Sid Meier On Industry State

Gamespy had a talk with Sid Meier and Soren Johnson at the DICE event last month, and they've got some interesting commentary on the current state of the gaming industry. From the article: "I think the thing is, if you're going to make a multiplayer game, the days of trying to 'shoehorn' in multiplayer are over. As an aside, I think we're almost reaching a point where single-player games are getting under-served. One reason I really enjoy World of Warcraft is that there's so few good single-player RPGs for the PC right now. I mean, I play with my friends, but I also like to solo -- I have separate characters for each -- because there aren't really any good single-player RPGs out there to play! But anyways, if you're going to make a good multiplayer game, you need to make that a priority from the beginning."

Ghost Recon : AW

[E-Rock]

The new Ghost Recon has on-line co-op modes where it's the human players versus bots. That's one of the reasons I bought it. I'm tired of running around shooting my friends (we've been doing it since doom). I'd like to play with my friends instead of against them.

Re:Ghost Recon : AW

[WidescreenFreak]

It's somewhat ironic that you say that because every Saturday (for the past two or three years) I've been playing "us vs. bots" Ghost Recon (the original version plus Desert Siege/Island Thunder and various mod packs) with my nephew and a friend of mine in North Carolina. Strategic team play vs. bots (plus respawn) is exactly why we keep going for GR, rather than try to find a BF2 server that can fit all three of us and hope beyond hopes that we all somehow end up on the same team. Screw that.

Ghost Recon gives us a strategic FPS that lets the gameplay be "us versus the rest of the world", which is exactly what we like. Hopefully, GR:Advanced Warfighter will continue that trend. Otherwise, it will sit on the shelf as far as the three of us are concerned.

Glad to see that I'm not the only one who (horrors!! ) actually likes team play other than deathmatch.

Hey buddy, wanna try some SMAC?

[Chris Burke]

At the least, it would be more fun to make tech advancement based on probability, so that investing X resources gives you a Y% chance of discovering gunpowder.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri -- the game with the most appropriate abbreviation ever -- has basically this. You can prioritize the four major research categories however you want, but while you'll only get technologies you qualify for which one you'll actually get once you aquire enough research points is unknown. So you have to think in broader terms, which of the four areas (Exploration, Discovery, Building, or Conquest) do you want to focus on, realizing that skimping on one area may deny you prerequisites for advances in another but without any guaranteed payoffs.

The expansion Alien Crossfire added two alien factions to the mix who could "direct" their research, under the assumption that they were re-discovering already known advances. In my opinion this was their strongest ability and made the game much easier. I prefer playing the other factions.

Re:No RPGs?

[Y-Crate]

"At the moment? The gaming world was playing squaresoft final fantasy series and chrono trigger 13 years ago on the snes and you just described them pefectly. In hindsight I don't know what the hell I was thinking back in those days."

I was trying to wrap the bitterness of truth with a little restraint to make it more palatable and thus avoid charges of trolling and/or racism.

The PS2 and the PS3 simply do not interest me at all due to the fact that their respective game libraries are so heavily populated by $50 cutscene collections masquerading as games. When Japanese developers balked at the Xbox 360's inclusion of a standard DVD drive because it prevented them from including more cutscenes, I really gave up hope that actual gameplay would overtake self-indulgance in the development studios in Japan anytime soon. Playing a Japanese RPG is comparable to being strapped into a ride at an amusement park. You ride along the same familiar track every time, where you are faced with endless examples of the art team trying to impress and thrill you with how cool they are. The ride ends, and you realize that you didn't really have any impact on where you would end up, and the whole thing was pre-planned years ago by people you never met.