Weregamer's Game Musings

The Witcher is one of those titles that has gotten a lot of positive writing from thoughtful folks, not just hype. But bits mentioned in that positive writing tend to put me off; things that suggest that it eschews"wimp" features that will make the game playable despite having a life and only playing a few hours at a time. "Oh no, we can't have quest objectives on the compass, that would Break Immersion!" But then I also keep reading things like this, that show a quality of worldbuilding that might make it worth the frustration of a UI designed for people who have nothing else occupying their brains. I'm on the fence, still. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/06/17/the-witcher-3-folklore-rpg

If you're a TL;DR sort of person, here you go: Stellaris is not a 4X game at all. Its core design goes a completely different direction. It has some cool bits in it that will probably catch on in future 4X games, and by using mods to tune it I got a hundred or so hours of fun out of it before the honeymoon wore off, but in the long run it will likely be remembered as a non-4X game that was nonetheless a good influence on the genre. To go into more depth for those inclined: Pre-release, the big excitement about Stellaris was the hope for innovation in a 4X in ways to make the late game less of a grind - that period when you know you've won but the mechanics of getting the victory screen will take hours more. This was a bit of marketing poetry, or maybe outright disingenuous. At its core, Stellaris is not a 4X game. It's a pretty standard Paradox set-piece grand strategy game with a "1X" game bolted on the beginning to substitute for the real-world history t...