Moderator Action: Moved to CivBE - Ideas & Suggestions.
Cool Lore - Wonders
- Thread starter purplecow
- Start date
Cannonballninja
Chieftain
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2013
- Messages
- 20
You can right-click on almost anything in BE and it'll open the civilopedia entry. I can't remember if it works on the "wonder you've just built screen" though.
Fabio1701
King
Given that none of the buildings, wonders, nor techs in Civ V have direct links to the Civilopedia, I'm not entirely surprised BE doesn't either.
Tsk! Kids these days, with their hyperlinks and sound bites and their instant gratification! Back in my day, we navigated to the civilopedia by hand!
Back in your day wonders had vids to explain what they did.
bouncymischa
Synthetic Genie
Back in your day wonders had vids to explain what they did.
Come to think of it, which Civ games did actually have wonder videos? I don't recall them in any of the first three Civs (heck, I remember listening to Civ I with the 8-bit IBM sounds), and I never really played Civ IV, SMAC, or Call to Power much. I know Civ IV had it's "this is the wonder being built" video, but don't recall if they actually gave much information about what the wonder actually was. The more sci-fi games were probably the best examples of wonders that showed what it was -- "hey, here's an AI intelligence that monitors your entire civilization and makes it happy!". But those games are getting quite old at this point, so I wouldn't be surprised if the design paradigms have simply changed since then.
Lord Tirian
Erratic Poster
CivII had wonder movies. They never really stuck with me, though - the Call to Power spin-offs and SMAC had much more memorable videos because they actually explained something.
bouncymischa
Synthetic Genie
I never really saw the SMAC ones, but I remember watching the CTP ones online and they did seem cool. On the other hand, I suspect they may be a bit resource-intensive for this day and age? Hmm...
Lord Tirian
Erratic Poster
I think that genuinely is a huge problem. The standard for in-game cutscenes has increased - you just can't get away with live action footage and some hobbyist cutting and renders any longer. And high quality rendered scenes are work intensive (and hence require a lot more budget that they are worth). Resolutions have also increased since then so bad models become really obvious.
I actually think that the Civ5 solution was pretty good, I take a good atmospheric painting over a cheap video any day. I just think that the blueprints fail at conveying the atmosphere and concept of the wonders.
Imagine something like this for the Holon Chamber or this for the Xenonova. Or for the Tectonic Anvil or this for the Human Hive. With a bit of flavour text, that could've made all the difference, lore-wise.
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