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DArtagnan
Guest
Perhaps the adage 'simple to learn, difficult to master' can serve as a passable example for now. DS fails on that measure for me, but LSW passes. Supreme Commander almost passes for the single player game, but it has too much depth in multiplayer to be accessible for more players - it's competitive rather than co-operative as well.
In the interview (PC Gamer, UK, issue 182) he likens SupCom to a game that people expend energy on playing, but says that his ultimate aim is to make a game that cycles between expending energy and recharging it. He also says he's tired of recycling the same old core games.
Well, as I said, LSW works for me just fine. But it's not a game I would ever expect the kind of extensive feature set from that I'm talking about. It's a game that doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is, and which works because it focuses on that. Dungeon Siege was a deliberate attempt at dethroning Diablo (1+2) and Chris Taylor specifically "improved" features that he didn't care for in Diablo 2. I remember reading several things from him about why Dungeon Siege was the next step, but in my opinion he utterly failed to grasp what made Diablo 2 work so succesfully.
He totally ignored the pleasure people get from finding powerful combinations of skills, for example, and he chose to leave out character building almost entirely. The game had 4 skills which basically represented a class each. There was little or no point in developing more than one skill, because you would gimp yourself in another. Furthermore, he "forgot" that games typically become more intriguing by actually having a story or plot that you care about. Not that D2 was a great example of this, but it definitely served its purpose as a suitable background goal amidst the core gameplay.
Dungeon Siege was both simple to learn and simple to master, and perhaps that is really what I'm talking about. Not that it didn't have challenges, but once you had found a comfortable group setup, the game literally played itself. There was nothing more to it than that.
Diablo 2 was (and is) very hard to master once you go beyond the first difficulty level and the game is definitely simple to learn. That's the kind of depth and complexity I'm talking about.