Hagen

________ It is not, however, a reason to be overly defensive or non-responsive (e.g., Oscar & Hagen). ________ Sorry, I am not quite sure what you mean. I am infering that you are saying that I was overly defensive or non-responsive? I apologize if you misinterpreted something I posted. -Hagen

___ and what is the one Steve mentioned? ___ comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic I THINK that how it goes, at least... -Hagen

I responded to Steve in that 'Don't Post here...' thread some clown started. Psy, I certainly have not taken offense at anything anyone has said in response to our comments about CM. (Not even Fionn's comments.) But when people like a game, they will want to defend it passionately, that is what makes gaming the fun activity that it is. So people may get a little hot under the collar if someone criticizes the game of their choice, but we shouldn't really blame them. Steve has been pretty good in his responses. You can imagine how upset someone who is busting their tail to finish a project might get when someone bad mouths it. (Although, I don't think any of us have been callous with our comments...I've seen much worse.) So I think this has been kept pretty civil. In fact, I have learned quite a bit from all the comments. A couple more weeks of this and I might even be able to play a full game of CM. (Btw, how do you quit the game? I keep having to reboot to exit...heh) -Hagen (email flames are always welcome) (Hagenjg54@aol.com)

Steve, I am replying here instead of that long thread about feedback, since we kinda went off topic there, and well...this is kind of a useless thread anyway.. Anyway, I will make a few points and take the rest of my comments offline and send them in through some customer feedback email for BTS or something if I can find one. Please keep in mind that the reason Civil War Generals and CWG2 sold so well was because of the theme. People love to buy Civil War games. Even The Blue and the Gray sold relatively well considering what the game was. Front lines had a crappy theme and didn't sell well. Neither did Powerhouse, Spacebucks, or High Seas Traders. Lords of the Realm sold well because it had a good theme that folks could understand and good graphics. The game looked good and played good for the first 20 minutes or so. LOTR had no end game. LOMM sold relatively well for much of the same reasons. Caesar 2 and 3 sold well because of a good tangible theme that folks understood as soon as they looked at the box. They also had excellent graphics. Pharoah will sell very well too. How hard is it for a customer to imagine a game where they build pyramids and other cool eqyption stuff? Not to mention the graphics... Your arguement about not catering to the hard core surprised me. It is exactly the hard core that are enjoying CM. Do you think the casual gamer is going to be turned on by the CM graphics or the subtle game play elements? I haven't been on C.S.I.P.G.S recently, so I can't comment as to the feedback CM has received there. I would be more interested in how many overall posts there are about CM. I would suspect not to many, but hey, I was wrong once or twice before. I am not out to rain on your parade or make you change your product, I just want to point out the problems I see, and hope they can either be addressed or that I will learn something about the game that will make it 'click' inside my head so I can enjoy it. I will take the rest of my comments offline, but I will leave you all with a little story. There once was a great white hope of a racing sim called Grand Prix Legends. On THE racing sim newsgroup,(Rec.autos.simulations) GPL was the talk of the town. Over 95% of the posts were about GPL, especially after the demo was released. 99% of those were insanely positive. If you think Fionn is a rabid CM fan, you should have seen the GPL supporters. There were maybe 1 or 2 total detractors for GPL. The press raved about it, the hard core sim gamers raved about it. In the end, GPL ended up tanking big time. Instead of the 400K+ world wide sales expected in the first few months, it has sold around 35k to date. Critics still love it, hard core fans still love it, it is even used as a bench mark by most writers when reviewing racing sims. But in the end it was a big waste of money and time, and all the positive praise from the GPL groupies amounted for naught. That's it for this episode of Story Time with Hagen. Thanks, -Hagen (hagenjg54@aol.com)

Sorry, just trying to make a point, not be a wise guy. Many a would-be "super" game has met with fanatic online support only to later meet with commercial (and sometimes critical) failure. A hundred people posting that a game is great doesn't mean much more beyond the fact that at least 100 people will probably buy the game. On the other hand, if NO-ONE posted that they liked the game, that would truely be a bad sign. -Hagen (the guy who may soon find his posting privilages removed...)

If you are interested in an honest response, read on, if not, ignore this, as it is not intended to upset the developers... Steve(BTS): Why are you in the minority on this issue? ______________________ Because everyone else who doesn't like the game has deleted it and moved on. How many people who dislike it are still sticking around in this forum? Steve: If the game was SO HORRENDOUSLY designed that you have to write stuff down (I really want to believe that this is a stretch of the truth...) why the heck aren't we getting EVERYBODY on our case? I mean, long time wargamers, newbies, and even sim folks are not complaining en mas. __________________ Again...why would anyone waste time complaining if they do not like it? It is not like this game is on the cover of every PC mag. You are getting responses from the hard core who like it, not the casual folks who are turned off or the hard core folks who dismissed it out of hand. Steve: Information is such a FUNDAMENTAL part of the game that if it were really that hard to access, we should see torches and pitchforks at our windows from the angry masses. ________________ Only if the malcontents really cared about the game, otherwise they just move on. Steve: More importantly, with all the other things we have got right in the game (from orders interface to the game system), don't you think we might have noticed the "teensy" problem of tedious info gathering if it were a core problem? Come on, give us some credit! ____________________ Should I list all the games that have come out as complete dogs because the dev team really thought they had something special? Anyone who has been playing games seriously for any length of time knows that blind trust that the design team "knows what they are doing" is a bad policy. Steve: Look at the game! Look at all the other games that have come before it! Do you really think we would strike out on such a basic element? __________ Yes. It's been done before. Look at Acendency, it even got a rave PC gamer review (from the guy who wrote the strat guide, oddly enough) The road to gaming hell is paved with the good intentions of passionate developers. Steve: If the answer is "yes" then your standing in our eyes has sunk to "not our customer" and we wish you well with whatever wargame you buy instead of Combat Mission, since it is obviously not intended for you. ___________ Well, that is kind of a defeatist attitude but certainly within your rights to assume. It's your game after all, YOU of all people need to be happy with it. The 'trust us or else' idea is one that should maybe be reconsidered, however. Steve: But if you do see the forest through the trees, and admit that we know what the heck we are doing then PERHAPS you will consider that it is your expectations and play style that are are the issue here. ______________ The blind trust issue again. I think gamers should almost never assume developers know what they are doing. (Even Blizzard can make mistakes) I also must admit that it is a tough arguement to make that it is the customer's fault for not liking your game.... Steve: No game system can be everything to everybody, so there is only so much we can cater it to a particular style outside of the one we are shooting for. ____________ You are absolutely right. You will always have malcontents who want a game to be something it is not. But what you need to ask yourselves is: Are these people upset with game concept or are they upset with the execution? Are these people looking for a different game, or are they running into obstacles that are preventing them from enjoying the real game? And is it worth it to us to fix these obstacles? I'm one of the few people posting here who still can't enjoy playing the game. Why am I here you ask? (No, not to be a wise guy...) I am here because this is the type of game I have wanted for a long time, and I really really want to learn to like it...so even I am not your typical malcontent. Thanks, -Hagen

The other threads are getting long and off topic, so I started a new one to focus on the feedback issue. I think Psy made one of the points I intended far better than I did. Sure, I can replay the turn 10 times focusing on each enemy unit to determine what has been happening to them. But I really don't want to. I want to watch the turn once or twice and then move on. Is the goal of the design to have players watch turns multiple times to get necessary information? If so, then this is not the game I am looking for and you should all tell me to sod off. The problem is that I am fighting the interface for the necessary information. If the information isn't available then it isn't available and that's fine. The challenge of CM seems to be wrestling with the interface to get the necessary info; man versus machine, not man vs man. Why should I have to right click or cycle through each of my troops to find out what is going on each turn? Is there no better way to give the player this info? I want the challenge to come from interpreting the info available and making strategic decisions, instead of the challenge coming from how dillingent I am in watching each turn over and over to get the necessary intel on the enemy. It is funny that Impression's consumer research was mentioned because CM reminds me of the old Impressions game Front Lines. I get the same feeling that what I am doing has little effect on what is going on. (A review said playing Front Lines was like, "Two cavemen throwing rocks at each other.") Let me play the GAME. Don't make me wrestle with the interface. I am no longer bringing up the graphics issue since everyone seems to be in agreement that I should not expect this information to come from the graphical representation, and I am okay with that. Just tell me, how am I supposed to get it? -Hagen

By 'our industry' I mean those of us who want to play computer games that have the balance and playability of traditional board games, instead of the mass market stuff that has little or no depth. My only agenda here is to put my finger on exactly why CM doesn't work. Or, to find out where it does. I do this through offering up points and listening to the responses from players who enjoy the game. Fionn, I am not interested in your trolling. Let's talk about CM and what works and doesn't work. I will say again that FOW needs to be achieved through the restriction of information from a design stand point, not through the restriction of the game engine. As it is now, I do not know what is going on in the game not because I can't see it, but because the game can't depict it, either visually or through the use of text. We are making a cause/effect arguement here. The game doesn't look like it does because they wanted to add FOW, the FOW comes from the game looking like it does. It is a better to limit the information the player receives, not limit the player's ability to receive information. -Hagen

Thanks for all the replies. You all make good points about the fog of war and realism aspects of the game. After looking at the game again and keeping in mind all the comments, I've decided that CM still falls far short of the mark. The problem is very simple. If you are going to develop a game that realistically simulates the fog of way, then the game needs to represent the available information in a useable way. If the only way I am going to know that my mortar team is hitting that advancing enemy squad is by zooming in close to the enemy team and listening for the paper dolls to go 'ouch' and 'medic' then something is wrong.(I can't do this is real life, can I?) The graphics in CM are not accurate enough to provide information necessary to play a game that is based on 'fog of war'. Why didn't they just use arbitrary symbols instead of paper dolls to represent the troops? Because they wanted the game to look nice...sadly it doesn't look nice. At least if they used sybols they could tell us what is going on.(or at least tell us what they want us to know) The 'Fog of War' effect should come from the game design, not from the inefficiencies of the graphics and interface. It is like trying to do the NY Times crossword puzzle when the puzzle itself is missing, leaving you only the hints. Sure you can still do it, but it is much more difficult. Doing the crossword becomes less about your ability to interpret the hints, and more about something completely unrelated. This is the feeling I get with CM. I am fighting against the interface and graphics to figure out what is happening, rather than using what little info I DO have to plan my moves against the enemy. The arguement concerning how much better the troops could be made to look is a tricky one. Yes, the troops could be made to look better.(And still run on a PII) They could be motion captured with the appropriate textures to indicate who/what they were. Comparing this to Decent or Quake is unreasonable, since they are real-time games(or real-time multiplayer game)....CM is a turn based plotted movement game. The graphics engine is not running at the same time the combat resolution engine is, or at least it doesn't need to be. I could point to products like Homeworld as examples to decent graphics with similar scales to CM, but that's not the point. The fact of the matter is that while CM graphics could certainly be better than they are, the development team doesn't have the time, money or people to do it. So in the end we have an ambitious project undertaken by a small and energetic dev team that comes up short. It is a shame because our industry needs more games along the line of CMs concept. The fact that some of you here have found something to enjoy in CM gives me some solace. (As opposed to those of you who will blindly defend the game to the death, regardless...and you know who you are) I am not sure how many units of CM they expect to sell, but I really doubt they will sell more than 4 or 5 thousand units. Let's just hope they make enough to enable them to try something else after CM. Thanks, -Hagen

I downloaded the much anticipated CM demo last night and played it a few times. Although I really wanted to like the game, I must admit that I was sadly disappointed. CM misses the mark on many levels. First, the graphics are very subpar for 1999. The game has a pre-Wolfenstien 3D look to it, and the guys moving around look like cut out paper dolls. This itself is not the end of the world, especially for those of us who care little about how a game looks but are rather concerned with how it plays. Unfortunately, CM fails here too. There is little feedback from the game during the moves; nothing to tell me if what I am doing is effective or not. I have my various units shoot at an enemy, but I am given no indication if their fire is doing any good. (Yes, occasionally an enemy unit will drop down as if supressed but that's all) This is a real problem as in any game the player needs feedback to determine if what they are doing is working or not. Sure, if my tank blows up a building I know something happened, but short of that all that happens is a lot of fire moving back and forth. When moving my troops it is hard to determine if they are in cover or not. In fact, it is hard to learn anything about my troops at all. I may have 25+ units on the board, and each turn I am expected to right click on each one to check it's status? CM is an ambitious project done by a development team that I am sure does not have all the resourcesor time they would like. The game tries to both look realistic and play realistic and the resulting compromise fails in both regards. The orignal Computer Ambush was a black and white map with letters representing squad members. However, other information was provided during the game which made it very playable and very fun. This info was provided as simple text each time an event occured. It wasn't pretty, but it worked great. Close Combat is a game where the psychological effects of enemy fire(and other things) are hidden from the player. However, the graphical display along with the unit status bar combine to give the player an excellent idea of what is going on. Sadly, CM fails at providing necessary feedback to the player both graphically and via text/info bars. I fear the dev team simply tried to do too much and ended up failing at everything. Overall the game has an unshakable feeling of being imprecise, leaving me with the feeling that little I do has any effect on the outcome of the game. I could write more, but I am sure everyone is interested in rebutting/flaming me, so I will save my additional comments for responses. Thanks, -Hagen