"Building is more fun than breaking" - (may be paraphrased).
Sure, but that's extremely common these days! Genre blending is all over the place. Tons of action games have base building mechanics, for example. Or management sim things. Everything has RPG mechanics these days.
I dunno. Obviously this increases complexity a lot but things have changed significantly in the game industry since Sid Meier said that
There's a simplification of multi-genre-ism these days that didn't exist then, mostly because nobody knew what the rules for a good ____ game even were.
Now, it's like getting a "Greatest Hits of {Genre}" mini game embedded in the main game. Sure they're tasty, but not as weirdly interesting.
Look at the Elder Scrolls. Skyrim is a lot more complex than Morrowind in a lot of ways, but Morrowind gives the player more actual freedom with the spell creating and such.
"Weirdly interesting" describes Morrowind to a T
Likely driven by increasing AAA-class game development budgets + the consolidation of publisher-developer first party studios. Both of which create organizational inertia to hedge risk.
It felt like the 00s and 10s were marked by 'everything you expect, with one magical new feature.'
E.g. Halo (infinite downtime-recharging shields), Gears (tight cover mechanics)
From what I've read, Morrowind avoided this by a distinct lack of adults in the room (in the sense of boring, risk-hedgers) for much of its pre-development and a decent chunk of its main development cycle. Also, the creative team on it being incredibly hard-working and inspired.
In fairness, this was often enough to make a game really stand out and inject a lot more fun into an otherwise expected formula.
It's certainly a lot better than what the 2020s have been so far imo. There have been a couple of stand-out games this decade but mostly I'm so interested in anything the AAA portion of the industry is doing. No one seems to be pushing things forward almost at all anymore from what I can tell
Personally, I'd just rather have a tragically-flawed but also creatively-great Populus, Lemmings, Myst, or Worms.
> No one seems to be pushing things forward almost at all anymore from what I can tell
Imho, that's the tyranny of spectacle budget. At any given time, it costs this much to make something that meets state of the art, and gamers expect state of the art from their AAA games.
Hopefully gen-AI provides a (still-likely temporary) reprieve from that, by lowering the cost of AAA-quality via more efficient labor and therefore making publishers take more risk on unique games.
Specifically, if the minigames were too engrossing and the overarching layer too complex, you'd go into one of them with an objective that you've forgotten by the time you gotten out of it.[5]
And it's not a new argument, either. XCOM, also published by Microprose as a later contemporary, was very close to the medley model that Meier felt that he struggled with, but its various modes and mechanical levels (base-building, interceptors, budget/time/people management, research and manufacturing, tactical combat) all worked so well that it became the DNA for decades of a franchise.[6]
There's still a point to be made about maintaining an overarching focus, but it's a much muddier, know-it-when-you-see-it (or not-for-everybody) quality to it that makes it hard to turn into an actual rule.
1: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/covert-action-review
2: https://mssv.net/2010/09/19/covert-action-and-pirates/
3: https://scientificgamer.com/in-praise-of-covert-action/
4: https://www.filfre.net/2017/03/whats-the-matter-with-covert-...
5: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/analysis-sid-me...
6: Instead of writing a long comment, I'll link to the last long comment I wrote about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36297056
And this is why it's relatively unlikely to find worthy successors: Making the whole be as good as the sum of its parts is hard enough. Getting to be as good as Pirates, or the best Cinemaware games, where the whole was significantly better than all of the games in isolation, is aiming foolishly high. Which is why, say, the xcom remakes are such a wonder, because they manage to both change the original two minigames underneath, improving them substantially, all while still being balanced.