Rob Zacny

Episode 327: Kingdom

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Three Moves Ahead 327:

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Kingdom

Rob, Rowan, and Fraser apparently got into the catnip this week before getting together to talk about Kingdom. Kingdom is a game about chasing rabbits, usurping monarchies, and losing your hat. It caused Rob to enter a Howard Hughes-esque fugue state, shuffling about in his apartment with tissue boxes on his feet while mumbling about forgetting to bring coins into the woods.

Kingdom, Risk of Rain, Terraria

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Don't listen to them, Rob. You should just dump Kingdom if it makes you work through hell to get to its magic. There's plenty of fish in the sea.

 

So you're playing as Sonic in Terraria in Civilization and you're the only one who can do things. Has Fraser really used the term "Herculian task" or did he mean "Sysiphean"? 

 

It was a very interesting discussion even if I'm not interested in the game. Made me get where all those negative reviews with 100+ hours of playing are coming from. The beginning of the Tom Chick parabola is too steep. In this Kingdom game it may seem that the game can be as big as possible. Maybe you'll build intergalactic empire for all you know. And not only in the terms of scope and content, there's a promise of some deep strategy. The same way as Empire Total War promises huge battles, scenarios, revolutions, ships, technologies, Indians, Americans - and it's sorta there but it's not even useful because you should just get a full stack of line infantry and the enemy will die throwing himself at you.

 

In some sense it's an anthitesis of Cookie Clicker. Cause it makes you think you're playing cookie clicker. It starts like one and it is one for 15 minutes and then you're supposed to master what there's. Problem for many 4X too. Can't remember many games that succesfully live with it. Maybe Heroes of Might & Magic? You start a scenario, get few types of monsters. Then you look into your castle and see there are many more guys there. And they're upgradable. And there are spells, dozens of them. And there are many types of castles. 

 

And it transforms into Tom Chick x

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I would have loved to have done this show, but have not put in nearly enough time, plus the PR guy is a very recent colleague.

 

I am, I think, close to where Rob is even without putting in 20 hours of play. Lots to explore, sure, and I am, I guess, OK with the limited range of actions. But it is a puzzle to solve and once you have that routine down (a charming routine for sure), I wonder how long I will keep this fondness.

 

But still a beautiful game.

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Rob and Troy's impression reminds me of my experience with Diablo 3.  Like I play a LOT of Diablo 3 when its expansion came out.  But then I dropped the game hard and absolutely resented every moment spent on it (I guess this is where it differs because it wasn't just "I hate this game", it was "I hate ever having to known this game") and core reasoning sounds like how Rob would describe his beef with Kingdoms.

 

So moment to moment gameplay is good.  Game constantly gives you hint of things that COULD be there (Diablo 3 is far worse with this because it is random loot so you know something's there (just incredibly irregular), while with Kingdom it turns out nothing is there).  So you spend hours of time into it.  But every time you look back, you realize you never hit the implied promise land and combine that with few obsessive play sessions and it's just awful sensation.

 

Never hit that with CiV but then I never played BE.  I mean I did get jaded with CiV but I never quite hit that point of disliking my past experience with the game.

 

Anyways, so yes I think it is possible to truly dislike a game while spending lot of time on it.  Bless you Troy for being a better person than I or Rob for seeing this coming much earlier.  Bless you Rob for warning me of this.

 

I think games that END well (I mean player quitting the game as end point, not the ending), for this reason, should be noted.  I think Xcom: EW (NOT with Long War mod which falls into this pitfall of compelling to play but the compulsion absolutely outstays its welcome) is an excellent case for this.  Similar with EU4.  Even CiV for me.

 

On side note I really want to be published by these guys.  They are like my top dream next to Paradox.

 

EDIT: And the outtakes at the end was great!

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Well, I haven't said anything about the game beyond this very brief post - I guess I don't see how the simple mechanics can lead to a great variety of endstates and it becomes puzzle like quite early. But I won't nuke it from my Steam list like Rob has. It is a nice little diversion and I need more of those. Terraria never stuck with me, but that's because I am epically bad at platforms.

 

The Raw Fury team are good people, Gaiz. 

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It's absolutely possible to sink endless time into a game and not enjoy it.  When Destiny launched, I disliked it immediately.  I then put in 200 hours and ultimately hated both it and myself for having done so.  

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Don't listen to them, Rob. You should just dump Kingdom if it makes you work through hell to get to its magic. There's plenty of fish in the sea.

 

I agree with this. The podcast was a bit of an oddity to hear, with less experienced players telling a more experienced player that he was being too hard with his misgivings about a game's depth and longevity.

 

I've wasted too much of my life playing indie trifles that hooked me with the ostensible promise of infinite depth and then revealed that that "depth" was either a tedious opener or a grindy endgame for high-level play. I'm thinking of Space Pirates and Zombies and Reus especially, games with a look and feel that continually tempted me to play them even though I found them unsatisfying because their design so clearly incorporates the symbology of complex strategy design. Even though they aren't as flagrant time-wasters as (say) a 4X with no endgame at all, I'm still less forgiving of such games than Rowan, if only because you'd think that smaller games, lacking the multiple interlocking systems of a larger-scale title, would have what gameplay they do have baked more fully. With Kingdom, it sounds like they didn't really expect anyone to play it to completion, and that's disheartening.

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It's like a lot of indie games, you have an interesting thought and don't really go much beyond that- Kingdom is a really shallow game.  It seems like the developers hit a point where they could make a great game if they did the design grunt-work to do so, but they don't, they just push out a proof of concept and call it a day.

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I agree with this. The podcast was a bit of an oddity to hear, with less experienced players telling a more experienced player that he was being too hard with his misgivings about a game's depth and longevity.

 

I don't think we really believed Rob was being too hard on the game. All of his misgivings were valid, and were shared by both Rowan and I to a certain extent. And in regards to experience, while Rob had put the most hours into the game, we were all at the same stage, getting to end-game easily enough and focused on pushing past all the portals. Indeed, I believe that Rowan was actually the furthest along, and had been closest to the win condition.

My point, as I said on the episode, was that for all of us, the game was still, in part, a mystery. None of us knew what the end really was, or if the game had more in store for us. That's why I wanted to keep playing. 

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My point, as I said on the episode, was that for all of us, the game was still, in part, a mystery. None of us knew what the end really was, or if the game had more in store for us. That's why I wanted to keep playing. 

 

A variation on J.J. Abrams' "black box" theory of screenwriting, perhaps? I get it, totally.

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If you haven't looked at Kingdom lately, last week the devs put out Kingdom: New Lands as a free update it adds more stuff and progressively difficult islands to travel to.  If you already have Kingdom, just go to the store page for Kingdom: New Lands and click the play now button, it will download the new version.  

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On ‎8‎/‎14‎/‎2016 at 3:37 AM, fledermaus said:

If you haven't looked at Kingdom lately, last week the devs put out Kingdom: New Lands as a free update it adds more stuff and progressively difficult islands to travel to.  If you already have Kingdom, just go to the store page for Kingdom: New Lands and click the play now button, it will download the new version.  

Yeah. In Episode 327, Rob's take on Kingdom 'Classic' prevented me from buying the game. But I'd sure like to hear the 3MA crew, and especially Rob's take on this ne Kingdom: New Lands.

 

This review of the new version paints a pretty good improved picture.

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It's... kind of the same, sort of?

 

The mechanics are the same.  The game now has levels, essentially, where you beat each level by building, populating and defending a boat.  If you manage this, you ride the boat to the next level.  The levels start out easier; initially there's only (IIRC) one enemy gate, so you only really have to defend one side of your castle.  The difficulty ramps between levels as you'd expect, and even within a level things get hectic if you stick around too long.

 

The main difference is psychological; the level structure makes you feels more like complete accomplishments: "I made it to level 3 and then was overrun" feels like winning twice, whereas "I survived to day XX and then drowned in lakes of blood" feels like losing.  Practically speaking, they may amount to roughly the same thing, but with the level structure it kind of feels like you left a couple of successful kingdoms behind even if the third one got buried under monsters.

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