From Steve Butts’ IGN review of For Liberty!:
While it’s historically accurate that few Revolutionary battles achieved a clear decision, we found it a bit anti-climactic to have a 20,000 man battle decided with only a few hundred casualties on each side. Trying to actually eliminate an enemy unit is next to impossible. Instead, you’ll find yourself attacking them again and again in successive turns until their morale is completely shattered. Accurate it may be, but fun it ain’t.
Sorry all the history got in the way of your slaughter. The fact that Washington’s army couldn’t be pinned down and destroyed in a battle was one of the reasons we have an America today. Though only a few decades away from Napoleon’s ability to turn decisive battles into a forced peace, 18th century wars were full of inconclusive sparring until someone went broke or got penned in. Remember that the deciding battle of the war was a siege, not field combat.
On the plus side, Butts’ does call for wargamers to stop apologizing for poor graphics.
The individual unit and tile assets are serviceable but leave a lot to be desired. Effects are very sparse. The smoke effect from bombarding a fortified town is particularly bad. Beyond that the interface displays the information you need but feels far too cluttered as a result.
Note, grognards. He’s not calling for photorealism. He’s looking for clarity. And who can argue against that?
The fact that IGN reviewed this game at all is a big step, in my opinion.
“Sorry all the history got in the way of your slaughter. The fact that Washington’s army couldn’t be pinned down and destroyed in a battle was one of the reasons we have an America today. Though only a few decades away from Napoleon’s ability to turn decisive battles into a forced peace, 18th century wars were full of inconclusive sparring until someone went broke or got penned in. Remember that the deciding battle of the war was a siege, not field combat.”
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Do you think reviewing a game based on it’s “fun-ness” quality is a bad decision? Obviously it’s a wargame, so there’s a lot of people who won’t “get” it, but I do think he has a point. As he says, he realizes it’s being depicted accurately, but he finds that (proper) representation unfun. It is IGN after all, not Armchair General. :)
Jon
I’ve said time and again that history should take a back seat to good game design whenever necessary. These are games, after all, and abstractions in all cases. The trick is deciding what to keep and what to toss. You can make a great game by totally throwing historical warfare out the window if you like (like the Total War games do) but a lot depends on what your design priorities are. If you want to make a realistic American Revolution game, you wouldn’t have battles with 60% casualties any more than you would add zombies, no matter how much fun zombies are.
Fun is certainly important, but, as a reviewer, I expect a little more than “killing a lot of things” would be “more fun”. Why would it be “more fun”? What would it add to the game? What are the costs of doing so? Butts just says that something would be “fun” without going into any of the effects it would have on the wargame.
A lot of it goes back to the word “fun” being almost useless for the reader.
I suppose he has the expectation of “closure”. I win a battle and that gives me X. If you keep winning and it seems like you’re never making much progress against the enemy I could see how that wouldn’t be viewed as “fun”. Most strategy games like Civ or Total War do provide that closure. You win a battle and take X, the enemy is destroyed and you move on. The Europa Universalis series is probably the most “mainstream” set of games that stray from this.
I do agree that more elaboration on his concerns might be warranted. “Fun” has always been one of those popular, warm fuzzy-feeling catchwords. ;)
This means the game doesn’t provide proper feedback. It doesn’t really matter if a 20,000-man army loses and suffers only 200 casualties if something shows the player that he won. If an 18th-century army’s morale has been broken, it should be ineffective. Therefore, something should designate this ineffectiveness. Gaming is all about feedback and resulting gratification. I won a huge battle. Give me credit for it. Make his army’s flag look all droopy, or turn red, or something.
These are all game mechanics. You can represent a victory in terms of morale or casualties, but however you do it, you need to give the player some reward for winning, because it’s a game, and thus is entertainment. Wargames sometimes rely too much on the player’s understanding of the system for rewards, such that someone who wins a battle decisively realizes all the implications of that battle (I made him retreat, so now he can’t relieve this siege, so I will force that surrender, so he will lose his port, and become unsupplied, and be forced to withdraw, and I can maybe cut him off, and eliminate him) and gets gratification from that, instead of just getting a big VICTORY splash screen. It’s a legitimate complaint.
The difference between a winning position and a hopeless position in chess might be indistinguishable to someone casually familiar with the game. To someone with more knowledge, it might be clear, albeit mundane. Only real chess aficionados will find it dramatic. If you’re only trying to appeal to those players, then fine, but if wargame designers want their games to be reviewed by mainstream sites, they need to start acknowledging these facts. Should wargames try to make things more rewarding for the player? I dunno – why not? “Photorealistic graphics” (whatever that means for a theater-level game) aren’t necessary. Graphics which engage the player, are. That can have a lot to do with how the graphics change within the game itself. I didn’t think the Korsun Pocket graphics were extraordinary, but it was great to see the terrain change when the weather turned to mud. That’s not revolutionary, but it’s a nice touch. Reinforcing game mechanics through game graphics is really important for wargames. It’s all about dynamic representation. Does it matter that in Rise of Nations, the buildings change motif when you “age up?” In gameplay terms, not really, in the sense that you could just color-code them or something. Civ4 cities don’t need to “expand” on the map. Except that it conveys game information in a way that engages you. Reducing a defeated army’s strength from 20,193 to 16,987 in a wargame, which you can’t see unless you click on it, doesn’t.
However, the objection stated in the review was simply inarticulate, and sounded kind of asinine. If you don’t like something, explain it.
I, too, am also glad that For Liberty! was reviewed at all by IGN. However, I think, all in all, the reviewer did a very good job; his readership is most likely going to be non-wargamers and noting that the game’s battles were – while historically accurate – inconclusive and not particularly fun was an important point. He did, in fact, explain why he didn’t find it fun: attacking and attacking again to lower a unit’s morale and drive it off the field is repetitive. Why it would be more fun for a battle to be decisive is, I think, self-evident. Non-wargamers are put on notice right there that this isn’t their usual bloody fare; the object here is not to destroy but to avoid destruction. The reviewer goes on to make some additional good points regarding some unnecessary micromanagement (like having to set things like movement and attack stances and pay) and
some good abstractions that allow one to focus more on raising armies and strategic maneuvering. I also have to add that I personally found the interface a bit busy and cluttered: I couldn’t readily what was important and what wasn’t. For Liberty! really feels like a niche game designed for wargamers and I think the review made one aware of that.