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Yeah, I'm not quite that cynical about slightly more complex 4x games. I do still love everything Civilization up through 4. But I can see where you are coming from. But to me, it's not a waste to treat a 4x game like a story telling device. Sub optimal play is fine. Sometimes perfectly optimized play is just the enemy of fun. I'm reminded of the starvation strategy in the board game Stone Age. Or the Halifax Hammer in A Few Acres of Snow, although I'm skeptical how game ruining that strategy actually was as the story behind it, so near as I've seen, is interesting.
It's been probably 20 years since I played MoO3, but I remember the game just sort of ran itself. It was difficult to tell what impact anything you did had on anything, so much was automated, indirect and abstracted. I've been watching Tex play Ultimate Admiral Dreadnaughts, because I love to listen to him sperg about history while he plays. But it seems to be a game of similar qualities. He acts like he knows what he's doing, and these arbitrary decisions he makes in budget allocations and ship design are yielding concrete results. I can scarcely tell by watching it.
I think it's also why I avoid a lot of grand strategy games. Especially the grand strategy games with dozens of different DLC. I remember looking into Endless Space 2, because I enjoyed the first one, and it was like land mines which DLC were good and which break the game with bullshit. And how does a game like that even work after 20 expansion packs worth of modifications? Fucking what? Back in my day, a solid strategy game got a single expansion pack to round out it's short comings, if it even had any.
In fact, I would argue that perfectly optimized play is almost always the enemy of fun. Given the opportunity, gamers frequently choose to optimize the fun right out of a game.
Absolutely! I've been playing the Marvel vs Capcom Fighting Collection that just came out and the game there most were waiting for was Marvel vs Capcom 2 (MvC2)
The main selling point of MvC2 was its gigantic roster (like 50 characters). Competitive play over the like 24 years the game existed identified that there are like 5 actually viable characters. That meta is stronger than in other fighting games, there is only one competitive player known to be able to beat it and yeah, he's been playing 24 years so no one's catching up to him. Other than him, forget about situations like happened at EVO this year for SF3 Third Strike: forget about a cheeky Hugo or Elena making it far into the finals.
The community had to create the norms to resolve it. Picking a meta team when your opponent signaled he was not going to play a meta team makes you an asshole in the eyes of the community. People have to purposefully play suboptimally and run low tier teams otherwise the competitive meta sucked all the fun out of MvC2.
The ratio system has helped keep MvC2 interesting. You have to resort to banning characters or super arts in 3S to mix things up.
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That's really interesting. Good on the MvC2 community for not letting the fun die from the game!
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If I'm not in an actual competitive environment, but rather am goofing off with friends or doing a good ol' comp stomp, or when I literally just want to enjoy myself and not sweat my ass off, then I try to optimize for FUN.
FUN IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE GOAL, if pride or money or some other incentive isn't on the line. Not sure why you'd be 'optimizing' your play without accounting for the "Am I having fun" variable!
So yeah, once a game has become so well understood that 'optimal' builds, strats, items, and such are everywhere, it loses almost all appeal to me because it squeezes out the room for experimentation and the 'game' is now just about following a set strategy with as little deviation as possible. I'd argue that when it is reduced to a contest of who can execute the proper script more accurately/quickly, it ceases to be very game-like, where the challenge comes from the unpredictable elements.
I blame it to a large degree on ELO making skill levels more legible.. Now if you're NOT using the optimal strats, but instead playing around, everyone can see your ranking and make judgments about you.
I don't know if we have a similarly objective framework for identifying how much 'fun' a person is having in a game.
One of my great joys playing old school games was TRYING to force the game into weird edge cases or find a completely unique path to victory by trying less popular strategies and using the mechanics in otherwise sub-optimal ways that could still combine in such a way as to lead to a good outcome. Or setting little sub-goals or handicaps for myself so I have to actually get creative rather than just follow the optimal strats that I've memorized.
I think good game design should make it possible to use largely ignored mechanics or combine weak items in such a way that, with a certain amount of risk, you can 'surprise' a more skilled opponent who was following an established strategy but literally never encountered the scenario you've created and thus either adapts quickly or loses.
Of course said player will immediately adopt that strategy if it replicates, and soon it just becomes the meta. And that takes the fun away again.
And if I'm not having fun first and foremost, unless something else is on the line, I'm just not going to spend time on it.
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