Moo3
- Thread starter R.B.
- Start date
It forgot that what TBS players want is to have an impact with their decisions.
I think the 2nd paragraph here summarizes it pretty well:
http://www.quartertothree.com/reviews/moo3/moo3-1.shtml
Hardcore MOO3 fanatics will call this "complex" (and we are just too lazy to learn). But it is just extremely poor UI.
http://www.quartertothree.com/reviews/moo3/moo3-1.shtml
Hardcore MOO3 fanatics will call this "complex" (and we are just too lazy to learn). But it is just extremely poor UI.
Psyringe
Scout
Believe me, the review is rather friendly considering what he *could* have written. If you ever really, really want to write a review in which you totally slam a game, MoO3 is one of the easiest victims available.
IIRC the review barseer linked to was rather a preview, it came out before the game hit the shelves. And Tom Chick was slammed on the MoO3 forums by the fans, basically he was accused of not understanding the game well enough. This coming from people who (contrary to the previewer) had never even seen the game. The fans *so badly* wanted the game to be good that they clung to the other previews (IGN was basically calling MoO3 the next best thing since sliced bread, and especially commended the AI - note: the AI was incapable of invading planets before the patch, which arrived months later) that they simply wouldn't listen to QT3's preview. needless to say, when I got an opportunity to play the game myself, my respect for QT3 skyrocketed (and my respect for IGN plummeted likewise).
Back to the question, what went wrong with MoO3? A lot. I don't think I remember all of it, but here's a small list:
- The player gets little to no feedback on his actions. You make a decision, as a result in the next turn some numbers may or may not change in some unforseen way. There is no way to see how the numbers are calculated. The game doesnÄt even give you the data you need to check whether a strategy you devised might be working well or not.
- It was planned to make the "planetary governor" so smart that the players would be discouraged from micromanaging their planets and let them run by their governors. In the end the governor was so incredibly stupid that it not only forced you to micromanage your planets yourself, it also made you *fight* against your governor, turn by turn, because he would constantly revise your decisions no matter whether you turned him off or not.
- Incredibly convoluted AI. You needed 4 or 5 clicks to get to the production queue of a planet (and you had to check each queue in each turn because the governor kept putting orders there that you didn't want to have).
- Laughably stupid AI. Before the patch, the AI was not even able to invade planets.
- Embarassing diplomacy. The diplomacy texts in the game simply made no sense. The developers acknowledged the problem, but claimed that it couldn't be fixed because the person responsible for the diplomacy code didn't work there anymore. Weeks later, a modder found out that the game simply looked for the wrong filename when reading in diplomacy data, hence the data got never read, and the responses remained random. All that had to be done was to change the filename.
- Non-workable game design. MoO3 was in development for years. Half a year before the release, the devs found out that the game "wasn't fun" and ripped out core features. The remaining husk didn't hold together very well. Features that were advertised as core features of the game were implemented in a haphazard way, looking like nothing more than an afterthought (the much-hyped "Fifth X" victory condition in the end consisted of simply removing fleets from the game, there they would remain in hiatus for some amount of time while ships kept getting lost due to reason you were never ever told, and then the fleet might or might not return with an "X").
- Ugliness. Due to being in development for years and years, the game used a totally outdated voxel engine (and not even a good one at that). As a result, the advertised "epic space battles" in reality consisted of one sprawl of pixels hunting another sprawl of pixels. You did, btw, get no information whatsoever about how much damage which of your weapons did, so most of the time you had to guess whether you were being effective or not.
- Lack of support. MoO3 received only one code patch, which left many, many bugs and problems unaddressed. Modders made valiant attempts to fix them by themselves.
- Repeated lies to the fans. When a release date wasn't met, one dev told the fans that the game was basically finished, they just wanted to finetune multiplayer to make sure that the game would be really great. Months later the game was released in an obviously broken and unfinished state. An updated manual was promised by Quicksilver's vice president and never delivered (the manual that shipped with the game was clearly written for a previous build and described features that weren't even part of the game).
I'm certain I forgot a number of things, but I think these were the core reasons for the spectacular blunder that was called MoO3.
IIRC the review barseer linked to was rather a preview, it came out before the game hit the shelves. And Tom Chick was slammed on the MoO3 forums by the fans, basically he was accused of not understanding the game well enough. This coming from people who (contrary to the previewer) had never even seen the game. The fans *so badly* wanted the game to be good that they clung to the other previews (IGN was basically calling MoO3 the next best thing since sliced bread, and especially commended the AI - note: the AI was incapable of invading planets before the patch, which arrived months later) that they simply wouldn't listen to QT3's preview. needless to say, when I got an opportunity to play the game myself, my respect for QT3 skyrocketed (and my respect for IGN plummeted likewise).
Back to the question, what went wrong with MoO3? A lot. I don't think I remember all of it, but here's a small list:
- The player gets little to no feedback on his actions. You make a decision, as a result in the next turn some numbers may or may not change in some unforseen way. There is no way to see how the numbers are calculated. The game doesnÄt even give you the data you need to check whether a strategy you devised might be working well or not.
- It was planned to make the "planetary governor" so smart that the players would be discouraged from micromanaging their planets and let them run by their governors. In the end the governor was so incredibly stupid that it not only forced you to micromanage your planets yourself, it also made you *fight* against your governor, turn by turn, because he would constantly revise your decisions no matter whether you turned him off or not.
- Incredibly convoluted AI. You needed 4 or 5 clicks to get to the production queue of a planet (and you had to check each queue in each turn because the governor kept putting orders there that you didn't want to have).
- Laughably stupid AI. Before the patch, the AI was not even able to invade planets.
- Embarassing diplomacy. The diplomacy texts in the game simply made no sense. The developers acknowledged the problem, but claimed that it couldn't be fixed because the person responsible for the diplomacy code didn't work there anymore. Weeks later, a modder found out that the game simply looked for the wrong filename when reading in diplomacy data, hence the data got never read, and the responses remained random. All that had to be done was to change the filename.
- Non-workable game design. MoO3 was in development for years. Half a year before the release, the devs found out that the game "wasn't fun" and ripped out core features. The remaining husk didn't hold together very well. Features that were advertised as core features of the game were implemented in a haphazard way, looking like nothing more than an afterthought (the much-hyped "Fifth X" victory condition in the end consisted of simply removing fleets from the game, there they would remain in hiatus for some amount of time while ships kept getting lost due to reason you were never ever told, and then the fleet might or might not return with an "X").
- Ugliness. Due to being in development for years and years, the game used a totally outdated voxel engine (and not even a good one at that). As a result, the advertised "epic space battles" in reality consisted of one sprawl of pixels hunting another sprawl of pixels. You did, btw, get no information whatsoever about how much damage which of your weapons did, so most of the time you had to guess whether you were being effective or not.
- Lack of support. MoO3 received only one code patch, which left many, many bugs and problems unaddressed. Modders made valiant attempts to fix them by themselves.
- Repeated lies to the fans. When a release date wasn't met, one dev told the fans that the game was basically finished, they just wanted to finetune multiplayer to make sure that the game would be really great. Months later the game was released in an obviously broken and unfinished state. An updated manual was promised by Quicksilver's vice president and never delivered (the manual that shipped with the game was clearly written for a previous build and described features that weren't even part of the game).
I'm certain I forgot a number of things, but I think these were the core reasons for the spectacular blunder that was called MoO3.
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