TheRealTurk

Master of Orion II is one of my favorite games of all time, and something that I will extol the design virtues of until the end of time. So naturally, I bought this one sight unseen and it remains one of my biggest gaming disappointments. I can appreciate that they were going for the sense of actually managing a gigantic, galaxy-size bureaucracy, but as you point out, so many of the systems were completely obtuse and badly designed that it often felt like the game was just kind of playing itself and player input never mattered. Like, is this system not working because I don't understand it, or because the effect is small enough to barely notice, or because it's just broken?

My distinct memory of this game is how utterly broken the diplomacy stuff was. You could go from the best of friends to the AI declaring war on you in a single turn, and then they'd flip right back, generally with no explanation of why.

I really wish MOO would make a come back. There was that remake a few years ago which had a lot of effort behind it, but unfortunately, it was too much Civ and not enough MOO. For every good thing, there were two or three really bad decisions. For example, each faction had tons of personality, but the research tree was extremely boring and lacked II's "pick one of these" incentive to trade and spy on other factions.

Well, from the company perspective, it's pretty simple:

1. Make a game as quickly as possible, probably by crunching the staff half to death while not caring about bugs or overall quality.
2. Shove in a "battle pass" of "exclusive" content of dubious quality that took virtually no effort or money to make and easily could have been free. Bonus points if the content was AI generated or straight up stolen from other creators.
3. Design the look of the battle pass to maximize FOMO in the consumer. Bonus points if you can design it to be addictive.
4. Rake in the money.
5. Layoff 40-60% of the people who made the game.
6. Bonuses for everyone the talentless suits!
7. Repeat.

From the consumer side of things, that usually looks like this:

1. Gamer pays money for game.
2. Gamer sees battle pass, gets FOMO.
3. Gamer pays more money for the privilege of early unlocks and "exclusive" cosmetics of dubious quality.
4. Gamer complains that the content is low quality and predatory.
5. Gamer keeps spending money anyway because "Meter go up."
6. Gamer wonders why people keep buying low quality, predatory games. Realizes they probably shouldn't do that anymore.
7. Gamer buys the next low quality, predatory game anyway.

I dunno exactly how to feel about that. On the one hand, it sucks that a studio shut down and a game got cancelled. On the other hand, at least it was for a legitimate reason and not "the suits can't do basic math." So that's . . . good? I guess?

@bludgeonparagon: Alright, let me ask you this - how many of the games in that screenshot did you actually play? Not just "dipped your toe in out of curiosity" but "actually played a substantial amount"?

I don't dispute that there are good games on that list. Neither do I dispute that some of those games are "new". But it's not just about whether those games are there and good and are recent, it's whether you'd play them in place of the newest releases and if you would whether you'd play them on Gamepass as opposed to somewhere else. For example, in my case I've played five - Football Manager, Dead Space, Like a Dragon: Isshin, and Lies of P, and Spiritfarer. The first four I played on PS5. The last one I played on Switch.

All of which begs the questions, if I'm not going to play them on Xbox, then do they really have value as part of the Gamepass subscription?

It's like one of those gym memberships where they try to get people in the door by advertising a $10/month membership. And sure, that's great value for a gym, but only if you actually go. Otherwise it's just a recurring charge on your credit card. That's before the "sign-up" fee of actually buying the box on top of it.

I'd also point out that of the games on that list, only two are exclusive to Xbox - Forza and The Lamplighters League. Forza may as well not have been released for all the attention it got and The Lamplighters League flopped to the extent that it caused a business split and a bunch of layoffs. Not exactly great case for FOMO if I don't have Gamepass.

To paraphrase George Carville, "It's the games, stupid."

As an owner of all three consoles, I would say that the XSX is definitely the one that's just sort of "there" and mostly collects dust. At this point it's much less of an "Xbox" and more of just "a box." If I want the big tentpole, AAA, "prestige" games, I go to the PS5. If I want the smaller, quirkier, indie-type games, I'll hit up the Switch. Xbox has what in comparison? Gamepass?

The issue with that is that, after thinking about it, I don't know that Gamepass is all that great. We almost reflexively say it's great value, but I think that ends up being sort of an optical illusion. Yes, it has tons of games, and a lot of those titles are very, very good. But so many of the greatest titles are a generation or two old at this point. How much of that stuff are you actually going to play? For reals? Am I really going to boot up the original Mass Effect or Gears of War? As great as those games were, probably not. To the extent that there are bigger current-gen games on there, you can usually get them cross-platform and I would prefer to play them on the PS5 or Switch. The great exclusives are few and far between and they've had more embarrassing high-profile flops than successes.

So where does Microsoft go from here? I could think of two possibilities, both of which are unlikely. I do think there's an opening for them embrace being the "B-game console." There's a gap in the market for more games like Hi-fi Rush - in other words, games that are just extremely fun and well made, but much more focused and modestly budgeted than a normal AAA title. Xbox could fill that gap and it's something that would work well with Gamepass. Unfortunately, this one is probably off the table since I don't see Microsoft pivoting away from the bigger franchises in the wake of the Activision acquisition.

The other possibility I see is to focus on getting the cloud gaming thing really dialed (like, really dialed in) in and gradually phase out the consoles entirely. If they could get rid of the box and just market Gamepass as a truly "play anywhere, on any device" experience, that could potentially solve a lot of their problems. It would give them the portability of the Switch, but power parity with the PS5. Again, this one seems like the tech probably isn't there and might be too costly to figure out.

So - which actor do we think can give the best reading of "Well, excuuuusssse me, Princess?"

You do it because you're a big company that spends millions to hire someone like McKinsey. All so that you can have a smug, snot-nosed Yale grad with zero knowledge of your industry put together a 80-slide PowerPoint that amounts to "Cut costs. Sell more stuff."

This feels like a project kept alive entirely by corporate inertia. The smart move probably would have been to cancel it somewhere around delay 2 or 3, but development continues because they've sunk too much into it and they might finally achieve their goal of a blackout on the Ubisoft Buzzword Bingo Board.

I just remember the last presentation I saw describing the presumed gameplay loop being almost painfully Ubisoft. It was like "You need to attack this ship so that you can interrogate the snitch to find out which town to attack so that you can get the doubloons to buy the map to find the lookout to discover the island with the treasure chest containing the flibbertygibbet. And that's how you get Infamy."

If there ever was a "B" game, this kind of feels like it. It's better than the original if only because it actually tries some new ideas. I just wish they had focused on one or two of those things rather than spreading out the effort. I mean, you've got the lamp, the full on transition to Umbral, the timer while in the Umbral, a form of a Bloodborne-style rally mechanic, the soul flaying of enemies, a soul-flay resource to manage, bespoke bonfires with the seeds, etc.

It a feels a much of muchness, and unfortunately a lot of the core mechanics kind of suffer because the focus went to so many different places. For example, I think the soul-flay idea is kind of cool, but I'd much rather they have dropped it in favor of making a functional lock-on camera.

I think that Diablo IV is a perfect example of a game that for whatever reason feels extremely over-designed. Any individual system in that game technically works, and you can even see the argument for designing it that way. However, it really feels like they were so focused on whether systems fit together that they forgot to think about whether that ended up being any fun.

As for your list of other games, the only one I've played is Wo Long. Skip it. It tried to combine Nioh with Sekiro and it just doesn't work on any level. Even before you get to the massive and unpredictable difficulty spikes, the central design idea was DOA. Nioh worked because all the weapons felt distinct and fresh from one another and you used the massive amounts of loot to craft an actual build. Sekiro worked (mostly) because the focus was so narrow.

In Wo Long, you get the worst of both worlds. You have all the loot bloat of Nioh but none of it matters. The weapons aren't really distinct because you're just parrying all the time rather than using them as weapons. The gear doesn't matter because the set bonuses are all extremely minor or so specific it's comical. On the other hand, the parrying isn't nearly as good or tight as it is in Sekiro and the game can't decide if it wants your characters stats to really matter or not.