Yeah, sorry for hijacking. :/
Yeah well, Gorb should be sorry.
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Yeah, sorry for hijacking. :/
QA catches bugs. it does not care for balance or fun.
new lines in the xml like new difficulties (techs, e.g.) should quickly (immediately?) pass QA.
By forcing a specific playstyle per Affinity, as supposed to small variant strategies available per Affinity (which is what we have, and what Firaxis could also improve upon) you reduce variety within the game and thus both visible and invisible depth (the former immediately obvious to a player, the latter discovered from playing the game).
Though, I'd argue that makes them suffer from being too close to the source. Civ:BE certainly got better and more atmospheric for me through repeated play, just because you started to learn the mechanical intricacies and the lore.IIRC at Firaxicon it was noted that the role of Firaxis QA was primarily to look at balance and fun, rather than bugs.
On Twitter, Lena Brenk announced that she is leaving Firaxis to go back to her native Germany. Yesterday, was in fact her last day. So, it looks like BE will get a new producer to lead the way into any future patches and/or expansions.
Either I've expressed myself badly here, or you have misread what I said. Affinities ought to be more differenciated from what they currently are, each should be giving bonuses to certain areas and rewarding certain gameplay styles. Say, it is not as if choosing harmony should curtail you from pursuing a domination victory or offering weaker military power, but rather than its military strategies and strenght ought to be significantly different from other affinities. This would actually expand and offer a greater plethora of strategic options and thus, increasing the game's replayability.
The current model of extremely similar factions and affinities in the name of "balance" makes for some really boring, bland and repetitive games with little to no inmersion nor strategic choice in them. The game desperately needs flavour and embrace a game design approach based in asymetrical balance, me thinks.
Maybe you do not but I do. Even if I never actually reach that level of expertise.
However, I do not think difficulty level has anything to do with creating a game with depth (which is the main reason BE this is easy) or audacity though. Even if there were 10 more difficulty levels on top of Apollo, BE would still be "easy" in this sense.
You're actually misrepresenting what happened by a LOT. I assume that's not intentional, but rather because of a lack of information. The whole story:However, I'll offer a counter example here: Diablo3.
All through dev the team said "we're making this level that's designed to be way too hard, as an almost-impossible challenge mode". It wasn't a secret - it was explicitly stated all the way through. I loved the idea, and quietly cheered them on.
Come release, there's a massive outcry (about many valid things), but one was how bad the tuning was, how unfair it was to have a level that people couldn't beat, gear they couldn't get, achievements they couldn't earn and so on.
That bit is actually quite strong. Isolated Harmony units are though nuts to crack. At tier IV you are virtually immune to air strikes and ranged attacks from non-top tier units.There's a little bit with units that get bonuses from running solo vs. being in formations, but that's pretty minimal.
I think that is my point though - you're forced to reach Inferno by virtue of completing the level below. But you're not forced to play at Inferno; it was stated to be a too-hard, after-completion area - not to be End Game.The analogy doesn't really hold.
Playing a H&S is about progression through the levels. You are forced to hit Inferno at some point. Also even if I beat Inferno before the nerfs I personally think it was very poorly balanced and deserved some of its changes.
Agree it's not a direct parallel, and the game types are very different.Playing a TBS is on the other hand about playing a new game each time with a new civilization. There is no forced progression through the levels. Complaining about it being too hard is a bit like saying chess is too hard when you put the computer above your level. The difference being of course that a chess game increases its IA strength while Civ5 increases the bonuses. I stil think the idea holds despite this though.
The difficulty problem in civ would be more if say the AI started at Prince and by the information era it reached deity bonuses.
I'm not intending to misrepresent anything - thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt there. I'm trying to simplify a mass of problems and extract one isolated point.You're actually misrepresenting what happened by a LOT. I assume that's not intentional, but rather because of a lack of information. The whole story:
Diablo 3 is a game that is based around the idea of getting better and better gear. The potentially best Equip (Itemlevel 63) dropped only on very high difficulty (Inferno Act 3+4, a later patch added a small chance of them dropping in Act 1-2 (especially Inferno Act 1 was very doable with somewhat good equip)).
Now, that alone wouldn't really have been a problem if the curve at which you got better gear wouldn't have been so steep - and if the Auction House had not been in the game. <valid explanation of the bad gear curve problem cut for brevity.>
The outcry wasn't really that there's content that not everyone can reach (which Diablo 3 now once again has, in form of potentially endless levels of Greater Rifts), but that people just couldn't improve their gear on their own - which completely destroyed the aspect of the game that was fun in Diablo 3.
So I think that problem doesn't really have anything in common with the difficulty settings in Civ.
Thanks for the respectful responses. Discussions so easily go sour in forums.
I think that is my point though - you're forced to reach Inferno by virtue of completing the level below. But you're not forced to play at Inferno; it was stated to be a too-hard, after-completion area - not to be End Game.
Players finished Hell (for non D3 people, that's the next level down), saw this one ahead, and decided to go on to Inferno and have that as End Game. If Inferno is End Game, then it follows that Inferno will have most of the player-base, and should be playable, when it wasn't intended to be (other balance issues aside).
\If there was no reward for Inferno then people wouldn't have perceived it as the next step but only as a challenging one. The truly "difficult but optional mode" is more the Hardcore setting.
Firaxis was too concerned about alienating players of previous titles in the Civilization series when creating the most recent, science-fiction themed entry, Beyond Earth, the game's lead designers said during an open and honest retrospective on the PC game at GDC 2015 in San Francisco today. "We should have been more audacious," said Will Miller, co-lead designer on the game.
David McDonough, Miller's co-lead designer, agreed: "In moving Civilization from a historical setting to a science fiction setting we had a real opportunity to do things differently. But we were too conservative." McDonough ascribed this conservatism to the team's anxiety about alienating long-term players of the series, "We wanted to find a compromise between the game being like Civilization V and something entirely new. But in the end we were caught between the two poles. This left players feeling a little short-changed and flat, especially with aspects of the sci-fi that we kept close to our chest."
Miller gave the example of the diplomacy system as an area of the game which was borrowed from previous Civilization titles, but which failed to work in the game's new sci-fi context. "The diplomacy system is when a famous historical leader pops up and engages with the player directly," he said. "We figured it would work exactly the same in our game, but because we didn't have the historical foundation for the game, the system didn't work." Miller claimed that the psychology of interacting with historical figures is different to that of interacting with fictional leader, and the leaders Firaxis wrote for the game weren't strong enough to carry the mechanic. "If we could go back we would provide players with more fiction to hold onto," he said. "We actually wrote a lot of this material, but we held it back from the game."
McDonough also talked about how the way that Firaxis operates caused some problems for the design team. "The studio doesn't grow and shrink as projects come and go," he said. "We keep a steady staff." He explained that this way of operating offers employees security, and allows the studio to prepare art and code even when there isn't a live project. "But this meant that the design remained gooey for a while, even while art and programming were steaming ahead. It’s a testament to their skill that they managed to pull off a terrific game despite the burden of having to change so much to accommodate the changing game design."
The pair also explained that it was a mistake to not run an Open Beta phase for the game, during which they could have gained valuable feedback from players before final release. Miller gave the example of "Wonders" as an area of the game that would have benefited both from a more daring approach from the design team, as well as player feedback during a Beta phase. "Wonders are exclusive buildings and structures from history," he explained. "They’re things that players covet for their emotional and historical value as much as anything."
The team designed fictional wonders for Beyond Earth and simply borrowed the same underlying mechanic for them as seen in Civilization V: Brave New World. "We figured it would more or less work," said Miller. "But players complained that they were not wonderful and failed to provide a sense of awe. We'd had a perfect opportunity to bring out the sci-fi and flavor of the game that people could integrate into their own story. But we completely missed it. Here was an opportunity to allow players to do things that you could never do in a traditional Civ; but we just held ourselves back because we were too afraid."
The pair explained that these lessons have been learned and that, as Beyond Earth continues to evolve as a live game, they are working to fix what they perceive as shortcomings.