Qt3 Games Podcast: making strategy games even better

Posted by on February 20, 2013 in Game Podcasts

legendary_tactical_obstacle

This week we welcome Stardock’s Derek Paxton to talk about add-ons that make strategy games even better. For instance, the upcoming Legendary Heroes add-on for Fallen Enchantress. We also talk about Crysis 3, Nooky Koodie Poodoo: Wrath of the White Witch, this World of Warcraft thing McMaster keeps playing, the latest on Bungie and Gas Powered Games, and Sony’s Playstation 4 “look ma, no price!” reveal.

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  • http://twitter.com/CHGardiner Chris Gardiner

    The Fallen Enchantress expansion sounds great! FE is the first empire management-type game that’s really grabbed me. It’s just packed with great stuff.

  • http://www.facebook.com/bobby.bullets.18 Bobby Bullets

    How are you playing the beta before ALL the buyers who paid for the original disaster? I’d like to have earlier access, considering I paid for Elemental’s Collector’s Edition.

  • Mr_Propellerhead

    Tom, regarding the repetitive pattern of the Crysis games, didn’t the first Far Cry (and Crytek’s first game) follow much the same formula, substituting mutants for aliens?

  • tomchick

    Yep, absolutely. The Crysis template predates Crysis!

  • tomchick

    It was an early press build they provided so that I didn’t have to interview Derek based only on reading the press release. I’m sure Stardock is eager to get the beta into everyone else’s hands as soon as they’ve been able to put together a stable and reasonably feature complete build.

  • luke

    Great interview, Derek and Tom. It made me think of some questions for you guys:
    Derek, you said the decision was made during the development of Fallen Enchantress to make the civ-esque strategy layer have the most influence on the game’s outcome. Assuming that, what influence did you intend for the tactical layer to have on the game? Will that balance shift with the changes to tactical combat in Legendary Heroes?
    Is anything being done to evolve the mid and end game to make the decisions as weighty and impactful as the ones made during the first part of the game?

  • http://www.facebook.com/matthew.downie.353 Matthew Downie

    Tom, Influence points in GalCiv were votes in the next United Planets (or whatever the space UN was called) debate – not purely abstract trading tokens.

  • http://www.facebook.com/derek.paxton Derek Paxton

    The goal of tactical battles is to allow the player to see the results of their higher level decisions played out. It’s the place where you find out if all your planning is going to work.

    That theory is the same in LH, but the way we do it is more hands on. Instead of getting to see that you were smart to bring soldiers with pikes against heavily armored opponents, you still get those bonuses (pikes still negate a % of your enemies armor) but you also have new options available to you in combat. We are relying less on statistical differences and more on gameplay differences. For example axes are great weapons to take into battle against hordes of monsters like mites because they have a cleave ability you can use to hit 3 enemies at once. This allows the player to choose when, where and how he wants to use the ability. His strategic decisions still drive tactical combat by giving him options in tactical combat, not just by improving his stats.

  • http://www.liquidelectron.org/ BleedTheFreak

    I don’t get it – is the ad a spoof or something? There seems to be no such thing as Age of Knighthood (at least pertaining to a browser game). http://www.ageofknighthood.com seems to be the only domain not atually being used for anything.

  • tomchick

    Maybe their servers are down.

  • tomchick

    Ah, thanks for the reminder. However, wasn’t there some resource in GalCiv used only for diplomatic deals? Something analogous to the way influence works in Fallen Enchantress?

    Man, I helped write the manual for one of the GalCivs, so you’d think I’d remember that sort of thing… :)

  • http://www.liquidelectron.org/ BleedTheFreak

    I suppose they must be. But the page was not found yesterday, too, when I first tried it, and even Google searching comes up with nothing at all, like that game doesn’t exist. Puzzling.

  • anon

    TR has seemed utterly horrid from what they’ve shown, an amalgam of all the worst modern video game tropes topped with ample ludonarrative dissonance in a game they keep pushing the importance of Lara’s tale or whatever. Maybe it’s just bad PR, but they’ve shown quite a lot. Even if it turns out good, it’ll be one more series getting homogenized for big bucks, which is sad.

  • tomchick

    “Ludonarrative dissonance”? Is that even a thing? And if it is, who even talks that way?

    But I’d be curious to hear in plain English why you think it looks horrid. I haven’t seen any of the press for it since last year’s E3 presentation.

  • anon

    Clint Hocking does, and we must all worship at the altar of FC2!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludonarrative#Ludonarrative_dissonance

    There seems to be an immense disconnect between their purported gripping story of how Lara goes from an inexperienced, scared girl agonizing over hurting anyone to experienced Tomb Raider and the gameplay constraints of a modern AAA shooter in which she’s apparently a psychopath shotgunning of every living thing in sight. They put heavy emphasis on the narrative in their marketing, and it’s their chief justification for streamlining every part of the game, taking away real control and consequences for your actions.

    Cinematic sequences like Lara balancing above an abyss played up as hugely dramatic, when in reality you cannot fail. Simply hold forward, yay! Platforming completely removed or safetypadded to death. Detective vision babysitting. Obligatory XP system seemingly pointless beyond hooking some players, crafting, collectible doodads to sate OCD needs, seemingly non-existent AI, QTEs for gritty executions(so visceral, just like your screen desaturinggetting covered in blood when you’re hurt!), optional tombs for god’s sake. It just seems like a mishmash of everything popular at the moment instead of being its own thing. It’s not that I think you can’t do anything new with a series, it’s just that this doesn’t seem to be anything new, just going down a checklist of tropes from games that sold well this generation. That’s how it appears, could be that their PR is the worst in the world apart from securing review scores though.

  • Dave Perkins

    Jason, how did you read, “Put points into such skills as strength, wisdom, and dexterity!” without yawning? Professional, sir.