I was in San Francisco last week to see a presentation of the latest version of the City Building Series That Just Won’t Quit. You can read about my time with Blue Byte’s Settlers 7 over at Gameshark.
Over dinner and drinks the night before the preview, Bruce Shelley and Benedikt Grindel talked about boardgames. Both of them are big boardgamers (Shelley, of course, is a veteran of Avalon Hill) and were excited about the integration of boardgame mechanics into their new RTS.
Here’s one that didn’t make it into the preview, for example. You can research technologies to improve your military or economic power, but each technology can only be held by a single player on a map. If your enemy researches faster troops, you can’t get that bonus. But, once they start researching it, you have a countdown timer to outbid them – you off to pay more to gain that tech for yourself. Eventually the cost will reach a point where it makes no sense to keep outbidding your enemies, so the auction will stop and someone will win the tech. Since some of the techs come with victory points attached, and the possession of victory points determines the winner, you can see how this mechanic could make things very interesting.
I think there was a little bit of willful blindness going on, of course. Though a lot of my friends play boardgames, it would be a stretch to say that love of boardgame mechanics is likely to bring them back to a series that many people are surprised is still continuing.
What could make Settlers 7 relevant to American gamers is the slower pace, but that presents a marketing problem. When Bruce Shelley says that there has to be room in the market for more than one type of RTS play, he’s almost certainly right. Settlers, like the Anno games, is more city builder than RTS and is more about how well you plan your economy. But there is some military stuff going on, too, so you need to be ready for it. Armies are essential, but not dominant. Dawn of Discovery and Settlers 7 are for those gamers who like the turtling part of RTSes, the resource gathering and city building and watching the people move around.
But how do you reach them? Especially in an American gaming media that has little patience for games that require patience? City builders, and even the most frantic RTSes, make for terrible game trailers once you get beyond opening cinematics. All the pounding music in the world won’t make building a fifth storehouse the must see movie of the year.
So the people who would appreciate a slower and more elaborate game will find it very hard to learn about it since those videos and developer diaries and previews will not get Dugg (Digged?), if they read the games media at all.
When I started this blog (as Portico back in the Blogger days), strategy gaming was in better shape. In many ways, so was the gaming media since it too moved at a slower pace. The 24 hour gaming news cycle has become good for business and has led to more people writing about games, but it also means that there is a lot greater churn and a lot less emphasis on elegance and efficiency, because loud or cute are better for traffic. Part of this is the old man in me talking – and I do like loud and cute sometimes.
Settlers 7 is cute but it’s Hummel Figurine cute, not wacky Japanese cute. How does a game like this, still very relevant in Central Europe, reach a new audience? I hope that Ubisoft finds a way. I doubt trumpeting the board game elements will be the key.
The problem with the more recent Settlers games (ie everything since II, basically) is that they’re too RTS and not enough city builder. Well, that and they’ve been buggy as hell. I don’t know if that’s because they’ve been trying to appeal to Americans, but I wish they’d stop doing it.
“So the people who would appreciate a slower and more elaborate game will find it very hard to learn about it since those videos and developer diaries and previews will not get Dugg (Digged?), if they read the games media at all.”
I don’t know about that. Dawn of Discovery got quite a lot of coverage for a PC exclusive. Not as much as it did in the European press, true, but Tom had a lengthy series of posts on it and it’s been mentioned again and again in various high profile podcasts. It’s not going to reach IGN readers, but then are IGN readers going to want to play a city builder. Maybe I’m being naive, but surely Blue Byte would do better to make a game that would appeal strongly to the sort of person who likes city builders (and there are still plenty of them) and reads the sort of sites that cover city builders , than make a hybrid game that appeals to nobody and gets no coverage.
“You can research technologies to improve your military or economic power, but each technology can only be held by a single player on a map. If your enemy researches faster troops, you can’t get that bonus. But, once they start researching it, you have a countdown timer to outbid them – you off to pay more to gain that tech for yourself.”
Sounds like Sid Meier’s Railroads! Well, apart from the victory points bit.
The biggest problem, I think, is that no one is explaining this game to me, “guy who’s never heard of the series before”. Maybe I’m alone in this, but there might well be a huge audience of people who would give it a try– if only they knew what the game was.
Then again, given the DRM this game is saddled with, I’ll be giving this game a miss…
Of course, I wrote that comment before reading your gameshark article. One thing at a time, I always say :)
Has there been a decent Settlers game since Settlers 2? After 3 and 4 turned out to be awful I gave up on the series.
Settlers VI was OK except for the frequent crash to desktop issues. And even then it was only OK until we had Dawn of Discovery to compare it to, at which point it looked extremely mediocre.
Oh yeah, and that “OK” verdict was premised on the fact that I picked it up for about £7.
I’ve been wrestling with the problem with how best to present a slow moving strategy game to a youtube addicted audience myself.
The only thing I’ve come up with so far is to take inspiration from other people who try to make things that seem fundamentally dull look exciting. For example I think you could make a great video out of live drawing interesting and well presented graphs of even a spreadsheet type of game, look at the great charts over on information is beautiful:
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/who-rules-the-social-web/
Imagine drawing something like those out piece by piece for some interesting data in a strategy game. Better still you could have the data tracked by the graph tell a story much like that recent super bowl advert for Google told a story through search queries. I imagine somethign like dwarf fortress could craft an excellent trailer out of something like this.
For a city builder I think you could take some inspiration from how nature documentaries depict the growth of plants and craft a timelapse of a city shown from a single viewpoint growing from nothing to an endgame sort of city in a minute.
The goal is just to honestly distill the feelings of a strategy game into something that lasts a minute or so. It doesn’t have to be just flat gameplay footage of that fifth storehouse build.
At least thats what I hope will be compelling to watch :)