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Rob Zacny

Three Moves Ahead 541: Strategy Games As A Service

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Three Moves Ahead 541:

Three Moves Ahead 541


Strategy Games As A Service
Len and Rowan discuss the concept of "games as a service" as it relates to the strategy space. Is it a good thing? Has it always been around and we just called it something different? Can you ever really trust a game studio? Are the post-Kripke seasons of Supernatural actually worth your time? Listen to the episode, then check out the Season Pass over on Patreon.com/3ma

Crusader Kings 2, Europa Universalis 4, Civilization 6, Darkest Dungeon, Battletech, Total War: Three Kingdoms

 

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I definitely got the impression that Battletech was built on a base of massive technical debt - when I first got it, I didn't have an SSD and accidentally installed it on my 5400rpm media drive. Missions could take 15-20 minutes to load.

 

Putting my developer hat on, between the long load times for the tactical game and the massive game install for fairly middling graphics, I wonder if the Harebrained schemes isn't compressing their textures - long load times bottlenecked by storage media speed sounds a lot like an I/O limit consistent with reading massive amounts of data from disc.

 

The other thing is the long transition time to the mech bay/store/hiring hall/available contracts - for the first two, I've heard rumours that the game engine doesn't have that sort of data (weapons specs, etc.) readily accessible (for example via an internal database or by caching that data in memory), so that data has to be parsed from disc every time.

 

One jarring thing for me about Battletech was the lack of a minimap - it makes sense in that the same handful of maps tend to be reused with the elements and orientation switched up a bit, but it's a huge missing feature.

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