has never seen the product before. This leads to information missing as teh devs "understood" how it functions.
The writers only care about implemetation of the 411 they got.
Once done, someone reviews it. In most places that is, you guessed. Devs and Testers and in house users.
This will catch some things, but these player all have a familiarity with the app and will also leave out information that newbies need.
In my experience most reviews will gloss over the doc and look for obvious typos and things (I know I have doen that a time or two). I mean someone hands you this manual draft and says review by thursday. Well you already have all you can do, so come thursday you jam through it.

[Ianpolaris]

vmxa1,

I can certainly understand that. When I am in the last stages of a research project and I am writing the paper for publication, I have found it is often all to easy to leave out crucial steps in your calculation and reasoning because by this time it is "obvious" (after months of research). It sounds like much the same thing happens in professional computer game design just by what you said.

Given that, why were there only 25 BTs testing this product? Surely with a game of this complexity, you would want hundreds of BTs testing this from the entire spectrum of your target audience, no? For that matter why were the BTs ignored? [I happen to have read at least one instance (on the IG boards) were a BT was nixed and a reviewer almost pilloried during the Dev process because he wanted an easier to manage game more like Moo 2. This may be apocryphal, but given the reaction thus far I believe it.]

I know when a researcher is actually writing his paper, he has collegues from entirely different fields of research proof-read the paper to make sure that nothing important is left out....repeatedly. Aren't BTs supposed to do that?

I also have heard no comment on Emrich's hubris. Isn't it just plain silly (to put it in the kindest possible way) to alienate a major segment of your target audience just because you (Emrich) hated Moo 2? Why didn't someone at IG set him straight? [After all IG is marketing this thing and paying the bills, yes?]

-Polaris

[Arnelos]

umm.... Emrich was let go months ago and hasn't been working at QS since near the start of the project, right?

[Ianpolaris]

Arnelos,

Emrich was let go only a few months ago and only (to the best of my knowledge) after all the major design decisions had already been made. Remember that Moo III was supposed to come out more than a year ago and the actual project was to my knowledge almost two years overdue (which almost means grossly overbudget unless computer game design is different from any other design I have heard about).

In short, when it was Emrich who hated Moo 2 and it was Emrich that made some of the crucial design decisions that alienated many of us who liked Moo 2 early. Check out the old Delphi boards if you doubt me on this. Now given that as a whole the Moo and 4X community happen to think that Moo 2 (along with Civ 2) is a 'benchmark' game, doncha think that was just a little silly?

-Polaris

[Arnelos]

Ok, now I see what you're talking about.

As for MoO2, I agree with Emrich that MoO was a vastly better game for gameplay.

That said, I honestly think MoO3 has more in common with MoO2 than MoO... so I guess I'm just not seeing how hostility to MoO2 and preference for the original MoO is what shaped MoO3...

If that was the intent, they hit waaaay off.

[Ianpolaris]

Arnelos,

That's odd. While I have never played Moo I, I have heard a great deal about it (from friends of mine who have). Based on that, I rather thought Moo III was a throwback to Moo 1 (esp with taskforces and the research system). This difference in perception could be a matter of taste so I will move on.

I happen to know (from lurking both on the IG boards and the older Delphi boards) that Emrich hated Moo 2 and that affected (by his own admission) many of the fundamental game design decisions (such as overbearing macromanagement) that many people now openly loathe.

Let me leave you with this thought: Doncha think it is sort of odd that those that defend Moo 3 either here or on the IG boards either preferred Moo 1 over Moo 2 OR never played a Moo game before? I am not (yet) saying that it is a statistically significant sample....and I am in no way suggesting that those that post on these boards are necessarily representative of the gamer population as a whole......but don't you think this is interesting especially in light of Emrich's indisputed hatred for Moo2 along with the (admitted!) direct influence it had on his design decisions?

-Polaris

[Arnelos]

I agree that such a correlation IS interesting, yes.

I loved the original MoO and while I certainly like MoO2 and play it on occassion, it's just not as fun to me as the original MoO.

But you see... part of what made the original MoO so much fun is that it was SIMPLE. It was huge, yes. You tons and tons and tons of ships and planets and things, but the gameplay itself was amazingly simple. The macromanagement tools were easy to understand and, once again, were SIMPLE.

The reason MoO2 was a not as fun was that you had all of these individual miners and researchers and farmers and you felt like you were spending more time micromanaging which pick-axes each miner used than worrying about holding the front near the Xengara system with back-up forces coming in from other areas.

MoO2 had more things to do, but it lost a lot of the sheer scale of the original MoO. The magic of the original MoO was that it was somehow huge and simple at the same time.

The reason why I think if they were aiming for the original MoO, they missed by a long shot is this:

MoO3 is hellishly complex. It's huge alright and that's a desirable throwback to the original MoO for me, but it suffers... debilitatingly suffers, from that hugeness being complex to handle rather than simple to handle. In there being so much complexity that you are tempted to micromanage, the game seems more like MoO2 and than the original MoO (meaning what was NEGATIVE about MoO2, not what was great about it).

I liked MoO2, just not as much as MoO. I'm generally liking MoO3, but not as much as MoO. My reaction is actually quite similar to both MoO2 and MoO3... neither is MoO. They're DIFFERENT forms of "not MoO", but both significantly diverge from the original MoO in some ways to be almost unrecognizable.

I think I'm liking MoO3 in the same way that I liked MoO2. Forget about it being "MoO" and just treat it as its own game. On its own, it's not a bad game... even has some really nice things about it (as with MoO2). It's not MoO and has some significant drawbacks compared to MoO, but it's a good game even with the drawbacks.

So I'll enjoy it... but I'll still go back to play MoO or MoO2 every now and then. They are three rather different games.