I appreciate iteration but I think you're more impressed with it than I am and more ready to pay for it. An engine rework feels like pretty tangible work to me, something that should have been done a long time ago. Reworking fort systems (again) or movement, while appreciated, doesn't blow me away. Thrones are cool but seriously, does an extra feature and some tweaks a full game make?
I mean, "some tweaks" goes from a game where you manage a gem economy into the late game, where all nations end up playing very similarly, and where you must tediously take all provinces into one where nations remain different and where you can rush key locations to end the game prematurely even if you're not the strongest player (see my Marverni AAR, where I was the strongest player but made critical strategic errors regarding force deployment) which simply couldn't happen before. It's true that if we simplify to only the biggest features, it looks like something that could be an expansion pack, but the little changes do add up. Given the time span and the degree of changes, the idea that you're paying more for less with Dominions doesn't really line up with what's going on in the rest of the video game market.
Everything carries forward so why not....make a base game, do your content updates and bug fixes (which are standard part of the package deal for any reputable developer, I'm not sure why I'm supposed to applaud that) and actually sell content packs every year or two for $5, $10, $15, whatever seems reasonable. Because from when I started it doesn't actually feel like Dom 3, 4, 5. It feels like Dom 3.3. 3.4. 3.5. It's a very efficient way to sell your game.
Paying ten five bucks twice a year might appeal to you more than paying forty bucks after four years, but for an incoming (new) player it's the difference between paying $40 for a new game or paying $40+($5t) for the new game, where t is number of expansions released. I mentioned Paradox for a reason; they do it this way. Crusader Kings 2 costs ~$400 for all the content. Dominions 5 costs the price of one game.
Like I said, I'm not actually upset about it. It just gets me every time a release comes around. Illwinter is the only developer in my library aside from Ed McMillen and Cyanide where I feel like I've paid retail price for the essentially the same game multiple times. (Cyanide in particular has caught a ton of shit from people for this.) I didn't give them a pass and didn't buy BB whatever Edition because I didn't feel like ultimately it was worth my time. I'm still buying Dom games. Doesn't mean I give them my wholehearted endorsement for how they do it though.
Man, you think that's something, look at what Spiderweb's been up to with Avernum. On the second remake of the third iteration of a pair of trilogies now. But for something like Dominions, or something like Blood Bowl, where the bulk of the game is in the multiplayer community, it makes a lot of practical sense to release the game as a full release when you update it. Could there be discounts for owners of the previous game? Sure, Steam supports that. Now that owners of the previous game actually are, for the most part, on Steam, Illwinter may decide to do that if their liaison at Valve suggests it. Even if they don't, though, the kind of prices they charge are pretty worthwhile for four years of support. Even if they don't, I don't think it's an unreasonable price for support over the years. Of course, you can definitely quibble with that if you consider that a lot of the support is done by the community (and llamaserver in particular is a volunteer job) but I still find the price to be reasonable considering the size and the niche nature of this operation.
And to further clarify, I'm not saying that I think Illwinter's efforts are flawless or, in every regard, even adequate. Over on the Qt3 forum, Turin posted a list of changes that ought to be made to make the game more accessible, and I categorically agree with that. But insinuating that the game's price and value don't line up is just not consistent with the facts.
Nor does the fact that sprites (mostly) remain constant over time.
A quibble as someone who spends far too much time looking at Dominions sprites: they haven't. There have been progressive overhauls, reworks, replacements, and additions from the start. Dom4 in particular replaced and/or revamped A TON of the graphics, as well as increasing sprite resolution. Dom3 hurts to look at these days. I would not be surprised if some of the outstanding Dom2/Dom3 graphics disappear with Dom5 as well. I'm not going to hold my breath on all of them going away, but I expect it'll be a lot harder to find old graphics come Dom5. Well, except maybe in Jotunheim. Those haven't changed in forever and show no sign of doing so, though in fairness they probably aged better than most or all of the rest.
Well, that's sort of true, but they upgrade is so piecemeal that the changes aren't big and flashy. If resolution was doubled again (not like current computers can't handle it, and it would save work compared against a hypothetical eventual future doubling once all the sprites are updated) and the old ones were updated to that, then that would be a pretty drastic change. As it is, a few updated at a time changes relatively little.
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Topic: Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension (Read 520859 times)