Over the last little while, I've been seriously wondering about continuing to play the game. There are a handful of reasons for this:
1. The majority of systems in the game are incomplete or do not work. I understand Tom has time limitations and all, and that's fine. It's just that what's currently there is not a complete game, or even close
1. Like I said, that's okay
5. It's just increasingly I'm no longer happy with working around them, waiting for fixes, and so on. Which is a me problem, not a Tom problem.
2. Things that seem to me to have been greatly touted are distinctly not living up to expectations. For instance, I have seen people raving about how fantastic and detailed the combat system is, but after reading most of what Tom's said about it it seems that it actually amounts to an RNG weighted by relatively few quantities. Similarly, settlement management strikes me as being a little like the 'spreadsheet simulator' genre of games (things like Aurora, and so on), but with only a handful of rows and columns.
'Just because you can build something, doesn't mean you should' is a sentiment I've seen expressed quite a bit, but actually it loks to me like that's not really true in the way it seems to be. It looks to me like there are three categories of buildings:
- a) Those which yes, just because you can build them, you should. Like the Mill, the Market, and probably the Fairground. Also, those that you will build. Yeah, even if you don't want to. Tavern, inn, and so on.
- b) Those which you should not build, except in certain unusual occasions2, because they amount to a net detriment. This includes, as far as I've seen, the temple, paved streets, and the armory3.
- c) Those which are actually legitimately circumstantial, all of them military, and actually mainly the stable. By and large, there's not actually very much detriment to having as strong a military production ability in a settlement as your population can manage. The exception to this is the stable, which offers no non-military benefit, is auto-built, and consumes a large amount of food, and so could almost fit into the 'net detriment' column.
3. From a game design perspective, there's nothing to be said about the game's balance. It's not that it's imbalanced; it could be excellently balanced. I have no idea. Most of what happens is almost completely opaque. And maybe that's part of Tom's vision, and that's fine, but I guess it's just not my cup of tea. I want to be able to know that training archers is a pretty good choice. I want to actually be able to have some knowledge of things that whould be obvious to my characters - like how much good a shield actually does a footman in a melee. This knowledge is currently pretty much restricted to Hawks, which is cool and all, but not really something I'm a fan of.
4. This game has one of the worst communities I've ever played with. There are a few gems of players, but the recta tend to pass wind more loudly and so they get drowned out. The vitriolic accusations of trolling, mechanics abuse, and so on are starting to wear me down. I kind of hoped that after the circle of hell that was the Imperial Civil War we'd get people calming down and playing the damn game, but that hasn't happened. I've also seen flat-out insults fired behind people's backs, and stuff like that, which is something I'm not really inclined to put up with for the sake of playing a game I'm not sure I'm enjoying anyway.
5. The bounds on the sandbox are starting to get me down as well. I get that it's part of the design, but it feels like sometimes someone will be digging a trench in one direction and Tom will arbitrarily say that no, the sandbox actually ends there. But at the same time, I'm sometimes really struggling to tell where the sandbox ends and we're actually getting onto the roundabout.
The most significant example of this I've seen recently is realm claims on independent settlements. How does that actually work, anyway? I have no idea how to explain it IC, because it relies on the map and on some definitely very meta concepts like events.
6. The format of the game is a very, very hard one to get right. It requires activity to be fun, but because it's no fun without activity people tend to be inactive. I know I'm guilty of this, and the Black Road was until very recently
4 my escape from this - I'd be active, dammit, even if the activity didn't necessarily make sense. That ended with Oclire dead, which admittedly is an acceptable outcome and probably makes the game great fun for Constantine (which is awesome, don't get me wrong), but kind of saps
my motivation to keep playing. I could kind of try to back-seat drive the realm, but it's pretty hard to deal with being half the driving motivation of a realm and the only one that understands the backstory on a free account. Spawning in a 'successor' to replace Oclire wouldn't sit right with me.
I think that's everything. A lot of these are quite possibly just my vision of what I was hoping for the game to be conflicting with Tom's vision of what he's making, in which case more fool me and I should either suck it up or move on. I do think a lot of them are valid otherwise, though.
1 It seems to me that it is much easier to enumerate the number of complete systems than the incomplete ones.
2 If you are the ruler of a major realm, and control the realm capital, these can be useful to build the very high-level buildings.
3 The Armory is buildable at 1000 population. It does nothing good for you until you reach 4000 population.
4 Like, a matter of hours.
5 I went back to add this footnote because I thought it was important. I'm not blaming Tom at all for the slow speed of updates, especially not recently, because I know how it's been lately and I know how badly that can drain your motivation, and I know he's had to hotfix a ton of bugs.