cephalo
Deity
We've all heard the sayings, 'Less is more', and especially as Civ fans, 'The designer reaches perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.'
These 20th century ideas have become conventional wisdom in almost everything in life these days, and it wouldn't bother me a bit to see this paradigm challenged now and again.
I'm seeing a trend from Firaxis that I'm not entirely happy with. I think that Civ5 suffers a bit from the same thing that Civ4:Colonization suffered from. There is such an overwhelming priority in making all the pieces fit together, that the pressure to deliver fewer pieces is deceptively strong and detrimental to the final product.
In order for a game to have 'interesting decisions', the various pieces do have to fit together. It is certainly a very important aspect of a game's design. However, an equally important aspect of a game's design is the 'discovery process'. This has to do with revealing the game's content in such a way that you efficiently extend the time in which a game continues to be fun. The less content you have, the harder it is to govern this important process.
So you have a bit of challenge here, because more content means that you will have difficulty creating 'interesting decisions' out of it all, while less content means that you have more difficulty providing an adequate 'discovery process'.
I played Civ5 hardcore for 5 days straight, and I enjoyed it immensly during that time, but now I feel I'm finished with it. I've never been done with a vanilla Civ game that fast. The discovery process is too short. There's not enough content for a Civ game. I expect the expansions to help, but there is alot of catching up to do.
These 20th century ideas have become conventional wisdom in almost everything in life these days, and it wouldn't bother me a bit to see this paradigm challenged now and again.
I'm seeing a trend from Firaxis that I'm not entirely happy with. I think that Civ5 suffers a bit from the same thing that Civ4:Colonization suffered from. There is such an overwhelming priority in making all the pieces fit together, that the pressure to deliver fewer pieces is deceptively strong and detrimental to the final product.
In order for a game to have 'interesting decisions', the various pieces do have to fit together. It is certainly a very important aspect of a game's design. However, an equally important aspect of a game's design is the 'discovery process'. This has to do with revealing the game's content in such a way that you efficiently extend the time in which a game continues to be fun. The less content you have, the harder it is to govern this important process.
So you have a bit of challenge here, because more content means that you will have difficulty creating 'interesting decisions' out of it all, while less content means that you have more difficulty providing an adequate 'discovery process'.
I played Civ5 hardcore for 5 days straight, and I enjoyed it immensly during that time, but now I feel I'm finished with it. I've never been done with a vanilla Civ game that fast. The discovery process is too short. There's not enough content for a Civ game. I expect the expansions to help, but there is alot of catching up to do.