Tag: Modding

Empire Earth (2001) is a special game

There are not many games similar to Empire Earth. The ability to have a civilization that is going to be able stand the test of time is truly gratifying experience.

I will say that after spending many years not playing it, the game still holds up as an exceptional game. I think it represents something we haven’t seen in the industry in ages. The video game has a competency in it which is missing in Civilization VII. That idea of someone putting effort into a game and having a great product is being replaced by people making poor quality things on an assembly line of code.

To just emphasize the differences between the games. Just look at the way in which maps are made in Empire Earth vs Civilization VII. While Empire Earth is not a 4X game, it does have some similarities here. What I want to emphasize is that the map generation in the game is much better than that of Civilization VII.

The maps actually look like actual continents.

Civilization VII sacrificed single player for a stale multiplayer experience.

Empire Earth belongs to a time when the industry was in a state of transition. However, there were still many of the old greats working away and it shows in this game. It was grown up but not yet lethargic and nostalgic for the past.

Civilization VII is stuck in the past. Empire Earth was using the past and present to tell a story in the future. It is a game that transcends its video game nature and provides a soundtrack to mankind.

While some may say this is overly idealistic and that it is simply a game, I disagree with this sentiment here. No video game is simply product of recreation. It is art.

Why Civilization VI is winning the war with Civ 7

Civilization VI is simply a better game. I bought both Civ 6 and 7 when they came out. This means that this is when they were new and did not have dlcs or many patches. The difference between the two cannot be clearer. Civilization VI had its detractors in the beginning, mostly in the area of it being cartoony and too impressionistic in its art style.

However, the game came out in October 2016 complete and many new features and refinements of what came before. The game was modernizing the micro which many old players enjoyed. Unlike in Civilization VII, there is a degree of control with how one runs their civilization. There is no plopping of improvements on the map, you have make to the choices for yourself and see how they affect your civilization in the game.

This is what is sorely lacking in Civilization VII. It is that choice and control which I enjoy.

It is not simply that control however, it’s the feedback one gets one playing in the game world of Civilization VII. It feels like a flat and uninteresting game. It just seems that the team that was working on it have no passion for it.

Civilization VI is clearly the one you should playing now.

Starfield and the prospects for 2025 and Steam

Starfield and Steam have an uneasy relationship to say the least when one looks at the reviews. When I bought the game, the Space RPG was sitting at Mostly Positive. After people began attacking the game because YouTube’s algorithm was boosting such negative videos, the rating went to Mixed. People often call it a mixed bag and there are many reasons for such a change in the ratings that I have already talked about on here. Generally, the negative reviews are understandable however many of such criticism can be stated about Skyrim or any Ubisoft game. However, the blandness of Starfield which many people talk about is more of a product of Bethesda’s emphasis on realism. However, I strain to see how one can call it bland when one can go to Neon, which has a clear visual style in comparison to New Atlantis. These criticisms stem from a culture of stagnation in video games that are more interested in rehashing visual styles of old games on the NES and SNES then in accepting that nothing everything is going to made in that style.

Steam players are truly passionate in way that most people in Modern Western culture are not. However, they can be quite myopic with how they review games. Reviewing a game on Steam sometimes gets tied up in one’s political ideology. Another is that many people are in a nostalgic mode which I have often tried my best to avoid. I enjoy respecting the past, but video games are inherently not a media that lends itself to a style of art that stagnates.

In 2025, I hope that the developers of Starfield and the Modding community continue to improve the game. They should take what they see on Steam into account, but they have to remember that this is only slice of gamers. There are many players of Starfield who were Xbox gamers and some who also use Xbox Game Pass. Steam gamers are truly passionate about games but they can also be elitist and try to be myopic about game styles

What we see in Starfield’s reception is an industry in stagnation.

When the gaming industry was in the sixth generation with the rise of the Playstation 1, Nintendo 64 and the Sega Saturn. The games were changing quickly in the graphics. The SNES glory days of 1992 and 1993 had been transformed into the 3 dimensions of palaces and creatures in Mario 64. One can see a clear change in graphics in modern games from the early 1990s to the late 1990s. Even the early 3D games of 1992 were charming but crude by the late 1990s.

MechWarrior 2 by Activision was released in July 1995 and was a stunning game but one looks at MechWarrior 3 and MechWarrior 4, it looks as if thousands of years have past in development of gaming graphics. MechWarrior 2 was also more advanced than the original MechWarrior game of the late 1980s. However, the change between 2 and 4 is huge.

When one looks at older RTS games such as Dune 2 and then looks at Science Fiction RTS games such as Starcraft and then the Star Trek Armada games, the difference is striking. While Star Trek Armada II looks uglier than the original, a product of cutting corners to allow players on their 2001 Computers to support having hundreds of ships on the screen, the graphic fidelity is a huge canyon. While Dune 2 was a monumental game in the creation of the RTS genre, rather being more of an experimental game such as the Atari 2600 Game, Utopia, it was still a crude game that isn’t easy to replay in the current age. However, by the creation of Starcraft, RTS games had become more formalized in their designs and now one can see the current way in which RTS games appear to the player. In my view, RTS games have largely looked the same since even the time of Blizzard’s classic Warcraft I, when the company was more interested in breaking boundaries and not just relying on the IP in order to make money and sucking its creativity out of people working at the studio and ruining their own company’s visions.

People are used to what they have been seeing for the past 15 years. When it also comes to the transformative Sixth generation of consoles, many gamers grew up in that time and have fond memories about it. These people have grown up and are now writing the articles in magazines and the sites have a bias towards those games. There were many other games released in the 1990s; many such games were not that great; however some were trailblazers in new genres. Instead we are stuck on the old games and styles that were once innovative but are now preventing the industry from being able to embrace creativity or even revive old franchises that should have been given another look instead of being abandoned by the companies.

Thankfully, Starfield was made and we have the foundation to continue improving it. I hope that 2025 has many successes for Starfield and the modders who are making it more interesting and unique in its styles.