"It's a different system from Civ, for example, where you have many different units spread out in different places," he says. That's really the thread that goes through from one mission to the next."Īs for any suggestion that Starships is too simple, well, Meier seems unconcerned. You get to know them individually and what their strengths and weaknesses are.
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You built these ships, you designed them, you upgraded them, they've been with you through this whole series of missions. And the idea is kind of similar in Starships. 'This is my battleship, this is my reconnaissance ship, this is my sneaky ship, this is my fast ship.' In XCOM, you get attached to these soldiers as they perform mission after mission. Says Meier, "We want people to get invested in these individual ships so that you recognize them from one encounter to the next.
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And while those units may be spaceships rather than human soldiers, you still establish a relationship with your vessels by choosing which type to purchase, and how to customize them as you earn currency over time. You move units into position and then attack opposing units or use special abilities to gain the advantage, and there's even a sort-of cover system in which asteroids function as natural barriers by interfering with your line of sight. I can see elements of XCOM in it, for instance, mostly within the turn-based space battles that play such a central role.
What Meier and Firaxis are making brims with potential.
For me, the fun part is the design and watching it grow and iterating, and this approach gives us the ability to kind of focus most of our time and energy on that part of what we're making." "We can do games on a shorter schedule," he continues, "but there's still the same amount of actual game design, the same amount of time spent iterating and evolving the game as with other games. So what I wanted to get back to was a method of making games that really focused on game design, that allowed us to spend most of our time designing and maybe a little less of our time on all the other stuff needed to make games." These days, we might spend two or three years on a game, but there's only the same amount of actual game design time. "When I did Pirates and Civilization and Railroads, we spent a year on a game," says Meier, "and two-thirds of that time was actively designing the game. Isn't a creator's time and energy best spent on the act of creation?īy clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's Meier sounds excited when he talks about stripping away peripheral concerns, and it's easy for me to be excited with him.
He clearly loves the act of creation, so it doesn't surprise me that Meier and the other members of his team at Firaxis have aimed their focus at smaller games that prioritize systems over a big-budget presentation. It wasn't my first time talking with him during a trip to Baltimore a couple of years back, Meier had told me about weekends spent creating gameplay prototypes during the development of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I got a chance to discover just what some of those challenges are just recently, during a chat with Meier himself.
Just because you aren't controlling dozens of units across a planet-spanning map doesn't mean that a game doesn't present unique issues during development, however. In this case, you control a single fleet made up of many spacecraft, and maneuver that fleet about the galaxy, performing missions, spreading influence, and customizing ships for maximum battle effectiveness. It is not a grand strategy epic in the vein of Civilization instead, Starships' closest relative within the Sid Meier pantheon is probably Ace Patrol. His newest game, Sid Meier's Starships, was announced just yesterday. Thankfully for every armchair tactician ready for the next challenge, Meier never runs out of ideas to try and problems to overcome. Design legend Sid Meier has been creating strategy games for long enough that you'd suppose he has encountered and surmounted every possible obstacle one could imagine.
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