Bethesda – My Game Reviews

Wild West Pioneers: City Skylines meets the Wild West

Wild West Pioneers is a city builder game with a focus on resource gather set in the Western Expansion phase of the Old West in America.

Here are my ideas for the game.

1. Outlaws who harass the town

I think that many city builders are in two camps. The cozy ones and the ones where there is some outside pressure. The Caesar Series generally was based on having some pressure on the player while the SimCity series more of a cozy game.

Wild West Pioneers needs to have outlaws and their gangs running around in random events. These events should be based on multiple mechanics in the game. I think it would make the game more dyanmic and interesting. Many cozy games end up being chores and boring simply because the player is just looking at graphs and charts here.

2. More than just resources

One of the issues that I have with city builders in our age is that many of them focus too much on resource gathering here. There needs to be a focus on character not just looking at objects on a screen.

This is one issue that I have had with some of the Paradox games. They tend to be too focused on the charts instead of the characters and the story. City Skylines tends to have this issue also where the game is simply too clean and too much of a movie set. I want to see the life of the town, not just collect resources. Such a gameplay loop is more of something you see in the RTS genre, where base building is more important than the personality of the units or structures.

3. Every citizen needs to be unique

One thing that I want to see in the games is that there is a sense that every person in your town is unique. Considering that Wild West Pioneers is dealing with small towns, this should be something the engine can handle here. Virginia City and Carson City were rather modest but had huge personalities that one even struggles to find in some medium sized cities in our age now.

I think that the personality system is really important at cultivating replayablity so players have a willingness to spend more time exploring the game. Too many games tend to have shallow gameplay. Players want to not have work but to have an experience that they can remember. Video games are not meant to be jobs and the developer should remember that there.

4. Mayor system has to matter in the game

I have recently heard that the game is going to have mayors that you can choose. This mechanic should mean something in here. Make them have unique personalities and have different political parties so that the game is more unique in every playthrough.

5. Elections

I think that having elections in this game would give some more flavor to your towns. While I believe that the game will probably add more features in DLCs if it is successful in here, having elections would help make these playthroughs more dynamic and it bring it into line what players want now. With the size of these cities being smaller than most city builders, I think that this should be appropriate for this game.

6. Trains need to play an important role

In many parts of the USA, small towns were supported by a new technology, railways. Cheyenne, Wyoming began as a railway town, so did many other places. The game has to be able to capture this change and vibrancy of the trains steaming into these small towns. The steam train has been a technology that capture the imaginations of that age and they are prefect visual aspects of a video game which can show off the power of an engine.

Why Civilization VII is not a Civilization Game: The Emergent Story

The blurbs that appear at certain times of a Civilization III playthrough were always a great way to know about your progress at certain points of a game.

These blurbs, especially the ones that said: “The Most Advanced Nations of the World” or “The Largest Nations of the World” were important to know whether you were going to build a great empire or be at the mercy of your rivals.

This is what Civilization VII is missing. It has the graphics, but it cannot create a feeling of progress or change.

Civilization games are not just about the Civilization but about they affect the world around them. Civilization VII just takes that away and imposes the board game mentality that was starting to creep in with Civilization V.

When you enter a new age, you start with a new civilization of your own choosing, basically resetting the map and you are back to square one. This is essentially splits the game up into three mini games. That is not interesting in the slightest as Civilization is a macro game not some mobile game. While some mobile games are intriguing, Civilization VII basically railroads you into certain gameplay choices. That makes the game less replayable and essentially is changing the spirit of the game.

Civilization V’s continued presence should be a sign of how fans really perceive the newest game. This 15-year-old game continues to outperform Civilization VII. Even Civilization VI, which I had issues with, is ahead of Civilization VII by a considerable amount. I believe that Firaxis Games will have to create a Civilization VIII more quickly than they anticipated as the game is not gaining traction. Civilization VI was in a much better spot a year after release and Civilization V was not surpassing Civilization VI in the player counts.

These small blurbs are just text but they also connect to the great context of the game. You are not simply building a civilization but building a world. That is what Civilization VII lacks and why players are not warming to the game.

Why Style matters more than graphics in Video Games, especially now

There is a general consensus among gamers now, that art style matters more than graphics.

The screenshot above is of a 2001 game known as Empire Earth. It looks rather crude now, but it has a unique style that no other game can replicate.

We have seen this with independent games, which replicate the simpler and colorful graphics of older generations. Photorealism is great in Chatbots if one is attempting to brainstorm how a character appears but there is a place for all sorts of artistic styles. The Japanese have shown this in many of their games. Some games aim for photorealism, but they also show that they want to continue their tradition of having many art styles, especially their homegrown anime. Japanese games often have a reputation for being more stylistic and it’s not surprising that Nintendo did not give up on their original IPs in favor of more mature ideas. They sometimes did have more mature games in their earlier consoles, but this was to compete with Sega and after Sega was beaten, they began to focus on their generally cozy game reputation here.

Style matters more than graphics. I remember that in the 1990s, graphics cards companies had managed to change this idea. Graphics were more important than style as many programmers wanted to showcase the power of their inhouse engines. This was the age of graphics growing every year here. It was truly an exciting age where every game seemed like a foreign country with its own rules.

Now every game seems to have the same GPS navigation and isn’t really interesting here. Unreal Engine is used heavily in many games now, but it is also getting in the way of helping games to distinguish their styles from one another.

It isn’t just in the graphics. It is also in the interfaces also. The interfaces in earlier games were art styles that were peculiar to that one game. Now, too much of it is optimized to be interchangeable between genres and games.

We need to have friction once again. That may make things some what more uncomfortable to use but it will allow for a greater variety of games to made.

The independents are often cited as an example of creativity. However, they cannot carry the industry alone here. They need to work in synergy with middle budget and high budget games. The independents are often works of passion, but they lack the ability to get a product out to the gamers within a reasonable time before they have their attention going to somewhere else.

Style is what companies should be chasing now. We have enough photorealistic games. With generative AI, photorealism is available in a way that surpasses even the best camera.

What we need now is way to encourage the creation of new styles instead of just attempting to outcompete on the issue of photorealistic graphics.