Forum Overview :: Reviews
 
I wasted some of time, have this review and prognosis for Kalypso's next title by fucking newbie 07/12/2013, 8:08pm PDT
Patrician IV is a trading game by a bunch of Germans trying to get revenge on the world for destroying their hopes for a thousand year Reich. There is no other way to explain its atypical deviation from self-respecting german product quality, unless the creators were from fucking Bavaria. Every shit german I know comes from Bavaria.


This is what every Kalypso product ever looks like:


Eat up! A little stockholm syndrome and you'll learn to love it.


If you want to read no further than this paragraph, here is what you need to know about this game and everything else these people will ever make in its genre: The premise is spending an evening tinkering with a business plan and solving problems to grow from just another self-made guy that has to deal with occasional threats until you become a powerful merchant prince who locks horns with kings and warlords whenever not crushing competitors in the market, buying all their shit in a hostile takeover that'd put a Wall Street raider to shame, and having your colorfully-uniformed goons throw the body of a failed rival into the harbor as a warning to others even as your business protects a dozen cities from famine because everyone else was too much of a stupid bitch to keep their own employees from starving. The reality of what these chucklefucks deliver is life as a bean-counter trapped in a world of ledgers and badly planned recordkeeping that occasionally gets to leave his cubicle prison to hire shady, bearded vagabonds for the task of setting fire to people's houses. None of the money you make using the complex, involved problem-solving process of basic arithmetic makes you feel particularly rich or powerful, you're just a penny-pinching asshole with petty feuds, and you occasionally implode a market to gain a temporary advantage over a competitor with no personality or business sense living in some twisted version of Northern Europe that can't manage to build an effective weapons platform. You want an example that properly illustrates this game's problems? Throughout a playthrough, the regional sovereigns continuously hamper your ability to screw people out of an honest wage, and eventually you win the right to deal with them directly by giving them your nicest shit for the benefit of not having them hit you with sieges that burn down your buildings anymore because their whole effort to get money out of the land is about attacking their most lucrative source of tax income. When you get tired of doing their scut work or bribing them endlessly, you can paying them even larger sums (outrageous only for how much boring waiting and desperate scraping it takes to make that much money) to eventually leave you completely alone. This means that success is rewarded by having to deal with less of the game's shitty content.

I'll claim that this is relevant if you're looking for a good economic strategy simulator because Kalypso - that's our game industry perpetrator for today - is coming out with Rise of Venice in October, and anyone looking to make a prediction of some sort about it would be well-served by a comparison of the level of shit in Patrician IV with both its direct predecessor (in which it is less deep) and the later Kalypso title Port Royale 3 (which is worse than this crap game) to properly curb their enthusiasm. I guess this is sort of a nod to Let's Not Play? Whatever, it should've all been obvious from the start 'cause the developers managed to name themselves after a mythological time-burglar. Is it me, or do game companies that pick names on cool-factor alone tend to do the same with game design? These guys must've, the features list for Patrician IV reads like someone pitching shit without any thought to execution as soon as you correct it for reality.



The shape of Kalypso's next bait-and-switch scam.


Everything below this line is a poor imitation of the glory of TDARCOS. But hey, let's get to it, I have little else to do today so here's a general overview of the features you spend the most time with.

FIGHTING:

The ground combat may as well not exist, like many other vestigial elements. The game has all the assets required for it to have interesting ground combat, of course, but uses them so badly one knows they didn't even bother. The naval combat actually manages to make one appreciate the bland standard set by every 3D naval combat game ever, if only by failing to meet it - the only saving grace of a fight at sea in this game is the reliability of its autoresolve function because manually winning a fight is tedious at best, performance tends to hang even on overpowered machines, the interface is flawed, the AI's win/loss assessment conditions are insane or nonexistent so it is suicidal when it should retreat or surrender, etc. These people don't understand decisiveness at all, I'd fall asleep after the first dozen ineffective broadsides (sufficient only to wear down one of an enemy ship's three health bars) if I weren't trying to keep my fleet from sinking because of the stupid-ass AI unavoidably pushing small, maneuverable ships into toe-to-toe fights with hulking big gunboats, unavoidably using the dumbest tactics available, unavoidably making any non-fleeing ship on my side a liability and turning strength of numbers into a complete joke. Did I mention you can't take your whole convoy into battle anyway? You won't want to take more than one ship, but it'd be nice to have the option to bring more than three, or experience combat at normal speed without wanting to uninstall it.



Eight minutes of the most fun you can have shooting things that take
forever to die in a naval battle. Now do this a hundred times, grasshopper.


It's like Kalypso simply weren't aware of what every competitor from Firaxis to the Creative Assembly managed to do when faced with this problem. The fights in Sid Meier's Pirates have all the same basic elements but manage to end a conflict within a dozen exchanges of fire at most. The entire challenge of a fight in Patrician IV is finishing a it before you die of old age. Did I mention that moving ships is fucking awkward, as is firing weapons? Did I mention the lazy animations? The lack of a pause key? BUT THIS IS A MERCHANT PRINCE GAME, MAN, I don't hear any of you saying. WHAT ABOUT OUT-JEWING COMPETITORS? Okay, champ. Fine, we'll talk about the whole hog.

TRADING:

The core of the game is setting up trade routes and networks on a screen substantially less pretty than the town view where ships shuttle around making money far below maximum efficiency and then losing it. Is it fun? Sure, for maybe the first half hour definitely, after that less and less so. The tutorials, which are mistakenly lumped in with a campaign that is in no way different from a tutorial, are probably the best part of the game because it has so little depth outside of them. This has two causes - first, unresolvably bad AI on the part of competitors that is both weak (causing them to make bad decisions) and restricted to function within crippling limitations (rendering them unable to do most of what the player can for no good reason), and second, because as soon as you understand the interface and its limitations you will begin to fight it, it will be a heavy yoke for you, your joys will sink. First you'll be denied the ability to eliminate a competitor because the economic warfare available to you is completely unreliable and takes vast time and energy to implement, and then the few remaining interesting possibilities like monopolizing the trade of raw goods needed for, say, ship production to limit the size of competing fleets will require BOTH spreadsheet bullshit AND constantly sitting in the same screen and clicking a button over and over. And you'll have no help if you want to get useful information from the game so you can use it's automated trade feature, because the tools for understanding prices aren't integrated for shit. You'll be paying some guy entire chests of gold per week to run a counting house, but for sure he can't even scale how much of a good is kept onhand to increase or decrease in proportion to population-based consumption because FUCK YOU, pleb, Kalypso thinks it's enjoyable and character-forming if you do the addition and subtraction yourself - and forget sea captains or clerks or ANYONE except AI competitors with endless money being able to do this across a whole trade route, get those stars out of your eyes, everything in the game is too stupid to do more than BUY LOW, SELL HIGH.



This route will lose money within an ingame year because an AI competitor
will accidentally spike a town's economy into the gutter. No, the route doesn't
automatically adjust for that. Just THINK of the micromanagement in your future.


I played with an abacus next to the keyboard because computers can't be used to make tedious calculations less of a burden. You know what I was doing? Managing a separate inventory for every warehouse I had a city in and every fleet trying to make money for me, and I had to have at least half a dozen of each to mitigate starvation and natural disasters so I could make any cash at all. Then I started looking around for my pay stubs because there was no more play involved and wanted to kill myself.

These things all combine together into a game where you focus on trade because fighting sucks worse than autoresolving, find trade punishing because of interface limitations that a designer worth your dime should have corrected while sleepwalking, and yet find that all the barely-there win conditions are foregone conclusions if you just waste your time waiting for them long enough. Any player with a pulse can't help but muddle through to an eventual victory simply because the AI competitors are all one-trick ponies, but they can draw out what passes for victory on both local and regional levels until it is a war of attrition. This makes every win a phyrric one in terms of enjoyment, and then the competitors repeatedly come back like lawn weeds after you've utterly crushed them in the market, only to try the same stupid trick, the only one they know - ruining town economies accidentally. The game threatens you when you succeed with their whining protestations and sabotage, they gloat like scumbags when you're forced to take losses to fight for market share, and that's all the characterization there is in the whole thing - but then it foists becoming Alderman of the Hanseatic League on the player, as if leading these insulting, unprofessional assholes were a reward, despite the player being guaranteed this victory in the course of the game anyway. They pretend it is a juicy carrot for you in your skinner box, they make it clearly the most obvious win condition, but it is largely meaningless anyway since gaining that title barely impacts gameplay. Patrician IV is a clunky mess, and after a few hours you won't want to touch it anymore - but hey, it practically plays itself anyway.

Contrast this with its immediate predecessor and you get reports of AI that, while only marginally better, could at least be forced to stop annoying you by ACTUALLY managing to put a competitor out of business. Contrast it with Port Royale 3 and you find that the later game's interface is even more cripplingly limited, combat is a bit prettier but still just as bad, and they've tacked on some meaningless choices in terms of whatever passes for plot or campaign structure.



Miss me yet?


The sheer number of things that weren't attempted in this game out of developer laziness is immense, not least of which is a sort of hostility to mods because fuck the community, they can't fix anything. Most things were just disappointingly lazy, though. The AI competitors, for example, not being able to own businesses in more than a single town? The lack of mechanics for putting rivals out of business, buy them out, deal with them peacefully, or partner with them, and the creation of a new rival dynasty to compete with you if you managed to scratch one of the top guys off but left room in the market for new blood? The election of the leader of the Hanseatic League depending not solely on having a bigger monopoly but on the goodwill of competing merchant princes? The trade automation and player tools failing to become more useful as they became more costly? The benefit of the player having a multi-branch trading empire granting some sort of synergy other than lower production costs? It's not worth going the whole nine yards here, really, because there is literally nothing in Patrician IV that could not have been better managed, Port Royal is even worse, and the outlook is pretty bad for Rise of Venice.

Played just on its own merits, the game progressively demeans itself and speaks badly of its developers. Played with an eye to competing titles, every element is instantly eclipsed, and in historical context it is absolutely pathetic. Here's a picture of something awesome the Hanseatic league made that you'll never see in Patrician IV:



The outcome of unbridled wealth and being tired of Scandinavia's shit.


Those bloodthirsty motherfuckers made it for use in killing latter-day vikings in the Seven Years' War, complete with about a hundred and forty guns to blow the enemy to pieces; it was the biggest ship of its time. Did Kalypso look at it and think 'hey, that belongs in a game about hoarding the wealth of the European Continent?' Of course not, they're in the business of serving you gritz. Drink your Ovaltine and shut the fuck up like a good consumer, if you're good they'll fix some glaring flaws in Rise of Venice and let you pay for the patch as DLC.
PREVIOUS NEXT REPLY QUOTE
 
Patrician IV: Rise of a Dynasty is fucking great by jeep 08/22/2012, 8:40pm PDT NEW
    Thanks, am now in its horrible grasp. by fucking newbie 07/09/2013, 2:30am PDT NEW
        I wasted some of time, have this review and prognosis for Kalypso's next title by fucking newbie 07/12/2013, 8:08pm PDT NEW
    I've recently gone on a Patrician 1-3 binge by fabio 08/26/2013, 5:46am PDT NEW
    I always got bored with it rather quickly by WITTGENSTEIN 08/26/2013, 7:25am PDT NEW
 
powered by pointy