Atanatari

Excellent episode! I too was once in love with Civ but have not been able to summon the interest to play more than a few hours of Beyond Earth and Endless Legend. On the other hand, I absolutely love 4x board games like Eclipse, Twilight Imperium, Runewars, etc. Even Risk if you can call it a 4x. I'm not sure what the problem is, but I can try to rattle off a few possibilities: Social interaction. In a board game each empire has a friend behind it, making conquering and allying vastly more meaningful. Simpler/faster. Board games distill things down to simple, elegant, barebones systems. Turns go faster, you reach "Level 16" much faster. Dice rolling. Rolling dice yourself is much more fun that letting the computer do it. Larger start location differences? This may just be my perception, but there are massive differences between starting positions in Eclipse or even Risk. In theory the start location matters a lot in Civ and Endless Legend...but does it really? The maps are so large and you can claim so much territory it all seems to average out in the end. When you only have 3 or 4 hexes in Eclipse, the nature of those hexes matters a great deal. Random techs. Video games never seem to use random technology availability. I think this is a great mechanic that makes each play unique. In Eclipse the available techs are random, and players compete for them. In Civ you can just follow the same optimal tech path every game...gets old fast. So, those are just a few ideas. A more general problem is that 4X video games are really little more than giant, super complex boardgames. They don't really leverage the benefits of the medium (audio and video) except for making things more complicated and doing a lot of math for you. The result is a very slow, solitary boardgame. Series like Heroes of Might and Magic or Total War make better use of the medium, in my opinion. HoMM is essentially just a boargame, but it has beautiful artwork and animations on large sprites that really bring your armies and towns to life. Total War has an amazing 3D tactical battle simulation. Endless Legend looks very nice and bears a lot of similarity to HoMM, but the battles don't have nearly as much depth and the unit models are not featured as strongly.

I think you are overestimating how informed people are before they get into a game. Often you just hear that a game is top notch, you check the genre, maybe look at a few screenshots or a trailer, and then you buy it. I haven't played it yet, but the problem with Banner Saga sounds pretty simple. Its a tactical RPG that happens to have tons of dialog between battles, and there is no way to skip the dialog because the choices in the dialog have a mechanical impact. So it is really two games in one, trying to be well integrated but not allowing you to skip either part. In Bioware RPGs, while there are some required cutscenes and dialog, you can skip a lot of it. You can default to the first dialog option and usually be fine. You can certain skip the whole fireside camp chat aspect of Dragon Age: O. Personally I found some of my conversations at camp to be some of the most memorable experiences in the whole game, but they are entirely optional. So is the codex or whatever they call the "lore catalog". Finally, in a first-person RPG like Dragon Age or Skyrim, not only do you expect tons of lore, but you are immersed in a rich 3D world where your character is more fully realized in the game world. I think the fiction-heavy approach works more easily in that setting. I'm not a big tactical RPG player, or handheld gamer (where most of those seem to get released), but I've never been able to really get into the story in those types of experiences. Its usually static talking heads spouting predictable lines of text, no talented actors to sell it, no inspired writing, rarely any cutscenes to create drama. I think if the fiction presentation is good enough, even people who aren't fans of genre fiction will probably enjoy it. Look at the popularity of LoTR, Harry Potter, and Hunger Games, only a fraction of those audiences are real fantasy geeks. But those movies are expensive productions, Bioware style RPGs cost $100s of millions. If you look at the successful low-budget titles, they tend not to rely on those kinds of cinematic narrative presentation elements, because I don't think there is any way of getting around the price tag. Solid mechanics (the tactical RPG part) is much cheaper to do well. People don't generally like to just read text in a video game, because if they wanted to read text they would just go read a book. I'm sure they tried very hard to connect the dialog to the combat, but those connections are usually just illusions or window dressing, if you aren't into the narrative they won't work.

Much as gamers like to pretend otherwise, graphics are king. Firing up Super Mario World for the first time felt like pure magic when I was a kid. There is nothing like the experience of truly next-gen tech. Mechanics are definitely important, especially once you get accustomed to a new level of graphical fidelity, but what I'm really after is immersion. Crysis felt real to me, Far Cry 2 did not, simple as that. Not really sure why.

No, just look https://www.google.com/search?q=far+cry+1+screenshot https://www.google.com/search?q=far+cry+2+screenshot https://www.google.com/search?q=crysis+screenshot Far Cry 1 had pretty basic graphics, but the environment was bright, green, and lush. Far Cry 2 has better graphics sure, but the world is so incredibly brown, and often dark and dull. For some reason it just didn't feel very immersive, felt like a video game. Crysis is in a completely different league, has more graphical variety, and came out a full year earlier than Far Cry 2...

The graphics blow most other shooters out of the water, the visuals inside the alien ship were incredible. The engagement ranges are longer and more realistic, the scale of everything is bigger, it doesn't rely so much on scripted sequences, its open-world (most shooters are really corridor shooters). The AI felt more satisfying to fight than the typical shooter AI. To me it feels like it relies on good AI and environment design rather than scripting. The guns and mechanics were better than many shooters (better than Far Cry 2 or 3 imo). It continually presents you with situations you can attack from multiple angles with multiple strategies. Doesn't bog the experience down with stupid open-world filler activities.

My problem with Far Cry 2 had nothing to do with Malaria or gun jamming, those are cool realistic mechanics. No, my problem was that from the minute I started playing the environment just seemed fake, like a set rather than a real place. Also the lighting seemed dull and ugly. Maybe it was because I was playing on console? Far Cry the original was all about atmosphere and beauty. As for gameplay, I think I prefer open world games like Crysis that just have missions that move you along from point A to point B, but allow a lot of exploration in the process. The "systems" in games like Assassin's Creed, Far Cry 2, and Far Cry 3 usually just seem really artificial and stupid. I'm talking about all those icons they put on your map indicating different copy-paste "activities" you can do. Can't remember if Far Cry 2 had this or not, but it feels like that kind of game (weapon vendor quests, buddy quests, tower quests...snoooore). I much prefer a Crysis style game where its just you, your gear, your mission, and the world. No goofy "radio towers" to climb every 100 feet or repetitive "quests" to complete. As far as I'm concerned Crysis is the real successor to Far Cry. Far Cry 2 did not live up to that at all, I stopped playing after maybe 2 hours.