Free Candy For Everyone

In between all my other gaming (*cough* World of Warcraft), I’ve found time to play through Civilization Revolution. This is the newest in my long beloved Civ series, first time ever designed from the ground up for consoles. I got the Xbox 360 version because I love achievements (love them!). Today I wrapped up my achievement collection, getting the last one to bring me to the full 1000 tally. Now that I’ve done that I feel like I’ve pretty much finished the game and could give my thoughts.

It retains the general flavor of a Civ game - you start from the dawn of civilization with a single settler unit to build a city with. A lot of the general gameplay is quite familiar to long time Civ players, but the presentation is very much for the console. The graphics are bright and colorful, the interface is streamlined, and you have less micromanaging to do.

Overall, I think they did a really nice job, conceptually. The flow of gameplay is nice and the console controls work well. But I have a few major problems with the game. The first is a bit insurmountable, I’m afraid. I like all the complexity of the PC versions of Civ. All the streamlining they did to put it on console removed a lot of the gameplay that I quite like. Overall, the console version can’t quite win my heart away from the PC. But for newcomers to the game it will probably be a great introduction.

The next two problems are with game balance and bugs. I feel like the game forces you to play a particular way. You can either rush and take out your enemies before they build up their culture, or you can settle in for the long haul in which case you better have enough culture or you will lose. Culture is a concept the Civ series introduced in its third installment. Basically, buildings in your cities generate culture, and each city has a cultural border that grows out around it. As this cultural border comes up against other civs, it can swallow them up and cause their cities to become yours without a single act of war. In the PC versions, there are more ways to prevent the cultural flip than there seem to be on the console. I found that going for a military strategy in the middle of the game without any culture was totally futile as I’d take a city only to have it flip back to its previous owner a couple turns later. Argh.

And then there are the numerous bugs. The pathing is really bad. I’ve seen two major issues - one where you send a unit to a far away destination and it starts going in a direction that won’t actually get it there. It then will go back and forth until you stop it, never getting to its goal. The other is that sometimes it doesn’t pick the shortest path. I have to micromanage the legs of the journey to keep my units from going the longer way around. Grr.

Last negative is big for me, considering I’m an AI engineer. The enemy AI is just frustrating and bad. This is a game that should be in large part about diplomacy. But the opponents in this game just hate you if you’re winning and hate you if you’re losing. If you have a lot of gold, they demand you give it to them and go to war if you don’t. If you have a lot of culture they might just declare war on you because that pisses them off. There’s no way to have an amiable relationship with anyone except by constantly giving in to their demands. Plus I’ve seen the AI try to send settlers repeatedly in the wrong direction, where they’re getting trapped by my cultural borders but they could just go the other way instead and settle plenty of open land. I think the diplomacy could have really been improved, it was so much better in the PC versions. Maybe Soren should have been called in as a consultant!

Anyways, I certainly played a lot of it, gathering up those achievements. I haven’t played multiplayer at all yet, though I checked out some forums today and it sounds pretty unbalanced, like there’s only one really strong winning strategy. Doesn’t sound compelling to me! So I’m probably done with Civ Rev for now, until they patch it or something. Maybe I’ll go play a game of Civ 4 instead…

Long time blog readers will know that I’m a huge fan of the game Civilization. I sunk so many hours into that franchise, I actually think it’s more time than I’ve spent on World of Warcraft. Not only do I love the whole Civilization franchise, I really enjoyed Railroad Tycoon. When I saw Sid Meier’s name on the GDC program I knew I had to go see what he had to say.

Overall, the talk wasn’t great. It was a Q&A run by Noah Falstein and as such it didn’t have much direction. Sid is clearly a smart guy with some interesting things to say, but this was a softball session with questions about where he grew up and what he studied in school. I didn’t really go to get a history of Sid’s life, I was hoping to hear more about his philosophy and future plans.

To paraphrase an interesting point that he made:

Focus has always been on the gameplay. That’s one of the things that hasn’t really changed with the technology. Core gameplay ideas that they experimented with and pioneered “back in the good old days” are still viable. See other people’s games, steal their ideas, see what others build on your ideas. Building on each other, we’re more in this together than working against each other.

Talking about his games in general, he said that they do the research after the game is finished. They’re trying to make a game about the fun stuff - whether we’re talking about a railroad game or civ or what. Do the research after to justify the historical context. Goal is to make the game as fun as possible and then justify it all after in a 60 page manual.

He talked about the value in being both a programmer as well as a designer. He says he sits in multiple seats - first the designer seat, then the programmer seat, then the player seat. Being both the designer and the programmer avoids a lot of meetings. Lots of decisions that you’re not sure of, you’re willing to try since can do it yourself and not use up someone else’s time. Very powerful to have the iterative flow. Play-improve-play-improve. Goal is to have a game up and running within a few weeks.

I find this to be a really interesting idea. In every project I’ve worked on we’ve had a clear delineation between design and programming roles. While I’ve frequently had input into design, I would never consider myself a designer. I can understand Sid’s point about prototyping ideas and only using your own time, I guess I just haven’t worked on a project that had that much freedom to experiment.

Noah asked “Would you recommend that all designers learn programming as well?” and Sid said he would. He thinks that with Xbox Live Arcade and Steam there is once again a place for a small team based in a garage. If you’re a young designer looking to prove your prowess, Xbox Live is a great place to do it. Then Sid made a really cool point - small team games doesn’t have to mean simple games. If you look at the credits of Railroad Tycoon, it was just a handful of people. A few people can make a game with complex gameplay. The games they made 10 years ago are casual by today’s standards if you consider only team size.

Talking about the very early games, he said that they had to do a lot of work with your imagination because they only had 16 colors. Finding ways to trigger those responses where your imagination comes into play. Red Storm Rising was a submarine sim set in the Cold war era. It was just two dots moving across the screen but it managed to evoke the feeling of a sub dodging a nuclear missile in your imagination.

Noah asked, “You haven’t gone down route of traditional story but your games are really good at evoking people’s own stories (like Will Wright’s). How do you feel about story, emergent or otherwise?” Sid said that the key rules of game design is who is having the fun. It is important that the player have the fun. In story based games, a lot of time the designer is having all the fun. Sid believes you should allow the player to tell an interesting and rewarding and brand new story. Keep the designer in the background and let the story emerge from the players decisions. But Sid was quick to explain that this was his philosophy and that he very much admired other people’s story-based games, that was just not something he is interesting in creating.

Some other random tidbits of wisdom:
Every unit in the game is useful. Came out of iterative tuning.
Always trying to keep the complexity at a manageable level.
Every unit and technology is a decision and it has to justify itself otherwise it’s just adding complexity without purpose.
Repeated play identifies the losers and they’re gone.
Taking bad stuff out is just as important as putting good stuff in.

What games is Sid playing?
Interestingly, he said he doesn’t play strategy games. When you do something all day you want a change of pace at home. He’s really been enjoying car games like Gran Turismo and Forza. He liked Mercenaries for some reason, though he’s not an FPS person. He liked Halo as well.

Asked “Do you ever have any intrest in making a sort of monumental combination game that sums up everything you’ve ever done?” (like Spore) he answered with an amusing and concise, “No.”

“What motivates you to make games?” The desire to play a game that hasn’t been written yet. Feel like the games that he creates fill a void, they haven’t been made before.

Finally, an audience member said that he’d once had the opportunity to ask American McGee what game would come ouf of a collaboration between Sid and American. American said something like “Railroads in hell.” So the fellow asked Sid the same question. This was actually pretty interesting, Sid said something like “That’s exactly why we should never work together.” He thinks that big designers shouldn’t work together. You’d get the worst of both worlds instead of the best. When making a game, you need someone with a creative vision and you can’t have multiple visions to make one game, no matter how big the game is.

He spoke a bit about the upcoming Civilization Revolution, the re-imagining of Civ for consoles. I’m looking forward to what they’re doing. Sounds like they’ve really revisited what it means to be a Civ game and really tried to figure out what makes Civ Civ, and boil that down into a new and unique console experience.