How about Spore? This is a bit different from a vaporware accusation, but it might be more appropriate than the Molyneux comparison. Spore, in its early phases, really did deliver on a lot of its promises. There was lots of emergent gameplay, player decisions as gods really did have significant impacts on the way creatures worked, there was an emphasis on experimentation and replaying from an early stage. But over time all this got abandoned in favor of solid rules players could master as playtesting revealed that losing really isn't fun and players think their animal that is horribly impractical but looks cool really should be cool. What are the chances that CE might end up with most of its emergent elements compromised for pragmatic concerns, or things getting stuck too early in predictable local optima and lacking variety, players being unable to master the game and derive value from it, etc. On another note, do you guys use any forward chaining techniques to restrict the search depth of your character AI?
Do we really want to start a thread bashing Clockwork Empires for what it isn't? I'll tell you what it isn't -- available for play.
Given the sheer difference between games and the simple lack of experience we have with Clockwork Empires, I don't see that we can really make any meaningful conclusions on this hypothesis. Certainly any new element in any game can be gutted by the desire for the tried and true, beyond that I don't know what you can say. If anyone is going to innovate, it is a company like this one, being less beholden to the endless march of safe sequels and executive pocketbook calculus.
Hey, I'll join in. For one, we're not owned by EA and subject to the whims of their executive meddling and artistically conservative interpretations of focus-group testing. Spore
Spore makes me very sad to. The premise held such promise and playing it felt so good. And then finding out that it was less deep then the dust on the ground made me very depressed for a few months.
If you go into spore with low expectations it can be fun at some parts, but yes spore horribly undelivered, maybe someday we will see a game like it again that actually follows through on all the expectations.
I thought that Spore was fun, but it lacked depth -- it had an incredible amount of breadth, but it sacrificed depth to get that. The consequences of that were that even though it was fun at first, you realized that there wasn't much joy in replaying any of the sections more than a couple of times, nor was there much reason to spend a lot of time with the space exploration piece. It was fun... for a couple of weeks. Then again, there are games that have been better reviewed that have done worse as far as replayability.
Given the general tone of pitch for CE of Dwarf-Fortress-With-Sane-UI, I expect the player base drawn to it will be different to Spore's. Likely a much higher level of self-admitted masochism, for starters...
To offer my bit on Spore, I think the problem is that the (amazing, astounding) simulation and procedural generation basically didn't matter. All it did was make pretty stuff to populate a linear series of extremely simple minigames - match the pattern, click the place, collect the things and put them on your thing then collect the other things to put them on your thing until your done, etc. But the simulation didn't matter in this - all that determined (say) your creature's walk speed was the fact that you collected the doodad with speed 2 in the last minigame. (The cell phase game was kinda fun in an arcadey way, I'll admit.) Speculating: It's like someone didn't get this whole procedural/simulation thing, they're like, what if the target market doesn't understand? How is this like other games that we aim at the youth market? Make it like that, make a solid return on our investment. Compare this to Sim Ant which, man, I must have been like 7 or 8 the first time I played it. That's a real simulated agent-driven game. I jump in, first thing I see is I'm an ant and I can dig. Awesome, digging is fun. Dig tunnels and watch ants walk through them. Oh, maybe I can make more direct tunnels so they can get from place to place faster. Or how about secret hideaways to store food and eggs, cool. And hey, when I start carrying food or eggs around, other ants do it too. How can I manipulate this? What are these other buttons, what the heck is a "pheromone" and what do these overlays mean displaying different types? And so on. That's exploration of a series of interconnected systems rather than hand-holding through a series of gated minigames. Sorry for the rant. But I seriously don't think it's just nostalgia, I do think that when Maxis was bought that core value of making games/toys about exploring systems was lost in a more structured contemporary approach to designing a product.
I like this way of thinking, and not just because SimAnt remains one of my favorite games. I don't recall ever winning against those evil Red Ants, which fostered a deep psychological aversion to the color red for many years. (seriously. I'm crazy, let's move on shall we?) I really wish more games these days would just -stop- with the hand-holding. I get it: the majority of gaming people today are probably less intelligent than they used to be(but that may just be the online influence making people seem less intelligent...), or they are more inclined to needing assistance, or they simply don't have patience anymore. But I really wish there was a "turn hand-holding off" option sometimes. I'm a huge minority in that regard, but I remember thoroughly enjoying stumbling my way about a game system until that "Eureka!" moment when things started to click and you started to get better. Back in the days when RTS games were still a thing, I actually liked losing. I believed then, and I still believe now, that you learn more by losing and making mistakes than you do by winning all the time. You learn where you need to make adjustments, and that makes your strategy better. I personally hope that Clockwork can strike a good balance this way and teach players that "hey, you just lost your colony, but that's okay! Not only is it okay, it's encouraged! Here's another colony to burn under the fires of Quag'garoth!"
IIRC wasn't Spore pretty much the breaking point between Maxis and EA? I believe it was revealed that a large part of the delay of the game was due to EA meddling around with the game and the studio with Will Wright and EA at odds over what should and shouldn't be in the game and the overall direction. All I know is in the end Will Wright resigned and we've not heard of him since.
Shoot, are we the same age? I always feel like people that impress me should be older... And really, was anything as good as mobbing that damn spider and killing it? Sure, the caterpillar was good food and all, but it was all about seeing that sucker shrivel up and die before your mighty forces... If only one could swarm the lawn mower man's leg...
I think the problem with spore was that it was too big and cost too much money. It HAD to be succesfull and for that they cut out any risk. I don´t think we have to fear that here, because the guys at gaslamp are making a game they want to make, not one that HAS to be a topseller (though that would be awesome of course). In the end spore was a nice editor/zoo program. Hell, a lot of "games" that are just about exploring get good reviews today, so let´s just put spore in the same category.
I have a theory that that tends to happen in larger companies because there are too many layers of people separated from the actual dreamers and developers, too many people who aren't there because they love making games, but because it's a job to them rather than a love. People who want to create something which they can be proud of are going to be less concerned over mass appeal, and more concerned with their own ideals. That's not to say that the money people aren't always wrong -- at some point, as a company grows, you have more and more people depending on the success of each project that they are (maybe rightfully) more concerned with the well-being of their co-workers than any artistic considerations. Furthermore, older people (rightfully so) tend to be a lot more conservative with their money and investments, and there jobs, because the less time you have until retirement, the dumber it is to take those chances. Younger people can afford to fail. It's actually a smart thing (I remember hearing this way back when I was being encouraged to invest in a 401K by the people who ran it for my company, and they were trying to explain how we should decide which investments were best for us based on how close we were to retirement -- some of what they said may have been BS, but that particular thing about conservative vs. more risky investments rang true).
The thing that Spore did wrong was the space stage there was way too much micro management and the very baine of my own and everyone else's existence the Grox.
Seeing a dev explain things in this way really adds to the hope I have for CE , you guys DEFINETLY will NOT disappoint seeing spore and micro management in the same sentence irritates me.. spore had NO micromanagement, and what it did have that could be called "micromanagement" (the eco-collapse quests were very annoying), was pointless. Dwarf fortress has tons of micromanagement, but I love it... The difference, the things you do in DF actually matter, no matter what, you are effecting an entire world.. and could change the way your next game goes.Or make interesting things happen...
