The link between cause and effect, again, I have to move 400 armies in order to see whether my plan worked or not, one by one. And what creates trudge is micromanagement. WD: I should mention as well, because I talked about diplomacy for the last question, but the other big problem in strategy games is in the late game, which is the trudge. Which I think is a huge difference from Civ. JS: One other thing that we sometimes forget to mention in how we differ from Civ is the whole city building thing, the one city per region and the lack of city span. It’s never anywhere near as interesting as the core gameplay. But something like diplomacy… that’s something that rarely works in strategy games as, given the AI, it either seems very arbitrary or very predictable. GC: The whole idea of having a narrative director for a freeform strategy game seems unusual. So that’s the goal really, to create that emerging narrative and that meaning. If you look at the Cuban missile crisis, which could have led to World War 3… things didn’t happen over overnight. There’s a historical aspect to this as well. We have very much this goal of creating meaning through causality, how things build up. So the whole diplomacy system that we’ve built into the game, which is, I think, quite special… I don’t want to give you the answer that we often give to this, which is to talk about the cultural transition system, which is pretty special too, but I thought, to put everyone on the back foot, let’s talk about diplomacy because it’s pretty special as well. In order for the player to – on the playground or around the water cooler with their colleagues – tell the story of the game that they just played you need to have causality, you need to see things happening for a reason. You want to have drama but you want to see that drama coming in advance. But you can try at least to have an interest curve where you build tension towards a conflict. WD: In a strategy game you can’t have a static narrative with an inciting incident, mounting tension, the symbolic death, you know… the monomyth. I’m here with the narrative director of Amplitude and we can get philosophical about emergent narrative from a gameplay system… Because if you didn’t say check, that would be really frustrating – they just take your king and then that would just fizzle out. I think of the game chess and the fact that you have to say ‘check’ when you’re about to take someone’s king. That all looks set to change with Humankind though, which is now easily one of our most anticipated games of the year. Turn-based strategies have enjoyed a major resurgence of interest in recent years, but generally not with games on as large a scale as Civilization. We discussed all these issues and more with not just narrative director Jeff Spock but also lead designer William Dyce. From what we can see so far this all seems to work very well, with a surprisingly fast pace and not too much staring at stats on spreadsheet style interface menus. Other elements are more abstract though and designed purely for gameplay purposes, such as the fact that you only have one city per region, so that the game doesn’t get bogged down in micromanagement. In some ways Humankind is more realistic than Civilization, in that rather than controlling a real-world civilisation from pre-history to the modern day you create your own composite society as you go, incorporating elements of other cultures into your own through trade and warfare – just as has happened throughout history. That’s not nearly as big a problem as it sounds though, as Humankind is all about the survival of the group, rather than the individual, and within a few turns we’d split up our tribe to go exploring, looking for resources and a suitable habitat (within range of food, water, and minerals) for a city. There’s no mad rush to establish a city as soon as possible and instead you’re gently introduced to the combat system, and by gently we mean half our followers were immediately wiped out by trying to take on a woolly mammoth. At first Humankind really does seem like a clone, with similar looking graphics and a turn-based system for the passage of time, but according to narrative director Jeff Spock, who we’d spoken to before back in 2019, Humankind allows you to elongate this section of the game so that, if you want, you can remain a hunter gather tribe for longer. The start of Civilization is always thrilling, as you explore a new, randomly generated world, and Humankind sparks that seem sense of awe and wonder.
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