18 ms·
Sid Meier: “I don’t think I could make Civilisation today”
- eezurr 6y ago>"For a long time we were pushing up against the limits of what the computer could do,” he says. “We were trying to get the most out of the available hardware and then tap onto the players imagination to provide the rest. That was the art of game design, to provide that stimulus. You would imagine being a fighter pilot, or a pirate, or the king of a great civilisation.” Where some games are more like films, gorgeous to look at but where many of the artistic decisions have been taken for you, Meier’s games are more like novels, inviting the reader to fill in the gaps. His maxims." Leaving the rest up to imagination is the key part IMO. Rollercoaster Tycoon, Simcity 2 & 4 (never played 3000), Warcraft II (and too some extent, III), Baldur's Gate I/II.. the graphics are just enough to tell you what's going on, and your brain fills in the rest of the details. I feel the closer graphics approach reality, and the more details their are, your brain begins to filter out those details, and notices the flaws/unpolished pixels, which ends up taking away from the immersive experience.
- grillvogel 6y ago90s PC gaming was a golden era
- sgillen 6y agoFeels to me like right now/this last decade is a golden era as well. Factorio, rimworld, binding of Isaac, dark souls + sekiro, xcom, civ 6, Divinity, paradox games, Minecraft, subnautica, rocket league. To name a few of my favorites.
- diffrinse 6y agoThe Last of Us Part II
- mywittyname 6y agoToday is absolutely the golden age. We stand at the point where making and selling a game is easier than it has ever been. I think over the years, people will continue to move away from PCs as a gaming platform to mobile devices, and shovelware from the casual, pay-to-play game companies will keep the market so saturated that it will be hard to discover great indie titles. PS. your list is missing Disco!
- jointpdf 6y agoThe term shovelware reminds me of the E.T. incident. A game so bad that Atari literally got out the shovels: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial
- chrisco255 6y agoReally? I feel like any damage mobile could do has already been done at this point. Mobile is no longer novel and has been saturated for many years. I haven't built a new PC in years but recently with the fantastic AMD chips and some great titles that I want to explore, I plan on doing it soon. Plus it would be nice to have a system I could tether a VR headset to if I want.
- Merem 6y agoI tend to agree with him (well, for me 95-2004 is the golden era) for the reason that it's mostly "been there, done that" nowadays. In addition, you have a lot of bad business practices such as microtransactions, lootboxes, terrible DRM (Denuvo, Steam etc), release of unfinished products and you can't even buy the games physically anymore. Apart from some indie games, nothing really seems worth it. As someone who started playing PC games at the beginning of the 00s, I'm mostly playing ones released in the 90s and early 00s. The main issue with older games is typically the UI and controls. Apart from that, they feel a lot more "fresh" due to its content and often times experimentation. In contrast, a lot of games these days stick to the same things and at best combine two genres into one (roguelites for instance). Or they take old ideas and just build on top of it. Very rarely you get something like "Return of the Obra Dinn".
- Shared404 6y agoFor me personally, I would add Hollow Knight to the list. That is one of the few games I intend to always have installed on at least one machine.
- drivebycomment 6y agoYeah. I think gaming market and the technology are doing just fine since it produced Hollow Knight. I really think it is one of the best games in history, and one of the greatest storytelling in an interactive, electric media. Such exquisite balance between simplicity and detail, music and visual, story line and game play, characters and background, etc. Waiting for Silksong...
- mercer 6y agoThen there's also Shovel Knight, Celeste, The Messenger, Stardew Valley, Undertale, and so on. We've never had it better as gamers!
- renewiltord 6y agoMinecraft is the best game I have ever played in 25 years of playing games. Nothing like it. A masterpiece. Once in a generation masterwork. Created an avenue for creativity for a generation. It's for the history books.
- Merem 6y agoDo you know Clonk? Minecraft is basically that, just in 3D and with some added things like a procedurally-generated world and stuff like hunger. But crafting, "blocks", extracting materials, mobs, multiplayer, creating new items, mechanics, scenarios etc for the game and so on were already there, many years before Minecraft. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Clonk-Endeavour-4.9.5.4-deutsch-screen.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Clonk-En... https://cc-archive.lwrl.de/shots/7.jpg https://cc-archive.lwrl.de/shots/7.jpg (with Stippel pack) Seems like it's really hard to come by screenshots these days. Things like the Stargate pack with working portals, Goa'uld etc were just great.
- renewiltord 6y agoIncredible. What a disappointment I did not come across these as a child. There's something to Minecraft, though, and I can't quite describe it.
- Kiro 6y agoClonk is great but not comparable to Minecraft imo.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y agoSome of the added things you mentioned plus the 3d aspect are vital to what minecraft is. The game starts in survival mode and slowly switches to building mode which is a very well executed and satisfying transition. The 3d aspect of it is important and so is the hunger. Hunger is the first bit of horizontal progression, then the rest comes from unlocking building resources and convenience. Vertical progression in comparison is quick and 99% of the mobs soon pose no challenge.
- mcv 6y ago
- GarvielLoken 6y agoTotally agree. Dark Souls threw every third person action game of the nineties down the trash. Same with the wargame series being the best rts game ever released, in complexity combined with real time and unit balance it's unparalleled. The only 90 games worth talking about anymore are the rpg games, the space simulators/rpgs and Homeworld. As in that you would actually prefer to play it instead of a modern game for none nostalgic reasons. And we still have games breaking new ground like Disco Elysium.
- freeAgent 6y agoEh, I think there are truly classic games from all genres from the 90s that are still relevant and played today. RTS games like StarCraft and Red Alert still have large followings. On the FPS side there’s the original Counter-Strike (well, “1.6” at least), Doom, Quake, and even stuff like Starsiege: Tribes which I’d say are still relevant and hugely influential. I have played lots of these games in recent years. I enjoy the relative simplicity of them compared to most modern day counterparts.
- Shared404 6y ago> Dark Souls threw every third person action game of the nineties down the trash. I dunno. Ocarina still holds up today, or at least the 3DS remake does. I don't know about the original.
- GarvielLoken 6y agoYeah, the Zelda series is alright. And the Zelda games for all consoles are still worth playing.
- jewelry 6y agoI'd argue it was a golden era for you as that's the best time of you to play game. My kids would say 2020 is the golden era of game as they started to enjoy minecraft and roblox now.
- smabie 6y agoI played a lot of games as a teenager in the mid 2000s, and they kind of sucked. The graphics aged terribly compared to something like SNES or N64 games and the game play wasn't that great. 2010-2020 has undoubtedly been the golden age of gaming, thanks to Steam mostly. Without physical discs, lower indie price point games could be sold and still turn a profit. From a quality and diversity standpoint, the last ten years have seen the best games ever made, a lot of them indies.
- groby_b 6y agoI'd suspect that might be related to when you grew up. I'm a child of the late 80's, and nothing will ever beat the experiences of Zaxxon, Manic Miner, Paradroid, etc. I do know gamers who were teens in the late 70s, and it's all about River Raid, Pole Position, Frogger. My guess is that, just like music, what you experience as a teen shapes you.
- pavlov 6y ago> “...the closer graphics approach reality, and the more details their are, your brain begins to filter out those details, and notices the flaws” This is often called the uncanny valley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
- phaus 6y agoI thought the uncanny valley specifically referred to things that are so close to realistic that it physically creeps people out because they subconsciously know somethings wrong. Not necessarily realistic graphics taking away the magic. We aren't even close to the level of realism in games that's creepy IMO. Probably another few generations of GPUs away from that.
- tuatoru 6y agoYeah, this phenomenon is more like the hi-fi treadmill, where the closer your sound system is to perfect reproduction, the more annoying the remaining flaws get. And so you upgrade...
- serf 6y agoit's not just that phenomenon. Daniel Dennett mentions an experience where a painting , with very little detail up-close, appeared to him to have all the detail of a photograph when viewed from afar[0]. It's not quite the same thing as the uncanny valley effect, for him it came about from his naive expectation of up-close detail being blown apart by his experience, when getting closer and closer to the painting, of realizing that the painting itself was almost incomprehensible up-close -- the detail was created by the way the abstract shapes created the illusion of detail from afar on a very large canvas. It was sort of an artistic physical version of rendering LOD tricks. He expresses it much better than I do, I recommend the TED talk or the Google talk where he highlights this example as a way to gain insight into what consciousness may be. [0]: https://youtu.be/fjbWr3ODbAo https://youtu.be/fjbWr3ODbAo
- freediver 6y agoIf you really want to experience your imagination being talked to directly, try MUDs instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg&feature=emb_logo
- StanislavPetrov 6y agoWe used to pay $6 an hour (~$14 an hour in 2020 dollars) to play MUD1 (British Legends) at 300 baud on Compuserve in the mid 80s (plus phone fees which were ridiculously high in the 80s).
- WhompingWindows 6y agoI'm fine with nice graphics, they don't remove me from immersion any more than older, more basic graphics. My issue is when there is no substance to the game, when it's mostly eye-candy. As a Starcraft/Civ/Witcher gamer, I like complexity and decisions and which "era" of game graphics is mostly irrelevant. The mixture of games I play with pleasure spans from 1990's to 2020s, graphics are like music, atmospheric but not pivotal.
- phaus 6y agoYou may be on to something. However, I think the biggest thing that detracts from many beloved franchises today is a design philosophy where everyone is hell bent on streamlining out all of the gameplay to the point where the gameplay isn't fun for people that liked gaming in the 90s and before. Warcraft II was amazing because it had really great RTS mechanics. Warcraft III was a great game, but it introduced hero units so powerful the game ceased to be an RTS and became a hybrid of the genre it eventually gave birth to. It already felt like a MOBA half the time when players could just power-level their hero and come decimate your entire army almost single-handedly because you focused on building.* *Not saying this was an optimal strategy vs really gifted players, I wasn't a WC pro and I only played on LANs back in those days.
- chrisco255 6y agoYeah they pulled that with one of the more recent SimCity games. I used to enjoy laying pipe, running electricity and setting up zoned grids on tiny squares, but they streamlined and oversimplified way too many of the enjoyable details from SimCity 2000 (best version in my opinion). Maybe modern game designers thought those were empty chores but I felt they added to the sandbox feel of the game.
- non-entity 6y ago> but it introduced hero units so powerful the game ceased to be an RTS Interestingly, one of the criticisms of new total war games is similar to this. Sadly that series seems to be going down the drain.
- foresto 6y agoI still see examples of this in modern games. Overwatch chose cartoonish visuals while other shooters aimed for realism, and the result is both more appealing to my eye and more performant. A few more years down the road, I suspect Overwatch will still look good, while its contemporaries' attempts at photo-realism draw attention to their own shortcomings in light of what the tech of the day will be able to render. Breath of the Wild is another example of stylized art instead of trying to look like a live action movie. It is imagination fuel in a way similar to a Miyazaki film. I think it will age well, too.
- the_benno 6y agoWind Waker on the gamecube is a perfect example of what you're describing. Almost 20 years old and I still think the cel-shaded graphics look great, especially when compared to its more "realistic" contemporaries.
- rvnx 6y agoActual title of the article is: "Sid Meier: ‘I’m not sure I’d play Civilisation if it was released today’"
- tcgv 6y agoThe title chosen by the OP is contained in the second half of the article: > “I don’t think I could make Civilisation today,” Meier says. “I’m not sure even I would play it. It wouldn’t fit in the zeitgeist. It asks a lot of the player, and takes a while to work it out. You have to play it once in order to understand what's going on. You have to be willing to spend time with it, and that’s not where most gamers are these days. Civ came out at the perfect time. The PC had got beefy enough for us to make it, but weren’t inundated with so many possibilities. If it had been created two years earlier we’d only have had four colours and it would have been much shallower.”
- agumonkey 6y agoIt also represents a change in the mystery of computers and games. It was esoteric and fascinating to see stuff even happen on screen. This made people want to try and dive in. I think this issue is even larger, the web also suffers from this. It's all streamlined and a commercial endpoint.. very very different from the beginnings.
- mbroncano 6y agoIt’s remarkable they changed the spelling in the title to match the British customs, one would think this is a proper and not a common name in this context.
- ChrisSD 6y agoProbably just someone running it through a spell checker. Or an over zealous editor who isn't familiar with the series.
- safog 6y agoCrux of it seems to be: > It asks a lot of the player, and takes a while to work it out. You have to play it once in order to understand what's going on. You have to be willing to spend time with it, and that’s not where most gamers are these days. However, there's plenty of games like this being made today. Paradox games all require hundreds of hours of playtime before you feel even barely competent at the game. Stellaris is one of the best games in recent memory for me. CK3 just came out and is pretty popular. I don't think gamers today are more / less patient than gamers 30 years ago. You just have a larger, more varied audience but the type of people that are attracted to strategy gaming still exist in good numbers.
- atroche 6y agoYep, CK3 is in the top ten games on Steam, hitting almost 100,000 simultaneous players most days: https://steamcharts.com/app/1158310 https://steamcharts.com/app/1158310
- onion2k 6y agoFor comparison, Call of Duty: Warzone regularly gets 30 million players.
- chrisco255 6y agoOk, 100K simultaneous online players is nothing to sniff at for any game. That's a success, that's a hit. Might not be a triple platinum mega hit but a hit nonetheless.
- onion2k 6y agoAbsolutely. It's a huge achievement. However, in a discussion about the tastes of gamers and whether or not there's as much appetite for complex games today as there was when Civ was released, it says a lot that CoD is more than 100* as popular.
- 6y ago
- paxys 6y agoI don't really buy the argument in the title. The demand for complex video games hasn't gone anywhere. The recent Civ games have all done well, along with dozens of other titles in the same genre as well as grand strategy, role playing, MOBA and more. Yes online shooters are popular, but the gaming market as a whole has grown substantially. Just look at the player numbers for EVE Online, Dota 2, X-COM, Starcraft, Crusader Kings, Total War series, Europa Universalis. Civ is comparatively pretty straightforward. Kinda related, but "you couldn't make [XYZ] today" is for some reason a very frequent quote from artists, directors, authors, comedians etc., despite the fact that works far more brazen/offensive than what they did are being released every day, and there's definitely a market for it.
- dylan604 6y agoDo you think they could make Blazing Saddles today?
- slowmovintarget 6y agoFirst example that came to my mind. There isn't a point in the last 30 years that that movie could have been made. I agree that the Civ point is a little silly. But try to play the original X-Com now. I have fond memories of poring over strategy guides for that thing and starting to see a measure of success. But it's really tough to play after visiting the modern counterparts. And not because of the graphics.
- phaus 6y agoX-Com Apocalypse is one of my favorite games. I can't stand the new ones. They have shiny graphics (which I generally like in most games) but they have streamlined stuff to the point where it doesn't even remotely feel like the same kind of game. Part of the fun of X-Com Apocalypse was how detailed and overwhelming everything got. It was hard so success felt good.
- triceratops 6y ago> There isn't a point in the last 30 years that that movie could have been made. Why not? Pulp Fiction was made in that time frame, features roughly as many racial slurs and even won awards.
- justinzollars 6y agoI probably owe my interest in programming to this man. Civ 1 was one of the first games I played as a kid. What an imagination!
- dehrmann 6y ago> ...Meier reminds us that the bestselling games of 1998 were Civ 2, Warcraft II, Myst, Command & Conquer and Duke Nukem 3D. Aside from the last, all require more thought and engagement than the Candy Crushes or Fortnites that dominate gaming today. It's no Myst, but Candy Crush?!
- p1necone 6y agoThe market for these types of games is just as big as it was in the 80s. The existence of a bigger fish in the mobile market doesn't mean you have to make soulless crap.
- christkv 6y agoWhen talking about complexity I was fascinated with this interview of one of the dwarf fortress developers explaining how the cats kept dying from alcohol poisoning due to emergent behavior caused by a bug https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VAhHkJQ3KgY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VAhHkJQ3KgY
- mercer 6y agoI played quite a bit but gave up because of the inscrutable UI and ASCII graphics, so I'm quite excited about the recent developments. Can't wait to play Dwarf Fortress again once it has actual 'graphics' and (ideally) a better UI!
- dylanz 6y agoI’ve been watching Potato McWhiskey on YouTube (his games, not streams). He plays Civ6 and talks about all his moves as he plays. It’s almost more fun to watch him play than it is to play myself. After watching his videos I pretty much know every mechanic in the game and it all makes sense now. Without his videos however, I’d be clicking through and reading the Civopedia for hours. Having a virtual mentor via video can turn impossible games into possible games, and the path to getting there is really fun.
- smabie 6y agoI mean, Crusader Kings 3 seems to be doing well, and it's staggeringly more complex than Civ. I'm not sure what Sid Meier is talking about. Other complicated and successful games might include Factorio, Shenzen I/O, Exapunks, Europa Universalis, or Star Craft.
- hoseja 6y agoYou can't just "do well"! You have to dive for the lowest common denominator until you're a unicorn!
- syspec 6y ago> "I don’t think I could make Civilisation today,” Meier says. “I’m not sure even I would play it. It wouldn’t fit in the zeitgeist. It asks a lot of the player, and takes a while to work it out. You have to play it once in order to understand what's going on. You have to be willing to spend time with it, and that’s not where most gamers are these days. Civ came out at the perfect time. The PC had got beefy enough for us to make it, but weren’t inundated with so many possibilities. If it had been created two years earlier we’d only have had four colours and it would have been much shallower.” I could agree with that, although on the other hand there are deep simulation games being released today
- mcv 6y agoWell, Civilization 1 certainly wouldn't pass muster today, but that's because it's too simple, with too many shortcuts. There are far more complex games today that are doing very well.
- swiley 6y agoTo the complex game authors of the world: we love what you write! Don’t stop! Some of us may be busy but we haven’t stopped taking the time to play in the universes you’ve created!
- beigeoak 6y agoI stopped playing Civ, not because of it's """complexity""", but because it's lack of polish in its complexity. Yes, on the surface when you play it there's a lot, but it's not unique in that regard. What made me stop is that after understanding the base meta and how the systems work with each other, you realize how woefully unbalanced the game is. The moment two advanced players try to play a game, the starting position determines the result. It has such an absurd snowball effect that the game gets reduced to rock paper scissors. Complexity is fine, if you can manage it and use it to enhance the player's experience (e.g., Dota) by using that complexity to give dozens of viable routes to play the game in and have a chance of winning. But complexity thrown in just to have these amazing "systems" that totally unbalance the game makes no sense.
- haspok 6y agoCiv1 is one of those old games which I can still get lost in, almost 30 (!) years later (yes, I played it in 1991, I'm that old). Interestingly, one of the things that puts me off playing anything even remotely modern is the graphics. Around the mid-90s it was decided that everything has to be 3D, everything should require the latest, most powerful graphics card, etc. In contrast, what kind of a graphics card do you need to play chess? I think that Civ1 is a bit like chess, albeit more accessible, maybe a bit shallower, but endlessly fun. I can watch a fancy animation once maybe, then I no longer care. The gameplay, the balance, the complexity is what it is about for me.
- mercer 6y agoYou might be missing out on a lot of great games if you feel 'modern' games are ruined by graphics! There are tons of pixel-art/2D/retro style games that rival the best of the oldies, but with 'modern' gameplay (or refined old-skool gameplay).
- mcv 6y agoJust above the line that everybody else is quoting, the article says: > "Despite its near-infinite replayability, Civ is not as easy to pick up and learn as many of today’s popular phone or console games. In the book, Meier reminds us that the bestselling games of 1998 were Civ 2, Warcraft II, Myst, Command & Conquer and Duke Nukem 3D. Aside from the last, all require more thought and engagement than the Candy Crushes or Fortnites that dominate gaming today." I'm not so sure this is true. When my dad bought Civilization in 1992 (just at the start of my exams; great timing), I jumped straight in and learned everything while playing the game. My son plays Fortnite, and he sets up explicit training scenarios to practice certain skills he's decided he needs improvement in. There's plenty of engagement in modern games.
- koheripbal 6y agoGames like Factorio demonstrate that there is still an audience for games that require thought - not just those we use to numb our brains. ...but at the same time, the gaming market has grown to the general populace, whereas in 1992, it was more niche. So maybe that niche group remained the same size, and the general population's craving for addictive numbing games has just dwarfed it.