xiphias: (Default)
[personal profile] xiphias
It's a game from 2002 or so, and I picked it up for $10 off of a discount rack at Filiene's Basement. And it's got a lot of neat things in it, which manage to make a rather lackluster game.

See, one good thing about it is that the people who made it wanted to make it easily hackable, so it's easy to take it apart to see how it works. And when you do so, you discover something disturbing: the game is having more fun than you are.

Okay, so this is a space empire building game. And it's got lots of AI basically running small bits of the game for you so you don't have to. That's a pretty good idea. But I think it goes too far. . .

Like, spies. You push a button and the game trains a spy. Then you push another button and you send the spy into a rival space empire, and it either does some stuff successfully, or gets captured and killed.

So you take the game apart, and there's this whole set of files on how spies work. Those spies have ratings in being seductive, or secretive, or all sorts of things. They've got all these different options of how they can operate, what they're good at, all sorts of stuff. And the internal security forces of various empires have all these different ratings, too.

So, basically, the COMPUTER is playing this entire complex strategic game on spy insertion and stuff that you don't even get to SEE. It's making all these decision, and you're not. So the computer is having fun, but you just push a button and see if your spy died.

The whole game's like that. Apparently, when you invade a planet, your generals can send commandos in who can do special missions, while psy-ops demoralize the population, hackers disrupt communications, and so forth. And the computer is playing all these games to do that, which, looking at the data files, look like fun. But YOU don't get to play those games. No, the COMPUTER plays those games. You just form an army and send it to the planet, and that's it.

There's an entire set of algorithms about religion, ethos, and philosophy, that determine all sorts of things about how planets interact with other planets, how good they are at research and what kinds of research, what the effects of diplomacy are, how content they are, what they do. Vast impacts on all parts of the game.

I only know that this EXISTS because I was looking at the data files. It never shows up visibly in the game itself.

There's some sort of lesson here about "being clear about what your goal is, and making sure that what you're doing actually benefits your goal." All these things that are in the game are really, really cool, and add NOTHING to the experience of playing it.

(no subject)

Date: 2004-11-26 08:54 am (UTC)
navrins: (sirj)
From: [personal profile] navrins
Sounds like the designers came up with a much more complex game, and somewhere in the design/user-feedback process someone said, "This is too complex, make the game simpler," so they ended up hiding all that complexity (and not removing it, because it's easier to hide it than remove it).

The original MoO still seems to be the best of the set. Just played another game of it earlier this week.

(no subject)

Date: 2004-11-26 09:29 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] mswae.livejournal.com
We were very excited when MOO3 came out, as we are big fans (or at least RoaminUmp is). We ran out, bought it at full retail, and played it ... and discovered pretty much what you said.

Then our friend Kevin recommend Space Empires 4, which was everything that RoaminUmp wanted in MOO3, plus it isn't nearly as resource-intensive as MOO3 so it runs on his computer and he doesn't have to use mine, plus it's dirt cheap (if you can find it).

Go Figure :)

(no subject)

Date: 2004-11-26 09:46 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cattitude.livejournal.com
MOO 3 originally had all that wealth of detail exposed to the user. You could micromanage anything, in as much detail as you cared to. It also had an attention point system. Each turn you'd get a number of attention points that you'd use to issue commands; anything that you didn't pay attention to ran on AI for that turn. It was an attempt to allow selective micromanagement, without forcing you to micromanage everything all the time. It was fairly elegant, and the play-testers hated it.

They delayed MOO 3 for several months, ripped out the attention point system, hid all those things that you'd want to micromanage once a game if at all, and released it as a mediocre sequel to MOO 2. I wish they'd stuck with the attention point system; it would have been interesting to try.

(no subject)

Date: 2004-11-26 12:35 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] vvalkyri.livejournal.com
Don't know that this is a goal lesson but instead a lesson in realizing that the player might want to know these things. I'm fascinated by the behind the scenes algorithms you've just described.

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