I’ll add the usual disclaimer that Paradox is a client of Evolve PR, though no one can really call into question my serious love for many of the studio’s design ambitions. The Sword of Islam expansion is something that fans of the Crusader Kings franchise have been calling for ever since the first game in the series was released; people want to play the Muslim states and not just the Christian kingdoms.
It would be easy to get really soicio-political here and talk about the challenges of presenting an historic Islamic faith in a Western culture that is often sceptical, fearful or confused about Islam in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, 9/11, two extended wars in Middle East and Central Asia and the Arab Spring. Islam is a sprawling and diverse faith that, like many religions, was adapted to the cultures it converted but in game terms needs to be standardized to some extent.
But I’m not going to do the easy thing. I am going to focus on one design issue here, because Sword of Islam does some really funky things with family dynamics. [Read more →]
With everyone very busy and very tired, a shorter and smaller show than usual this week. Troy welcomes Pokemon trainer and DS guru Nadia Oxford to the show to talk about the weird mixture of Pokemon and Nobunaga’s Ambition in Pokemon Conquest. How does it differ from other Pokemon games? Do the strategic and tactical levels work? As the 3DS slowly pushes the original out of the way, what is legacy of the DS as a strategy platform?
Cory Banks joins Julian, Troy, and Rob to talk about fiction and world-building in strategy games. They talk a lot about Endless Space and whether or not its fiction is undercooked, and how it affects the rest of the game. Does having an interesting world make for a better strategy game? Is Civilization just abstracting human history, or is it doing world-building of its own? The gang considers Alpha Centauri, and what its fiction added to the game, and what the poor fiction of Rise of Legends and Kohan took away. Julian explains why Warhammer’s fiction works so brilliantly.
So with regular meetup commuter Jon Shafer pushing me to pick a date when he can come up and kick butt at board games again, we’ve settled on the Civic Holiday weekend – the first weekend of August.
On Saturday, August 04, 2012, any and all are invited to come to Toronto and play board games with what has turned into a nice, friendly and collegial group of readers and listeners. Last time, we started a Risk Legacy board, played Pandemic and some other stuff. It was pretty great, and I loved seeing a couple of new faces.
We never seem to have enough time when I set it for mid-afternoon, so let’s shoot for starting at 11:00 AM and then running to 7:00 PM. That gives us 8 hours, time to eat beforehand if anyone wants to and then we break up and go to our homes. You are, of course, not obliged to be there the whole time. Feel free to drop in. I understand that holiday weekends could mean some issues with family plans, but my weekend schedule is a little batty this summer so I picked one that I knew was clear on my end.
Location: To Be Determined.
We have been doing these upstairs at Tequila Bookworm, which has been OK but there are a couple of small issues. Table space isn’t great, for one thing, and the chairs are crap. But there is room to move around and space for staging areas.
Snakes and Lattes has been recommended more than once, but their largest room can only be reserved for 10 at the maximum and we could easily hit a dozen if new people come, and new people always do.
So, as usual, if you can think of a convenient location on a major transit line, feel free to pipe up.
Religion is the big new system in Civilization V: Gods and Kings and we talked quite a bit about it on last week’s podcast. To recap the basics, you now accumulate “faith” as a resource, similar to culture, and can use this resource to create prophets, missionaries and religious buildings. It also lets you spawn a religion which you customize from a list of traits, some of which help you as the religious founder, and some of which apply to any city that has the religion as its majority faith. Religions spread via missionary activity or simple diffusion, much like it did in Civilization IV.
Religion has always been a bit of weird fit in the Civ universe, even though it has undoubtedly been a key driver of culture, exploration, war and diplomacy throughout human civilization. In the first two Civ games, religion was only recognized as a pacifier, an opiate of the masses – temples and cathedrals reduced unhappiness. Then Civ III introduced culture, so you get that aspect of religion. Civ IV introduced religions as real historical actors, and Civ V has only just done so.
Civ V‘s approach to religion is similar to its approach to society building. As you recall, the Civ social policy trees are a series of perks you choose to improve your empire. Open a tree, choose the perks and if you fill the tree, you get a bonus perk. (Fill five trees and build Utopia project, you win.) There are no negative policies, no trade-offs for choosing a policy. Everything you pick will help you, so you decide what kind of help you need and how quickly you can get it.
Similarly, religion is never a matter of “X but not Y” – there are no downsides to picking one faith or Pantheon option over another. Sure, some may not be especially useful in the long run, but when you found a religion you need short term help in any case; buildings and policies can mitigate a sub-optimal early decision. Religion is, for the most part, an early and midgame concern, with a few longer term perspectives related to culture, happiness or defensive posture. [Read more →]
So here we have the teaser trailer for the freshly announced Rome: Total War II. Given Creative Assembly’s amazing success with Shogun 2 and my own inability to resist anything vaguely Roman, I suppose I should be excited. And with drops of information being passed out (fewer armies, meaning more significant battles, for example), it seems the CA team is saying some of the right things.
But a few words about the teaser trailer.
Live action teasers can go in a lot of directions. You can go the serious route, as CA did here and as Micosoft did with Halo 3. You can go the complete other way around, too, and admit that many of our serious games are a little silly, as Paradox did with their Crusader Kings 2 “7 Deadly Sins” series. You want to evoke some kind of emotional response to the game and about the game, but also communicate your own attitude about the game. If you can’t get actors, you have people motion and gesticulate and have somber music play.
It is probably somewhat intentional that CA’s trailer evokes the HBO series, Rome. You have the stunning reversal on the Senate steps where an old man is dragged away in chains. You have a lover/courtesan/assassin plunging her hair-knife (is that a thing?) into a man’s chest. You have two Roman soldiers who appear to know each other meeting in the aftermath of a battle and the victor executing the defeated man. The tag line suggests that to gain power in Rome you will have to do unspeakable things – will you pay the price? (A silly question to ask strategy gamers who have probably starved more cities on their computer than all the tyrants of history.)
The tricky thing for CA is that this trailer does suggest emotional connections to the governing of Rome that people might hope they follow through on.
It’s not easy. For a very long time, CA has excelled at making beautiful battles on scenic maps. As attached as we have often gotten to our generals and daimyos and kings, however, few of them really lived as characters with ambitions. And, to really capture the awesome weirdness of Roman politics and intrigue would take the sort of game that Paradox failed to make in EU: Rome, but showed was possible in CK2. But these are not CA types of games. CA is a big budget movie that requires cavalry swooping in and letting the player accept the fact that a poorly ordered charge could cost them an important general or tribune or whatever.
This probably won’t be the final live action teaser for Rome. This one (“Faces of Rome”) tells only one of the many facets of any Total War game, and maybe it will be better developed in Rome 2. But it’s not like they can do a live action trailer of a siege or a naval battle. At least not convincingly.
Rome: Total War II is targeted for some time in 2013, and I’ll be following it closely. The more I learn, the more I’ll write. But for now, this teaser just sits on my screen making me wonder if anything besides the “assassination by scarlet woman” will be effectively conveyed in the final product. (They have always loved their assassinations.)
