60 Minute Review of…Master of Orion 3Taking another cue from Civilization, the original Master of Orion games relied on their tech trees to ramp you up a learning curve and suck you in for the long haul. By researching new technologies, the game mechanics evolved. You learned new ways to develop your colonies and build your ships. Each new discovery was something to look forward to. But in MOO3, you get a confusing "tech matrix" with six areas of study, each with several levels of advancement, each with several technologies. Many of these have no clear indication of what they do in the context of the game or why you'd ever want to research them. Not that you have much choice in the matter, as they'll manage to work their way into your research queue with no input from you. Your job is to set a series of slider bars, which will then wiggle their way to different settings anyway.
As you play, a series of technologies parades through your turn report, some being made visible, some being researched, and some being made available. Each of these stages ensures that every tech will get several chances to say 'hey, here I am!', which is kind of embarrassing for them, considering how impossible it is to keep track of who they all are. If you thought the techs in Alpha Centauri were esoteric, wait till you meet these guys. You get standard sci-fi techs like Space Ports and Fusion Drives, but a lot of the tech matrix is crammed with an assortment of the arcane, the mundane, and the utterly ludicrous. What's a Scanning Resonance Collector supposed to be? What are Holistic Practices, Frame of Reference Simulators, Cross Discipline Methodologies, and Societal Workplace Modules? And who thought it would be exciting to discover Broader Usage, Database Standardization, Lending Associations, and Adaptive Administrative Techniques? At least Alpha Centauri's techs fit into that game's powerful narrative framework. Here they're like guests you've never even met who show up at your party. The races in the original Master of Orion games gave them considerable
replay because they all felt different. But because MOO3 is choked
in a fog of its own inscrutable mechanics, there's very little sense
for how the races play differently. Sure, the silicoids eat minerals
instead of food, so that number in the upper left of the screen
that tells you how much food you're making each turn is going to
be smaller than when you were playing the humans. So what. It's
not like you're ever building farms or even paying much attention
to whether your planets, which are automatically colonized and developed,
have much arable land. Sure, the insects get some sort of collective
government model, but it's not like the governments have any noticeable
effect on how the game plays. Sure, the harvesters are supposed
to be evil, but it's not like you're in this for the backstory about
mysterious origins. Each race plays almost identically to any other
race, with the exception that the main splash screen shows a picture
of the last race you played. This is the extent of Master of Orion
3's personality.
February 21, 2003 |
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