posted 03-16-99 04:03 PM ET     

I don't speak for anyone but myself, so far as I know, but it pains me more every year to watch the dollars (and time, and apparently QA effort) in game development go into the multimedia aspects of the game, even when the point of the game is (relatively) abstract strategy. This is not Riven; I'm not going to fire it up just to gape.

Here's a concrete example: personally, I would prefer to have stylized icons to represent units, rather than realistic 3D renderings of those units, IF THAT MEANT that I could tell customized units from vanilla units of the same type, at a glance. Gameplay dominates ambience by an order of magnitude, in my book.

Here's a second example. I would be unutterably delighted if some of the processing power that was currently being wasted (or "spent", if you prefer) on graphics were instead used to replace the stupid integer-valued production levels with a finer-grained system. Elevations come in meters, but energy production is 0/1/2/3 ??? Why not 1.7, or 2.2, or 0.4? Why does rainfall have to be in small integer units? That touch of realism would do more for my enjoyment of the game than all the movies or animations or sampled speeches or combat sounds you can imagine.

So I find myself in the position of a man who went out and bought a car, only to find that the car has a 4-foot-wide hood ornament that makes the car undriveable, and that the hood ornament can't be removed.

Just one man's opinion.