Old World Review — Russell Troxel

Jul 11

Jul 11 Old World Review

For about a decade, a friend of mine has been a fan of the Crusader Kings franchise. When we would hang out for game nights, he would often have these incredible stories of assassinating the pope so his nephew could invade France or something equally bizarre. So when Crusader Kings 3 came out last year I decided it was finally time for me to try the franchise. This led me to an important discovery about myself: I need to be given a goal to achieve in video games. Unlike most other games, there is no victory condition in Crusader Kings 3, which left me floundering. I ended up consigning myself to not having the decades-long stories my friend did. But then last week, I was given another chance with the release of Old World.

Look upon my city management screen, ye gamers, and despair.

Old World is a 4X game from developers Mohawk Games that puts players in control of a historic human kingdom. As the leader of Rome, Persia, Greece, Egypt, Carthage, Babylonia, or Assyria, players must lead their nations to victory over the other ancient nations. Unlike other 4X games such as the Civilization franchise, players aren’t only the nation’s one and eternal ruler. Instead, all of the leaders, as well as their children, peers, and adversaries all age and die. When leaders and court members die, players’ capabilities and paths to victory will shift, so they’ll have to stay flexible if they want to come out on top.

Old World makes an odd change to researching new technologies by using a deck of cards. Any card not picked when drawn goes into the discard pile, which is eventually shuffled and drawn from again. — *Old World* makes an odd change to researching new technologies by using a deck of cards. Any card not picked when drawn goes into the discard pile, which is eventually shuffled and drawn from again.

I will say right away that I enjoyed Old World quite a bit more than Crusader Kings 3 and that’s because Old World takes the aging, inheritance, and court intrigue mechanics from CK3 and nestles them in the cradle of 4X game standards. And my favorite feature they adapted is the many paths to victory. In games like Civilization or Endless Space, players can win a number of ways and Old World follows this trend but adds a twist. My favorite way to win is to fulfill 10 Ambitions. Though this may seem straightforward at first, ambitions can be all sorts of objectives, including stockpiling wealth, capturing enemy cities, and building libraries. The ambitions players can pursue are decided by the attitudes of their current ruler as well as the desires of their nation’s most influential families. However, when the player’s ruler dies, every ambition they aspired to are put on a clock. Once the character that set an ambition dies, players have 20 turns to fulfill them or they’re lost forever. I liked the ambitions a lot because it makes sure there’s not one set path to victory players can follow as a stagnant guaranteed win every time they play and forced me to stay open to new paths as I played.

If a creative path to victory is what Old World takes from the classic 4X games, the side of Old World that borrows from the Crusader Kings franchise is the game’s inheritance system. As the player’s leader and court members age, they will find love and marriage, or have it found for them through political machinations, and have children who eventually take over when their parents pass away. This is very important, not only because it helps change the player’s capabilities and keeps ambitions front-of-mind, but also because dying without an heir is the fastest way to lose. By default, the eldest child of the current ruler will inherit the crown but this can be changed by passing new inheritance laws or, for less scrupulous monarchs, having the current inheritor jailed or assassinated. However, the game may also throw players a curveball and have a member of the court assassinate the current ruler, dramatically shifting the player’s timetable. Overall I liked this system, but am still bitter about the two turns I had to waste doing political deals when I realized none of my five children were married.

The character portraits, like this very freaked out baby, are great because they age with the character. Though this did eventually lead me to more or less ignoring anyone with grey hair.

More often than not, a turn will start with an absolute truckload of information. Only with experience will players be able to weed out what matters and what doesn’t.

The last facet of Old World I want to mention is taken from nowhere I know of. Unlike in other strategy games where players can command massive empires and armies with ease, Old World uses the Orders system. Anything the player does, whether it be military activity, political deals, or civic projects, consumes orders. How many orders a player has each turn is chiefly decided by their Legitimacy, which fluctuates as the player acts more or less like the head of an empire. Honestly, this might be the crowning achievement of Old World because of how the mechanics and the flavor combine to make it work. Admittedly I have never been the leader of a nation, but even I know only so many people can be coordinated successfully, so having limited capacity for actions feels delightfully realistic. Additionally, having the player’s legitimacy be a huge factor in how many orders further immersed me in the experience of being a head of state because I found it changed how I behaved. Because I knew it earned me more legitimacy, and thus more orders, I put my ambitions ahead of almost every other concern and ensured that the other heads of state either liked me or thoroughly regretted not liking me.

Casting a pall over all of these cool features is one of the most lacking tutorials I’ve seen in modern gaming. In spite of Old World having specially designed scenarios for players to experience, there is no special teaching scenario, leaving the player to learn information at a helter-skelter pace. Old World teaches players at a pace that’s a step behind need-to-know, meaning that a player won’t be shown the tutorial for new units or buildings until after they’ve already made one. Worse still, it never explains why a player would want to do anything. There will be suggestions of which building should be built in a specific spot, but no explanation is ever given why that is the best building for that spot, leaving players to only mimic the actions instead of understand them. On top of that, the screen is packed to the gills with information and various panels and none of them are explained. A prime example of this is the five small tabs in the top right of the screen that each focus on one aspect of the player’s empire, such as foreign relations and current production, but the game never bothers to bring these to the player’s attention. Whether inexperience, overconfidence, or some other factor is to blame for the extremely lacking informational tools, it’s a massive wet blanket on the entire experience.

Players will need to periodically check in on their family trees to make sure the right person inherits the keys to the kingdom.

A unit’s movement is limited both by their own movement stat as well as the number of orders the player has. One order will move the unit to it’s first blue line, another order to the second, and so on.

Old World is a textbook example of how, no matter how many good ideas you have, if you fail to tell players how to get to them, it’s going to kill enjoyment of your game. The orders and legitimacy system is extremely creative, inheritance is well-crafted and makes for fun stories, ambitions are a fantastic and flexible way to win, but they pale in comparison to the near inaccessibility of the game as a whole. I don’t want to have to waste my first two or three campaigns just learning how to play the game. And my hopes aren’t exactly buoyed because the tutorial section of the game’s built in encyclopedia is just a dry list of the guides that pop up during the game presented without any context, as well as being two menu screens down to find. On the other hand, the developers have been posting regular updates during the game’s early access campaign so they seem to have the disposition to fix problems with their game, so it could all work out by the end of the year. Right now, though, I can’t recommend paying the full $40.