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Take-Two to Publish Next Civilization Game
An anonymous reader writes "Take Two Interactive announced today that they have acquired the rights to the Civilization franchise. They also announced Civ 4, saying that "Civilization IV will also set a new standard for user-modification, allowing gamers to create their own add-ons using the standard Python and XML scripting languages." Okay, so XML's not a scripting language. But it's nice to see open source tech in a major PC game!" Civ IV will be released under the new 2K Publishing Label we reported on yesterday.
Being able to program the game is geeky and all, but I buy games primarily for the gameplay, so I hope they intend to improve on the game in more ways than just adding a scripting language.
One interesting (and new) moddable feature is the computer AI, I'm sure reading Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games: An Introduction will help.
This is certainly not the first time XML data files are used in games, Ghost Recon has that too if I remember correctly, and players are able to change the wind, bullet speed and whatnot in the game.
Is this going to be the trend in the future? Players pay $49 to license the game engine, and create their own game?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
World of Warcraft allows users to make their own UI mods and addons using a combination of XML and LUA. The only problem (not blaming Blizz because they don't "offically support" it) is good and complete documentation is pretty much impossible to find.
There are plently of places with fragmented documentation but it's still a lot of trial and error/guessing. It also seems mod developers who started in the begining of the beta do not want to share their knowledge.
My advice to Take-Two is this: If you are going to talk it up make sure you document the damn thing.
The rule is "the first civ you really get into is the best".
For me, I much preferred Civ 1 over Civ 2. Civ 2 just added a whole bunch of new units, technologies and wonders, without adding anything distinctive to the game. They turned a nice 8 hour game into an exhausting 16 hour game.
Civ 3, on the other hand, added depth to the game. Culture is awesome, and those strategic resources really opened up the diplomatic and trading game.
Waste, corruption and unhappiness are crucial to the game. Without it, however gets the most cities planted early wins. Only the game before 2000BC matters, after, it's just tedium. You may hate it, because it's what's holding you back on your preferred strategy, but without it, it'd be a much inferior game.
My 2 cents on Alpha Centauri: Definitely a great game, especially for fans of Civ2. But what really stood out for me was how the story and situation seemed so very much like a set of Frank Herbert books, which I think are referred to as the Void cycle. 'Destination: Void' was the original story, that led to the writing of three more books that he co-authored with someone whose name escapes me: The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension factor. The last one was completed by his co-author after Herbert's death. Alpha Centauri makes me think of those three books, particularly the hostile environment of Pandora, the world where Ship brought the characters in the very first book. It's so familiar, you almost want to wonder if there was a copyright-infringement suit dancing in some lawyer's mind at some point. The star system was Tau Ceti if I remember right, but close enough. A good read, not as well-known as Dune but similar to it, chock full of philosophy, religion, and ecology. If you like Frank Herbert but haven't heard of this, try to find it, it's cool.
Hmm...a short list off the top of my head:
;)
1. 'Recording' Civilization Advance - allows for construction of the Movie Theater improvement. (A humorous metagame side-effect could be that it opens up a new game menu for playing your own MP3s as background music.) Allows profession:artists to be considered productive for trade in addition to making citizens happy. In combination with Radio, allows construction of Big Three Networks wonder, that makes it harder for citizens to stay mad.
2. A physical layer for the communications that can be damaged, and without a connection from an area to your capital, you can't see what units on the border are doing (until maybe a couple of turns later?) Layer is made irrelevant with invention of Radio advance.
3. Time tightens to months with the invention of radio, weeks with the invention of the Internet, but doesn't speed up actual progress for civs that don't have them. (Better have spies/diplomats in place, to acquire them quickly! Or maybe capturing any unit from a civ with it in your territory would have a chance of giving you Internet, and capturing a city automatically would?)
4. The ability to attack foreign units in your country without your permission, without it automatically being an act of war! (If anything, THEY should be smoothing things over after that, most of the time. One of the most unrealistic aspects of Civ, IMHO.)
5. Railroads upgrade to Interstates, which can be used for emergency aircraft landing sites, but aircraft landed there must have fuel brought to them by another unit.
6. Future Tech that is more than a name, but is reasonably extrapolated from current trends - anti-matter weapons, matter fabricators, etc. - with actual game effects.
7. MANY more detailed units, military and otherwise, and many more trade goods.
As you can see, I want Civ to have so much detail that it can take a month to play a game.
:::The Spear in the heart of the Other is the Spear in the heart of You; You are He - Surak of Vulcan:::