The pace of major game releases has slowed a lot in the last decade. The games industry has a somewhat bimodal distribution of products now. There’s “AAA” games by major studios that have a lot of polish and complexity but take so much money and time to develop that even a company with very deep pockets can only put out a game of this kind every five years or more. There’s sort-of-AAA games that are franchise entries that reuse a lot of the same assets and designs, so they’re easier to develop but also prone to disappointing a lot of buyers. And then there’s a lot of smaller, simpler or visually cruder indie releases by small development studios, though often these turn out to be really enjoyable games. There’s also a model of “early access” that has ebbed a bit from its highwater mark but is still used by studios trying to develop fairly ambitious games where they use revenues from the sale of an early version of the game to finance the long work of completing the product. (The example of this approach that I have my eyes on most at the moment is Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3, a role-playing game based on Dungeons & Dragons that was available for purchase in the fall of 2020 but which won’t be finished until some time in 2023.)
The result is that players like me often end up playing some of our favorites from the last decade over and over again, sometimes using player-made modifications and studio-made extra content (“DLC”) to extend the lifespan of the game. This feels like a good thing for some genres and not so great for others.
For games that are built around a single story or adventure, there may be a bit of replayability that comes from choosing another character or making different story-based choices. (I’m into my second run through Elden Ring now, for example, where I’ve completely changed my character, but it’s mostly boring to me at this point, as the branching points in the narrative are not very compelling and there’s almost nowhere in the gameworld that I didn’t see the first time around.)
For games that are not particularly about narrative content—say, strategic or tactical games—there’s potentially a ton of life in them. I’ve always been fond of what are called “4X” games (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) where you begin with a single city, outpost or base and eventually try to control the entire map. On the other hand, I’ve never liked what are called “real-time” versions of these games, where you typically have to send your armies and commanders against adversaries in battles that you only indirectly control and where speed is typically of the essence. 4X games that are turn-based, in contrast, tend to be leisurely affairs that may take days to fully play out, whether you’re playing against the computer or other people, and they generally offer fine-grained control over the action of your units. If I’m playing one of those, I’ll often just leave it on in the background and take a break from writing or other work to play for fifteen or twenty minutes.
I’ve been doing that a bit in the last two weeks with the next-to-last version of Civilization, Civilization V. The series is one of the oldest names in computer gaming, first appearing in 1991.
The game has long attracted the attention of historians, in part because it reinforces some ideas about world history that we collectively find frustrating—technologies unfolding in a preset sequence that pushes societies forward along a predictable path of development, large city-centered civilizations that are all pretty much the same except for the cosmetic difference of their leaders that have to ward off attacks from nuisance “barbarians” and then confront one another in a struggle for dominance. I’m just as irritated with these ideas as any other historian, but I still find the whole series somewhat amusing. I also appreciate that over time they’ve added more and more cultures to the series and tried to think about more aspects of human history to work into the games.
So by the time Civilization V rolled out, the series really had tried to complicate its gameplay somewhat. There’s still barbarians who are a pain in the early game, but there are also “city-states” scattered around the world that function as cultures that don’t contend for dominance but can provide various benefits if you establish a friendly relationship with them. The designers tried hard to vary the different civilizations in the game as well, to give them more of a sense of divergent strategies and personalities.
4X games, including the Civilization series, also struggle a bit with the problem of that last X, which is overwhelming or crushing the opponents. At a certain point in the game, the inevitability of one faction’s victory generally becomes apparent. If it’s one of the computer-controlled factions, the player usually just quits the game and starts a new one, much as you would if you were playing chess and you could see it was seven moves to an inescapable checkmate. If it’s the player, on the other hand, they often have to grind out the game to get to victory. AI opponents will often have various subroutines that guarantee they try their best to stay alive (it’s how they stay competitive earlier in the game)—say in Civilization, sending a single settler off to a distant island on the map to found a new city. This can be really tedious if you’re determined to get an official confirmation of your win. Plus at some point, having to win every game by military victories over all opponents started to seem unimaginative.
So Civilization V does have more kinds of victories. You can win a cultural victory over other civilizations by having such a high tourism and cultural score that they submit and “buy your blue jeans”, as the opposing leaders often say when they acknowledge they are under your thumb. You can win a diplomatic victory by having the United Nations confer the title of world leader on your civilization. And you can win a scientific victory by launching a colonization mission to Alpha Centauri, a type of victory that goes back to the first game in the series. The game also simplifies military conquest—all you need is the original capitals of all the enemy civilizations.
In practice, I tend to find that no matter what you’re shooting for, the last 150 years of gameplay in any session (from 1990 to 2050, when the game ends no matter what) are always very similar. It is very nearly impossible to focus so narrowly on culture, diplomacy or science that you do not engage in military conflict and conquest. Some factions, like India and Venice, have attributes that push them towards building a very small number of cities (or just one in the case of Venice) and making them very large and then trying to pump out culture, science and gold. But if they don’t have enough of a military, they’re going to lose to aggressive factions, and if they have a military, they’ll need it to try and offset or slow rivals pursuing culture, science or diplomacy. (Diplomacy depends on having enough gold to buy the favor of city-states, who provide the needed votes in the United Nations.) So even with those variant paths, the endgame often plays out rather similarly.
In the earlier parts of the game, the different attributes given to each civilization amount to a sort of personality that is predictable. Genghis Khan, Shaka, and Attilla are always going to be on the attack. If they are randomly put near to your own civilization, you generally are going to have to take them out as early as possible. Alexander will always try to win the favor of city-states, but he will also be militarily aggressive. Some civilizations only flourish in maps that have a lot of ocean and small land masses because their advantages are skewed in that direction.
Civilization V did solve a lot of issues with previous 4X games in general. Often in earlier versions, a player would build a huge “doomstack” of many many armies that at some point simply couldn’t be stopped. In Civ V, you can’t stack units on the same tile, and it can break your empire economically if you try to overbuild your military. So you have to think carefully about how to use the randomly generated terrain to your advantage and to stage an attack with your soldiers very carefully. As in all games in the genre, there’s a lot to manage: you have to keep your people happy or face potentially devastating uprisings that also sabotage your scientific advancement, you have to produce enough culture to be able to choose policies at regular intervals that give you necessary further advantages, you have to build up quickly but not too quickly.
As I’ve replayed recently, I do find I still hit a wall in the late game because it always comes down to more or less the same thing. But also, the “emergent narrative” of a given game that has been so engaging to my imagination inevitably breaks down once you hit modernity. (Maybe there’s an accidental lesson in that.) In the mid-game, as the map fills up, the story is different every time. In my current session, playing as the Byzantines, I ended up in a weirdly friendly relationship to Mongolia, and acted as their protector when the Russians and the Shoshone were bullying them. I gave them back their cities and got into wars that were rather imprudent just because I’d decided that I was going to keep the Mongols afloat. On the other hand, I absolutely refused to deal with the Greeks and yet weirdly Alexander stayed friendly to me despite that right up to the point that I rolled over him as the endgame approached, even though I never even exchanged embassies with him.
The problem is that when you cross that line where you’re going to win no matter what, when you’ve got triple the victory points of the nearest rival faction, all of the computer-controlled players flip to being guarded or hostile, even when that’s flatly suicidal. Past that point the only change in mood they’ll have is to “afraid” if you build nuclear weapons and they don’t have them. The game doesn’t know the story of a given session, so the Mongols won’t remember that the only reason they’re still around is that the Byzantines saved their asses again and again. What this tends to reveal is that the game’s factions only have a distinctive feel because of their early-to-mid game strategic attributes. In the endgame, those mostly don’t matter any longer. (The Byzantine advantages in the early game are mostly about control of the seas along coastlines and in adding one extra power to a religion if they found one of the six allowed in a game.) I find this really spoils the feeling of a Civ V game, so much that I often quit somewhere in the mid-20th Century even though I’m going to win.
The other 4X games I own that I play sometimes (Civilization VI, Stellaris and Endless Legends) try to deal centrally with this issue, in rather different ways. Civilization VI I think just plain fails on this point, though there are aspects of the game that I like somewhat. In Civilization VI, the various civilizations have strategic characteristics and their leaders have very strong preferences and antipathies. In theory, this means you have to figure out what their preferences and their hidden agenda are and work with or around that. It’s a great idea, but the diplomatic AI in the game is just not up to it. You can in theory be the absolutely perfect fellow civilization from the perspective of a foreign leader and they’ll still default eventually to a kind of generic strategic response to you. You can’t stay friends forever with another civilization even if you do nothing to trespass on their preferences. They’re also just not very consistent. Gilgamesh is supposed to like anyone who forms long-term alliances and to dislike anyone who breaks an alliance or denounces a former ally, but Gilgamesh himself will do so fairly often, including breaking off an alliance with the player if he thinks you’re getting too powerful. That’s the equivalent of breaking the “willing suspension of disbelief” in fiction or film, at least for me—it ruins the story of the game up to that point. The diplomacy in the game also just gets annoying as hell once you’re in touch with a number of other civilizations—they ring you up a ton but there isn’t all that much you can do in gameplay terms a lot of the time.
Stellaris is my favorite 4X overall, I think—it’s set in space, with humans being only one (somewhat boring) faction in a conquer-the-galaxy game that reminds me of another great early computer game, Master of Orion. Like all the strategy games produced by Paradox Studios, it’s a hugely complicated, somewhat ungainly thing that is constantly being changed in fundamental ways by later expansions. (Mostly for the better, sometimes for the worse.) Like a lot of Paradox games, it’s also attracted a large community of modders, and even the basic game is very customizable in a variety of ways. Stellaris still has the problem of late-game tedium despite the fact that there’s usually a “endgame crisis” that presents a new strategic challenge (in practice, meeting the challenge is usually the same, which is building giant doomstacks of ships to fight the giant doomstacks of whatever it is that is attacking the galaxy). But there are at least a few kinds of factions that play somewhat differently. The personalities of their rulers don’t matter at all, or so I find, but the faction attributes and their victory goals give them a fairly different feel. “Exterminator” factions are going to be relentlessly hostile from the get-go, “hegemonic imperialists” and “religious zealots” are going to be headaches, whereas explorers and federation-formers and ‘honorable warriors’ are often folks you can get along with. Unless you’re the exterminator, that is. Forming a federation and keeping it together is usually a fun challenge into the mid-game. Plus you can play a faction that looks like a giant glowing turd.
Endless Legend, on the other hand, has great faction design that goes way beyond Stellaris or any Civ version. Every faction plays out in fundamentally different ways, with a very strong sense of personality. Depending on who you are, you can co-exist fairly well or you know that everything you run into, you have to kill. You can be racing to try and win by finishing all of your faction’s quests or you can just try to destroy everybody else. The factions are so complicated and particular that every time I boot it up, I have to go off and re-read about the one I randomly draw in order to remember what I’m trying to do and how to develop it. There’s some other drawbacks to the game, but this part of it is great. It reminds me a bit of a truly awesome mod that was developed for Civilization IV that was called Fall From Heaven.
If what I value in a 4X is a sense that the factions have different personalities, with different strategic goals (some of them not necessarily about maximizing their power) for the sake of creating memorable “emergent narratives” out of the gameplay, then a game-knowledgeable reader might say, “So why not play Crusader Kings, then?” It’s true: Crusader Kings, also from Paradox, is fantastic at generating hilarious, compelling emergent narratives. I just find that they’re not really 4X games. You don’t explore (you can see the whole map), you often don’t expand all that much (quite properly, expanding is quite difficult), you don’t exploit in a clear way (resource usage etc. is complicated and not all that satisfying) and you definitely don’t exterminate or achieve total victory over everyone. It’s all about your dynasty. The recent game Old World was intended to be a merger of Crusader Kings and Civilization and it’s a great idea but its reach exceeded its grasp—it just doesn’t work all that well. If there’s any designers out there that want to take another stab at that merger, I’ll be first in line to try it—a 4X where the factions were as varied as Endless Legends but the rulers or commanders of each faction had varied, shifting personalities and dynasties or successions, where you didn’t always have to conquer or expand relentlessly but could make friends and allies in a persistent, narratively-coherent way? I don’t know that I can explain fully why that sounds like the best thing ever, but it does.