One brand!

Look at Jon Shafer's experience with At the Gates. A Civilization designer. Changed too much, and got 3/5 star averages. A one-man show, a literal indie game, comparable in resources to Civilization 1. This is what Meier is talking about. Tossed out of Paradox, for that matter.

Firaxis's Beyond Earth has barely 1 person who played at least 1 minute for every 10 that bought the game. 9/10 buyers just handed over money out of nostalgia, never playing a minute, nostalgia was and remained the only compelling association with that product.

Okay, was it a bad game? Who knows, hardly anyone played it. That's the crux of what he's saying.

We've barely covered just Civilization-adjacent products.

Anyway, it's preposterous - that Sid Meier has never heard of Paradox, that he's unaware of their success, and that he hasn't contemplated it. It isn't about strategy games as a whole, it's about new games, about new experiences and changing 30% of the formula every year instead of 3% of it.

I bought Beyond Earth for full price at launch out of nostalgia for Alpha Centauri (of course).

Unfortunately it had many flaws: - Much less interesting art direction and characters than Alpha Centauri. - Gameplay was very one note, with little meaningful deviation from a few defined paths. - On release, when you finished the game it showed a "finish game" button which unceremoniously dumped you back to the title screen. No opportunity to see stats or review your empire.

My impression was that it was rushed and had a limited budget, and I never felt like revisiting it. As sibling comments note, there is a sizable niche of mostly PC gamers looking for meaty experiences, and I believe Beyond Earth failed on its own merits.

That’s Strategy (and I don’t know if it’s true even there as most Strategy is RTS and I prefer turn based). There have been many deep and complex RPGs released, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Underrail, and Age of Decadence come to mind.

> Okay, was it a bad game? Who knows, hardly anyone played it.

Well, those who did play know it. And to me it was essentially a dumbed-down Civ V that, to make it worse, didn’t have the same amazing modding community behind it.

> Firaxis's Beyond Earth has barely 1 person who played at least 1 minute for every 10 that bought the game

It is common for a lot of people to "buy" games on steam that they will never play. Especially with less popular games.

I think you have it backwards - At the Gates is a case of a game simply not being up to bar despite the recognizable name behind it (because the competition has gotten so fierce!), rather than people not bothering with complex games unless they have a recognizable name behind them, and only then for nostalgia reasons.

What's that number based on? Feels like taking some telemetry more seriously than it should be.

I played it a few times when it came out. I had been looking forward to it. Unfortunately it was unbalanced with very obvious exploits. Maybe they fixed it later but I gave up on it.

(Should I give Stellaris another chance? I got it when it just came out and was disappointed, but I imagine they put a lot of work in it since then.)

But maybe it's gotten better since then. I tried it pretty early.

So then you have to relearn everything. And it's a slow paced, very abstract game to be begin with so it becomes a slog.

I don't really have a problem with that, though. These games, especially a new one like Stellaris, are also a search for the right approach to the game they want. Sometimes they realise (based on feedback most likely) that they took the wrong approach and have to make dramatic changes. Would you rather they abandoned the game and release a new game that does it right, or that they update the old one? I quite appreciate Paradox's approach. You get way more value out of the game than with most other games. And if they did that with Stellaris, that gives me hope, because the initial version of that didn't work for me.

And if you really prefer the old version, you can just continue playing that.

They dont fix bugs only, they actually improve the game. For free.

The amount of writing that goes into anomalies alone is worth probably a couple of books

Maybe it would have been more interesting if, like in EU4, the galaxy was already populated. Maybe that's indeed what it is in newer versions, but not back when I picked it up.

So I “wasn’t there” 20 years ago already.

"Death stacks" happen in real life. e.g.: every human battle ever, including Normandy in WW2, I don't know why Civ 5 chose to remove them.

Civ 5 and 6 have nice features but it's no longer Civ to me. Plus, the excessive amount of $60 DLCs are a no-no.

I think the game was fine the way it was.

Alpha Centauri enters the room ;)

I played the tutorial and then one and a half games against the AI.

It took 8 hours and not much happened. It had a fairly overwhelming UI and was really slow for each turn (even on fastest speed, tiny map, two players).

I’ll probably never play it again, it wasn’t fun.

As a non-native speaker, I sometimes have a similar experience when reading English books written in a rather ornate style, i.e. where I don't know some of the vocabulary: I can follow along just fine, I get the story arc etc., but the book just isn't fun because lacking the vocabulary I can't grasp the fine details of the atmosphere, the character descriptions etc.

Civ6 has a crazy amount of complexity to do basic actions - the complexity comes from the UI and all the rules, each city has a ton of things to build which each take many turns, there’s multiple skill trees of unclear benefits, there’s governments and policies, where you can build and what you need to build isn’t clear. During all of this kind of tedious action nothing interesting is happening.

I’d guess there’s a baked in assumption that people playing are already familiar with the game. The tutorial and in game recommended actions were not great.

I don’t mind some complexity (I like KSP, Starcraft) - Civ6 feels like a bad design problem.

Definitely! Multiple core mechanics are downright broken. Religion for example is a complete waste of time, as it has practically zero consequences outside of the mechanic itself. I can routinely beat the game while completely ignoring religion.

I'm still playing Age of Empires and Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, so I may just be trapped in a time vortex.

Now I have less free time but enjoy the feeling of progression in lighter RPGs like Deus Ex.

Audiences change over time among with the game offerings.

As I’m sure you are aware, mental health is an important component of overall well-being, and you will find that doctors have prescribed treatments involving computer games in a wide ranging number of studies since their popularity began to grow in the late 1980’s. Picking one well cited example at random from a 30 second Google search https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0026... .

“No doctor ever advised playing more video games” is such a broad brush statement as to be useless to refute. It is factually wrong, and the first statement in our sub-conversation that truly deserves the label “wilfully ignorant” - you can learn more about the topic with a few minutes of searching for “video games therapy”.

You are likely aware that not everyone is neurotypical. Some people come alive in their creativity in a video game but struggle to communicate face to face, or struggle with the fine motor control to draw, paint, or write. Video games like Minecraft can become effective communication channels. Doctors and researchers can and do prescribe video games as therapy ( https://psychcentral.com/news/2019/01/28/therapeutic-video-g... ).

> No doctor ever advised playing more video games.

No doctor ever advised reading more thermodynamics textbooks either. And that's because it's out of scope. Most of medicine deals with the body. A smaller part deals with emotions. There is no branch of medicine concerned with cerebral skills.

Not only do you start with a double negative which is both hard to read and an incorrect statement, but you then ironically don’t add anything meaningful to the conversation.

Edit> he edited his comment

And also, people dont spend as much time exercising as they spend gaming, not unless majority of that gym time is pure socialization. Body would not handle it for majority of people.

But yes, the few individuals that do exercising related activities all the time do have those interfering with jobs and families. With families complaining about about that and with people who decide to cut down on exercising for that reason.

That is really sort of thing you should not do.

I guess you can walk most of marathon, marathon distance is not some kind of unachievable hike. But as of actually running it, you should not and would not manage to run.

Ok, I took the whole "your body is likely to get damaged forever" thing as "can not and should not run".

And also, healthy non trained individual wont run half marathon. May walk majority of it, but wont be able to actually run that distance.

> I'm really surprised at how many dedicated adult gamers there seem to be these days, especially employed ones, as I don't know where they find the time.

Judging from people I know, they get time because they either dont have family/social life or simply dont spend time with them. If they have kids, they expect partner to deal with all child related care and housework, not really interacting with their children.

If you are alone or divorced, having hobby that actually immerse you and eats your time for hours is not a bad thing.

And popular games like Factorio or Satisfactory are far from simple. Also, in many survival games you can loose results of many hours of gameplay in an instant.

Further, this is just true in general. People say "games are so bad now," when what they probably mean is "per capita, most games are terrible because the market is so huge." However, there are more and better games available today than in any time in history. Again, this is true because for the most part all the old games remain available. You could extend this to almost any kind of media: books, movies, TV, music. There is simply MORE of everything, and so the mainstream center-curve feels more estranged.

Various Microsoft game/whatevers on PC were such a shit show in the past (while on consoles it was great) I am probably not alone in just ignoring everything that comes out of microsoft on PC.

1. Free to play. 2. Marketing budget in the 9 figure range. 3. Comes from a long established series with ~20 games. 4. Available on all platforms.

I'd be willing to bet there's more of an appetite for complex games today than when Civilisation was released from an absolute standpoint, just that there's also more people playing games in general so from a relative standpoint there's less.

COD sold 75-80 million copies [1]. Getting 30 million regularly implies that one of third of them are actively playing at the same time. That seems rather unlikely

[1] https://www.gamespot.com/articles/call-of-duty-warzone-sees-...

Maybe Civ needs a little touch up in modern design - maybe the first playthrough is quick and easy, but "willing to spend time" with a game is definitely not a problem.

> In the book, Meier reminds us that the bestselling games of 1998 were Civ 2, Warcraft II, Myst, Command & Conquer and Duke Nukem 3D. Aside from the last, all require more thought and engagement than the [redacted] that dominate gaming today.

To avoid picking and choosing, what are the bestselling games of 2020, for comparison? How would we even determine that?

That's where I think he's saying things have changed. Four of the top five best-selling games of 1998 were more thoughtful, while today he offers up "Candy Crush" and "Fortnite" in contrast.

As I write this, the best-selling games of 2020[0] seem to be: Ghost of Tsushima, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Paper Mario: The Origami King, The Last of Us: Part II, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. If that's not a perfect comparison, maybe throw in the top paid app on iOS: Minecraft.

In terms of being one of the top five games, he's clearly right. There's not much room for something like "Civilization" on that list.

But that might be the wrong way to think about it. If I sell X units in 1998 and it makes up 25% of all units sold, and then I sell X units in 2020 and it makes up only 0.1% of all units sold, that might seem like what I'm selling is much less popular, but in fact I'm selling just as many. It's the overall market that has grown up around me. In my hypothetical example, it has gotten 250 times as large. In reality, it might be even more extreme than that.

Something like "Civilization" today might not be a best-seller the way it was 22 years ago, but that doesn't mean there's not a market for it.

[0] https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/top-10/video-game...

It might be hard to master, but I've had a lot of fun with my first game already, so it's easy enough to get into (I don't like 4X games usually and I hadn't even played any RTS/Sim games for many years).

I think the point was more "you're in for some work if you want to enjoy it properly". But if we're simply looking at the "playing to beat it/mastering aspect", then you're right.

CK3 just just looks simpler because its presented in a lot better/cleaner way. (and the fact, that CK2 wasn't as complicated as EU4)

here is some gameplay[1][2] and forum where development happens [3] . There is c# revrite comming ...

  [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXqBYDSno7w
  [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77mvpSvVu10
  [3]http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php

The goal is not complexity for its own sake; it has to serve a purpose. Some of the complexity does, some of it doesn't. Revisiting some of those assumptions for a new version makes a lot of sense. That said, these big Paradox games have a tendency to accumulate a lot of complexity over the years.