[wodenokoto]

No, this has nothing to do with simplifying games. Complex games can be intuitive and build up complexity as the player learns.

Take something like Civilisation. You don't need hours of tutorial to play the game. As the game progresses, it becomes more and more complex, but you start with 2 units, no enemies and no technology. After you build a city, technology is introduced. As you start exploring, enemies are introduced.

If civilisation threw new players into a typical midge scenario, players would need to read manuals and use tutorials and spend quite some time getting an overview of the current state.

Even complex games can start with the player playing a game.

[notahacker]

cf Paradox's Crusader Kings etc., where you can start off with a tiny county with an army your larger neighbour can effortlessly stackwipe to avoid the issues of managing subordinates if you want, but if you don't read the manual to find out what all the options mean, you'll struggle to get beyond the tutorial never mind understand why people find it addictive (or buy any DLC...)

And weirdly the mystery UX forcing you to pore through the manual and how to guides might actually be a good thing since even if you start out big enough to conquer and learn how to raise an army you're going to find it very frustrating when you lose it all and more happy because you didn't research the implications of gavelkind inheritance

[jamesgeck0]

The second paragraph here seems like it can be summarized as, "reading about things the game doesn't tell you about is good because you'll learn about other things that the game doesn't tell you about."

What if the UI was good enough that it exposed some of those gavelkind inheritance implications?

[notahacker]

It does supply you with warnings for stuff that might go wrong. It's just that there's a lot of things that might go wrong, may of which need longwinded explanations, and you're probably never going to love micromanaging all that stuff (never mind enough to buy shiny add ons giving you more symbols and options!) if you don't like reading manuals. And the whole point of differentiation from the Civilization series is to start off with an enormous choice of unbalanced real life historical scenarios which may need immediate attention rather than a blank slate to gradually build up. I mean, the UX is terrible in many other respects: but the first this looks like it's designed for people that enjoy complexity glance probably reveals more about the games than anything actually intuitive could!

Fair to say it's targeting a different market from mobile games where you see a screenshot of something that looks like Tetris crossed with Scrabble or Solitaire with poker hands and instantly understand the rules and what a good strategy might look like.

[MaikuMori]

It was slightly off topic rant indeed.