I think this is a very good analysis of the issues that recent and current 4X games have. eXplorminate is the site I use for reviews and analysis, now that Space Sector no longer publishes those. All That Glitters Is Not Gold
Indeed, they are a great source, especially now that Space Sector has transitioned. When I first started looking for 4X and strategy game news, Space Sector was the place I came across to get my fix. Before too long I became interested in not just reading but also contributing my thoughts. The rest as they say is history. When the decision was made to transition the site, I was in favor. This was in large part due to the existence of eXplorminate and the level of passion their staff had for the genre. They took the community and brought it into the fold in a more substantial way. While I don't always agree with all of their writers impressions (oh that original Worlds of Magic "consider" they gave...), there is no denying that they do an excellent job overall. As to the article in particular, having followed Oliver and his articles over the years, it's not a surprising read. I know what he likes now, for the most part. In many ways I agree with him. Age of Wonders 3 for instance is, with the Eternal Lords DLC, the highest rated game I reviewed for this site so I suppose I agree with him that it's the best 4X in recent years (if you consider it a 4X). I'm not quite as cynical or harsh on the developers as he is, but I do see his points. I've always felt like it was me just growing a bit tired of the genre, but it could be that many of us are in the same boat. Oliver at least seems to be. I kind of feel like the "4X" genre is a set of shackles that force games in specific directions instead of allowing them to branch out in new and interesting directions.
I visit explorminate from time to time as well but it lacks the feel of space sector. For some reason it has a more commercial feel to it and that takes away from the more intimate and personal appeal held by space sector initially. None of you knew me prior to PSS but I on the other hand knew you. The honesty and passion I found in some of the reviews posted by Adam, Keith and "muh favourite", Edward, went a long way towards influencing my decision to commit to PSS. The comments offered by many of you were also insightful and gave me a glimpse about you as individuals, I liked the idea of being in your company. I read the article written by Oliver, he is correct in many areas and somewhat off in others, or rather not off but missing some fundamentals about how these issues could be rectified. But as someone that runs a tight ship, I understand and empathise with his point of view. Indeed it is a major contributing factor to why I look at how many "little" issues can be eliminated in PSS prior to the general public having access to it. You only get one chance at a first impression gentlemen. The question then is will you be part of the herd or will you be the game that brings back the thrill of MoO2? Oddly enough, the very first thread I created here at PSS spoke of some of the same issues discussed by Oliver. Unlike him, I don't write professionally but at the end of the day common sense is still common sense.
Brad Wardell had a response to that article (it is not a critical response, he liked the article, it is more of an honest response). It is nice to see the issue answered from the other side. It is easy to be a consumer and easier to be a critic, so seeing a developers view on it is interesting. https://forums.galciv3.com/483562 I think his title alone is actually quite interesting by it self. Heck even before I read his response I was already thinking about the issue by reading that title alone.
I can see the issue from both perspectives, both are correct and both mistaken at the same time. Leaving aside any of the superfluous comments, I think the issue would be well served by taking a basic approach and addressing some issues that really make a game look bad but would not require breaking the bank to fix. Top of the list? Bugs No excuse can satisfy the consumer. Suppose I buy a new vehicle, I’m happily cruising down the highway and turn on the radio as my speed increases when the vehicle blows up. Would a bug be permissible here? Bugs can destroy a product that could otherwise shine and there is no excuse that is acceptable for them, sorry none. I do not wish to go on a rant here but some steps could be taken to insure a better reception and impression. Clean up the dialog and spelling errors, kill the bugs and then take a good look at the mechanics. Do they serve a true game purpose? If yes keep them and polish them, if not then perhaps the resources could be better spent elsewhere. I know some studios are tiny and have limited resources but most players are not going to sympathize if the product is poor. Any studio or developer, or for that matter anyone in any endeavor would be well served by being organized and methodical. Knowing where and when to commit your finite resources is not a skill that applies only to the military, it is a philosophy that always pays dividends and would be a good place to start in addressing some of these issues. DLC is an issue that I address case by case. While I do not speak for or claim to know the official policy of Paradox, I know what it “seems” like and it is a turn-off. My advice to anyone creating any type of game is to make sure your product can stand “alone” prior to additional content being created. In this manner DLC becomes a bonus not a must and that will generate good will. Think about the logic here. A Dev could concentrate their efforts and focus on fewer areas while reducing costs at the same time. The result would be that whatever comes out as a first release would not seem amateurish. If and when a DLC comes out the player will already have a positive image of the dev releasing it. In my opinion, the central issue is that game development does not follow the standards of other industries and is permitted to be lax in a way that would not work in almost any other industry, this needs to stop. To be treated as a professional, one must be a professional.
I think the issue here is the issue of cost. That is why I said the title is interesting. If you want polish and high end graphics and push that i7 processor to her limits, the game will have to cut corners somewhere to keep the price point low. So either the gameplay might not be as intricate, maybe you don't have as much voice acting, or the game is not designed to look good on 4000000000000000K monitors. Now the voice actors guild want to unionize and their list of demands include honey milk from the mountains of Tibet between voice shoots. Now look at E3 and look how many people brag about the omnicore computers with 24 GFX cards slotted in parallels, while developers are trying to show how you can see the individual pores on Lara Croft's skin sweat. Now I am not saying every gamer tries to brag they spend 90% of their income on just upgrading their computers, but it seems a lot of developers and publishers try to chase that crowd. In the end they don't want to sacrifice on any of the bells and whistles, including the high resolution of Lara Croft's cleavage sweat. So either the price has to go up, which marketing starts shaking its head in utter horror, or knock it out without proper quality testing and polish. I am not defending the industry, I am actually slamming it along with that one guy in the steam forums who brags about his or her overpriced Alienware or Republic of Gamers PC, which developers seem to be chasing for some reason. Ironically that one guy is also the product of the same mistake the industry is currently doing. They created that guy in an attempt to one up each other, and now they have to cater to them. Now how does this impact the indie scene? Everything I said seems to be the issues of the AAA titles. I think it's because they set the standards. If EA or Activision can release games so buggy that even during an press reveal of the game it crashes, indies don't feel the need to up their game in standards of quality. I also think indies are susceptible to feature creep as they interact with their potential buyers more often than the large studios do. In a attempt to please everyone they start tossing changes that were not in the initial vision which the developers were not prepared to implement properly. So any potential polish goes out the window as the dev rushes to implement the seventh feature creep and still release the game on time (or run out of money) and release the game in a bad shape. Look at Endless Space 2, it was soft released a day early with a massive update on release, with the game still very messy in the weeks before release. I think they should have the release candidate ready a month before release and the last month only be bug hunting, polish, and balancing. Sometimes even longer if the game is complex. For whatever reasons devs keep adding and developing till the last second and do no real polish pass. Delaying a game would increase the cost, but I didn't argue for delays of that sort. But to focus on proper project management so that within the confines of your deadlines and budget you can get that polish pass done.
Edward has added some excellent points. So much so that I wish to expand on some of these. Being able to see the sweat on Lara Croft is nice and could catch my eye briefly... but This is the pig and lipstick thing again. Take a really mediocre game and put the best graphics possible on it along with professional voice acting and what do you have? A failure. A game that will be played once or twice and discarded as the reviews on-line rip it to shreds. Now imagine the opposite. The graphics are nothing to get excited about and text replaces voice overs but the game is well thought out and executed, what do you get? MoO2 Now about those devs and players in love with their machines. Devs live in a high tech environment and their love of pushing that i7 is natural but counter-productive at times, still it can be understood and perhaps forgiven but devs need to understand that they are creating a game to appeal to players. Most players are not devs. Players on the other hand who think that the specifications of their machine is some sort of status symbol remind me of some guys I grew up with. I'm talking about the guys who had wallets full of pictures...of their car. I wasn't impressed then and I'm not impressed now. But personal feelings aside let me offer how I view this as a businessman. Any game coming out today, that cannot be played on at least a 3 year old off the shelf machine with an i3 just eliminated a very significant portion of its potential customer base before it even releases. Oh that's smart. Edward is correct in stating that if the big boys can launch a bug riddled piece of trash then indies feel why not us too. They are both wrong and it is poor business. Unfortunately the players are at fault here as they feel that they cannot wait for a proper release, if players ever react negatively enough this will change. He is also correct in bringing up proper project management, there is a distinct lack of discipline with that. No one is going to please every single player so don't even try. I'll say it once more, there is a lack of standards here and this industry continues to get away with practices that would sink an auto-maker or ship-builder. In my opinion, the first dev or AAA outfit that addresses these issues will gain a competitive edge that will last quite a while.
Software and especially game tests are nowhere near those practiced by automotive industry . There is some theory about automated software testing but it's mostly practiced by companies working on long uptime systems or by those who have above average discipline. And let's face it, nowdays anybody can land a programming job. Back to tests, there is not much working theory on how to automate testing games which don't have neat definition of input and desired output and my involve a lot of randomness. Design game mechanics takes very sharp critical mind and experience and as I said about programmer quality before, it's something everybody can do but most can't do it well. For example, who was game designer behind MoO:CtS and how did the game pan out? On a contrary, as Chris says it's harder to make game run smoothly on i3. i7 will just power through performance issues. I still don't get how 64-bit multicore means no pointers. There must have been more going on then those two things, like my MVC feature in Stareater. Initially the idea was to decouple game logic from GUI code but along the way I ended up rewriting whole codebase. From my perspective it was for the better, from player's perspective it's +3 years of development time for marginally better graphics.
However, I wasn't speaking about performance or retro-spec compatibility. I was speaking of cost, specifically production costs incurred by assets and engine features. Getting to run the game on lower end machines can cause costs (time and the talent that can do it) but as I said, that is not even my point. But even then, having a physics engine that has every geometry destructible and NPC move dynamically will require a lot of effort and run up the cost to make that game. Way more than any low end optimization would. The programmers, art teams, and animators will be costly so that the outhouse can be procedurally exploded. Like most of the points in the first half of my post, was about shoving top end graphics, physics, features, audio, and who knows what else to make the game an E3 show stopper, that can only run on an high end machine (hence why I mentioned processor types). All these are cost inducing things. I don't even think I was speaking about performance or optimization. When I refer to polish, I was only speaking about balance and bugs, along with UI usability and things like that. Some people do have problems with performance but that falls on my list of priorities if everything else in the game is broken, and a lot of games do come out in such a state of mess that even high end (or any kind of) machines can't run it properly. I hope I clarified the point I was making.
I agree with you, excellent interpretation. Specifically to the above, I am aware of this. But we could both agree that even a modest effort at upgrading those tests would be noticeably superior to what we have now.
Mea culpa, I misunderstood you. For me smooth performance is a bit more important polish then balance. Players my actually enjoy some disbalance, especially if it's in their favor but jitters and non-responsiveness are never fun. Missed this one . Yeah, we are all guilty of it. Sometimes it just an urge to do the thing that other game did and sometimes when someone asks you if you'll add feature X it just seems like good idea at the time.
Well the editor-in-chief, site manager and owner, and main contributor is one of the developers for this game. The game's development would take up too much time to manage both affairs. Also, the other contributors came along to help with the project. Since we also have day jobs, this means we are also pressed for time to help here and continue our analysis of games. Also, harder to do as the editor-in-chief would be gone (as mentioned before). Lastly, this is to avoid conflicts of interests. Space Sector received review copies and interviews with developers. We are technically now competitors, it would feel conflicted that we still get free copies and access to developers despite we are in competition. So to avoid conflicts of interest and to dedicate all our time to this game, we retired our blogging past. Hopefully our reasons make sense and you all understand our decision.
As Edward has said, a few years ago I decided to start developing ISG, and with that embrace the cause to develop a worthy spiritual successor to MoO2. I always wanted to develop a game, and this post was the driving force and source of inspiration that I needed to commit to that undertaking. However, soon I realized that developing a game of this kind of complexity just takes too much time for you to be able to do something else. My dear friend MalRey joined the development team and Edward and Keith kept providing content to SpaceSector.com for a while. But, and without my support, we could no longer keep writing content for SpaceSector.com with the frequency and quality we'd all like, and soon Edward and Keith also joined the cause to help the ISG project. The conflict of interests of being both a developer and receiving copies to review games from competitors on SpaceSector.com was also a factor. And so, we just decided to let go. We embraced the cause of developing ISG, and SpaceSector.com stopped receiving previews and reviews. Personally, I think we accomplished our mission of keeping the 4X strategy genre alive and well. And, in the meantime other sites appeared, like Explorminate, that are doing a fantastic job covering the genre. So, I think we're all in good hands. I created SpaceSector.com, and I'm the sole responsible for the decision to close it down. I thought my time would be better invested, for me personally and others, if I decided to develop a space 4X game and embrace the cause of developing a worthy spiritual successor to MoO2. Not because there are very few space 4X games out there on the making (there weren't as many when we started 3 years ago) but because I felt the calling to embark on that quest. And now here we are. And, I hope you will help us bring this quest to its conclusion, and that in a not too distant future we can all play another great turn-based 4X game, worthy of the classics for many years to come.
thanks for the reply Edward and Adam, I understand your points. still it's a pity that I cannot read the reviews of Space Sector from now onwards: that reviews were the best I ever read in more than 30 years in the hobby.. :-(
ps: but I'm sure, dear Adam and Edward, that with the precious help of the Space Sector team and the readers of the VIP Project Space Sector group [from now VIP Project ISG..], the spiritual successor of Master of Orion 2 will definitely be a great inter-galactic success !!!!!
A great article which highlights many of the concerns I already had with the genre. Thanks for linking the article, I'm going to have to take Explorminate a lot more seriously if they keep coming up with quality stuff like this. Another very interesting article although it begs the obvious question, If all three aspects of a game - polish, low price and sophisticated gameplay - are truly mutually exclusive, then how did we ever get games like MOO 2 which appear to have all three simultaneously? Personally I think Brad is just making excuses, hes making them in a very elegant and articulate way, but they're excuses nonetheless.
Yeah that price sounds about right, but that's my point, most games at that time were also sold for between $50 to $100 so MOO 2 had polish (after the 1.31 patch), sophisticated gameplay and was NOT considerably more expensive than other competing games. There are several other older games which also break Brad Wardell's "rule" too, which IMO makes it less of a rule and more Brad's personal excuse. I like the way that he's up front about the fact that Gal Civ doesn't include hands-on tactical combat because its too hard for him to write an AI that can do it justice, I can definitely respect his honesty there. But there are several 4x games - most notably MOO 2 - which can most certainly accomplish exactly that and accomplish it very well. Just because Brad Wardell cant do it, doesn't mean it cant be done and the same goes for his "price - polish - sophistication" claim too.
