Monday, November 7, 2016

Banished - 2/20 hours

I know now why virtually every other small-scale city-building game tries to leaven itself with humor. I've never felt such a keen sense of responsibility for my video game pawns. There's just something about seeing them scurrying around, unadorned by commentary, snark, or even any sort of distinctive UI elements, that tricks my brain into granting the villagers a sort of independent life. The thought of them starving or freezing to death troubles me greatly.

Banished is essentially a resource-gathering game, but there aren't many ways to combine resources and your villagers will just use many of them raw. My main constraint to growth so far has been a lack of labor, leaving many of my buildings understaffed, but since none of your buildings require maintenance or upkeep, there's not been any downside to expanding my village purely on a speculative basis. There's a possibility that my population will outgrow my food, but growth so far has been pretty slow, so I'm not worried about it.

Which is to say, things have been pretty simple thus far and I'm not sure how more complicated it's going to get. Maybe my villagers will get more complex needs as they pass certain population thresholds, but the tutorial didn't explain anything about traffic or pollution or any of the other mechanics a typical city-builder uses to punish over-rapid growth.

It's tempting fate, I know, but I think I have this game more or less figured out.

No comments:

Post a Comment