I really like 4X games but nothing new in that genre has really drawn me in. Stellaris was the last one that I really played a ton of and still do. I actually wanna start a new game with all the new expansions but playing without Gigastructures is heresy, hope it gets updated soon.
Makes sense, I love strategy games, but I end up playing more variety of “casual” games than these “in-depth” games. Simply because I stick with one in-depth game for a while, whereas I roll credits for casual games multiple times a month.
I don’t disagree with your main point, but D&D 5e is a rather shallow rules system. It’s needlessly complicated (15 strength gives you what bonus? How does readying an action work? Can you smite when unarmed?), but it’s not really deep.
I would bet it’s more like “gaming has expanded to a larger market”. Gamers who were willing to fiddle with computers and online gaming, hell, up till the late 2000s are probably also the same type of people who are willing to be patient and fiddle with a complex game and learn where the fun is. Now playing a game is easy as 1,2,3 no matter where you get it, I’m not talking down on anyone, and I don’t care if that’s where the AAA trend is going, just that when the access gets easier the group expands to more and more casual audiences.
Also, console games have always been way more “casual” as those markets expand gamers kind of defacto have a larger preference for casual games.
I was deep into Strategy and lore – preferring games that ate hundreds of hours. Unfortunately these days my available gaming hours are reduced to a mere handful. It’s difficult to remember everything when I can only play sparingly.
Thus, I’ve resorted to smaller indie games that can be enjoyed in a smaller amount of time, with less of a learning curve. I’m a casual gamer now. What can you do?
As soon as some technology becomes so accessible that anyone can use it, the platform becomes populated by morons and it’s essence is diluted by all sorts of rules put in place so the morons can’t damage each other.
Meanwhile I still think there’s that group of folks out there who want to decompile the game looking for lore in the code comments.
There’s a Rat Man den in Portal 2, it’s in a later section of the game after you’ve climbed out of the depths, you can get behind the scenes and there’s a niche with a big fan in it, and Rat Man has built kind of a shrine of coffee mugs. And if you listen, under the harsh electro music and the sound effect of the fan, you can hear a sort of insane jibbering, as if Rat Man is still there raving to himself.
Fans of the game hungry for any more lore or story hints, have put more thought into this sound clip than the folks who made it and put it in the game.
I have always been the one who goes against the trends, and it looks like I still am. Strategy is one of the very few genres that I like, and if the game has no strategic element to it, I usually don’t enjoy it.
But… I don’t like overwhelming UIs and elements. I like simplicity, few elements and not many options, but a deep strategy.
UI feels like such an art nowadays. With computers being powerful enough to handle more complex simulations, we can potentially have insane amounts of data in a game. And game devs need to figure out how to present that information to the player without overwhelming them.
For example I think Victoria 3 does a pretty poor job of it, while a game like CK2 does an excellent job of it. It can be hard to get right.
I love 4x games, but playing a game of Stellaris for a week or more just to realize that I’ve inescapably fucked up and lost the game is disheartening. I just don’t have the bandwidth to spend 40 hours per match. Yeah, you can make 4x games run a lot shorter, but it usually feels like you’re doing something crazy to the game.
I bet it has to do with the average age of the gaming community getting older. I used to play Civ 5, EU4, CK2 all the time in college, when I have tons of free time and didnt care if I was up until 3 in the morning. Now that I have a life and a job, it takes like a week of 1-2 hour sessions to finish a game of civ 5, and the last time I played EU4, I played for several weeks and didnt even finish.
I really do think it has something to do with improper difficulty scaling. Hopefully, we can see a proper ML-model implemented as AI in a strategy game soon.
I’m in the same boat (as far as free time goes) but I have the opposite outlook. Strategy games, and other games with some amount of crunchy complexity, keep me engaged even when I’m not playing. I can spend some time on wikis, crafting theories, and cooking up plans throughout the week and that keeps me coming back.
I can’t do story games because it’s too easy to forget what’s going on when you spread it out that far. Or there’s online action games (shooters, mobas, etc) but it’s rare that I can guarantee I’ll be on long enough to complete a match.
Someone who isn’t into strategy games will play shallow strategy games like fire emblem because its anime and allows you to date anime girls with big boobs.
I always preferred Arena style fps games because the varied weapon set means having far greater variety in possible encounters with opponents. Military style shooters feel shallow to me. Skill just means placing shots to the head. There’s no real movement techniques with them
My problem with strategy games is that they’re too hard to get into. I tried to play civ 5, but they are a thousand mechanics and the tutorials are very bad.
The difficulty setting in strategy games shouldn’t be “how smart is the AI?”, it should be “how many mechanics do you want to manage at the same time?”. That way you can start by playing on easy mode, then the next game on normal, then hard. Instead of that there are 10 difficulty levels and half of them are impossible, the other half you can beat by following the exact same strategy every time.
The difficulty setting in Civilization games has never been “how smart is the AI.” The AI always plays with the same level of “intelligence” (which is almost none). What the difficulty setting controls is how much the AI cheats (which is a ton at the highest levels) and how aggressive it is.
My problem with Civ 5 (as a player of the series since the beginning) is that they’ve added a ton of stuff to the game that doesn’t actually make it more interesting or challenging to play. At the same time, instead of improving the AI to make it more interesting and challenging to play against, they decided to hobble all of the strong strategies from the early games in a way that just makes the game more annoying to play.
The fun part of the Civ series has always been about building the largest, most technologically advanced empire and steamrolling all the AI’s cities. Since Civ 5 this has been flat out impossible due to the changes they made to the game which cause exponential corruption / waste for large empires and the inability to stack units which means large armies are extremely tedious to manage.
Yeah several times I have tried to play Crusader Kings because conceptually its really cool but I just give up every time because I don’t know wtf is going on.
Also this may seem like a weird suggestion but if you like FPS you may like Rainbow Six: Seige. Got over a thousand hours and I’m still cooking up strategies with my gaming buddy. And unlike a true strategy game you can just run and gun when you start out and still have fun and the game will always be balanced because it’s pvp and it will adjust your rank accordingly.
Strategy games are still my mainstay, but I’m always returning a few old familiar games. I’ve not bought any new releases in a long time. If too many other players are like me, then strategy game development is going to be in dire straits indeed.
Used to play strategy games quite a lot 20 or so years ago. AoE, Homeworld, Red Alert. But I never got very deep into them.
The main reason I don't like strategy games anymore is that most of them simply boil down to micromanagement and actions-per-minute. That is not how my brain works. I hate micromanaging and multitasking. I love planning tactics, doing recon and analyzing the situation (as long as I don't have to do statistical analysis with spreadsheets for that), setting goals and executing plans.
Best strategy game I've ever played? X3: Terran Conflict. Once you set your plans in motion everything works pretty much automatically—you don't have to order your traders or military forces around constantly or set up product batches in your factories manually. You set up parameters by which your assets work, and aside from occasional tweaking and optimization you leave them to their own devices. Instead you concentrate on the actual grand strategy or a single battle at hand or putting out some random brushfire that needs your attention without the worry about your "villagers" standing around idle because they can't figure out there's a fresh patch of fish 100 meters to the left.
Plus you're there, in situ, as an actual participant in the world, not an abstract godhand hovering over the map. First-person strategy. Commanding two task groups steamrolling through a sector from the bridge of your cruiser, sipping coffee as turrets put on a massive fireworks around you is epic.
For me, it’s not such much not being interested in strategy, but because strategy games always seem to end up with a solved meta. There’s the obviously best thing to do, and then everything else is hard mode if you can be bothered with that.
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