How’d It Age #6 – Pharaoh / Pharaoh: A New Era

More Info from DotEmu

  • Genre: City Builder
  • Platform: PC

So I suppose this is a bit of a look at how an old game aged, and a bit of a look at how a remake both did and didn’t change a game. Pharaoh is a game that I played when it first came out, and is something that I’ve continued to come back to on and off throughout the years since. This is really the first city builder that hooked me. I’d played some SimCity on SNES, SimCity 2000 on PC, and dabbled a bit in Caesar 3, but none of them really got their hooks in me like this one. However, it had some distinct issues that have never really gone away for me as I play through it, and for better or worse a lot of that is maintained in the remake, though it does come with a few nice tweaks.

I think this screenshot is a good place to start, because it really shows the main thing that drew me to playing the remake over the original. They added a global worker pool mechanic that later games like Zeus started playing with. In the original game, your places of work had to be close enough to housing to allow recruiters to find people for the jobs. What this meant at least for me was that instead of designing cities I was haphazardly putting together pods of industries where they needed to be with pods of housing connected to them, but not too close so their desirability wouldn’t be affected. It always felt like a weird restriction to me in terms of how I wanted to go about designing my layouts. The global worker pool fixes that.

Now, I simply need to have enough people in the city to fill the jobs. What this means for me is that I can design my cities with distinct regions. I can have industrial regions, where resources and production buildings are grouped in ways that make sense for efficient creation, storage, and ultimately trade purposes. I can then have housing in areas where it will best allow it to both have access to everything it needs, as well as room for the buildings to expand in later levels to high-level 3×3+ housing. It makes the entire city creation process about designing rather than fitting to specific mechanical needs.

There’s also an additional sub-option that changes the underlying worker availability from being age-based to just being a flat percentage, and this is unfortunately a good option covering up a mechanic that I feel still doesn’t work right. The underlying default worker pool is anyone in your town from age 20-49. This works great as your city grows and workers move in. However, once your housing capacity is reached it becomes a long term problem. There seems to be an underlying mechanical issue where people just do not have children at a replacement rate so your city ends up ultimately aging out. To keep the worker pool up, you end up just constantly chasing a growing population or doing mechanical cheesing, such as deleting an entire neighborhood and rebuilding it to get new immigrants.

At the time of the game’s release it felt like potentially a systemic limitation that was just annoying. However, it feels like something that should just be fixed. The flat percentage worker pool is an alright solution, and honestly gets me my goal of having a city that I can grow to a predictable size. However, I’d have liked a more elegant solution where roughly stable populations also have roughly stable birth rates, and I can plan around that. Yes, I expect that cities with full health care coverage would have more older citizens that age out of the worker pool, but it’s so aggressive in both the original and remake that it feels broken.

That isn’t the only thing that I kind of wished had more elegant solutions. In the original release as well as the remake I end up hitting a point in the middle kingdom period where mechanically the game just becomes something I don’t want out of a city builder. You reach a point where you’ve kind of seen everything so the game becomes less about city building and more about speed running. You start getting into levels that expect you to have a lot of industry up and running extremely early, and if you don’t do things just right you start suffering consequences such as the pharaoh invading your city. It ultimately is not how I want to play a city builder. I find it more interesting to be chasing layouts and efficiency within that rather than hitting mechanical bullet points, and the later levels just feel like you should build in precise locations at precise times and learn that via being defeated. It’s at that point where I tend to fall into just doing mission editor free play on cool spots.

The game also really did nothing to alleviate boredom around the god mechanic. The tl;dr is you need to keep gods happy or suffer negative consequences. If you keep them happy you have positive consequences. Unfortunately, the practical way to do this is to just routinely hold festivals in their honor. It’s so robotic of a mechanic that I’d almost rather neither positive or negative consequences existed, and the whole thing just went away. Long wait periods while monuments are being built just turn into clicking the festival button every couple months and doing that in repetition for long periods of time. It felt unnecessary 25 years ago and feels unnecessary now.

All that being said, I’m glad this remake is out and is still seemingly being worked on. This offers me a hugely easier way to do my semi-regular hop into the game. It gives me modern perks like ultrawide support and cloud saves. It modernizes a few mechanics and gives me hope that they’re going to be willing to do more to create an ultimately better experience. And I suppose what it really gives me is hope that city builders are still a popular enough thing to exist within some niche on Steam. I would say that since this game came out I’ve leaned more heavily into open-ended builders like Timberborn, but I think there’s still a place to explore more history-focused task-oriented builders like Pharaoh, though I do want to see more of a push to fix what wasn’t liked about the originals if the studio behind this does end up going into later titles.

Game Ramblings #151.1 – Forza Horizon 5: Hot Wheels

More Info from Microsoft

  • Genre: Open World Racing
  • Platform: PC / Xbox Series X
  • Also Available On: Xbox One

Original Forza Horizon 5 Ramblings

Forza Horizon always plays that line between fun and realistic at a base game. Their expansions then either lean towards one of those. For Hot Wheels, it’s definitely leaning into the fun.

This feels a bit like deja-vu in that I’ve already done an x.1 ramblings on a Forza Horizon Hot Wheels expansion. However, that’s not a bad thing in this case. The original run of this theme felt like a layer on top of the existing gameplay. It threw some Hot Wheels tracks into the normal environment and called it a day. This is very much a step up. They’ve built an entire new world for this expansion, consisting of three environment archetype islands (desert, snow, and jungle) set in a large interconnected world in the sky. It’s an incredibly well constructed landscape that really pushes the Hot Wheels theming far better than the previous run.

Compared to the previous one, this also just feels much more playable than I remember. That one had some weird things with physics where opponent AI would have problems staying on the track or staying on all four wheels. I didn’t see that at all here. I think some of that has to do with a much increased use of magnetic tracks that keep you really locked down, at least compared to my memory. On the general driving side there feels like a much larger inclusion of randomly fun track elements. There’s things like water slides, corkscrews, a giant half pipe, boost fans all over the place, and more that just make you feel more like you’re in a childhood playroom than in the base Forza.

That’s not to say it’s all great, but what’s weird here isn’t really a surprise. The events aren’t really that different to the base game. The AI is still rubberbandy as all hell. Like the FH3 expansion, the Hot Wheels cars are largely impractical if you use cockpit view and you end up depending on regular cars. It’s very distinctly an expansion to widen what Forza Horizon 5 is, which is the pattern they’ve followed in the past and isn’t really anything of a surprise here.

This is ultimately a case where you know what you’re getting into. If you liked Horizon 5, you’ll like this. If you didn’t the theming isn’t going to be enough to get you on board. It’s a stupid fun bend on the core Horizon gameplay, which is really all I want. It adds some more events to a game that I will routinely come back to every few months for a few hours, and give me some things to do until the next expansion comes out, and again that’s expected and for me is perfectly in line with what I wanted.

Game Ramblings #151 – Forza Horizon 5

More Info from Microsoft

  • Genre: Open World Racing
  • Platform: PC / Xbox Series X
  • Also Available On: Xbox One

Look, this is Forza Horizon. From a meta game perspective, there’s nothing new. You drive around in an open world, find races, find over the top stupid events, crush signs, get a ton of cars. That hasn’t changed. The location has changed. The specifics of the story have changed. None of that is really important though. If you’ve played these games, you know if you like this series by now. If you don’t know if you like it, give it a try. That stuff’s not really what I care to talk about.

What’s nice about 5 is that it’s a lot of the things that they felt like they learned from 4, but amped up and there from the start. Seasons and seasonal play lists are no longer the big new feature, but just part of the game. As a result they feel oddly more integrated to me. There’s more variety in the seasonal play lists. There’s a better push to get you to jump into multiplayer games just to try them out, without the stress of needing to win. There’s just more of a reason to do these things for the hell of it. Being rewarded with cool new cars is just a part of the fun.

The other big thing just there is the Eliminator. For 4, this was the battle royale that was added as a random patch a year after the game’s release. What nobody expected is that it was going to be a hell of a lot of fun. For 5, it’s there from the start and continues to be chaotic. Now that it’s just a part of the game, I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of dumb shouldn’t work but ends up being hilariously find ideas they come up with.

However, the big thing for me is related to screenshots in this one being in different aspect ratios. I was actually able to take advantage of cross platform play this time around, and boy does it work well. For FH3 and 4, my choices were PC or a base Xbox One, and let’s be realistic – that isn’t a choice. I was PC all the way. However, now I have my development PC or a Series X. They’re comparable hardware for me with comparable experiences – I can do 60 FPS in 21:9 1440p or I can do 60fps in performance mode dynamic res 4k. They’re both great experiences and I used them both.

The big thing for me is that the cross platform play just works. A lot of cloud save stuff in the game industry has tended to be sporadic. Nintendo’s cloud saves work well, but require a lot of manual handling that can be kind of a pain in the ass. Sony’s storage needs are so slim relative to the size of modern save files that I stopped taking advantage of it when I left the PS3 generation. On mobile, both Android and iOS have made me want to stab myself in the face when developing on those platform. Steam’s cloud saves work well though because they check when you launch a game for any newer data in the cloud. Microsoft takes this approach, and it works flawlessly. If I was already at my PC, I’d just play there. If I wanted to lay in my beanbag or didn’t want to turn my PC on, I just turned on the Xbox. In both cases I didn’t think about save data or whether I needed to sync things. I just went, it just worked, I just raced.

It should also be noted just how well it runs on any hardware you throw at it, but frankly Digital Foundry covered it better than I will ever be able to.

That was really the important thing for about playing through 5. I already knew I was going to come in and enjoy the game because I’ve literally been doing that now for this subseries for the past decade. What I didn’t expect was how easy it would be to just play where I wanted to play. This series has always been spectacularly fun, and it continues to be so. Now I just know that I can do so where I want, when I want, and I don’t have to worry about the platforms getting in my way.