Lol,
@Jerom Jerom wrote:notification
now you're acting
a bit like the hypocrites I was describing.
Once we talk about the historical aspects of the game you dodge, but just right after you're convinced you can find actual historical sense in the game.
Of course good gameplay beats everything. That doesn't mean though that a historically-themed game should not also be about history with a certain level of quality, right? Video games have a lot of facettes, just like movies and books.
There's the obvious entertainment or gaming part (Ludus) steming from its game's mechanics, its
syntax. But there's also a lot of semantics in games that do not really interfere with how the game works on a technical level. This is the "surface design" of the game consisting of graphics, sounds and text that serve as ornaments, environment, cultural references, etc. which are supposed to create a certain type of immersion, game experience and meaning. I'm only talking about
that layer between the player and the game's mechanics.
For game designers it's easy to take the stats of let's say the lbow, xbow or whatsoever unit and give it other visuals that are closer and fit much better to the historical setting and theme of the game. Surely, designing a pure melee unit with the stats of a Doppelsöldner for 4 ages up to Imperial age would not work so well in a historical context where these weapons were no longer used. However, there are also dozens of
alternative stats you could design and instead of Doppel stats you would easily enrich the game with alternative stats. Mods like NE, K&B and WoL proved that with ease for AoE3. So if we can make AoE3 with accurate/credible depictions of historical troop types instead of cliché anachronisms and archaisms from children libraries then so the original devs could have achieved that
if only they wanted to (which you can see in the quote they didn't). The result is that even though AoE3 is a good game on the mechanical side, its loosely historically-
inspired sandbox world does lack a lot of authenticity and credibility, which is just unnecessary and wasted potential. And that is my point, you could have made a historically-
based AoE3 with pretty much equivalent stat design, but a lot more credible game world with comparably easy measures.
@iNcog iNcog wrote:notification
: So far I just flamed AoE3 for its lack of historical credibility.
I actually didn't say yet
how accurate I'd like AoE3 to be. But from what I just said about mechanics and visuals (syntax and semantics) you can probably see that improving the historical quality of a game does not
necessarily mean to change the whole fundament. One could easily replace the War Wagon with an elitary German ranged cavalryman from somewhere between the 17th and 19th century and still
use the unit like a War Wagon. And the use of a unit is what most (especially competitive) players care about anyway, right? Most people would probably still use Skirmishers because of their usefulness even if they'd be ridiculous stick-throwing kids. For me personally a good, credible presentation matters a lot more in games, but I think you'll all agree that a Skirmisher truly looking like a light infantryman in proper historical uniform would make the Skirmisher's usefulness even more
enjoyable than him being just a random guy in jeans, right?
A more historical AoE3 would not only increase its credibility and authenticity as a historically themed game, but it would also look and sound cooler.
q.e.d. in Napoleonic Era 2.2