There is much to be learned in a comparison between Age of Empires III <\/i>and Civilization IV<\/i>. Both are highly anticipated sequels to legendary series. Both have had overenthusiastic preview press. Both have been mentioned many times on this blog. And both have consumed most of my gaming time in the last month or so.<\/p>\n
But the difference in quality between the two games is astounding. Both are very good games and well worth the purchase price, I think. But plyaing Civilization IV<\/i> is like discovering Civ <\/i>for the very first time. Playing AoE 3<\/i> is like playing AoK<\/i> again.<\/p>\n
The differences between good and bad games are obvious. Even the line between good and average is pretty clear. (Well, one magazine gave Empire Earth 2<\/i> a near perfect score.) Since so many games fall into the bad\/average\/good troika that it is often easy to forget that a truly great game is a totally different experience than a merely good one – or a very good one.<\/p>\n
What makes a game great? I could say, “Elves”, but it’s not elves exactly. For all the talk about magic and game gods and x-factors there has to be some way to express what makes one game so much more enjoyable than another.<\/p>\n
<\/i>At a cursory glance, Civ IV<\/i> is just as familiar and threadbare as AoE 3<\/i> is – if not more. It hasn’t been that long since Civ III Conquests<\/i> came out and there have been other Civ<\/i>-like games out there. The first Civ<\/i> came out a very long time ago and the formula has been barely touched. The Age<\/i> series at least has shifted in time and place. Civ<\/i> is just the same stone age to space age thing repeated every few years.<\/p>\n
And Civ III<\/i> wasn’t “great” – it was very good. Age of Mythology<\/i> on the other hand was a really wonderful experience with a great variety of gameplay challenges. So, Civ<\/i> looked like it was getting stale while Ensemble seemed to be hitting its creative stride.<\/p>\n
But for some reason, Civ IV<\/i> never fails to entertain. Every game I lose is as much fun as the games I win. Except for the terribly slow PBEM experience I’m going through, every turn is full with the immediate promise of something interesting about to happen.<\/p>\n
In AoE 3<\/i>, even as I play it over and over again, I keep asking myself why they didn’t borrow more from other recent RTS games. Every spine-tingling moment of musket fire and cavalry charges is colored by the awareness that the subgenre has moved on and Ensemble hasn’t seemed to notice – despite their own innovations in Age of Mythology.<\/p>\n
<\/i>But it’s not just the issue of doing new stuff – which Civ IV <\/i>has a lot of. As crazy as it sounds, I prefer both the look and sound of the turn based game to the glorious prettiness of Age 3<\/i>. The triumph over simple art direction I guess. Better interface, better manual, better in game documentation…but this is all pretty mechanical stuff, isn’t it? Shouldn’t “fun” be something less easy to quantify?<\/p>\n
It’s not just the Civ<\/i> formula – Activision’s Call to Power<\/i> series never quite did it for a lot of people even though it parroted a lot of the Civ<\/i> stuff. I think most gamers have a soft spot for Meier and company – few other developers have so consistently satisfied our appetites. So maybe we subconsciously cut Firaxis a little slack. I doubt that’s the case though.<\/p>\n
There is a difference between good and great. It’s the difference between Icewind Dale <\/i>and Baldur’s Gate<\/i>. Between Puresim Baseball<\/i> and Out of the Park Baseball<\/i>. Between F-19 Stealth Fighter <\/i>and Red Baron<\/i>. And it’s different from genre to genre, case to case.<\/p>\n
And it’s the reason that I may not bother to buy another game this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is much to be learned in a comparison between Age of Empires III and Civilization IV. Both are highly anticipated sequels to legendary series. Both have had overenthusiastic preview press. Both have been mentioned many times on this blog. And both have consumed most of my gaming time in the last month or so. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-4u","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}