Architect Address July 2020
🕑 Added 2020-07-07 00:32:04 +0000 UTC
Okay, Architect Address time, what’s up friends? How have you been doing? Staying safe during the lockdown stuff? Good.
So, what’s been going on with the channel in the last month and a bit, well - we hit 200 subscribers, first and foremost, yay! Seriously it’s a big milestone and I’m incredibly grateful to you all for continuing to support the channel in spite of its objectively terrible quality. As for why I chose not to do any sort of big celebration this time around, it’s a combination of 200 not being a particularly important milestone and the event coinciding with the peak of the George Floyd riots and I’d feel really bad undermining that well-deserved anger with some self-congratulatory nonsense, so I’ve decided to defer to 250 because that just seems to make more sense.
However, I did get to release some videos during that time and the first of which was How Satisfactory Makes Work Fun. I have been waiting to make a video on optimisation games for YEARS and it really wasn’t until satisfactory came out with it’s big liquids update and Factorio announced that it was finally coming out that I finally got off my arse and made the video. These games are fantastic, they use all the super compelling tricks and tactics to make you feel good without the downsides that usually come with sketchy free to play and gamification mechanics.
What really surprises me is just how much playtime you can get out of these games - the save file you saw in the video has had about 40 hours put into it and I think I could comfortably play it for another 20 before I’ve gotten everything done and the devs are planning to add more content to the tech tree later. I think what these games really come down to is that you get exactly as much out of them as you put in, which can’t be said for a lot of other games which either require a lot of investment to be any fun at all, or become less fun the more you get invested in them. Planning out super-intricate factories with perfectly balanced production lines is fun, but so is making weird dumb spaghetti networks like these ones you’ve been seeing right here.
The thing is though, whilst logistics games are great, I’m interested to see where the genre will go from here. Factorio is great and so are citybuilders like Anno but past a certain point you are more or less doing the same thing every time with the same road and conveyor belt mechanics. What i really want to see is a properly high fantasy logistics game where you’re gathering things with weird spells and teleporting them around or transmuting them with weird rituals you've got to automate with magical golems or something… I guess what I want is the thaumcraft minecraft mod which is just fantastic, play that if you haven’t already.
The other video released recently waaaass What Makes a Great Deckbuilder which I’ll be honest is a super boring name but I couldn’t really think of something more interesting, my bad.
Deckbuilders though are really interesting, and even after playing a bunch of them during the production of the video, the first thing I did after uploading the thing was to boot up nowhere prophet and play a game of that before ragequitting because it’s a bit broken, not to spend too much time shittalking a game I barely mentioned but vast swathes of that game are super easy and you can waltz through without breaking a sweat until suddenly you get one bad opening turn and it’s just game over - I like the game, but the combat takes a little bit too much from hearthstone and is just sort of a swingy value war no matter what your strategy is - anyway.
Deckbuilders are a real favourite genre of mine because I love improvisational strategy where you’ve got to think on your feet to find and construct synergies. I was originally going to make the entire video about synergies until I realised it would’ve been a bit too similar to mark’s video on slay the spire and I didn’t want to embarrass him too much, so I broadened the scope.
I ended up playing a crapload of different deckbuilders over the course of my writing/research period including a lot I’d never played before. Ascension is a classic tabletop deckbuilder that has so many cool ideas in it and although I didn’t end up showing much footage of it at all, ratropolis is a game with a lot of potential but I’d hold off until they get the balance sorted out.
The real standout though is monster train which might have overtaken slay the spire for my fave deckbuilder ever, seriously, give it a play and it’s got an almost guaranteed spot in the games of the year list, please give it a play.
Okay I won’t keep you any more, that’s my rambling nonsense done. See ya round! bye!
Comments
Adam Millard - The Architect of Games
I've had a video on ratings systems rattling around in my head for a while. Fundamentally, attempts to numerically quantify subjective opinion are never going to work well - but we do need some way to quickly communicate our assessment of a game's quality. I think the biggest issues of the day surrounding review scores specifically surround sites rating games on their technical competence and production values over how good the underlying design is.
Steve Riley
Hey Adam, I was thinking about game ratings recently, like Metacritic stuff. One thing that I can't always wrap my head around is what they mean. Like, with The Last of Us Two, there are super high ratings from the critics, but if you look at the players, they think it's one of the worst games of all time. What does someone do with that? I know since Gamergate (and probably before) ratings have been a really charged topic. Do you have thoughts on all this?
