I’ve noticed a trend in strategy games lately that I’m not entirely satisfied with, and I wanted to give my opinion here on the Elemental discussion. It seems that game designers often want to force an early conclusion of their game, perhaps reasoning that it’s better to end a game while the player still wants it to continue, than to drag things out long after the player wishes that it would just end already.

I’ve been playing Settlers 7 for the past week or so, and it’s a great game, but I think I might be done with it. They have it set up so that there are so many ways to win, that somebody is going to win, no matter what, in not very much time. There are no stalemates here! Here is what I posted on the Settlers forum. Not everyone agrees, Some people enjoy a race against the clock.

The problem is that I can’t just use my imagination and build a nice functional kingdom and defend it. If I do that, I will lose even without testing my defenses against my opponents. Adding to the frenzy is that it’s hard to monitor your opponents’ progress. They can sneak victory points on you in no time flat while you’re focusing on some other production chain. If I feel like I’ve built a nice kingdom that I’m happy with, why must I lose because someone else built a lot of priests? I can only win by putting my imagination aside and optimizing every move and covering every base.

Another fairly recent game that rushed things was Civ4: Colonization. As soon as your pioneers got off the boat you had to be planning for independence, or you lose. From turn one your opponent was your king, and neither you nor the other colonizing powers could afford to mess with each other, as victory was by independence and the clock was ticking away. You can’t just sit back and tell your story and follow your imagination like you could with the original Colonization from 1995. The original game had multiple phases with plenty of time to experience each.

One thing I’ve always loved about the Civ series is that on the default difficulty, you always had time to do what you wanted to do. That’s what I would like to see in Elemental. Instead of trying to wrap things up and focusing on the game’s conclusion, just make sure there’s always something to struggle against, and always a story to tell. There’s nothing wrong in my mind about a game that lasts for a whole week of ‘after work’ play. When the pace is too fast, it takes away player choices and favors optimization over imagination.