What is the difference between dumbing sth. down and innovating it?

[Exterminas]

"What is the difference between dumbing sth. down and innovating it?"
- specific topic: the new happiness mechanic. -

Now there. If the european release a week away and plenty of surplus time at hand, I feel like sharing some thougths with you about the whole dumbing-down-discussion. There are two reasons why I open a new thread for this:

1. I am incredibly narccistic and have a desperate need of attention.
2. I feel like http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=379072 thread suffers from being too general for a game that hasn't been released yet.

I don't want to focus on weather or not CiV is being dumed down in general. The question from the title is the main one.

What is the difference between dumbing something down and innovating it?

Are electrical trains dumbed down versions of steam trains, which were driven old school, by shoveling coal into them?
Are computers dumbed down abacuses, to make them accesible to the casuals?

To further characterize that question I will take the new happines mechanic as example, because I think we have a pretty clear picture of how it will work.

Spoiler :

Here is a brief break down if you don't know what I am talking about: Happnies will be empire-wide, instead of city-based. You earn empire-wide happines by having resources (the amount might matter, just like with military resources), buildings and (natural-) wonders. Having cities (the amount) and population (the size of the cities) will generate the matching kind of unhappines. If you have surplus happnies, this will help you generate golden ages (bonus on production and commerce)

This mechanic is given as a regular examples during "CiV is being dumbed down"-debates I have encountered irl and across the internet.

Do hurl my cards onto the table: I think this is an innovation, not a dumber version. It would be, if they removed happiness entirely. But let's remember when you had problems with happines in Civ4:

-Start of the game, until you got monarchy. Served as a block against rapid early expansion, because it kept cities from getting too productive, earning their own maintenance.

-During war, if you did it too long or if you did it bad.

-During the end game, if you were growing some monster cities, using sushi or something like that.

My point is that for the main curse of the game happiness in Civilization 4 never really mattered to me. If you were playing a warmonger, your empire would soon cover enough terrain, or have vassals, to provide happines-ressources. Or you would even be using mornachy longer than usuall, just because most of your money would go into your army anyway.

As a peacemonger you would have a high cultural slider or friends, providing you... with happiness.

The only version where I saw happiness ever being some kind of problem was when I played a truttled tech-nation with a cottagebased economy, where i wanted to go for univeral sufferage, but hand't enough religions or resources around. The first one being something that usually doens't occur to you on a standard pangea map.


Sooo... Long story short:
Why do you think people are so fast these days to mark something as "being dumbed down", while this is anything but an absolute truth?
Is it just paranoia about losing their franchises to the mob?

What do you consider dumbing down in games?

Do you consider the new happiness-mechanic as an innovation or a step towards the casuals (or even :shock: both?)

 

[QuantumPion]

I agree, I think the empire-wide happiness will work out strategically the same as Civ4. E.g. if you have not enough, then you will be trying to acquire resources to improve happiness or building buildings. The only difference is that you can build a temple in your capital to get more happiness for your far away cities which still need granaries and forges. And you don't need markets/grocers in every single city to maximize their potential.

 

[UWHabs]

The devil is in the details. In some ways, it's good, since in IV, happiness ended up being pretty consistent across your empire. I mean, sure, you can build a coliseum in one city but not another, but in general, every city is unhappy at about the same.

Really, it's just another way of getting rid of some micro-management. So instead of one city accidentally growing into unhappiness, when your cities get too big, you'll see a slight amount of extra unhappiness (I don't know what the pitfalls of your civ as a whole being unhappy are).

It's a bit like the difference in maintenance of units per city (as in Civ 1 and maybe 2?) vs empire-wide (in 4). You can argue either way. I do think it's a bit of dumbing down, since I do like having some individualistic appeals (ie. in civ4, one city that's 1/4 roman will have more anger if you're invading the romans than the rest of your pure-bred cities), but if it's done well so that it doesn't just mostly eliminate it or make it so that one city can "cure" all your empire's happiness, then it's not such a bad thing.

 

[Zhahz]

I actually think global happiness will be more strategic and critical. In IV, if any one city grows unhappy, it's not a big deal - just one city, build something, or find a resource. Simple equation. If you have a lot of unhappy cities due to something like war weariness, bump the culture slider and boom, instant solution (that I don't like using but it's a quick temporary fix).

In 5, since happy is empire wide, and the effects of letting happiness get out of control are empire wide, it will be more critical to manage cities well. If enough unhappy hurts your military too, that could be a disaster that you want to avoid. There is no easy solution like the slider. You need to play better.

 

[SomethingWitty]

Dumbing something down involves removing fun and interesting and popular features, for the sake of simplifying the game in order to attract as many new players.

Innovating this game would mean polishing everything to make the game more fun. That might involve removing somethings, religion for example. Or adding things, like city states.

The key feature here is whether or not the new game is more fun. And we're going to have to weight a few more days to determine that.

Me? Everything I've seen so far is telling me it's going to be much more polished and fun.

And personally, if somebody really wants to debate about this, I'd think that the more relevant question is: have they removed fun features not to attract newbies, but to sell us those same features at some later point?

 

[tom2050]

'dumbed down' and 'innovation' are 2 completely seperate things.

Dumbing down does not mean removing fun features, as was stated above. It means, in Civilization's case, to alter the game to a overly-macro style model. A Macro model makes it easier for all players to play the game, because you don't have the ability to get 'down and dirty'... The game more or less plays itself for you with minimal effort, and you just make the largest of decisions.

Innovation has nothing to do with it whatsoever. You can innovate on anything, including a dumbed-down game. All Civ games have not been dumbed down, because they are obviously more complex than the last... so the real question is, "are they turning the franchise into a macro-model game to attract mainstream gamers?"

At this time, I believe the answer is no. And I hope it stays that way (it probably will as long as 2K doesn't get overly involved to screw things up).

 

[Tridus]

The difference between "dumbing down" and "innovating" is if you like the change or not. If you like it, it's innovating. If you don't like it, it's dumbing down.

 

[Carver]

If it involves a GIANT. DEATH. ROBOT. it is probably a dumbing down.

 

[Wolle68]

Innovation has nothing to do with it whatsoever. You can innovate on anything, including a dumbed-down game. All Civ games have not been dumbed down, because they are obviously more complex than the last... so the real question is, "are they turning the franchise into a macro-model game to attract mainstream gamers?"

I disagree. There is nothing inherently "smart" about micro and "stupid" about macro. A lot of micro-managing simply turns into a case of "Progress through boredom". The player that takes his time to go through all of his cities each turn will play better than the player that only does it occasionally, but it has less to do with intelligence than patience.

The difference between "dumbing down" and "innovating" is if you like the change or not. If you like it, it's innovating. If you don't like it, it's dumbing down.

 

[Shafi-is-back]

i think the new happiness is great its innovation for me. take away the unnecessary micro and still keep hapiness as a stratiegic part of the game.