In my opinion, they should have gotten Steve Barcia to make MOO3. He and Ken Burd were the designers of MOO2. And Steve Barcia also designed Master of Magic. Steve Barcia is a gaming genius. And yet, it seemed that some of the people on the MOO3 forums, were dismissive of MOO2. It seemed the developers were dismissive of MOO2 as well. I would probaly call that dismissiveness arrogance.miu wrote:Moo3, i I didnt mind UI, lack of proper shortcuts, AI, battles, diplomacy, lack of statistics etc. I found ways to cope with them, get the AI do what I wanted and run and play my empire well enough. But the major thing thas put me off after playing it for a while was the IMMERSION, or the total lack of it.
No graphic showing your citizens, no spacemonsters, poor random events, no landingraph when colonising, no pictures of the cities I've made, every race sayin same things in diplomacy screen. I didnt feel I was there, neither did the galaxy feel alive and living. It felt like spreadsheets in space. Felt very little emotional connection to my empire and race. And personalisation level was poor, (couldnt choose your empire color, couldnt choose the ship type, name the planests etc..) I want that my choices have visible effect in gameworld.
In my view this is one of most import things when designing the game, people are willing to forget about minor mistakes in gameplay as long as the game makes them feel and care. That is what makes people to stay with game.
for Immersoion and personalisation!
.Miu
Steve Barcia wisely put in a lot of "mini-movies" whenever major events occurred. I agree with you miu. The developers of MOO3 were far too concerned with complexity (that is ok as long as everything else is right) and not enough concerned with the graphics (which MOO2 definitely got right). To be honest, I was expecting MOO3 to be a graphics powerhouse - that's what I wanted from MOO3. For complexity, I feel MOO2 complexity is sufficient. The MOO3 complexity that MOO3 has is really good, but then they didn't seem to have enough time to lavish on the graphics.
Seeing is believing I guess. So as proof of my debate I put forward GalCiv as proof. GalCiv didin't have the complexity of MOO3 and yet it still was a success. So, I'd say from GalCiv that extreme complexity is not essential.