I’ve been putting off writing my thoughts on this latest expansion for civ because I wanted to play it a few times, but then I kinda stopped playing it for a bit for various reasons and kind of forgot about it.

So looking through the expansion it was a fairly good one. They added in a ton of new civs, leaders, 2 new technologies, corporations, and bunches of new units, they also had some new scenarios which all have various themes like fantasy and sci fi which I’ve not had the chance to play yet. I’ve never really been a huge fan of scenarios in these games, however I may play these because of the themes… I think it’d be cool to see dragosn or what not in civ.

The first thing I noticed that while all the new things were great, 90% of them seemed to be from previous games that they just never bothered to put in Civ4 for instance the Native American civ was in the base Civ3, but hadn’t made an appearance here yet. This was not just in the civs, this was in the units as well. Still, there were some new civs & units to keep it fresh like the Holy Roman Empire and the Levee. I was still disappointed by this, it just made Civ 4 feel a little more like Civ 3 without giving it any distinctiveness of its own. (They were advertising the heck out of those scenarios as well and I was really hoping to see mech suits & dragons in the game natural).

There have been several gameplay modifications as well. Just playing it, I have noticed that they tweaked the pollution of a city a bit because nearly every city I have had seems to go into the sickly face mode fairly easily. This actually is a pretty good thing because previously you really could get through the game with only one or two health buildings in the game (I usually got by with just the aqueduct and a hospital). Now you almost need to build all of them, though you can usually put them off until other things, you’ll need to build a couple early to make sure the health of your cities don’t get too low. There are also a couple of new health buildings which help in this cause.

I haven’t totally figured out the new espionage system in the game, that is something I’ve never done hugely well with. Although it does seem that with more espionage points that you put into a particular opponent, you get more of their map whited out, you see what tech they are working on, and you see their units without any real work at all which is very nice. I always hated going through the work in Civ3 to get anything done. I’ve still found very little use for spies, I realize they allow you to go in and destroy opponents improvement & buildings, but I have never found this hugely useful, I’d rather build units to do that which can actually fight. I have however noticed that the spies are attacking me far more than before which creates a need for the new espionage buildings to get built (one of which improves defense against espionage). Great Spies, like normal Spies I find fairly useless… although I have found that they help in getting an additional golden age easier (usually after 4 or 5 it is nearly impossible to get further golden ages), and the scotland yard that they can create are somewhat nice.

Corporations are pretty cool… I haven’t fully decided if they are really worth their weight, but it’s fun to try out a new dynamic. They basically act like late game religion, but they cost a ton of money to maintain. A few of them seemed worthwhile, but some of them seemed like they didn’t offer many benefits for the cost they incurred on the town. Actually considering you also have to sacrafice a great person of the appropriate level, this may be another reason why one may not want to have them… I think these are best looked at if you really look at the benefits of the corp.

I noticed a couple other new game dynamics, but the only one I can think of off hand comes from one of the new civ’s units which is this elephant that not only does better vs. mounts, but also will always attack mounts first. So no longer can your opponent hide the mounts in a stack, you will always attack them! That is a great idea and I hope they add more such units in the future.

Overall, a good little expansion… I think I liked the Warlords expansion a tad more just for the reason that with the civ buildings and the fighting stuff, I felt like they added more that I was interested in with that expansion. I do think they added more here though. Actually considering the number of leaders they now have in the game, it is more than a little surprising they also didn’t add new triats for them, but this was a very well balanced expansion at the very least and if you are a fan of the game it is definitely worth the buy.

So why do all video games have to be epic anyways? I look around and the storyline of every game is some epic scale… save the universe/world/girl/etc. Nothing real. In fact these are the same type of stories you tend to get from action, fantasy, and sci-fi movies. I use movies here mostly because much of the game industry compares itself to the movie industry, even if done so unintentionally. It is common knowledge that game storylines are aweful nearly accross the board… has anyone realized that those genres in the movie industry are known for having bad stories nearly across the board? Sure, we see a rare gem like Lord of the Rings that is actual quality, but for the most part, the storylines of these genres tend to be nothing.

I think the reason is that in general people don’t care about the epic stories, what really affect people far better is the personal story. For instance, I think in general to most people will find more personal meaning by watching Schindler’s List than they might find in watching Fast and the Furious. That is not to say that many people don’t prefer to watch Fast and the Furious over Schindler’s List, but people respect the List more than the Furious, and people think it is a much higher quality film as well. This difference really goes towards mood of the viewer more than anything else. When push comes to shove… Schindler’s List is the better movie despite not making the money that Fast & the Furious likely did.

So why is the game industry trying so hard to mimic Fast & the Furious instead of Schindler’s List? Strike that, why is the game industry trying so hard to mimic 2 Fast 2 Furious instead of Schindler’s list? Because not only is the industry trying to mimic pointless movies that are not taken seriously, they are mimicing pointless sequals that are rarely as good.

Money is one thing, but this really only works for the original in most respects… quite often it is the first that makes the most… Metroid Prime did better than Metroid Prime 2, and Metroid did better than both. There is a caveat to older games though. These can often be rejuvinated, but even here we tend to see greatest return on the first of a new revision. For instance, FFVII did much better than previous Final Fantasies, but it was also the first real 3D FF game, and has largely done much better than any FF game since that point. Likewise, Mario 64 has done much better than the 3 or 4 Marios that have come since then, and has done better than many of the previous Marios as well. Of course in every rule there is exception, but this seems to work nearly across the board.

I think there are three more real issues than money though. First… talent. The industry is just not geared towards writing talent. Movies and Television employ screenwriters, and while there are more writers coming into the industry, they are still not relied on much in the field. In most cases programmers think that they can write stories as well as anyone else, which is ironic because I doubt they would think that everyone else (like say the secretary answering the phone) could program as well as they could. Because of this, the stories are weak at best that get produced, often failing to even outdo high school level stories in many cases.

The second is somewhat related to the first but not entirely. And that is familiarity. The game industry is a copy cat industry. And what we see work once is copied beyond belief. Doom was hugely successful, and it was successful with a bad story. Now we see countless remakes of Dooms, in fact nearly every FPS put out is just a remake of Doom with a slightly different setting, but mostly the settings and stories are the same damn game. This can be said nearly everywhere… Tied to this is that game developers often develop games they want to see based on what they like to see in stories. Unfortunately, game developers tend to be the types who really enjoy Sci-fi, fantasy, and action genres and thus this all we see, even down to copied bad stories. Not to say anything against this, I personally love these genres too.

The third problem, is ease… it is just easy for everyone to shell out the same game over and over again. This is why you see copy cats and sequals in the movie, book, magazine, news, and television industries as well. If it has little to no effort, that is better than any effort at all.

But we as an industry really need to get over it, because we are not taken seriously by anyone else. Maybe we could easier make the claim that we are art in some fashion if our games actually were art in some fashion. And using the last issue, one of the easiest ways to create art is through story. Why not have it if it would help the respectability of the industry so much? Why in god’s name would the industry not want to be respected?