Galactic Civilizations is the only Windows game I've ever worked on that isn't multiplayer.
The first Windows game I developed, Entrepreneur, had multiplayer. It included a built-in chat area and match-making. Stellar Frontier also had multiplayer -- up to 64 players on a persistent world. The Corporate Machine had multiplayer. The Political Machine had multiplayer.
In short, I've worked on a lot of multiplayer games. Moreover, I play multiplayer games. As was pointed out on-line, I played Total Annihilation, Starcraft, Warcraft 3, and several other strategy games a great deal on-line in a "Ranked" capacity. I've tried out nearly every major strategy game from Master of Orion 2 to HOMM 3 to Civ 3:PTW/Civ 4 multiplayer.
From this, I've concluded two things:
1) Some strategy games really benefit from a multiplayer component. Multiplayer extends their "fun" lifespan.
2) Some strategy games don't benefit from multiplayer and the sacrifices made for multiplayer lessened the overall experience.
To people who don't develop games, multiplayer may seem like a simple checkbox feature. Indeed, many developers I've spoken to feel pressured to put multiplayer in because some reviewers will give the game a lower score if it lacks it despite the fact that for most strategy games, the percentage of players playing on-line is very low.
But multiplayer brings sacrifices that many people may not be aware of. Galactic Civilizations II was developed so that multiplayer could be added later (i.e. it passes messages back and forth). But the gameplay was not. We were not willing to sacrifice the single-player experience for multiplayer.
I'm going to give three reasons why multiplayer does not make sense in Galactic Civilizations as part of the base game.
#1 It sacrifices single player features. Ask any game developer whether they be at Ensemble, Paradox, Firaxis, or Big Huge Games, most people play strategy games by themselves on a single computer. What % that is depends on the game. But on a TBS game, I would wager that greater than 95% of players never play a single game on-line even if the option is available -- that includes Civilization IV.
But developing multiplayer is incredibly time-consuming and expensive. In our last game, The Political Machine, a full third of the budget was for multiplayer. The game was ideally suited for multiplayer, published by Ubi Soft it would sell a ton of copies. The game came out and sure enough, only a tiny percent of people played the game multiplayer. That tiny percent didn't justify the 33% budget dedicated to them.
My favorite game of 2005 was Civilization IV. It has multiplayer in it that is as good if not better than any implementation in the history of turn-based games. But what was sacrificed in exchange? There's no campaign. There's no in-depth scenarios. No in-depth random events. You can only trade certain items and techs back and forth no matter what. Do you think this is a coincidence? No random civil wars based on certain criteria? No war-causing assasinations? No crusades? Not even once in a long while? I suspect that there were a lot of concepts and features that Civ IV would have had if it didn't have multiplayer.
When we were making Galactic Civilizations II, we took a poll on multiplayer. Only a small percentage of GalCiv I players cared about it. We took additional polls since multiplayer advocates were so vocal. Same thing.
So instead, Galactic Civilizations II got ship design and a campaign. I think most people would agree that we could have taken GalCiv I, slapped a 3D engine on it, given it multiplayer and been in good shape. But can anyone who's played the beta imagine the game without ship design? And when you play the campaign, I think you'll find that was worth it too.
Moreover, players get a lot more single player experience. There are rare events that players may only see once in a great while but they're worth it -- a religions war that breaks empires in pieces. New republics formed from remnants of shattered civilizations. Civil wars. Precursor ships found on worlds. Powerful artifacts that slowly increase the power of a given civilization so that everyone has to team up on them. Terrorists. On and on. In multiplayer, this would all have to be turned off, but then again, if there had been multiplayer, whey develop any of this at all if it wasn't always going to be used?
Similarly, there's diplomacy. Last night, I played as the galactic arms dealer. The Drengin and Torians were at war and I was supplying both sides with ships for money. I then took that money and slowly bought up the worlds of dying civilizations. That kind of flexibility in diplomacy would be a nightmare in multiplayer, you'd have to put all kinds of restrictions in the name of balance.
#2 The majority ends up subsidizing the minority. Outside some game reviewers and people who have friends who are really into this stuff, most people don't know other people on-line to play these games with. And let's face it, playing a turn-based strategy game with strangers is an excercise in frustration (I am not sure I've ever actually managed to complete a TBS on-line without the other player either dropping or quitting prematurely).
Galactic Civilizations II is $40. Not $50. That $10 may not seem like a lot to some people but to many gamers it makes a difference. Check out the prices on the latest multiplayer strategy games -- they're $49.99. Part of that price is to subsidize the multiplayer component that only a tiny percentage of users will play.
If there's sufficient demand for multiplayer, we'll do it -- but as an expansion. Those who want multiplayer can then buy it and those who don't aren't forced to pay for it. And everyone wins because they saved $10 in the first place.
Because of the Metaverse, GalCiv II already has multiplayer plumbing. We even have a multiplayer design. But it'll cost money and time to implement it. So if there's demand, we'll do it. But it has to be demand in raw numbers, not just vocalness of the people who want it.
#3 It would have changed the design priorities.
When you design from the start to be a good multiplayer experience you have to make sure the game is streamlined -- particular the interface. So things that might slow the multplayer pacing tend to come out.
Galactic Civilizations has lots of mini-cut scenes in it. Things to help the player enjoy and savor the civilization they've created. The technology tree is huge and designed to linger through and pick just the right one. The ship design is full of extras that are there so that players can make cool looking ships. The battle screen was implemented to be not just functional but fun to watch. The planetary details screens include quotes from random citizens and there's flavor text all over. Each civilization has its own vocabulary based on who it is talking to (i.e. how a Torian talks to a Terran is different than how they would talk to a Drengin).
But a good multiplayer game has to be far more streamlined. You don't want to have core features that encourage users to do anything but move their units and make their decisions efficiently. Take a look carefully at any decent multiplayer games recently and notice how efficient they are. Efficient is great in a multiplayer game. But in a single player game, there is something to be said I think for inefficiency -- for fluff.
And because we designed the game from the ground up to be a single player experience, Galactic Civilizations II has a LOT of fluff:
The screenshot below, I designed all the ships in this particular game. Every new game I make new ships. Why? Because it's fun. It's not efficient though from a sheer "get to the next turn quickly" point of view:
And what's the point of sitting there watching your ships battle it out?
In fact, there's a ton of things that involve reading quite a bit of text. There's a lot of customization within the game that has no "point" other than to let players indulge in the civilization they've created.
It's not that a game with multiplayer can't have these things. Civilization IV has the Civpedia for instance. But the tendancy in a good multiplayer game is to move the text and other stuff out of the way during gameplay and out to a place where it's looked at at ones leisure. And that's a good idea in a multiplayer designed game.
But these days, nearly all games are designed with multiplayer in mind. And for people who have no shortage of choices on multiplayer, it's nice to have a good old fashioned single player experience where you can sit down and indulge yourself to the full experience.
I remember a game called Master of Magic back in the early 90s. It was a great game. But it was only a great game because it was single-player. The things that made it really neat would have been a disaster in multiplayer.
And that's really the point -- multiplayer is a feature. Sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn't. In some RPGs sometimes they're better being single player (Knights of the Old Republic) and sometimes they're better being multiplayer (Neverwinter Nights).
For those who think multiplayer is a must in strategy games I hope this post has at least made the case that maybe sometimes multiplayer doesn't belong in the base game.
We know how to make multiplayer games. We had the budget to make GalCiv II a multiplayer game if we wanted. We like multiplayer games. But we felt that GalCiv II would be a better game if multiplayer was not part of the base game.
So much of a strategy game, particularly a single player one comes down to little things like pacing. If things cost too much, it's too slow and boring. If things cost too little, then things move too fast and nothing has value.
That also holds true to the difficulty levels. How hard should it be? How aggressive should the computer players be? For me, what I've tried to do is make it so that I can beat the game at "Intelligent" (for the AI players) but just barely. At higher levels it becomes very difficult to win unless I have good starting conditions. Since I've been playing this game in one form or other for millions of years now then I hopefully represent a fairly expert player at the game.
At lower levels, the AI shouldn't be very challenging to experts but to new users present a challenge still.
In game design one of the goals is to provide X minutes of raw fun. Stuff that players find extremely fun. Many fun things may only last 2 seconds, others 2 minutes. There is some metric that says that a good game should provide X total minutes of fun. Designing ships we hope is one of those areas of fun in the game. I have to admit, I really enjoy designing ships, far more than I ever thought I would.
When I'm feeling funny I'll name the ship classes after my wife and kids. In a test game today, I played with my two sons Alex and Ryan (and in fact, my son Alex Wardell was the actual "leader" of my civilization). Being able to name everything in the game -- your civ, your leader your ship classes your individual ships your planets your starbases, etc. I think helps add a little extra fun. I know my kids kick a kick out of some alien saying "I don't think so, Alex Wardell! We're not afraid of you!".
So in this screenshot, these ships are named after my wife (Debbie) and two sons. The detail you can go into with your ship designs is one of those "fun" things we hope people really get a kick out of. The size of ship makes no difference.
There is no limit to the # of little jewelry pieces you can add. Obviously this would never work in an RTS since time matters. But in turn-based you have all the time in the world. 
Where it would work in RTS is the save function -- if you could do it off-line and bring in your units that would be pretty cool in RTS. You can save your designs here too and use them next game.
Another area that can be problematic is end-game build up. That is, where you've gotten to the end of the tech tree or at least pretty far and things no longer make any sense numerically.
This is something we've been spending a lot of time on this month. You don't want players to eventually have infinite money or infinite resources, it takes away the challenge.
In this screenshot, this is my main research planet. I have my spending 33/33/34 and as you can see I do 101 research per turn here. You can also see a bug (where we're missing a thumbnail for one of the improvements.).
At the same time, with my tax rate at 33%, I about break even. But my approval rating is 85%. The whole approval rate thing kind of bugs me because I feel like population and approval should do more. For example, I'd like to see that if my approval rating is >67% (for instance) that I get some sort of "bonus". I don't know what, maybe my influence on that planet is increased by 15% or something. Or if my population is greater than 10B that I start to get production bonuses. These things won't go into the final game, but it leaves us room to think about it for an update after release.
In this game I wiped out the AI pretty good but the difficulty was only at "Normal". The AI is so far behind that my fighter level ships completely outmatch their cruisers.
Boom.
Their battleships are a different matter.
For me, one of the "fun" things is that I can pause the battle and rotate around. It's like doing the Matrix type thing when I spin the thing around to do the screenshot. It's totally cool freezing a ship at its moment of death.
Two ships named after my sons. 
Another area of tweaking comes in the form of the ethical alignment and government. How much should Federation give you? What goodies should each ethical alignment give you?
In the current build, you get free maint on the initial colony for your top 5 worlds. But we've been wimping out the cost in recent builds because new users tend to run out of money. So we may have to bump up the power of this.
Another area of challenge has to do with the starbases, especially since we ended up letting their powers "stack". This opens the door to abuse but we wanted to let players go nuts with them if they can. I built up my influence abilities as far as I could and have influencer starbases that improve cultural influence by 322%
.
My view is that if the AI lets you get away with it, then that's the AI's fault, not the player's.
But in many ways, nothing is taking up as much time as getting the diplomacy just right. When should the AI ask for tribute? When and how often should the AI give in to tribute to you? Moreover, we want different civilizations to have very different reactions and text.
They rejected my tribute demand and they are the Altarians and they don't like me because I was recently at war with them.
By contrast:
The Arceans like me and I am more powerful than they are and I've never asked for anything before.
Or how about making the distinction between weapon trades and non-weapons:
If you ask for tribute too often:
The number of different scenarios is pretty big. And you want to make sure it's realistic and reasonable. What would a decent player on-line do?
There's also sensitivity to what the player is doing. Should the AI react to when the player does an obvious build up? If so, at what difficulty levels? Right now, I have it so that only higher difficulty levels do detailed analysis of human strategies and react accordingly (it's fairly CPU intensive). But on the other hand, will we end up with some review in some magazine where the reviewer played it at easy level and walks over the AI and complains that the AI had bad strategy? This actually happened in a couple of reviews of The Political Machine. Some reviewers think that difficulty levels just mean how much free money we give to the AI. In GalCiv, the difficulty levels determine what algorithms get used.
A decent AI would recognize this for what it is and react.
At lower difficulty levels if the player is being really blatant the AI will say "We know what you're doing". But at higher levels, it will rarely provide clues or be vauge.
BTW, doesn't that invasion ship look cool?
So that's what this weekend was spent doing. Balancing balancing balancing. Next week we have to finish up the Dread Lords campaign...
Gameshark has one of the best previews of Galactic Civilizations II I've seen yet.
It goes into extensive detail on the new game elements and also talks about an interesting issue with regards to expansion packs.
One thing that many gamers new to Stardock's software may not be aware of is that Stardock doesn't just release software and call it a day with a couple of patches. They get updated (for free) long after release. These updates aren't just bug fixes but add new elements to the game.
Galactic Civilizations I, for instance, received countless updates after release that added things like Rally-Points, the Galactic Encyclopedia, and a ton of tweaks and enhancements that helped keep the game interesting long-after it was originally released. Of course, the downside is that sometimes expansion packs don't have quite the same impact since players were getting so many free updates.
Still, in the long haul, we think that it benefits gamers and Stardock to release free updates that add new functionality to the game.
For example, Stardock plans to once again release a free BonusPak that will be available for download upon the game's release. We did this with Galactic Civilizations I and it did very well. The BonusPak is essentially a series of goodies that beta testers came up with during development that weren't part of the game design but that we thought would be neat things to throw in later.
Because of the 3D engine, there's more opportunity to do more updates too. For example, in most 3D games, the textures are bitmapped based. As a result, if you go back and play one of those 3D games a couple years later, the graphcs look muddy compared to the "latest" 3D games. In Galactic Civilizations II, our textures are vector-based which means that we will be able to keep updating them easily to higher and higher resolution. (see this screenshot as an example).
The idea being that even years from now, Galactic Civilizations II should continue to look as good as the newest games. The 3D engine also doesn't limit the # of polygons used in a model. Modders can make .X models with as many polygons as they want. And since the game is resolution independent (we've played it at 1920x1200 for instance) it isn't tied down by today's display limitations.
Now someone might make the argument "Well aren't you hurting sales of a future GalCiv? Why buy GalCiv 10 when GalCiv II looks fine?" but that brings up one of the key parts of Gameshark's previews: NEW VERSIONS SHOULD BE NEW VERSIONS. A sequel to a game should be a real sequel, not a glorified expansion. Gameplay, not graphics, should be what drives a new version of a game.
Read the whole article, it's a great read and highly informative.
The hours are starting to get to us.
Stardock, as a company, is 7/8's a Windows desktop software developer and 1/8th game developer/publisher. At least, that's how revenue in 4th quarter came out to be. It's not that the games do so badly but rather our other products are so popular.
But right now, nearly everyone in the office is on Galactic Civilizations II. One thing that really hurt us is turn-over. In all the years we've done games, we've never had anyone leave a game project before it was done. This time, we had two people leave. They left on good terms but the fact is, despite what Game Developer Magazine occasionally writes, game development doesn't pay nearly as well as regular software development and in both cases, they left game development for "Regular" development jobs. One was an engine developer and one was a key animator. And on a project like this, it's hard to absorb those kinds of losses.
And so we do our best with what we've got. We've put more people on the project from other areas so that the core team can focus on the things that only they can do and the parts that others can do can be done by newcomers to the project.
It's times like these that I can understand why many developers find console development so appealing. Why does configuration X have giant stars? Dunno. Why are the textures getting funny on configuration Y? Dunno. Why are the overlays disappearing on configuration Z? I dunno. I can definitely see why Civilization 4 went Windows XP-only. But we want to make sure Windows 98, ME, and 2000 gamers can play our game. Luckily, our non-game testing center is now on GalCiv II so all those "I dunnos" are quickly becoming knowns. But time grows short and the hours grow long.
We also have a lot of "It would be nice to have". Soren from Firaxis (Designer of Civilization IV) has been on the beta and has been providing some really useful suggestions. For instance, now when there are no more units to move, the turn button glows green a bit to indicate to the player that it's okay to hit the turn button. A number of other tweaks and changes have been made based on his feedback. Since Civilization IV came out, we've been trying to avoid "stealing" too many ideas from that game. But I love Civ 4 so much. It's how game design should be done. GalCiv II is very different in most ways but there are enough 4X user interface similarities that there are some nice touches such as the visual turn button cue that we can add in.
The cut-scenes are most worrisome. We have a lot of video in this game -- far more than any other 4X strategy game probably ever. The dynamic campaign is meant to convey the story of the Dread Lords and so we want to present that story. The screenshot you see on the left is a single frame from a cut-scene from the campaign.
The team has been putting in 12 to 14 hour days now since we got back from Christmas break. We've got another two weeks to go before we have to wrap it up and send it to manufacturing so that we're at stores on February 25th.
At least I can honestly say that the game is turning out very well. Everyone we have had play these last few builds have remarked at how fun it is and how much better than the first one it is.
A few stats:
Music: GalCiv I had about 10 minutes of music. GalCiv II have over an hour of music. Video: GalCiv I had a handful of cutscenes of various quality. GalCiv II has a LOT of cut-scenes. And I don't think the gameplay is even remotely comparable now. Going back and playing GalCiv I is painful -- no zoom out, weird interface, limited strategic options, ugly graphics, inconsistent pacing. GalCiv I was a good game -- for an indie developer. GalCiv II takes it to a whole new level (I think anyway).
We've finally gotten around to updating our own screenshots.
The game goes to manufacturing in about two weeks!
Things continue to progress. Much of Stardock's resources are currently finishing up Galactic Civilizations II. But within the next few weeks, most of the development team from GalCiv II will be migrating over to work on Society full-time which should get things moving.
Interest in the game remains very high and our goal is to have something interesting to show by E3 (May). So what is Society really about?
Society is a game that is about building up a virtual society. Your society continues to exist even when you're not on-line to play it. While it does have warfare, warfare is just one of many aspects of the game. Players have virtual ruling families that can be married off to the ruling families of other players to build alliances. They have unique resources that they can trade back and forth in order to build unique equipment.
What we think makes Society special is that we've come up with solutions to many problems one would tend to run into in a strategy game that exists in a persistent world. For example, buildng up some beautiful city over days and weeks wouldn't be very fun if it could be destroyed while you're sleeping. What we've done is create some new game mechanics.
Most MMOs take existing single player or multiplayer game mechanics and try to extend them to a persistent environment. Society, by contrast, was designed to be persistent from scratch. It's not taking some existing game design and putting it on-line. Its design only works in a persistent world.
Stay tuned.
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Back in 2001 Microsoft's early betas of Windows XP contained a user interface dubbed "Watercolor". But only months before the operating system shipped Microsoft completely replaced it with an entirely different look and feel called "Luna" which became known as "Windows XP Style". |
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