Waiting for Civilization May 13, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Other PC Games.Tags: Civilization II, Civilization Series, Civilization V, Performance Issues
6 comments
Last week my focus was a huge game of Civilization V.
Early in the week I started a few games on the largest map size (going with the Lakes option, so lots of land warfare) with a dozen competing civilizations and the usual complement of city states until I got a situation that looked good. The first time out I was wedged in a corner between the Huns and the Mongols, which did not bode well. The next time I was the Huns, but I managed to get into a war of annihilation with three other civs very early in the game, and while I managed to get to peace while still holding on to my capital, I was set back so badly that any rematch was going to go badly for me.
The third time out I drew the Germans which helped me build up my military quickly and avoid getting penned in early. The Germans have a somewhat imbalanced attribute that allows them to recruit barbarians to their side a certain percentage of the time when they defeat a barbarian camp.
Loading… still loading…
I actively went after barbarian camps, which allowed my city production to stay focused on buildings and wonders. You don’t get the best units that way, but you get a lot of them. My barbarian strategy actually ended up yielding too many units and some points, though I was able to gift them to city states in return for influence. The Germans also pay less for land unit maintenance, so that helped with the budget.
I ended up playing all the way into Sunday evening in sessions of an hour or more. In the end it was down to five civs, all of whom feared my military might and all but one of which, the Carthaginians, who were my game-long ally, I was chipping away at, declaring war, taking a city, getting another city as part of a peace settlement, and then turning to the next in line.
However, my enthusiasm for conquest was starting to wain, so I decided at around turn 1,100 to just go for the cultural victory and end it about 30 turns later. I saved before I started, so I could go back and continue the military victory… or the political victory… or the religious victory. All were still viable. But I was tired of waiting.
I was tired of waiting because, in the last 500 or so turns, that was what I was doing most of the time; waiting. I would make my moves, update production, tweak some improvements, then end my turn only to wait and wait while the computer handled each of the other civilizations, the city states, and finally the barbarians. Then the game would come back to me.
It is a truism of the Civilization series that each version is launched at a time when they really need the next generation of CPUs to run them effectively. I remember getting a new computer and seeing the time it took to play a game of Civ II drop dramatically. I recall writing a note to Firaxis about the slow performance of Civ IV back when it launched, at a time when I had a pretty high end machine in terms of processing power. Their response was quite snotty in my opinion and could be summed up as “play smaller campaigns if performance matters to you, there is nothing wrong with our game.”
So I am left wondering when we will reach the point where average CPUs will be up to the task of speedy turns in Civ V and where the bottlenecks really lay. The game appears to at least be multi-core aware. Looking at Task Manager, at least four of the eight cores in my CPU look like they are in use, though none of them are capped out or even showing usage beyond 50%. So the game doesn’t seem CPU bound. RAM appears to be available, so it isn’t like the game is paging out constantly… or it shouldn’t be in any case. And while there appears to be some issue with I/O… the game takes me four long minutes from launch before I can resume a game already in progress… and four minutes might not seem like much time, but try sitting in front of your screen waiting, clicking to skip through any video possible, and listening to the required speech about your civ and its leader, then it is the “watched pot” scenario… I cannot imagine that they are doing much of that for each turn.
So when will we be set on this front?
I hope that the next Civ V expansion, Brave New World, will include performance improvements like those that came with the Gods & Kings expansion… yes, performance was even worse at launch… because CPUs not only are not getting faster in the ways they used to back in the day, but the CPU doesn’t seem to be the limiting factor at the moment. A long campaign like last week’s, where the last third of the game was mostly me waiting on the computer, puts me off the game.
But it does make me want to dig out my Civ II disk, which is still lost somewhere in my office. The game isn’t as sophisticated as Civ V, though there is some appeal to its sometimes crude simplicity.
A simpler time…
But the game itself runs like a dream, the AI zips along, and most of any match is spent doing rather than waiting. There are many reasons I always go back to that game, and speed is certainly one. Yes, you can get mired into epic stalemates, but at least the turns move quickly.
Age of Empires II – HD Edition, That’s What I’m Talking About April 10, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Other PC Games.Tags: Age of Empires II, Age of Kings, Hidden Path Entertainment, Steam
7 comments
The Age of Empires II – HD Edition went live on Steam yesterday, and is a perfect example of what I meant when I wrote about games I would like to see revamped.
It offers up what I would call “quality of life” improvements such as:
- Re-mastered for high resolution displays 1080p+.
- Enhanced visual engine with improved terrain textures, water, fire and ambient lighting effects.
- New Steamworks features: Achievements, Leaderboards, Matchmaking and Cloud support.
- Share user created content with Steam Workshop support.
without changing the core game play. I have been anxious to try it out since it was announced last month. And given its position on the Steam Top Sellers list, I am not alone.
Top of the Chart
Granted, it is modestly prices compared to a lot of that list… just $20… and this is a mid-week reading, but that still shows there is some support for the game. And it has actually been on that list for more than a week now, with people grabbing the pre-order version which offered a $2 discount.
So last night I was able to download the game and take it out for a run. And it was good.
Smiting my foes
The graphic updates are small but effective. It looked good full screen on my 1600×1200 20″ monitor. And one of the first things I saw in the Steamworks mod library were replacement icons for the resources, to change them back to the old ones people are probably used to at this point. I must admit, I looked at those and kept thinking, “Is that gold?”
All is not perfect in the world though.
The launcher does not draw correctly on my system.
Funky Launcher – Their Term
There is actually a link at the bottom of the of the launcher that says, “My launcher looks funky?” which actually shouldn’t be a question because my launcher clearly looks funky. (Might I suggest “Does your launcher look funky?”)
Clicking on that link brings up a page… explicitly in Internet Explorer because Microsoft is involved with this.. that say that if you have your desktop text size set to anything besides 100%, the launcher gets screwed up. I have mine set to 110% because I need the text just a little bit bigger on my monitor to be able to read things comfortably without getting out the reading glasses. And, frankly, I am not going to change that… it requires a reboot if I recall right… just for a game.
Fortunately, it is just the launcher than has this issue, and I only see that for a brief time. But this is not the first time the desktop DPI setting has caused problems with a game. I got into the End of Nations beta at one point and the game threw an error and would not launch if your setting was anything but 100%. That made it “end of beta” for me. Damn young engineers and their good eyesight.
Also on the iffy list are achievements. They do not appear to be hooked up correctly. I played through a couple of quick games last night which, if I read the achievements right, should have netted me a couple. But none were awarded. Plenty of time for that later I suppose.
The game also seemed to be confused as to whether it should use the name I entered in the game, Wilhelm IV, or my Steam user name, Wilhelm Arcturus, when playing the game. It seemed to use one or the other at various points. I might not have noticed this except for the fact that the in-game name field won’t accept a name as long as Wilhelm Arcturus.
And, not really going out on a limb here, I am going to guess that unless you already have an account, that this being a Steam only game is probably an issue for some.
Still, for me, none of those got in the way of playing the game. Now I have to get Potshot to get a copy.
I do wonder what the impact of this game will be. For example, there was a group that created an unofficial expansion for the game back in December. Will they forge ahead separately or will they embrace Steam and move what they can into the Steam Workshop?
And what about Game Ranger, the service that basically picked up the slack for Microsoft on the internet game play aspect of things. Age of Empires II and its variations look to be the most popular game played on their service. Will this hurt them?
And what will success on this front mean in the gaming industry? The current fad is to remake old games in a new image, something that has not been wholly satisfactory. The people who played the original often balk at changes. Would we better served with efforts like this that leave the core game play alone and merely polish things up so that the game plays and looks good on current systems?
And do game developers even want to do that sort of thing?
I recall being in college back in the 80s, back when the Japanese were going to take over our tech industry. They had conquered manufacturing and were producing software engineers at such a rate that they would clearly destroy the US software industry next. A professor, who wast gamely trying to teach us Pascal, stated that this would never happen.
His evidence was a then recent survey of computer science grads and what sort of projects they hoped to work on in their career. The survey showed that a vast majority of the Japanese respondents wanted to go on to established projects and help maintain and improve them over time. The US respondents went completely the other way and mostly wanted to work on new projects. That desire to strike out into uncharted territory, he said, was they key to ongoing success.
Now, I do not know if that actually played into things, but the Japanese clearly did not take over US software development regardless of how many Japanese cars there are in Silicon Valley. However, that survey remained in the back of my mind for all of these years because the desire to work on something new and interesting seems to be quite a common thread where ever I ended up.
And reworking old games to bring them up to current standards doesn’t seem to fall into that category.
Does that have any influence on how often these sorts of revamps get done?
What do you think?
Was Anything Learned from SimCity? Should Anything Be Learned from SimCity? March 27, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Other PC Games.Tags: EA, Maxis, Metacritic, Origin Store, Polygon, SimCity
17 comments
…and remains one of the top 10 highest Metacritic-rated MMOs.
Mark Jacobs, in reference to Warhammer Online
I could list any number of reasons why I did not buy the latest SimCity. I could go on about EA itself, or the Origin store, or the price, or always online issues, or the estimated lifetime of server support.
SimCity in 2013
But in reality, when the game was announced, I realized that I have never quite gotten around to purchasing its predecessor, SimCity 4. Despite having spent many hours with the first three versions of the game, I think it was clear that I was no longer as big a fan of the idea as I once was. So I was probably not going to buy the new version in any case.
However, a lot of people did buy it. It is (or was, or might be again) a huge and popular franchise. And the pre-release reviews were overwhelmingly positive. This was a game to have.
For example, there is the review over at Polygon.
I am going use their review, because they are pretty up front with how things played out.
Great Game – Score 9.5
Their initial, day before launch review, based on pre-release play time review gave SimCity a 9.5 out of 10. The review praises the game mightily. Addiction is mentioned in the opening sentence. And the only real caveat about online play was a side bar that had to do more with the reviewers home router configuration than the game. There was a caution that you needed to have a reliable connection to the internet to play the game.
Good Game – Score 8.0
Then came launch day. Polygon, to its credit has a review policy that allows them to update review scores. The old score remains, but an update gets added with a new score if something changes. And the change was that a lot of people who bought the game couldn’t log on to play, even those with reliable connections to the internet. And since there is no offline play option, lots of people were unhappy.
Due to these first day problems, Polygon changed their review to 8.0 out of 10. The issues were likely temporary, but they felt that they could not keep the 9.5 score.
Bad Game – Score 4.0
Two days later, things had gone from bad to worse. EA was behaving like a real city government and turning off what it deemed as non-essential services. Leaderboards and cheetah mode were gone. Yet there was no change to how the game was behaving. So Polygon again updated their review. SimCity was now rated as 4.0 out of 10, which I am pretty sure we all recognize as a “do not buy” recommendation.
Which, of course, was too late. Part of the problem was that too many people had already purchased the game… well, too many people relative to the EA server infrastructure at least.
And there the review stands nearly two weeks later.
Meanwhile, EA began to consistently and repeatedly piss people off. It told players they could ask for refunds, failing to mention that their policy is not to issue refunds for products purchased via digital distribution. No refunds for Origin customers. EA danced around issues like how long server support for the game was likely to be around and whether always online was just a DRM ploy. And they outright lied about why online only was a requirement and that significant engineering would be required to allow the game to be played offline. (Even mainstream media is on their case about this.)
Meanwhile, the more hardcore fans were discovering that the simulation itself was not all it seemed on the surface. Sims seem somewhat dim, and the depth of the game doesn’t seem to be up to past standards, not to mention the simple things, like saving a city then unleashing disaster to see what happens, while still being able to restore and return to your city, are no longer an option with the online model.
And amidst this, EA’s Maxis Label General Manager Lucy Bradshaw came out to tell us that in many ways they had built an MMO. I guess if you consider an asynchronous experience like FarmVille an MMO, then SimCity fits the bill as well. Or if you just want to count bad day one experiences as part of the MMO experience, it certainly fit in that regard.
So it was a disaster. The Metacritic score sits at 65%, and is only that high because they only take the first review score and not revisions. So Polygon, as an example, still shows as a 95% score on the list. But enough sites waited that at least it won’t be the same situation as I quoted at the top of this post.
Amazon, where the game has a 1 star review average, stopped selling the game and has not resumed as of this time. EA issued a directive to its sales and marketing channel to stop promoting the game. EA ended up offering people who purchased SimCity a free game from their back catalog… which really costs them very little… but it was something. The best bit or irony in that though was SimCity 4 appearing on the list. There is your offline experience.
Well, there was one part that wasn’t a disaster. The money part of the equation for went well for EA. More than a million people sunk $60 (or more) into the game to play it. So, financially, EA probably did pretty well. And since all they need to do is sell the box to make their first big financial gain, there seems little incentive for EA to spend much right away on fixing issues. As Lucy said:
We’re hoping you won’t stay mad and that we’ll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent.
Whenever that is. Because at that point I am sure EA will have some DLC to sell you. Like the definition of MMO, I am not sure that Lucy is using the same definition for the word “friend” that I do.
Of course, I am not Lucy’s friend in the first place, since I did not buy her game.
All of which leads me back to the headline. Was anything learned?
Does anybody think that the launch of the next big single player, always online game will be anything less of a disaster?
Will anybody think twice before purchasing that game if it is the next title in a big franchise?
Will reviewers hold off on their reviews for such games until any first day issues are apparent? Or should such issues even be considered? And should reviews change as they did at Polygon?
What should we take away from this event?
What will people take away?
What, if anything, should change?
Addendum: Another input. You can log in and play now, but is it worthwhile?
Age of Empires II – HD Edition March 8, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Other PC Games.Tags: Age of Empires II, Age of Kings, Hidden Path Entertainment, Steam
3 comments
Keen tipped me to an announcement today that Hidden Path Entertainment is working on an updated version of Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings. It is called Age of Kings II: HD Edition.
The game will include both the original content as well as The Conquerors expansions and will add the following features:
- Re-mastered for high resolution displays 1080p+.
- Enhanced visual engine with improved terrain textures, water, fire and ambient lighting effects.
- New Steamworks features: Achievements, Leaderboards, Matchmaking and Cloud support.
- Share user created content with Steam Workshop support.
All of which is curious timing because just last week I posted about Age of Kings getting an unofficial expansion. It will be interesting to see if the team at Forgotten Empires will be able to (or even want to) include some of the changes they have done to the game via the Steamworks user content option.
This is such big news that Microsoft even has a page up about it. Maybe this means that they will update their ancient Age of Kings page. It still has ads from 2001 running on it.
Anyway, I have no doubt that Hidden Path, who made one of my favorite tower defense games, will do a good job bringing this classic into the 21st century. But we will find out in about a month, as it is slated to ship on Steam (and only Steam I gather) on April 9, 2013.
Backwards in Time to Forgotten Realms March 7, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Instance Group, Neverwinter Nights 2, Other PC Games.Tags: Dungeons & Dragons, Forgotten Realms, Star Trek References
4 comments
As I mentioned at the end of the last month in review, the more pen and paper focused wing of our Saturday night group, Potshot, was looking into more small party adventure-centric options for our group.
And so he headed to GOG.com to grab Neverwinter Nights 2, a game first published in 2006. It is the Obsidian Entertainment second version of the BioWare original. For $20, you get the whole package including expansions all wrapped up, updated, and ready to download and install.
Neverwinter Nights 2
The download is 6GB, so that part was an over-nighter for me, but otherwise things went smoothly.
NWN2 is based on Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, which pretty much means nothing to me at this point. I still think of 2nd Edition, with its THAC0 and such, as “the new stuff,” so anything after that is strange. But it is also based in Forgotten Realms, which is the D&D setting nearest and dearest to my heart.
Potshot has grand designs for NWN2. It comes with a tool set that lets you be the dungeon master and design adventures through which your friends can play.
But before you can run, you have to walk. And before you can walk, crawling is often advisable.
And so this past weekend was spent trying to get the basics going.
I had downloaded the game and run through the tutorial, most of the information from which I promptly forgot once I left the game, when Potshot and I started to work on playing together in the same game.
Which is where there were some issues. A meandering narrative after the cut.
Age of Kings Gets an Unofficial Expansion February 26, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Other PC Games.Tags: Age of Empires II, Age of Kings, Forgotten Empires
3 comments
Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings is one of my favorite RTS games from what I would consider the peak of the RTS era, where we also had StarCraft and Total Annihilation. Three great games.
Age of Kings took what was good about the original Age of Empires game and refined it to what I feel what really the optimum state of the series. It was good to the point that a lot of features in Age of Kings were eventually back ported into Age of Empires.
After that, the series had little new to offer me. I was disappointed by both Age of Mythology and Age of Empires III, and never bothered with the more recent Age of Empires Online.
But I still drag out the disks for Age of Kings now and again to play it. It is one of the games I wish somebody would update and put on GoG.com or Steam. It has been out since 1999 and feels its age in many ways, not the least of which is how out of date the official web site for the game is. Check out this classic ad from the site.
I guess I should be more surprised that there still is an official web site.
Anyway, I would like a version that didn’t need the CD, supported higher screen resolutions, and worked with an online game connection service out of the box. I have written about it and some of its problems a decade and more down the road previously. While I like and encourage Game Ranger, the only method I know of playing Age of Kings with remote parties at this point, I wish it was a little more tightly integrated.
And while I am wishing for things that I am unlikely to get, I might as well wish for a new expansion for this 20th century RTS.
And, as unlikely as it seems, I might be getting that last bit.
A team got together and created Age of Empires II: Forgotten Empires, an unofficial expansion for Age of Kings, complete with trailer, because if it isn’t on YouTube, it isn’t really a thing, right?
Actually, you need the Age of Kings: The Conquerors expansion, so it is sort of an expansion of the one official expansion to the game.
It adds the Italians, Incas, Indians, Slavs, and Magyars to the game, along with new map types, a new campaign, and new AI types.
Forgotten Empires – The Italians
That last piece seems especially interesting. I will have to take a closer look at this.
Anyway, it is nice to see another old-ish game I still enjoy getting some attention.
Find the expansion and related information here.
Defense Grid Kickstarter Success January 29, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Other PC Games.Tags: Containment, Defense Grid: The Awakening, Kickstarter, O.G.R.E., Planetary Annihilation, Steve Jackson Games
3 comments
The buzz around Kickstarter seems to ebb and flow.
When there is a Kickstarter going around something that gets you excited, it can seem like a great way for supports to get involved in a way that helps the development process.
And then there is the reality.
There was an article a couple months back (that I wish I could find) which reported the results of a study of Kickstarter projects and found that not only do most projects not get funded (which one would expect given the quality of a lot of the pitches), but that a large percentage of those that do fund subsequently fail to deliver anything (call it “take the money and run”), fail to get even close to their projected timeline (everything takes longer than you think), or deliver something that does not match what was promised in the initial pitch.
Now some of projects in the study seemed to be stuck in a category without considering mitigating factors. The Steve Jackson Games O.G.R.E. Designer’s Edition project has been delayed because they asked for $20,000 and ended up with nearly a million, so they actually expanded the scope of the project so that the end result will be even better that they had initially planned. But that has pushed out the timeline, so it appears on the “failure due to missed dates” list despite keeping backers fully appraised of the project status with regular updates.
(And I cannot emphasize how important updates are for such projects.)
In my own case, of the four projects I supported that actually made their funding goal (out of eight total) two appear to be stuck in the failed project timeline dimension.
Now, in one case, I know what is going on. The Jason Scott documentary three pack, which I first mentioned way back in September of 2011, has been delayed because of his Internet Archive work and because he got paid to do another documentary ahead of the ones funded on Kickstarter. I cannot say that the latter makes me very happy, but the documentary is being made available for free, so if you squint your eyes and look at things with your head turned sideways, it seems like maybe we’re getting a fourth documentary as part of the deal. Plus the other three are under way and I consider them getting made to be more important than me getting my copies in a timely manner.
On the flip side, there is a book I helped fund that has gone to the editors and hasn’t been heard from since. Such is life.
And then there is Planetary Annihilation, which I pitched in on because they invoked the name of Total Annihilation, one of two RTS games I still drag out and play to this day. (The other is Age of Empires: The Age of Kings, which I wish would get a screen resolution update and appear on Steam or GOG.com.) But this project has no real set timeline and, frankly, I have been burned before by people invoking the TA lineage. Supreme Commander was not at all satisfying to me, and so I stand ready to be disappointed again.
But amidst all of this “someday” level of hope, the fourth Kickstarter on my list delivered. The new content for Defense Grid: The Awakening arrived last week. As a supporter I already had my key and had access to pre-release versions of the new content, though I did not spend much time with them. I wanted to experience them as finished product.
The product is now finished.
It showed up a little late. The target was initially December. But progress updates were frequent and if you entered the Steam key you got as a supporter, you could see the new levels evolving from raw layouts to fully formed encounters. And once it was done, Steam updated you to the final version.
So I now have what I really wanted; more levels for my favorite tower defense game.
Appropriately enough, here is the first achievement for the Containment DLC for Defense Grid: The Awakening:
I am off to conquer the new levels in their various modes.
Now if Hidden Path can just get funding for their Defense Grid 2 project. They did not reach that level of funding as part of their Kickstarter and so must seek the money via more traditional channels.
Path of Exile Opens Up January 22, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Diablo III, entertainment, Other PC Games, Torchlight II.Tags: Path of Exile
2 comments
Path of Exile. I have written a bit about it before.
It looked, for a while, to be the third horse in the “Heir to Diablo II” race last year, but then never quite got there, leaving the field to Diablo III and Torchlight II.
Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
It might have gotten a little more attention going up against one of those at launch, but it likely would have suffered for it as well. So the other two have had their launches and… have gone somewhat quiet since. Diablo III shipped without any post-launch follow up plan it seems, while the team at Runic that did both Torchlight and Torchlight II is reportedly tired of working on that franchise and want to do something different. (Where is my Mac OS version of the game?)
So it is a quiet time in the click-click-click RPG niche, which might be just the right time for Path of Exile to go… well… a little more public with their game. And so open beta has been announced.
According to their latest press release, open beta starts… tomorrow. Not that the previous year of closed beta was tough to get into. You just had to sign up and wait for a few days or a week and eventually you got an invite.
Now though… or tomorrow… you should be able to go to their site, sign up, and get access to the game right away.
This will also be the last wipe of the player base. Or so say the developers. This effectively means that the game launches tomorrow, as any progress you make with your character after that point is yours to keep.
And since this is a free to play, cash shop supported game, the transition from “open beta” to “live” seems to me to be more philosophical than anything; very much in line with every Facebook game being flagged as “beta” for most of their success.
As for the game itself, it has been about a year since I last logged in for a look. But even back then I gave it high marks for capturing the essence of Diablo II.
And a year later, after playing Diablo III and Torchlight II, that clip still “feels” a lot more like Diablo II than either of those other games. It might be time to patch up and give Path of Exile another look and see what has changed in the last year.
Storm Eagle Studio’s Obsession with My Marriage October 8, 2012
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Other PC Games.Tags: Storm Eagle Studios
2 comments
Previously Storm Eagle Studios felt the need to warn me that playing their games might lead to divorce.
Now they feel that I can bribe my wife with video games.
They clearly have not met my wife.
I can hardly wait to see what aspect of our marriage they will focus on next month!
Stormpowered, Steam, and Divorce September 14, 2012
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Other PC Games.Tags: Jutland, Steam, Stormpowered
4 comments
There is always a pile of things, ads, press releases, and what not waiting in my inbox every morning.
Because of this, my tendency is to delete unless there is some hook that grabs me. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to run all of this stuff down, so I relay on things standing out. This is the heart of advertising, and that is what most of the things in my inbox are, ads in one form or another.
The award for the hook of the day has to go to Storm Eagle Studios for their Divorce Pack Bundle.
I’m worried that it is back…
The package itself rolls up their WWI naval combat game Jutland with the three available expansions for a single price 50% off of retail, making the total $74.99.
Technically, 50% would be $74.98
This ad was in my mailbox because I actually tried out the demo of Jutland a couple years back. In one of those after hours fits of interest, I suddenly decided that naval warfare simulation would be an interesting avenue to explore, and so I ended up at Storm Eagle’s site where I downloaded their demo of many hurdles. One does not simply download into naval combat.
After a couple of hours of tinkering, the realities of the situation were brought home.
As I noted in a past musing on battleships, fleet engagements in the age of 20th century battleships were things that took place at considerable distance. The romance ideals implanted in my brain by the likes of Patrick O’Brein of laying alongside and blazing away were replaced by shooting at small dots on the horizon. Encounters tend to be prolonged sessions of wandering about trying to make something happen, followed by trying to figure out what actually did happen.
Basically, it is a game for a grognard, a hard core wargamer, who wants as realistic a simulation as can be managed. World of Warships (formerly World of Battleships) will pose no competitive threat here.
This is doubly so because, like so many such war games from small studios, the UI feels like it was designed by the IT department at my last company, where “Good Enough” wasn’t just an excuse, but a treasured organizational value.
It was enough to overcome any interest I had in simulating naval battles from the WWI.
But I remain on their mailing list, and so it was that the ad showed up and I decided to head on over to their site, if only to figure out how “divorce” played into this bundle. Thoughts of the studio chief attempting to goose sales in order to pay alimony were in my head.
Unfortunately, the site seems to owe a debt to our old IT department motto as well. Look at the description of the Divorce Pack Bundle in the screen shot above. Yeah, that. It looks the same in Firefox, IE, and Chrome. And I could go on.
In my looking around, I also found out that, among the changes that had occurred since I last visited their site, Storm Eagle had taken their onerous copy protection scheme and decided to turn it into a digital distribution system. They even lay out their features (detailed chart) and ask how they stack up against Steam.
Which is kind of an awkward question to ask, because it isn’t even possible in my mind for them to stack up, as far as user experience goes, with Steam. And user experience is important.
None of which should be taken as an explicit slam of the studio or their products. I get that, in a small studio with a small audience and a complicated, niche product, you have to pick your battles. Realism has to trump for your audience, and they’ll put up with a certain layer of awkwardness to get it.
And you have to have a delivery system for your games and if you expect low volume you like to be sure that you get as many sales as you can in a world of 93-95% piracy, which means copy protection.
But am I going to buy Tropico IV here rather than at Steam? I don’t think so.
But I wouldn’t buy it on Origin either, so don’t feel too bad. I just already have this relationship with Steam and a desire to minimize the amount of content management software running on my system.
And speaking of relationships, what was the divorce bit all about?
Ah, marital problems. I get it, ha ha.
Look, I play MMOs. Anything with a pause button is like ice cream and cake in my marriage.
But, as I said, the game is also too hard core for me.
However, if you are looking for a realistic battleship fleet engagement simulation, you don’t have a lot of choices, so there it is. And you can even play it for free this weekend.
