PC Game Fun Time

Stardock, the makers of such fine games as Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire, and who are well-respected ’round these parts for their vehement opposition to Digital Restrictions Management, have announced their next game, Elemental: War of Magic. In case the name didn’t give it away, this is a departure from Stardock’s usual science fiction fare into the realm of fantasy. Now I’m not especially fond of said change of venue, seeing as how I tend to think that swords-and-sorcerers fantasy is over-represented in videogaming while space opera science fiction is under-represented, but I’m remaining hopeful.

First of all, the game being from Stardock immediately gives it a leg up in my book, as I’ve enjoyed every other title they’ve produced for PC in recent years. Compare this with a larger publisher like Electronic Arts, whose titles are often hit-or-miss. And the graphical style looks pretty nifty. Rather than aiming for hyper-realism, Stardock is going for a cel-shaded look. It’s now been long enough since the initial cel-shading boom that I think cel-shading can be considered cool again.

But of course, what really matters is how the game plays, and we simply don’t have much information available on that front yet. According to GameSpot (if you’re willing to trust them after the Jeff Gerstmann incident; I’m still iffy) , the game will play like a mixture of Civilization and the Total War series. Stardock envisions battles being just as large as those in, say, Medieval II: Total War. It’ll have the ability to pause the action at any time and queue up commands, which is what makes it a bit more strategic than classical-style RTSes (and more of a chore to play online to boot). I suppose the main difference over Medieval II is that the out-of-combat screens are more like Civilization, which will allow creation and settlement of new cities (Medieval II was effectively played on a static map of Europe in which the cities simply traded sides).

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the game is the announced “persistent multiplayer” mode. I suspect it’ll compare to Cities XL in this respect, but there isn’t yet enough information to be sure just yet. I’ll be keeping a close eye on this game as time goes by and new information is released. Unfortunately, it isn’t scheduled to be released until February, 2010, so don’t get too excited over it. Also, I suspect the game is far from completed, because while we’ve seen lots of screenshots from the simple-to-program overworld map, we have nothing yet from the promised battle screens. That could take awhile to do right; heck, the Total War series is on its fifth game now and it still has significant problems with it. Simulating combat between thousands of units in military formations correctly is hard.

It’s been awhile since I last played a city-building game (since SimCity 4 came out in 2003, to be exact), and boy do I really need my fix. I’ve been addicted to the series since I filled up an entire box with floppy disks of SimCity 2000 saves on our family’s 386 many years ago. There’s nothing else that quite matches the thrill of being an urban planner — and no, I’m not being facetious.

So imagine my amazement when a friend pointed me to Cities XL, a city-building game in the SimCity tradition that I have absolutely no excuse for finding out about earlier. Cities XL is coming out in 2009 and will be a lot like the next release of SimCity, with an MMORPG twist — every other city on the planet in the game world is built by another player. That sound you just heard was the sound of me necessitating new pants.

In addition to the MMORPG element, and all the possibilities of trade/cooperation with other players that brings, Cities XL is also going to improve on the old grid-based landscape of all the old SimCity games. Roads can now be laid out in any direction, not just along the grid or at a 45 degree diagonal. Roads can even be curved. But it’s the highway construction that really has me excited. The video (you’ll have to navigate to it) shows the player fluidly constructing a major highway intersection, with multiple levels of ramps and curved overpasses. This is your opportunity to kick the clover-leaf intersection to the curb and make something so much cooler.

I’m definitely looking forward to Cities XL, and anyone who calls themselves a fan of the city-building genre should be as well. Will Maxis finally be surpassed in their own genre? Here’s hoping. If you don’t hear from me for several months in a row sometime in 2009, it’ll be because I’m constructing the most bustling metropolis on the face of the virtual planet.

Much has been made about Blizzard’s recent announcement that StarCraft 2 will be released as a trilogy. For those who don’t know, the basic story is that the initial release of the game will include the multi-player portion of the game, and the campaign for the Terran side, one of three sides (Terran, Zerg and Protoss) featured in the game.

This has generated a lot of controversy online, with people unhappy about having to pay for three games. While I understand where they are coming from, I also think this move on Blizzard’s part can make a good deal of sense from both a business and a gaming point of view. I’m going to try to explain this below as best I can.

To start off, we need to consider Blizzard as a company. Here’s how I see Blizzard: as a high-quality creator of commercial games. You can’t argue that World of Warcraft is a polished product (I’m sure there are rough edges, don’t get me wrong. But the average person doesn’t see those the first time through.), you can’t argue that StarCraft, Warcraft III, or Diablo II weren’t polished products. Blizzard is the James Patterson or Robert Ludlum of the gaming industry: they are dedicated to the craft of creating tight, vivid, readable (playable, in Blizzard’s case) titles. You can never tell me that Patterson has a dedication to literary craft. You can never tell me that Blizzard has a dedication to a deep or, well, complicated gaming experience. Blizzard makes games to get the widest following possible so they can make the most money possible. Nothing inherently wrong with that, it’s just the kind of games they choose to make.

As for my favorite game companies over the years, Cavedog, Black Isle, Warren Spector’s ION Storm Austin, Irrational Games, and Stardock, I see them as creators of interesting games. Total Annihilation wasn’t and isn’t the most polished game in existence (although it tightened up considerably from the original 1.0 to 3.1). Neither is Deus Ex, Freedom Force, Galactic Civilizations II, or five or ten of my other favorites that I could name. But here’s the key with all these games: Depth. Total Annihilation is, to me, almost infinitely replayable to me even in unmodded form, because of how many different ways there are to play it. Deus Ex is mind-blowingly deep for its era when you consider how many different ways you can play it. Same for Fallout and Freedom Force. These are not games that will truly appeal to a wide cross section of the gaming and non-gaming populace.

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In light of the large amount of feedback from our first Fallout 3 related post, I think it is a good idea if we do another one.  This will also give me a chance to respond to those who charged I was being overly negative.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that Fallout 3 has great potential, and I don’t think any of the things mentioned in my previous post are going to be major concerns once we are actually playing the game.  Also, I am not one of the Fallout 1 & 2 diehards who think that any change in the formula of the originals or any influence from other games (especially Oblivion) is a bad thing.

In fact, I quite liked Oblivion, and played it quite extensively.  It did, however, have some flaws that ultimately limited the long term replay value of the game.  So, my hope for Fallout 3 is that it marries the best aspects of the previous Fallout games and The Elder Scrolls series, and avoids the worst.

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Much ado has been made recently over the long anticipated post apocalyptic role playing game, Fallout 3.  After all, it has been just over ten years since the release of the last game in the series, Fallout 2.  (This is not counting Fallout Tactics, which was not a roleplaying game as such.)

Fan expectations for such a project are inevitably high.  Just as inevitably, fan complaints have been legion, especially from the die-hards who remember the original games with a fond sense of nostalgia.  There has been a great deal of worrying from these types that the new Fallout, which is being developed by Bethesda rather than the original developer Black Isle, will lack that special magic that made the first two games great.

Undeniably, a part of that magic was the mature nature of the games.  The original Fallout series featured many adult topics, including sex, prostitution, drugs, and drug addiction.  Unfortunately, times change, and many of these topics are no longer considered fit for video games, at least if they want to avoid the instant death sentence that is an “Adults Only” (AO) rating.  Games with this rating will not be sold in most brick and mortar stores, which means there is little hope of AO games achieving the kind of sales that less harshly rated titles often do.

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