This game was on one-day sale on Steam this week, and it had some really glowing reviews (especially at Rock, Paper, Shotgun which is one of the sites I trust most).
After playing for a couple nights, I have realized that I like this game a lot but I'm not enjoying playing it.
Some of the problem is the inept Windows coding and lack of display settings. No video settings at all - it can only run at desktop resolution, and while it might have been OK in 2010 when the game was first written, that makes things just too tiny on a moderate screen at high resolution.
A bigger part of the problem is that the screen is uselessly cluttered for manipulating stuff or watching the details of what happens when there are more than a couple things on screen. If you are used to EVE, or otherwise can adjust to a UI where you see things on the screen but have to use menus to select and manipulate them, it's only annoying (like EVE, but without the good reasons EVE has this problem). But if you are used to a usable UI it's frustrating. The display works much better when you zoom way out and watch your empire do its stuff, but for detail management it's not so hot.
Which does immediately bring up the thing the game does really well. It lives up to its intention of making a basically interesting 4X space game where you can leave the parts of the empire you aren't interested in on autopilot without getting really bad results. It mostly manages to avoid the pitfall of making a game simple enough for an AI to play well without making it too boring, but I think the mileage varies here depending on exactly what you want to do yourself. Many of the things most important to me - ship customization, especially - come out a little less viscerally satisfying than they should.
After a couple nights of playing, I realized that I was spending most of my time watching the game, not playing it. There's a fascination with watching as your empire does its stuff - the privately-owned ships and those state-owned ones you left automated going about their business, all under your benign eye. But the meat of a strategy game is the meaningful decisions you make, and outside of research order too many of these have such delayed effects that they lack punch. It may be an hour between when you create or majorly update a ship design and when one gets into combat - and because everything is realtime, that combat may be over before you can see what happens unless you are poised on the spacebar to pause and zoom as soon as it happens.
I think if I'd gone straight from MoO 1 and its contemporary, the Mac Pax Imperia, to Distant Worlds, I'd have been ecstatic with it for a while before reaching this same point of view. It has the huge scope of PI without the ultra-tedious micromanagement, and the simplicity of MoO carried to a finer scale. But MoO was a classic because it kept the important fun parts - making decisions and seeing their results - of a 4X space game while simplifying the management.
I also think the game is suffering from comparison with Stardrive 2, which was playing before and to which I've gone back. SD2 has some problems (which Zero is working hard and long to fix) but every decision I make has importance, and is felt immediately. The ship design is very satisfying, even though it's not as fine-detailed about things like firing arcs as I'm used to from other games in the genre.
As PC gaming is becoming once again a niche market, with the big money moving to tablet games as fewer and fewer people even own PCs, it's important for developers who want to stay on the PC to realize what is unique there.
PC games have to be deep, in the appropriate sense for their genre. Strategy games are about decisions and tradeoffs; RPGs are about composing personalized character(s) and experiencing a great story through the lens of those choices. I'd generalize and say that this is the meat of "depth" in any genre that isn't actually better suited for other platforms - there need to be choices for which there is no single "right" answer, and these choices need to make visible and satisfying differences. If playing through a second time with different choices doesn't end up markedly different from the first time, we (PC gamers) look at the much higher investment we put into the game (more expensive hardware platform and higher price point for the game) and feel ripped off.
After playing for a couple nights, I have realized that I like this game a lot but I'm not enjoying playing it.
Some of the problem is the inept Windows coding and lack of display settings. No video settings at all - it can only run at desktop resolution, and while it might have been OK in 2010 when the game was first written, that makes things just too tiny on a moderate screen at high resolution.
A bigger part of the problem is that the screen is uselessly cluttered for manipulating stuff or watching the details of what happens when there are more than a couple things on screen. If you are used to EVE, or otherwise can adjust to a UI where you see things on the screen but have to use menus to select and manipulate them, it's only annoying (like EVE, but without the good reasons EVE has this problem). But if you are used to a usable UI it's frustrating. The display works much better when you zoom way out and watch your empire do its stuff, but for detail management it's not so hot.
Which does immediately bring up the thing the game does really well. It lives up to its intention of making a basically interesting 4X space game where you can leave the parts of the empire you aren't interested in on autopilot without getting really bad results. It mostly manages to avoid the pitfall of making a game simple enough for an AI to play well without making it too boring, but I think the mileage varies here depending on exactly what you want to do yourself. Many of the things most important to me - ship customization, especially - come out a little less viscerally satisfying than they should.
After a couple nights of playing, I realized that I was spending most of my time watching the game, not playing it. There's a fascination with watching as your empire does its stuff - the privately-owned ships and those state-owned ones you left automated going about their business, all under your benign eye. But the meat of a strategy game is the meaningful decisions you make, and outside of research order too many of these have such delayed effects that they lack punch. It may be an hour between when you create or majorly update a ship design and when one gets into combat - and because everything is realtime, that combat may be over before you can see what happens unless you are poised on the spacebar to pause and zoom as soon as it happens.
I think if I'd gone straight from MoO 1 and its contemporary, the Mac Pax Imperia, to Distant Worlds, I'd have been ecstatic with it for a while before reaching this same point of view. It has the huge scope of PI without the ultra-tedious micromanagement, and the simplicity of MoO carried to a finer scale. But MoO was a classic because it kept the important fun parts - making decisions and seeing their results - of a 4X space game while simplifying the management.
I also think the game is suffering from comparison with Stardrive 2, which was playing before and to which I've gone back. SD2 has some problems (which Zero is working hard and long to fix) but every decision I make has importance, and is felt immediately. The ship design is very satisfying, even though it's not as fine-detailed about things like firing arcs as I'm used to from other games in the genre.
As PC gaming is becoming once again a niche market, with the big money moving to tablet games as fewer and fewer people even own PCs, it's important for developers who want to stay on the PC to realize what is unique there.
PC games have to be deep, in the appropriate sense for their genre. Strategy games are about decisions and tradeoffs; RPGs are about composing personalized character(s) and experiencing a great story through the lens of those choices. I'd generalize and say that this is the meat of "depth" in any genre that isn't actually better suited for other platforms - there need to be choices for which there is no single "right" answer, and these choices need to make visible and satisfying differences. If playing through a second time with different choices doesn't end up markedly different from the first time, we (PC gamers) look at the much higher investment we put into the game (more expensive hardware platform and higher price point for the game) and feel ripped off.
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