Take-Two to Publish Next Civilization Game

An anonymous reader writes "Take Two Interactive announced today that they have acquired the rights to the Civilization franchise. They also announced Civ 4, saying that "Civilization IV will also set a new standard for user-modification, allowing gamers to create their own add-ons using the standard Python and XML scripting languages." Okay, so XML's not a scripting language. But it's nice to see open source tech in a major PC game!" Civ IV will be released under the new 2K Publishing Label we reported on yesterday.

I hope that's not all

[eln]

Being able to program the game is geeky and all, but I buy games primarily for the gameplay, so I hope they intend to improve on the game in more ways than just adding a scripting language.

Take-2 vs. EA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Take 2 and EA seem like they're in a huge arms race for control of the Western video game industry, now...

Remember what happened with Radio? Don't people realize all this consolidation is bad for the industry? Better play as many video games as you still can, they're gonna get a lot more bland in subsequent years.

AI

[fembots]

One interesting (and new) moddable feature is the computer AI, I'm sure reading Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games: An Introduction [slashdot.org] will help.

This is certainly not the first time XML data files are used in games, Ghost Recon has that too if I remember correctly, and players are able to change the wind, bullet speed and whatnot in the game.

Is this going to be the trend in the future? Players pay $49 to license the game engine, and create their own game?

open source tech?

[geoffspear]

If they don't give me the source to the program, I don't see what "open source tech" has to do with anything. Windows has open source tech in it too, from BSD, but that's hardly a selling point.

reaction

[greechneb]

Looks like wallstreet likes the decision. Right now it looks like they are up nearly 5%. Should help them bring another profitable game into their portfolio. GTA keeps doing good, but they needed something else.

Take a good idea and work with it...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is proof that good ideas never die - if you know you have a viable concept, as long as you don't mess with the guts of it too much, you can keep it alive as long as you want. Kudos to the developers for taking their cues from the community in general and realizing that people like making mods for games, so to see one that's mod-friendly (and I'm sure there are others out there - I play a couple of games, but I'm not a big gamer) is a welcome change of pace.

Re:I hope that's not all

[Bander]

There's a long list of other improvements, but it's the Python scripting that I'm most interested in. Not because I'm planning on making a Lord Of The Rings mod or anything like that, but because other people with more time on their hands will be able to do so. Depending on how deep the scripting engine is, we could wind up with a nigh-infinitely extendable turn-based game, which would be a Very Good Thing.

Plus, the more exposure Python gets, the more likely it is that I'll be able to make money hacking in Python, which would be an Even Better Thing.

-- Bander

Documentation

[Fr05t]

World of Warcraft allows users to make their own UI mods and addons using a combination of XML and LUA. The only problem (not blaming Blizz because they don't "offically support" it) is good and complete documentation is pretty much impossible to find.

There are plently of places with fragmented documentation but it's still a lot of trial and error/guessing. It also seems mod developers who started in the begining of the beta do not want to share their knowledge.

My advice to Take-Two is this: If you are going to talk it up make sure you document the damn thing.

"Open source"? WTF?

[MoralHazard]

Since when does "extensible" mean the same thing as "open source"? For all we know, they could claim ownership of any derivatives works of their product, making any user-contributed code the property of the game manufacturer. Even if they don't intend to at first, who's to say they're not reserving the right for later? This is more like the "Anti-OSS", if anything: no guaranteed rights.

And I didn't see a reference anywhere to the license that covers mods. Maybe if someone did see it, they can point that out to me.

How did previous mod communities deal with this? Did modders just not care, or did the fact that the game manufacturer didn't claim rights over derivative works from the beginning save it?

Help enlighten us--maybe I'm being too harsh.

Re:I hope that's not all

[Anonymous Coward]

i think it would be a mistake to do a rough but ready release. the gamers dont tend to go after those games for long periods of time, the reviews tank it etc etc etc.

its gotta be a SOLID game to begin with, then the mods can take it in new directions.
(you were right there)

Re:Civ 3 issues

[Freedom Bug]

The rule is "the first civ you really get into is the best".

For me, I much preferred Civ 1 over Civ 2. Civ 2 just added a whole bunch of new units, technologies and wonders, without adding anything distinctive to the game. They turned a nice 8 hour game into an exhausting 16 hour game.

Civ 3, on the other hand, added depth to the game. Culture is awesome, and those strategic resources really opened up the diplomatic and trading game.

Waste, corruption and unhappiness are crucial to the game. Without it, however gets the most cities planted early wins. Only the game before 2000BC matters, after, it's just tedium. You may hate it, because it's what's holding you back on your preferred strategy, but without it, it'd be a much inferior game.

Whether or not XML's a scripting language...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

...is simply a function of whether or not there is an interpreter for it. Presumably this game would ship with such an interpreter making a fine and dandy scripting language.

Re:"Open source"? WTF?

[temojen]

Civ 4 will use Python [python.org], which means it encorporates open-source technology, but is not nescesarily open source itself.

Re:Civ 3 issues

[Dr. GeneMachine]

I disagree. You don't need about 100 cities to cover all your resource needs. I found the strategic resources a rather interesting twist to the game. The discovery of new resources changes the geo-strategical face of the map. For example, imagine you have been building a rather peaceful empire, holding your opponents at bay diplomatically or by small defensive actions, you got the lead - and suddenly you discover you are cut off from oil. What seems like a death sentence just forces you to radically rethink your strategy - suddenly it is all-out resource war. Capture the strategically important positions, defend them well, and you don't have to get into 100-cities micromanagement orgies.

Re:Speaking of games to dream about...

[Reignking]

who didn't live out their Civ strategies in their dreams?

Dreams? Who had time to sleep when these games came out?

Re:I hope that's not all

[Rei]

Or instead of realtime you could use, for lack of a better term, "partial realtime". I.e., it's realtime until some sort of significant event happens, in which it "freeze frames" and allows you to tell it what to do (which may be just simply to continue onward). I.e., you can issue commands at any point, but if a unit reaches its destination, gets attacked, gets its health reduced to critical, a new enemy shows up past the fog of war, etc, time stops to allow you to react to it. Additionally, you can change the rate of flow of time as you please.

Otherwise, you'll end up with something like command and conquer, with cities to build in at the same time! ;) Certainly, a "lock time to a certain rate" option might be enjoyable for some, especially during multiplayer, however :)

Re:Alpha Centauri

[Feanturi]

My 2 cents on Alpha Centauri: Definitely a great game, especially for fans of Civ2. But what really stood out for me was how the story and situation seemed so very much like a set of Frank Herbert books, which I think are referred to as the Void cycle. 'Destination: Void' was the original story, that led to the writing of three more books that he co-authored with someone whose name escapes me: The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension factor. The last one was completed by his co-author after Herbert's death. Alpha Centauri makes me think of those three books, particularly the hostile environment of Pandora, the world where Ship brought the characters in the very first book. It's so familiar, you almost want to wonder if there was a copyright-infringement suit dancing in some lawyer's mind at some point. The star system was Tau Ceti if I remember right, but close enough. A good read, not as well-known as Dune but similar to it, chock full of philosophy, religion, and ecology. If you like Frank Herbert but haven't heard of this, try to find it, it's cool.

Re:I hope that's not all

[Bullet-Dodger]

Granted it's not quite the same, but Rise of Nations [microsoft.com] does a very good job of Civ like gameplay in an RTS.

Re:Civ 3 issues

[Anonymous Coward]

I really liked the idea of the strategic resources in Civ3- you either have to spread out to have cities on a wide variety of terrains, or be masterful at diplomacy to ensure trade access to the things you need. The way an important new resource can shape the game mirrors reality- look at how oil has altered the geopolitics of the Middle East, for example. The concept could of course stand some tinkering for Civ IV, of course-several of my Civ III games were utterly wrecked by a total lack of coal and iron in my civ, but overall I think resources were a brilliant idea. I'll never forget one game when I depleted my only uranium resource (depleted...uranium...I'll be here all week) and started a brief nuclear war over a uranium resource.

Re:Waiting for Civ 4

[Surak_Prime]

Hmm...a short list off the top of my head:
1. 'Recording' Civilization Advance - allows for construction of the Movie Theater improvement. (A humorous metagame side-effect could be that it opens up a new game menu for playing your own MP3s as background music.) Allows profession:artists to be considered productive for trade in addition to making citizens happy. In combination with Radio, allows construction of Big Three Networks wonder, that makes it harder for citizens to stay mad.
2. A physical layer for the communications that can be damaged, and without a connection from an area to your capital, you can't see what units on the border are doing (until maybe a couple of turns later?) Layer is made irrelevant with invention of Radio advance.
3. Time tightens to months with the invention of radio, weeks with the invention of the Internet, but doesn't speed up actual progress for civs that don't have them. (Better have spies/diplomats in place, to acquire them quickly! Or maybe capturing any unit from a civ with it in your territory would have a chance of giving you Internet, and capturing a city automatically would?)
4. The ability to attack foreign units in your country without your permission, without it automatically being an act of war! (If anything, THEY should be smoothing things over after that, most of the time. One of the most unrealistic aspects of Civ, IMHO.)
5. Railroads upgrade to Interstates, which can be used for emergency aircraft landing sites, but aircraft landed there must have fuel brought to them by another unit.
6. Future Tech that is more than a name, but is reasonably extrapolated from current trends - anti-matter weapons, matter fabricators, etc. - with actual game effects.
7. MANY more detailed units, military and otherwise, and many more trade goods.

As you can see, I want Civ to have so much detail that it can take a month to play a game. ;)

Bleah

[ucblockhead]

As long as it maintains its "everyone moves all at once" thing, it's not for me. I play Civ games because I want to sit and think. If I wanted to worry about reaction speed, I'd play an RTS game.

Re:From an Avid Fan....

[theantix]

What it lacked: Wait a minute. Some ... thing ... isn't ... right. I, I, wtf are the Chinese planting cities are pure ice! Wtf are the Romans putting cities are pure rock! Wtf? I gotta keep planting cities like a madman? Um, why is Civ dragging down my honking system? CivIII was promising and nearly became my Civ to keep playing, but the way the AI built cities forever and always at a maddenning pace, the way the game chugged after much growth -- it was too much. I grew to not like it. Why should I have to wait 5 minutes between turns while the AI catches up as the math is hammered out?

It sounds like you are playing maps that are too large for the number of civilizations in the game. Try playing the same number of civs with a smaller map, or put more civs on your favourite map size. Or play freeciv for a bit and be happy that the civ3 AIs build way less cities by comparison. :-)

Re:Freeciv

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, they didn't forget to include modern graphics. They are aware that more modern graphics would be nice. (And before someone Slashdot suggests using C-Evo's graphics, FreeCIV developers feel that those graphics are extracted from a commercial release of Civilization without permission. Bzzzt. Thanks for playing.) What happened was that no artist was willing to submit their time making more modern graphics.

If you don't like the graphics, you can do some things:

• You can contribute better, more modern graphics to FreeCIV.
• You can set up a foundation that pays someone to contribute more modern graphics to FreeCIV.
• You can whine on Slashdot about how FreeCIV's graphics suck.

Now, of these things, which one is the least likely to improve FreeCIV?

That very well, however..

[fenix_ix]

The problem with the majority of games that are easy to modify is that you then need a systematic way of sorting out the gems from the rubble. For every well-balanced, original, creative mod there are 500 "hello world!" equivalants. Admittedly this is a human issue not a programmatic one. All you need to do to see this is to look at some of the hundreds of thousands of projects on sourceforge.net, for every successful project there a thousand 1 person projects that havent been touched in 4 months. There's no magic bullet, no automated solution. Might i suggest a 500w lamp and an interrogation chair?

Re:I hope that's not all

[snorklewacker]

Bungie made Myth II. It was Take Two that made the roundly despised Myth III. Farming out Civ4 to Take2 is still not going to make it a good game, regardless of however much they open the engine.

Frankly, I think the Civ series peaked with Alpha Centauri. Civ III had bargain-basement production values, and was essentially Civ II with better unit and map graphics. At least Call To Power dared to innovate some, despite its even lower level of polish. I don't know whether it was Sid Meier or Brian Reynolds that ran out of steam. Certainly Sid couldn't do anything inspiring with Civ3, but Reynolds took years and years to produce Rise Of Nations, aka Age of Empires 2.5.

Idolizing the bright lights of the game industry just keeps leading to disappointment, I guess. God knows Richard Garriott laid some real bad eggs at the terminus of his career.