{"id":510,"date":"2006-12-09T14:13:08","date_gmt":"2006-12-09T18:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2006\/12\/09\/first-forge-of-freedom-review\/"},"modified":"2006-12-09T14:13:21","modified_gmt":"2006-12-09T18:13:21","slug":"first-forge-of-freedom-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2006\/12\/09\/first-forge-of-freedom-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Forge of Freedom Review"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/jaguarusf.blogspot.com\/2006\/12\/forge-of-freedom-american-civil-war.html\">James Allen at Out of Eight Games<\/a> has written what appears to be the first review of Western Civilization&#8217;s <em>Forge of Freedom: The American Civil War<\/em>. Allen has a firm 5-8 scale (it&#8217;s rare for a game to score in the 4 or lower range) and Forge scores a 7. His comments are usually worthy of notice. He&#8217;s not a complete fool.<\/p>\n<p>I haven&#8217;t played <em>Forge of Freedom<\/em> yet (too much other stuff to do) but one of Allen&#8217;s comments gives me pause.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Forge of Freedom<\/em> allows the player to tailor how many of the game\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rules they want to have activated. This is probably one of its greatest attributes as it changes how complicated or straightforward you want to game to function. Forge of Freedom includes three pre-set levels of difficulty, but it also allows you to customize each individual setting. Is unit attrition too annoying? Is Fog of War dumb? Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t care about European intervention? Hate governors? <em>Forge of Freedom<\/em> allows you adjust 30 different facets of the game. This is unlike Western Civilization Software\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s previous game <em>Crown of Glory<\/em>, where everything in the game was piled on top of you from the beginning. Flexibility is always a good thing in computer games as it allows a single title to appeal to a large range of people. Thus, <em>Forge of Freedom<\/em> is not just geared to grognards, but also to people who just want to order troops around and not have to worry about supply or unit attrition.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Doesn&#8217;t there come a point where too much rule switching reveals a lack of confidence in the game design? If you can ignore 30 facets of a game and still make the game what you want it to be, how crucial are these to the basic game design in the first place? When does flexibility become lack of confidence in the initial design document?<\/p>\n<p>In other words, can a game be too customizable?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>James Allen at Out of Eight Games has written what appears to be the first review of Western Civilization&#8217;s Forge of Freedom: The American Civil War. Allen has a firm 5-8 scale (it&#8217;s rare for a game to score in the 4 or lower range) and Forge scores a 7. His comments are usually worthy [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"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-8e","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510"}],"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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}