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- 14 de Mayo, 2019
I really really hope we one day get an Old World 2 that fixes the character gameplay to be... actually good. Because the core of the game is fantastic, but that's the one part that's really weak in my opinion.
Some of this I'm sure I've rambled about, but trying to collect it all together, where it went wrong was:
TIMING
I think one of the biggest problems actually comes directly out of it being 4X. I have to manually slap that advance time button and on default settings I only get about twenty turns per generation, say. This means that instead of FEELING time pass, idly scrolling over family trees as it does so (only stopping when an event forces me to think), becoming familiar with people through the depths of time, everything comes as discrete textblobs (badly written ones too, hard to "prove" but subjectively I just don't like the prose compared to CK2) on people I have to navigate a terrible UI to see. The game is hostile to me learning who these people are, and that ends up being fatal because they have no...
AGENCY
Characters in Old World are not simulated agents doing things, they're puppets that just spawn canned events. They can get mad at you but they get mad at you because an event gave them a flag saying they're mad at you. They can plot but plotting just means they're advancing an event chain. You and other rulers are the only living beings on the Earth, all else are hylics. There's also a problem a lot of games seem to have of not understanding that Crusader Kings also made characters indispensable by making it impossible to avoid the reality (in political economy this is called "selectorate theory") that power is based on the ability to broker as an intermediate other people's power bases.
Here this shit just doesn't happen.
MELODRAMA
The game has some beautiful psychological models I've rambled about - the archetypes system is fascinating, the way it does jealousy is intereseting - but without agency nothing comes of it, and the devs just didn't have the creativity or resources to fully develop it, I guess. Where's my Romeo and Juliet crossed lovers stories? Where's deadly blood feuds decimating my aristocratic houses? Seduciton plots that blow up into massive scandals with body counts? Nutjob preachers disrupting things? Conspiracies? Rome of the Caesars has a lot of the flavor (it's an anthology of biographies) of the kind of nonsense that went on in the clasiscal world.
THE SNOWBALL
Whereas games like Total War and Crusader Kings seem to be designed to make your realm fractious as you grow, this game actually rewards snowballing. If I'm bigger and more advanced I can even more casually solve all of my problems. Past a point the dynasties and religions are all satisfied all the time. Edit: Games need to start making a point to scale factional demands with means. If you have 10x the capabilities they should be wanting 10x the stuff, maybe 15x the stuff. It shouldn't be possible to solve politics, you just get raped in a different way.
What saves it for me is the actual 4X core, historical specificity (even what's bad still feels better than Civ's history word salad, I like that peoples and ideas and what not exist in a coherent world) and that it does what I love in games where mechanics are thought through at least enough for my imagination to fill in the gaps and rationalize what's going on, interpret a historical thesis that's being explored.
I think part of the problem might actually be the clean 4X design: the goal was to make Civ 4 again, the other stuff was stapled on instead of being integral to the vision. My impression is Imperator Rome was the same way.
Edit: It playing like Stellaris (4X design but RTS-with-pause presentation) would solve the timing issue outright. I can't say as I like this either, but Terra Invicta experimented with real time that is turn-based for all practical purposes at the level of strategic decision-making - councilor assignment - but that had events resolve through real time passing between turns, so you got an ATTEMPT at the feeling of time passing and stuff ambiently happening.
Some of this I'm sure I've rambled about, but trying to collect it all together, where it went wrong was:
TIMING
I think one of the biggest problems actually comes directly out of it being 4X. I have to manually slap that advance time button and on default settings I only get about twenty turns per generation, say. This means that instead of FEELING time pass, idly scrolling over family trees as it does so (only stopping when an event forces me to think), becoming familiar with people through the depths of time, everything comes as discrete textblobs (badly written ones too, hard to "prove" but subjectively I just don't like the prose compared to CK2) on people I have to navigate a terrible UI to see. The game is hostile to me learning who these people are, and that ends up being fatal because they have no...
AGENCY
Characters in Old World are not simulated agents doing things, they're puppets that just spawn canned events. They can get mad at you but they get mad at you because an event gave them a flag saying they're mad at you. They can plot but plotting just means they're advancing an event chain. You and other rulers are the only living beings on the Earth, all else are hylics. There's also a problem a lot of games seem to have of not understanding that Crusader Kings also made characters indispensable by making it impossible to avoid the reality (in political economy this is called "selectorate theory") that power is based on the ability to broker as an intermediate other people's power bases.
Here this shit just doesn't happen.
MELODRAMA
The game has some beautiful psychological models I've rambled about - the archetypes system is fascinating, the way it does jealousy is intereseting - but without agency nothing comes of it, and the devs just didn't have the creativity or resources to fully develop it, I guess. Where's my Romeo and Juliet crossed lovers stories? Where's deadly blood feuds decimating my aristocratic houses? Seduciton plots that blow up into massive scandals with body counts? Nutjob preachers disrupting things? Conspiracies? Rome of the Caesars has a lot of the flavor (it's an anthology of biographies) of the kind of nonsense that went on in the clasiscal world.
THE SNOWBALL
Whereas games like Total War and Crusader Kings seem to be designed to make your realm fractious as you grow, this game actually rewards snowballing. If I'm bigger and more advanced I can even more casually solve all of my problems. Past a point the dynasties and religions are all satisfied all the time. Edit: Games need to start making a point to scale factional demands with means. If you have 10x the capabilities they should be wanting 10x the stuff, maybe 15x the stuff. It shouldn't be possible to solve politics, you just get raped in a different way.
What saves it for me is the actual 4X core, historical specificity (even what's bad still feels better than Civ's history word salad, I like that peoples and ideas and what not exist in a coherent world) and that it does what I love in games where mechanics are thought through at least enough for my imagination to fill in the gaps and rationalize what's going on, interpret a historical thesis that's being explored.
I think part of the problem might actually be the clean 4X design: the goal was to make Civ 4 again, the other stuff was stapled on instead of being integral to the vision. My impression is Imperator Rome was the same way.
Edit: It playing like Stellaris (4X design but RTS-with-pause presentation) would solve the timing issue outright. I can't say as I like this either, but Terra Invicta experimented with real time that is turn-based for all practical purposes at the level of strategic decision-making - councilor assignment - but that had events resolve through real time passing between turns, so you got an ATTEMPT at the feeling of time passing and stuff ambiently happening.
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