I do not want to be mean, but there is some revisionism going here. People forget inflation. A product costing the same thing 20 years ago is actually a product whose price has dropped! Since then the price of food doubled, gas has tripled, rent has nearly doubled, wages haven't increased as quickly but have increased, real wages (corrected for inflation) actually hasn't though. We are actually poorer as individuals with the price of things actually going up faster. How this relates to price of a 20 year old game, Well the price hasn't risen in current market value, this is actually a drop in price in real wages. So MOO wasn't just as expensive as today, it was more expensive. Fortunately we're had more disposable income too on average back then. We are very lucky that gaming (computer industry as a whole) is one of those industry that was having its overall costs drop very rapidly, both on hardware and software development (licensing of game engine, out sourcing of middleware, and if you are Eidos Montreal outsourcing the boss fights designs (that last one is a jab at Eidos)). Actually, if you wonder why the PC you buy today seem to be glitchier and more prone to hardware breaks is because the housing bubble crash has contracted our economy, but luckily most things were internal to the bubble. Except electronic devices were not, and we expect PC to always be better in performance, so they are made with cheaper materials (less gold plated circuits, less use of rare earth metals per chipset) to keep costs "the same." Thus they sacrificed durability. Except Apple, ergo why their stuff is so overpriced and they are the kings in outsourcing manufacturing. Long story short, MOO2 wasn't cheap. Even if you correct to the reduction in cost of electronics along with inflation, MOO was pricey. As for polish, you said so yourself, after patch 1.31. In the day of non-ubiquitous internet this was a problem for some. Thankfully by then most game companies had websites and most gamers had modems, otherwise you had to buy the issue of a PC gaming magazine that has the patch on its patch CD. A lot of people, more than you realize, didn't play the game with the patch in those early years. I think the game came out when my phone company started to sell dedicated internet lines (which was just a parallel phone line you needed to put a switch box on your phone jack). The other thing to consider is polish also includes the sexy stuff (graphics, music, voice acting) in the context of his article. MOO2 wasn't top of the line for its time in the visual aesthetics. It wasn't even close to be honest. It did the smart thing and went with style, sort of like what Stars in Shadow did, though MOO was less cartoony (looks at a screenshot quickly). Correction, less anime like cartoony. MOO used the same style you saw in Western animations of its decade like Exo-Squad, SiS uses a more Westernized Anime inspired style, which was actually gaining some popularity back then too, but is more popular today. So perhaps Brad should have broken up his list to 4 items and say pick 3 (actually more like 2.5 if you see each of these groups as having gradients which you can half-way on, but it would make for a crappy article title). So Brad was being slightly deceptive like a Minbari from Babylon 5, them half-truths and all. By lumping sexy graphics and sound with technical polish, he then can make an excuse why a game has to be expensive to have deep gameplay. Or that you need to swallow the bullet and sacrifice "polish" (meaning technical polish) if you want the game at a lower price. It kind of makes the assumption a game needs to go full hog on assets like ES2 or GC3 as a matter of fact. So there is an element of con job in his article, very sneaky. His overall points are correct, but he obfuscates some elements so that he can validate certain excuses within its frame work. Sorry if it seemed like I was being harsh and deconstructing your points as I have Mark. Since I agree with your overall point and that Brad is being sneaky, justifying his actions instead of being fully honest with his objectives. Imagine you were debating Brad he would have made those points but more viciously and not reveal what he has been really doing both in the argument at hand and in the initial article. He would further obfuscate "polish" and may even muddle the price by using hyperboles. We both know there is a range between $20 and $70, and he makes it sound like that's the only two options we have for price. It's important to note how Brad does his trick to justify his excuses, which I have indirectly attacked earlier in this thread. What do you think that whole rant about me complaining that developers want to bump map Lara Croft's cleavage sweat was about. Okay, that was also a rant on feature creep and graphical racing, but I was also attacking the core element that developers think polish includes this sort of high production value nonsense too.
Yes, games were relatively more expensive back then, but then I never argued that MOO 2 was cheap, just that it was no more expensive than any other competing game released at the time. You'd think that if Brad's argument was correct and MOO 2 came out with (1) high polish (which relatively speaking it did) and (2) sophisticated gameplay (which we all agree on) then the price would have to be significantly greater than most games on the shelf that did not have (1) or (2) in order to compensate. But the set price was the same as any other game, which brings his whole claim into question. In comparison to how some games are released today, MOO 2 was amazingly polished. For example Stellaris - even after all its patches and DLC - is STILL a bug-infested mess which actually got MUCH worse with a recent "bug fixing" patch that essentially broke the game entirely https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...1-opt-in-beta-released-checksum-b38e.1020919/ which the devs even apologized for. Even now Stellaris is still at the stage where nobody really knows whether certain mechanics like ethics attraction and influence are even working at all, let alone if they're working properly. No game is ever released perfect but MOO 2 was in a relatively highly polished state after very few patches compared to most other games. If any game can be called polished its MOO 2 but such classifications are all relative. No game is ever released in a perfectly polished state. No problem Edward its an interesting conversation and it seems that we agree on the fundamentals anyway. Truth be told I actually think Brad's argument may have at least some degree of validity. I can accept that it may well be difficult to produce a game which satisfies all three of his criteria, but I certainly dont think of it as some kind of written-in-stone game-production principle that cant be broken. It already has been broken.
regarding the patches at the time of the original Master of Orion [both 1 and 2], Microprose [and nearly all the software houses of the time] always send FREE disks with the patch to all the customers that sent them the registration card inside the game box. I received many FREE patch-disks at the time from the USA and from UK [and I live in Italy].
Well, those are still patches. On average even modern games get their polish after post-release patches. Usually. The issue is the level of polish at the initial release of the game, which nowadays is horrendous. Oddly, I never got free patch CDs in the mail even when I registered my games, you'd think that I lived in the taiga. We did have stores that did get them, the same ones that usually sold the game, so as long as you had your receipt they gave them to you for free. But they usually would give them out to regular customers even if you didn't have the receipt or bought the game elsewhere.
Heh, I remember installing games from floppy disks. Or getting pissed someone called while on your dial-up and learning to use the disable call waiting feature, then have your aunt complain why you were on the internet for 2 hours.
Dude. For me MoO2 was my second game with 1 being first. But by the time I got into it 1 was 3.95 and I got 2 for 10 I think. Basement bargain price for me but the experience was the same
*Pulls his old man card out!* I played E.T. It was as bad as they say, it was so bad it killed the console market in the West. It was horrible! People would pay you to take their Atari 2600 cartridges from them. I saw a guy who used a wheelbarrow to carry his old games, thugs came and stole his wheelbarrow, BUT THEY LEFT THE GAMES BEHIND! Seriously speaking, shovel-ware existed back then too.
