Civilization, Ultima, and so on
...I would suggest that Civilization and Ultima were really
not very good games. Sure, I've played them extensively, enjoyed them, but they were not very well made.
Civilization was neat because it was ground breaking at the time, but if you go back and play it and really pay attention...I think you'll see that it's actually very poorly designed. Combat was utterly simplistic, and often ridiculous (phalanx destroys a battleship, anyone?) the build tree was not well made, the game was thoroughly full of situations that didn't really make much sense(400 years for a 100,000 people to build a library?) entire systems of the game were badly made and completely useless (diplomacy?) and the AI was basically a random number generator (computer builds hanging gardens before you get your first marketplace?) Civilization was a glorified educational encyclopedia with a poorly thought out game slapped onto it. It was like Treasure Math Storm, or Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego with resource and combat systems stapled to it.
The Ultima series, especially in the beginning, was plagued with similar problems. Again...don't misunderstand. I played all these games at the time and enjoyed them thoroughly. But let's not let our sense of nostalgia blind us. Consider Ultima III. It was my introduction to the series. Fully half of the game was simply wandering around collecting gold to pay for all the myriad random stuff you had to pay for. A considerable portion of the rest of the game was simply waiting around to get a pirate ship. Most of the major premises of the game were completely random and nonsensical. Touching lava in one dungeon gives you immunity to fire? Touching lava in another dungeon allows you to walk through forcefields? Touching lava in yet another dungeon allows you to teleport over sea serpents? That was a major point in the game...touching lava in each of the various dungeons to give you super powers that you needed elsewhere. Now, sure...the game did have some very interesting ideas. The final battle was against a computer that you couldn't fight, you had to feed punch cards that would give it intructions to self destruct. Sure. That's neat. An unconventional. But how did you figure out that this was what you were supposed to do? Some random peasant in some random town tells you. Most of the game clues were discovered this way. Talk to random dude who gives you a major secret of the universe. Not well thought out. And the clues that weren't freely given by random passersby were purchased from clue merchants for gobs of gold. Again the theme of "kill stuff to get gold" being the majority of gameplay. And what about the cards themselves...where did they come from? After suicidally sailing the pirate ship that you wandered around for days looking for into a whirlpool...you're transported to a magic land with attribute vending machines that you dump thousands and thousands of gold into to become stronger, smarter, etc. And, if you "search" around these machines, you find the punchcards you need to command the big, evil bad guy computer to self destruct.
Who thinks this stuff up? It's totally random, unintuitive, doesn't make sense, isn't much fun to play, and it's only the fact that these games were the first in their genres that they did so well. We may have emotional attachment to them because they were so novel at the time...but really, if you were to slap pretty graphics on games like these, the gameplay and design aren't any better than many of the modern trash games that are being produced now.
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Topic: DF on par with (or even better than) X-Com, Civilization, Ultima, and so on (Read 8290 times)