Perhaps because there's very little to respond to? Or perhaps he did answer all your points and you shouldn't stop reading his post halfway through?xander wrote:Spectre Incarnate wrote:xander wrote:Garnasha wrote:3. It'll follow another good example set by Dwarf Fortress.
Prison Architect is not Dwarf Fortress. Copying features from anther game just because said other game is good is not creative nor innovative, and is no guarantee that the features under discussion would be worthwhile.
As I see it, right now, there is no good gameplay reason to provide extra stories. Most of the suggestions for why it is a good idea focus on (1) time to get from one place to anther, which can easily be justified as a gameplay / balance issue that intentionally makes larger prisons harder to manage, and (2) a way of introducing lots of features that don't currently exist (steam pipes, skylights, catwalks, and so on). It seems to me that Prison Architect is doing a pretty good job of being a 2D management sim, much like the original SimCity. Why wreck that simplicity?
Very sorry, but I disagree. Considering I am here because of the promo video where Mark specifically said in his dorky dramatic voice, and I quote...
"Prison Architect!..... Inspired by Theme Hospital, Dungeon Keeper, and DWARF FORTRESS."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDDzSOS0vzc
It is like read "Prison Architect is not Dwarf Fortress," and stopped reading. Since you didn't respond to anything that I actually wrote, but rather some strawman of your own invention, I don't think that I need to say anything else.
JamesBr: <snip>
xander
"Realism is a weak argument" is a weak argument, only valid if realism would interfere with gameplay. If you can increase realism while conserving gameplay, increase realism, it's a sim, realism within reason adds to the quality.
"Maybe the game devs don't want efficiency and compactness" is a very weaselly statement, which he basically countered by referring to DF as an inspiration, which has effective, compact prisons... I mean fortresses, they're just ALSO very, very big and liable to become Fun at any moment. And there's your answer regarding aesthetic/narrative arguments, that argument is shot down by simple virtue
"It's not DF, it's becoming a good 2D like SimCity" was replied to explicitly, so if you think he didn't answer that, go back and read again.
To the guy saying "Team Hospital was flat": yes, both in layout and in gameplay, compared to PA. Zones? Security? Supply chains? Absent, Absent and Only if you count people as goods. Team Hospital was a much simpler game, at least spatially and probably overall. It's also quite old by now. I recently bought it on GOG and played it again. You know what else TH doesn't have? Fully rotatable objects. They face front-left or front-right.
Thank you for making that argument clearly, instead of the earlier wool which Spectre dealt with. Regarding simple/complex: Sorry to have to point to DF again, you can't get much simpler aesthetically than ASCII art, and that's a hugely complex game. Regarding necessity: They would hurt very little, and I disagree that they would add very little. For example, they'd allow overpasses, which allow you to keep staff, normal and high security prisoners separate. 2D is mathematically limited in a quite fundamental way, which hurts zoning (see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_graph ). There's a lot of things z-levels allow, some of them fundamental, many of them aesthetic (compactness is a design ideal, lots of PA players are designers at heart).xander wrote:JamesBr: You, also, are attacking a strawman. Who is arguing that multiple stories would be too complicated? I have argued that they are unnecessary and that they add very little to the game as it is now. Not that they would be too complicated (from a gameplay perspective), but that they don't fix with the theme very well (the simple aesthetic---contrast complex aesthetic with complex gameplay).
), aesthetics has nothing to do with it.
