I won’t lie – when I was planning on when my last day with Bioware would be, the idea of coinciding it with the release of Civilization: Beyond Earth was pretty damned serendipitous. I expected to go into a six month Sid Meier coma of one-more-turn up until the money ran out and my wife demanded I shower, get a job and start bringing home bacon again. But I’ve found I’m not just reaching for the game. Instead I’m reaching for Endless Legend.
CBE is a fine game, and in many respects it is an excellent evolutionary step to Civilization 5. The game balance still has some flaws (trade is ridiculously overpowered, for example). Right now, Civ 5 + Expansions is a better game. A lot of that is just because Sid games seem to require at least one expansion to get all the kinks out, which is fine. I strongly suspect CBE’s first expansion will move it from ‘Fine’ to ‘Excellent’.
The problem I can’t get past with CBE is ironically the same problem I couldn’t get past with Alpha Centauri – the formula that makes Civ wonderful is just a lot stickier when you wander through real human history. For a lot of reasons, but earning ‘Autonomous Systems’ is just not as awesome a feeling as learning ‘the Wheel’ or ‘Gunpowder’. Why? Because we can map that onto our knowledge of human history. We understand its impact implicitly. We know where it should appear in the tech tree. We can mentally compare our progress to real human history. There’s just a whole bunch of hidden resonance in there, which CBE and SMAC just didn’t get access to. The designers who tried did a fine job (a better one on SMAC than CBE, IMHO), but in a completely uphill battle.
Resonance is the idea that some games and game design elements are just plain sticky. This can take many forms, but familiarity is one form that has proven to be successful over and over again. As an example, I went to a talk once where a God of War combat designer talked about how the team liked to have Kraatos’ moves mirror, on some level, moves and poses you were familiar with from other movies. In most cases, the move was different enough that the relationship was not completely obvious, but they felt, psychologically, those moves just felt better.
Similarly, I believe that Resonance is a huge part of why Asheron’s Call didn’t beat EverQuest, despite having some advantages. AC tried desperately to invent its own bestiary and world from whole cloth, creating a litany of monsters that were all new! Fresh! And original! Meanwhile, EQ gave us the orcs, dwarves and elves that we grew up playing D&D with. The result made the game immediately more relatable. And in a day and age where you have a very brief window in order to win a player from another entertainment source, ‘immediately relatable’ is the whole ballgame.
Which on many levels sucks. Resonance is a concept that nudges designers towards not straying too far afield. Resonance is the reason why lazy designers reach for overused tropes – the free emotional impact in these existing tropes make it easier and quicker to build characters and tell stories, because players already on some level know the basics. Take resonance too far, and you’ve got yourself a game that’s a total uninspired ripoff. A game that lacks resonance feels too alien, too distant, or too unrelatable.
Long story short is that CBE, I found, to have a deficit of Resonance, and of Relatability that makes the game easy to get into, at least compared to other Civ games. One thing they could have done better has been their approach to the factions – the alien, ethereal vibe they were going for – and the high level of abstraction representing them all. Compare that to James Raynor, the voice and spirit of the Human faction in StarCraft. He’s designed to be our stand-ins, to act as the avatar of humanity as it spreads its way across the stars into open conflict in an alien universe. He’s a huge part of the reason that StarCraft resonates – it gives us something extremely strong and familiar we can latch onto, which made it possible for Blizzard to unfold the weirder and more esoteric parts of the experience.
At any rate, I won’t say I’m done with CBE – there’s still an awful lot to like. But it will probably be parked on Steam until XPack #1 comes out.
You’re right, I really liked the fact that Asheron’s Call was a universe that was completely original and free from any assumptions. But probably for the market it was a bad decision. Ahh but I’ll never forget the break dancing olthoi video from the AC2 concept art:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mTWK1e0C7s
Interesting thoughts. I know that there were a handful of technologies in SMAC that had a lot of resonance with me, having an interest in tech and futurology. (Space elevators!But overall, I think that’s one of the reasons that having a more engaging set of leaders, and giving the planet a personality and a “story” that happens as you play was necessary.
Civ is just naturally compelling, as everyone has some familiarity with humanity’s history. World leaders that we recognize, and technologies that are clearly tied to the world we live in, are enough to give us a sense of place. We fill in the rest. SMAC and CBE lack that, the “resonance” as you put it. Which is why they can’t just create an environment and put us in it. We don’t have context to create the details and fill in the rest of the picture.
SMAC does that. Planet has a personality. It may not be as immediately compelling as with Civ, but it’s there. The interludes as Planet comes alive. The quotes from leaders with each advance, and the wonder videos, that all help paint a picture of the world that you’re inhabiting.
CBE doesn’t really do that. Even from the beginning, the “selection” of the planet to colonize, and the lack of effect on the game world other than your standard Civ parameters, discourages thinking of the new world as a solid setting. Then throughout, there’s very little that gives each tech meaning other than just a name and a set of benefits. There’s no resonance, and nothing to make up for it in the design.
The actual Civ games never needed world building, since it’s already done by history. But Civ in space does. SMAC understood that, and CBE didn’t.
I think a reason SMAC was so compelling is because there is a strong resonance regarding philosophies. There was two main conflicts, humans VS Planet and a 7 way ideological conflict with 3 axis. There was the ecological faction VS the capitalist faction, scientist VS religious and a 3 way conflict between cynic democracy, proto Chinese communism and fascism. Everyone had an idea how the new earth should be and are invested in realizing their vision. Conflicts were not only inevitable, they were bred by clashes of ideologies In BH, conflicts seem lame and even out of place. The setting have few hocks for non gamey conflicts.
When I got SMAC, I didn’t understood the Spartans. I thought they were only a band of Americans gun nut. I was not Americans and I was too young and uninformed about fascism to understand the Spartans. As a result, I found that the Spartans were boring. Now that I understand them, I wouldn’t find them out of place.
Also, SMAC had very interesting descriptions and quotes that helped to figure how advances were profoundly changing humanity. By comparison, the tech web feels like new toys, not technologies and philosophies that fundamentally transforming us. Affinity feel more superficial than the old philosophical advances. The virtues feel like gaining perks at level up instead of making societal choices.
I think that Brian Reynolds’s philosophy background contributed at making SMAC a much more memorable game despite having mechanics inferiors to BE or CIV5.
Omg yes.
SMAC is probably my favorite games of all time and your post sums up how I feel about it exactly.
3 thumbs up
I’ve always suspected that this is the real reason why fantasy MMORPGs have generally been so much more successful than science fiction ones. There’s a well known “standard consensus fantasy world”, the one with orcs and elves and dragons and so on, that they can use to give players a ready-made sense of familiarity. There’s no corresponding consensus SF universe, so SF games have to do pretty much all their worldbuilding from square one; the resulting unfamiliarity acts as a psychological barrier to players.
That’s also why I tend to find that SF games are generally more interesting on a baseline — the world has to have had some thought put into it.
And then I discover that the Space Elves are at war with the Space Orcs and die a little inside.
Raynor was a god damn red-blooded AMERICAN. Talk about resonance. I was a teenager when Starcraft was big and the southern-drawled Terrans were probably the biggest appeal of the game to me.
Wildstar suffers from the resonance lack on the other hand. Pretty badly in some cases, like their stat system – what the hell is Grit! Stop making me read its description every time I get some loot!
I’ll be honest and say I don’t have first hand experience of Civ V or CBE, I’m still slaughtering barbarians in Civ IV.
Taking a quick peek at CBE the interface looks a bit sterile and in conflict with the slightly cutesy graphics. From what I saw of Civ V gameplay it looks more like a mod or a slight upgrade to a loved and tested format.
That can lead to a clash of expectations and that unsettling ‘uncanny valley’ feeling where the differences are just enough to make you wish you were playing the original.
As to resonance, because looking forward to the future doesn’t have the same communal cultural historical depths to draw on more time has to be spent on world building. Not just the dryer aspects of encyclopedia entries but infusing the graphics and sounds with that same depth of detail.
Shortcuts can be taken, look at Star Wars (okay technically Space Opera and not that removed from fantasy) the original films rely heavily on Fascist iconography from World War 2 in uniform design to carry a resonance of who the bad guys are with their clinically shiny and soulless space-stations. While the good guys are living in a rough and ready world that’s got the rust, dents and scrapes of history. A very similar style choice taken for Firefly (a little closer to Sci-fi, although I’d argue the terraforming elevates it to fantasy 😉 )
The tech tree doesn’t look that friendly to get to grips with, sure there are some filters, but it looks like it hits you over the head with information overload.
When asking a player to develop ‘tech’ trees (I use the word tech loosely as it could also apply to ‘magic’ ) it is far more intuitive to understand the historical sense of progression and the sort of units and civilisation bonuses that will be attached to them.
There is no great leap to appreciating domesticating Horses and developing the Wheel are both needed before you can have Chariots.
This disappears as soon as you move beyond our current state of science. There is often talked about ‘singularity’, points beyond which the paradigm shift is so severe you cannot predict what life will be like the other side of it. Even the smaller shifts can be hard to assimilate if you are not given a deeper sense of the effect they have or they are not on a simple linear chain of progression.
My favourite example of a game that’s original to the point of discomfort is Vangers, a top down racing game where most of the missions are about serving the whims of alien bug larva and the needs of their very weird life cycles. There are no humans in the game at all, and you have to learn about the alien society as you go.
There’s also the classic text adventure, The Gostak. All the nouns, verbs and adjectives in the game are gibberish that you have to learn about from context and error messages. To this day there are words in that game that haven’t been related back to real world concepts.