60 Minute Review of…
Master of Orion 3
Master of Orion 3 is presented as a bewildering swarm of data against
black and blue backgrounds. The main map is an up-close view of
differently colored stars strewn like confetti on a ballroom floor.
Getting information on specific planets involves crawling down several
screens, one at a time. Finding specific systems on the map is a
matter of hunting around in the closest zoom view, because as soon
as you zoom out even one smidge, all the labels disappear and you're
just staring at all that confetti. The hypertext links are inconsistent
and riddled with annoying dead ends. Most of MOO3 is a spreadsheet
scattered across a thousand screens, a morass of crowded displays
with no clear relationship to each other where huge chunks of data
fall over each other in an avalanche of sliding panels, thumping
open and shut with the sound effect of a giant door slamming shut.
That sound effect might as well represents all the barriers to
making sense of how MOO3 works. There are broad "master's notes"
for some of the screens and a poorly organized online encyclopedia
packed with general information. The outdated manual, which is obviously
based on an earlier build of the game, manages to be simultaneously
dense and uninformative. Extraneous information is liberally scattered
through the 127 pages, of which 39 pages are exhaustive backstory
shuffled between the chapters like commercial breaks. There's no
index. "Really," the documentation seems to say, "this
stuff is too complicated for you. Here's just enough information
to discourage you from wanting to look any farther. Now why don't
you sit back and let us take care of the details while you hit the
'turn' button?"
This seems to be the central idea around which Master of Orion
3 is built: the player is superfluous. The AI develops planets,
sets up colonies, builds ships, trains armies, and conducts research.
There are some token nods to allowing the player to get more involved,
like the deceptive 'Planet econ AI' check box mentioned above. But
even when you do roll up your sleeves to plunge your hands into
this tub of wriggling numbers, the interface makes it clear that
you really shouldn't bother. Information is scattered all over the
place, three screens over, two panels deep, at the bottom of a drop
down list, or beneath some tab shoved into some margin where you
wouldn't think to look. It's a heap of numerals with percentages
and decimal points and invisible modifiers. Just when you think
you've got something figured out, it doesn't add up and you get
the feeling that the game doesn't expect you to be messing around
with this stuff. It's like you've just opened the back of something
electronic and suddenly you're out of your depth. With Master of
Orion 3, you're on a need to know basis, and frankly, you don't
need to know. You're just here to press the 'turn' button.
In addition to being maddeningly inscrutable, MOO3 completely misses
the point of the previous games' appeal. The ship building in Master
of Orion 1 and 2 was a large part of their personality. You designed
space ships by stuffing their hulls with nifty little devices, maybe
tweaking them to make them fit better or hit harder or skew further
to the side to draw a bead on more nimble enemy ships. At its best,
it was like building model spaceships. It was one of the signature
elements of Master of Orion.
And MOO3 fails completely to recreate it. Ship building here has
all the excitement of letting the AI draw up a laundry list of the
most advanced components. Sure, you can get in there and do it yourself,
futzing with the inconsistent interface and trying to decipher unexplained
numbers and statistics. But don't expect any payoff, because you
use your ships as fleets built according to esoteric rules that
seem to have been inspired by Harpoon. This downplays your individual
ship designs by forcing you to use them in clusters that are utterly
devoid of personality. And then you get to the wretched tactical
combat.
February 21, 2003
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