Note: I wrote this while watching Adventure Time in the middle of the night. Hopefully the idea gets through -- this is fundamentally a subjective piece, not a review.
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My name is Matthew Pecot, and I want to like 4X games.
I’ve spent most of my gaming career enjoying them, starting with Civilization 2’s eighty-page manual and
running to the present day. I’ve obsessed over the Civ games, Sword of the Stars,
Europa Universalis – I even picked up
Pandora: First Contact because it
billed itself as an Alpha Centauri
successor. “Rock You Like a Hurricane” always makes me think of mind worms.
And yet, now, I’m starting to look at the way I play these games, and they’re
more bowling than fencing. The main reason for this is that 4X games have a
huge problem with feedback loops, in part because each gameplay cycle is so
long.
Let’s look at how I play an average round of a 4X game. I choose my
starting advantages/faction, I kick it off, I play for about thirty minutes…
then I restart. And again, and again, until I feel like I have the opening
moves figured out. I do this because the opening turns are the only part of the
game I feel like I can solve. Just like a Zergling rush: If
I haven’t built an expansion by turn X, then I know I’ve failed.
How do you know if you’re failing in a science victory? Or in an arms
race during a cold war? 4X games don’t do a good job of letting you know how
you’re doing – except during a war, then there’s a good feedback system. The
rest of the time, your evaluation of progress is based on how well you will do in a war. There’s a good
intellectual challenge to evaluating an enemy, but 4X games bake so many
systems together to come up with combat effectiveness: available allies, tech
level, morale, local terrain, commanders, reinforcement rate…
Smarter people than I can make those calculations, and play the game of
gathering intel to fill in the variables. That’s not for me, though, especially
with games as complicated as Europa Universalis. (Ironically, those games tend
to have the most information available on other factions.)
I generally prefer to play these games very solo-style, though, more
like a citybuilder than a 4X game. I’d be happy playing a Civ game without any other
factions, just building up, and trying to build up Health faster than I could
expand. It’s the same reason I played EU III
as England: Because I could face a life-or-death struggle at first with
Scotland, then I never had to worry about a European war and could just focus
on colonization and trade.
The problem is that even if you’re playing against yourself, you’re not
the only bar to measure against. Sure, you might think that the only thing that
matters is if you feel accomplished, but these games are part of the zeitgeist.
You’re going to talk with your friends, and in the worst case, they’re going to
look over your shoulder and point out what you’re doing wrong. (My boss did
that to me midway through an EU IV
game. I ended up playing another 20 hours as a result.)
So, what’s the consequence of all of this? A lot of repetitive actions
that feel meaningless. If I’m taking actions, but don’t see how well I’m doing,
they don’t feel very impactful. It doesn’t help that, for most of a 4X game,
you’re employing the same stratagems and movements you have before, and because
they’re turn-based, there’s not much of an intrinsic reward when you execute
them well.
The scale of a 4X game amplifies this, because at a certain point any
given action is meaningless. You’ve already lost, or you’ve started to
snowball so hard that you’re effectively unstoppable, in which case you’ll win
if you just keep clicking End Turn and queuing up the latest buildings.
This is why the 4X games I enjoy the most are actually roleplaying
games: They add a sense of emotional meaning to your play, even if mechanically
the actions are rote. Civilization is
actually the furthest away from roleplaying of all the 4X games I enjoy,
because it has relatively little historical grounding or sense of exotic
location; Europa Universalis is on the
other side, with an incredibly deep sense of place.
This also explains why Beyond
Earth feels so lackluster: It has almost no character. The mechanics for
each affinity barely touch on what they’re supposed to be, and the quests are
just a bunch of placeholder text. Compare that to the thrill of following
Magellan in circumnavigating the world (and having mechanical benefits from
doing it), or seizing Orion from its guardian, or… you get the idea. The only
thing that makes a 4X game stirring for me is the sense of place and adventure.
Everything else is just forty hours of clicking End Turn.
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