review – 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.

What Total War Medieval III really needs to thrive

Total War: Medieval III has been announced and this what it really needs in order to be a great game that will surpass the previous titles in the series.

It needs to be fun and interesting.

That’s it. While I will write posts later on about specifics, this is the main part that is most important. I have defended Starfield on here, but I realize that the game is more of a sandbox waiting for gameplay to fill in the gaps. Such a game could have done well in the past but not now. Players have been used to optimized experiences. Games that want you have to explore systems is something that games in the generation from the SNES to about the PS1 could get away with. When the PS1 came out, standardization became the trend and the video game industry we have today is the product of that. There were some exceptions in between the way but the emphasis has on been on making everything optimized and holistic.

Total War: Medieval III has to be a holistic game that is also fun and interesting to play. They need to make sure not to overload with too many features here. Focus on making the game fun to play at first and then attempt to add more features. Many games focus on features at the beginning of making a game rather than the user experience.

Total War: Medieval III needs to make sure its art style also does not get in the way of the experience. Some games think they are being sophisticated with their art but its more important to have good gameplay than great graphics. Great graphics can come in a passive experience, but we still stay for the story not the experience of graphics alone. It needs to service the experience, not the experience just servicing the graphics. This happens too many times in movies and we are also seeing it in video games.

They also need to stick to history but not too tightly that it affects the game. I see Total War: Medieval III having a similar nature to Crusader Kings III here, but with more focus on battles you can control in here. The focus on changing history should make for interesting emergent gameplay, something that Paradox Interactive has pioneered but I feel needs more refinement. I believe that this game can accomplish that here.

The user’s needs are important. This is not productivity software but a game. A game needs to be fun and then expand our minds. Sometimes games get too complex and simplicity is bliss.

Why Empire Earth is better than most Modern RTS Games

The Intro Screen of the Russian Campaign in Empire Earth

The Russian Campaign in Empire Earth is one of the reasons why I still love playing this game. I have not actually won the campaign even after so many years. However, its the possibilities that the campaign has which still captivates me. The ability to have a science fiction story set on Earth rather than space in an RTS was a great accomplishment. Regardless of the quality of the voice acting or the plausbility of the story, the campaign is known as the hardest in the game. You really get a sense of a futuristic struggle between Russia and America and other nations which you rarely get to see.

Why is that we cannot see that with modern RTS games. The only RTS game recently to accomplish any dynamicism in its design while honoring the past is Age of Empires IV. While Age of Empires III was in a beautiful obscurity, a middle child one could say, Age of Empires IV has regenerated the franchise and RTS games as whole. Starcraft II’s hold on the RTS genre along with other offshoot genres. However, one game cannot do it on its own here. There needs to be more RTS games out there as I see the genre as a virtual chess style game which can help enhance people’s minds here.

Instead of focusing on esports, maybe developers should focus on making their profits sustainable versus a constant stream which eventually tires out and then they have no artistic integrity. Video game companies need to start paying attention to the tension between art and business. Without capital, most art could not start but they should not let business take their soul away from their jobs. Such a compromise ends up damaging many businesses. Somehow, Japan, with its harsher corporate culture has managed to keep the soul of its IPs intact versus the West here.

Empire Earth has a been game that I have played for over twenty years. There is a reason why it stays with me. Nostalgia, a very much misused word in our age, isn’t really for software. It’s more for our physical places and the sense of time passing and a willingness to come back to it. The technical aspect of a video game isn’t what we are sentimental about here, but the atmosphere around playing the game. The game’s technical aspects are solid, not prefect, but better than what you see now, regardless of sentimental aspects surrounding our playing of the game.

Empire Earth has something unique about it. The AI cheats in the game, but it is competent and the battles, even when annoying are also exciting. There is something about the quality of the battles where every unit has a role to play, big and small. Unlike so many RTS games now, I feel the gameplay loop is similar to Skyrim’s. It has a mythic quality while still personable. This is an issue that Starfield had, where its huge nature made the player seem too small and not distinctive enough. This is another issue I have with Stellaris, inspire of its great gameplay. The mythic nature is so huge, that the player just seems to be clicking buttons on a screen.

What we need in video games again is a sense of personal stakes and personality again. Not just moving digital information on the screen.

The reason why Empire Earth is still played by players is really down to its technical brillancce combined with the memories of an industry that wasn’t perfect but knew how to make games over assets for investors in corporations.