Civilisation III Interview (Sid Meier)

Auf PC Gamer (Diese quarkige Amizeitschrift) findet ihr ein neues Interview (engl) mit den Machern (Im Speziellen den Großmeister Sid Meier selbst) von dem Edelspiel Civilisation III. Die Erwartungen sind hoch, so wollen wir abwarten, ob sie erfüllt werden.

PCG: The last Civ was five years ago and the markets have changed since then. There’s probably a whole breed that’s never played Civilization. Are they a conscious part of the design for this game? How are you balancing the demands of the old and the requirements of the new?

>>SM: I think that there were two ways we could have gone. One was to [add] more and more complexity, technologies, units, etcetera, which is a direction that I think kills most genres eventually – the idea that you have to make everything more complicated, take longer to play, and require a bigger manual than the last one. You make a good point: there are a significant number of people out there that didn’t play the original Civilization. Our goal is to capture the spirit of the original Civilization which was easy to start playing. You had one settler moving around, pressed a button, and a city came up. We didn’t want Civ III to be the most complicated Civ or the most difficult Civ to ever play; we wanted to take advantage of the new technology to make the game easier to play and to make the information more accessible, keeping the “easy to get started” aspect and the depth that the original had. That allows new people to play but with enhancements, like new cultures and diplomatic play, there’s [still] a lot of new things for the experienced Civ player as well.

>>JB: This is something we’ve obviously given a great deal of thought to, and our initial take is that there are about 3 million Civ II players out there. We definitely want them to buy this game, so we have to have a path for them that will make the history of the world more interesting and more compelling as well. But I believe that just because something is deep, doesn’t mean that it has to be complicated. It’s just a question of how slowly you peel back layers, I guess, revealing more and more stuff. Civilization, the game itself, is perfect for new players – you start small, and move on once you get the grasp of the game.