I dug up my old copy of CIV III the other day and managed to install it on Windows 7. After the beating that I have given CIV V recently, I wanted to go back and have a look at what had gone before to see whether or not I was being fair. I don’t recollect railing against CIV III when it came out, but mind you I didn’t have a blog at the time either.
I played three games through to modern times and can say without a shadow of a doubt that it was tragically awful in its awfulness. I just don’t remember it being this bad. The game amounts to a settler rush; make as many cities as you can. Spread out across the world like the plague itself. The only way to win is to mercilessly crush your enemies. If you yourself don’t make a bad ass army you can bet your Great Library that the Egyptians are going to come across your borders in a rush, armies stacked on top of each other 40 deep. Gee, isn’t it fun watching all of those enemy units move … and move … and shoot me now.
So it’s pretty much rubbish as far as games go. Yet here I am ranting and raving against the forces of darkness for ruining a great game. Is this what they ruined? It doesn’t seem so great to me now. I suppose all of those other gamers are equally incorrect as they rail against the forces of Blizzard for ruining their game. Surely WoW back in Vanilla or TBC has also been tainted by the curse of the rose coloured glasses. We should all simply bow our heads and realise that the problem is not the games, it is us.
Which would be a fallacy. The fact is that when CIV III was released it was a good game, for its time. It was a natural progression from CIV II, (although the point can certainly be argued that CIV II was the better of the games. This however is not the point of this post). It got some things right, it got some wrong. But it was a logical progression in the right direction. When hard core fans see that progression then they are content. Even if the game for them is flawed they will have patience and faith in the developer’s vision. That vision holds to their own. And in fact, CIV IV was a very good game that improved upon many of the weaknesses of its predecessors, with Beyond the Sword being the pinnacle of its development.
The great problem with CIV V is not just the game itself. It is that the hard core fans feel that the developers no longer share their vision. Perhaps the developers think that their hard core fans are not that important any more. When one looks at the numbers that games like Farmville dredged up in a very short time it can be easy to understand the attraction to change your game to appeal to a much broader market. Except that the large market has no loyalty. They are game consumers, not game lovers. Hard core CIV fans have followed the game for 20 years. Try even paying someone to do that. Make no mistake about it; nerds are loyal.
Loyal as long as the vision is shared and understood. It is not for previous incarnations of games that players look back at with rose coloured glasses. It is for a time when players and developers shared the same vision. Play around with that vision by attempting to appeal to and please every market group and all you will do is lose your loyal fans while creating a game that ultimately satisfies nobody. I don’t want to play CIV III again, as much as I don’t want to play TBC WoW. I just want to know that the game designers and I are on the same page.
October 21, 2011 at 3:28 am
The rhetorical question becomes: were the designers and players on the same page because they shared the same vision… or because everyone is on the same page when there is only the one page to be on?
As Nils pointed out to me when I enumerated game designs that no longer work for me, a game designer would really have to go out of their way to please me nowadays. Is loyalty really worth that? In most ways, Cataclysm is actually Blizzard listening to and catering to their loyal fans: completely unique encounters (which requires gimmicks^3 to achieve), harder initial difficulty in heroics/raids, and so on. And the players revolted.
Can you imagine being shackled to the whims of 20-year fans? Having to dance around eggshells when you know you can generate more fans by tweaking this or that? And isn’t the concept of “loyalty” a bit off when it’s conditional on being pandered to? If one is loyal to Blizzard, Sid Meier etc, it seems to me that you want them to succeed as a company/person, even if they have to design games you don’t like to do so. Loyalty is about sacrifice, not tit-for-tat transactions.
Then again, I’m not a very loyal customer nor see any reason to be. I have favorite songs, not bands. I have favorite games, not companies. Squaresoft could do no wrong for a while, but my loyalty days (Sega vs Nintendo, etc) are long over.
October 21, 2011 at 4:17 am
I have favorite songs, not bands. I have favorite games, not companies.
So is loyalty to Civilization to a game or to a company? I for one couldn’t care less about Firaxis, or Blizzard for that matter.
Anyway, I think that you’ve missed my point. Loyalty doesn’t mean that a game developer bends to every whim of its loyal fan base. It means that a game moves in the direction that attracted its core fan base to begin with. CIV is a case in point: it has always been a turn based empire building strategy game. Each incarnation served to improve upon the ones that had gone before it. Yet now with CIV V we get a sudden direction change. The game now has more elements from tabletop war-gaming than its original premise, (which is my point in a previous post that the one unit per hex rule has been the most damaging aspect of CIV V).
To long time CIV fans this is a broad betrayal. It’s not a case of not liking this aspect or that about the game. Fans have always accepted that each game was a trade off, that some fans would like certain aspects and dislike others and vice versa for other fans. But the game premise stayed the same. And as a loyal fan you could always hope that the next incarnation of the game would bring more of the games aspects that you craved. Now nobody who was in that group can really hold much hope for CIV VI. The chain of progression has been broken, so we can have no idea of what to expect. So why continue to be loyal? If the next CIV game could be anything at all it makes just as much sense to go out and play anything at all.
October 22, 2011 at 5:45 am
“….when you know you can generate more fans by tweaking this or that.”
Do they know that? Most assuredly they can generate more one-time purchases, but those purchases aren’t -Fans-. They’ll get bored with a bad game and they’ll ignore future titles.
Purchases are driven by hype and are as mercurial as the facebook generation’s moods. Fans are irreplaceable.
October 21, 2011 at 8:39 am
I haven’t played Civ5 or really any Civ since Alpha Centauri and Civ…2, perhaps? Taking the “betrayal” of Civ5 as a given though, I still see “moving a game in the direction that attracted its core fan base to begin with” as shackling AND bending to whims. If the designers felt like Civ5 was the direction they need/want to go in… well, should they have made a title they didn’t believe in for the sake of the “loyal” fanbase? If there was no deception involved, I don’t see a problem with a company trying something new, even within established franchises.
I’m a big fan of Command & Conquer, having played all of them more or less on release. C&C4 radically changed the formula, to the extent that it doesn’t feel like a C&C game – no permanent bases, just mobile CC mechs, infinitely recurring units, etc. Did I wish they made a more traditional C&C? Yes. Did C&C4 play like crap (and have online-only DRM to boot)? Absolutely. Did I feel “betrayed” for all the years of my loyal purchasing? Not at all. I read the reviews for C&C4, didn’t buy it until it was essentially $5 on Steam, beat the game, and that was the end of it.
I understand the concept of what you’re talking about, like I would imagine someone with Red/Green color blindness can understand that grass is not actually brown (or whatever). I just never saw much point, having played and beaten an amazing C&C3 that was head and shoulders above the first two, in expecting C&C4 to be even better. I don’t expect anything from game designers; to me, games exist independently of studios, and other entries to the franchise. Without expectations, you cannot be betrayed.
Civ5 could have been Civ4 with tweaks and still hypothetically been as bad as you say it is now. Would that have been a better outcome? What if it wasn’t called Civ5 at all, but CivTactics or whatever, and they simply decided to not make another entry into the Civ franchise? I dunno, the entire situation gets pretty surreal since Civ5 still has a 90 Metacritic score. Lower than Civ4′s 94, sure, but nothing like C&C3′s 85 vs C&C4′s 64.
October 21, 2011 at 2:10 pm
Just like Azuriel, the word betrayal doesn’t fit for me. I actually liked Civ 1-5, by the way. All good games. Some of them more dated, of course.
What I dislike is when a developer creates a game thas is not only less fun for me, but also less financially successful. And this is what was happening with WoW when Blizzard dumbed it down for the (raiding) hardcore.
October 21, 2011 at 5:32 pm
I like your take away: “I don’t want to play CIV III again, as much as I don’t want to play TBC WoW. I just want to know that the game designers and I are on the same page.”
I pay them because I trust their creative genius to do something that I cannot do…when I lose that trust, I stop paying them.
October 22, 2011 at 5:06 pm
Well, if you liked Kung Fu Panda, you can be sure you and Blizzard are on the same page again.
October 23, 2011 at 8:20 am
I think you hit the nail on the head here Adam. Good post and I agree with you. Lets hope someone else buys the civ franchise and civ6 goes back from the age of empires style of play and back to spending 12hrs researching a tech advantage then getting 20 armour into your enemies muskateers and dragoons FTW. Tight game play, the abilty to play accruately even after several hours, adapt to losses by better building play/unit promtions and tactics. Its all good fun and the reduced tech trees in civ5 are one of my biggest “hates” in the same way MOP has 6 talent points and I am gonna hate that too. They scrapped the talent trees and replaced it with their path of titans it seems.
I wonder if the problem is the games are gaining too much mass market appeal? and the rising costs means each game has to sell like a lady gaga album? theres no more microprose, no more “no lifer” turn based strategy games thats take a week of game time to complete. No more rpg games based on D&D. Just an endless stream of fps. Heck even the flight sims seem to be dying off.