Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Endless Legend - Wrap-up

Over the past four days, I wound up playing Endless Legend for another 27 hours. I won a couple of times on "normal" difficulty and lost a couple of times on "normal" difficulty. Even now, I am in the middle of a game on the "endless" speed, where I'm just 30 turns away from winning a wonder victory. Yet, I think the time has come for me to walk away.

I'll admit, I enjoyed gaming outside of my recent regimen. It was nice to be able to just play and not worry about time benchmarks or coming up with interesting commentary (not that that's ever bothered me in the past). It reminded me of how I used to game. Wild and free and also somehow super-repetitive. Likely as not, had I bought this game a year ago, I'd have played it for a hundred hours at least.

But as much as I enjoyed my freedom, I couldn't help but feel like something was missing. Though it sometimes feels onerous, like an inhuman obsession driving me forward with the spiked whip of guilt, maintaining this blog has given me a sense of purpose and structure. And while I doubt it will become a valuable cultural artifact that future scholars will use to try and construct a coherent picture of our society post world war three, I can still hold out a certain hope that the main reason for that is because peace and goodwill will win out, and thus there will never be a need.

Anyway, back to Endless Legend. The more I played it, the more I came to appreciate that it was really a very unique and clever 4-X game. The way unit upgrades worked ensured a wider diversity of play-styles by making peace-monger empires militarily viable (while still ensuring that military specialists had the advantage). The season mechanic, though annoying, is actually a pretty innovative way of addressing the late-game doldrums that often afflicts 4-X games. As time progressed, winters would become longer and more severe, requiring you to use your advanced technology just to stay ahead of the curve, and thus mitigating the runaway singularity effect of advanced empires.

I'm not sure how much I cared for it, exactly, because I live for that moment in 4-X games where you transition from the early game of getting kicked around by the AI to the late game where all of your investments start to bear fruit and suddenly you're wielding godlike power, but I imagine for more serious strategy aficionados it can pose an interesting challenge.

I also wound up playing all of the factions, and while none of the others were as "out there" as the Broken Lords or the Cultists, they all had unique mechanical hooks that forced me to engage with the system in different ways, so it was pretty fun to change things up.

Overall, I'd call this game a success, and one of my wiser purchases. I took a risk and was rewarded with an experience that will stick with me for some time to come. I suppose that's why I own so many video games. I never really expected to enjoy them all, but the hope of finding a gem drove me to try out as many potentials as possible. The fact that I collected new games faster than I could evaluate them points to a flaw in this line of thinking.

2 comments:

  1. Did you create your own faction too?

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    1. I meant to, but I never got around to it. I sort of feel like it's cheesing the system, because the point-based faction create doesn't (and, realistically, can't) take into account synergies between various abilities that don't ordinarily go together. Still, it strikes me as kind of a fun minigame to try and find the most destructively overpowered combo.

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