If I was going to get one game, should it be Humankind or Old World?
- Humankind
- Old World
- Shitbonerz
0 voters
I accidently clicked, and didn’t want to vote, but no undo. So third option to me is to get both.
If I could only get one game, it’d be Old World for sure. It is just stuffed with a lot of neat design changes that could really benefit the 4X genre as a whole. The game is just so smartly designed. IMO it’s the better strategy game and it doesn’t feel close at this point.
On the other hand, Old World just doesn’t have the breadth that Civilization does. You don’t get the same grand sweep of history and to be fair that’s one of the reasons the design works so well! In that sense, Humankind is an enjoyable experience for me. I love seeing someone else’s take on it especially after the last two Civ games I have disliked pretty intensely. Humankind has some cool design of its own with the combining cultures for each era and that sort of thing. I also really like that progressing through the eras is tied to more than just tech, so it feels less strictly just a tech race.
Anyway, I’m glad I own them both but if I could only keep one on my hard drive it’d be Old World.
Old World is a much heavier game. You are fighting from early on, and even if you try to be peaceful, there are a lot of pot stirring events to stir up conflict. It’s much more intense, and it pushes you to study up on the details, at least if you want to play above the easiest difficulty levels.
Humankind is striking me as a lighter game. It’s not there aren’t a lot of options, but unless your next door neighbor is a total dick, you can avoid continual war. Both in the release version and in the OpenDev, I got the sense that it is not that tough to dominate your neighborhood, and the main tension is in seeing that your score stays ahead of far-afield rivals who are more difficult to dominate. I also get the sense that maybe Humankind will offer more variety from one playthrough to the next, since choices of historical cultures offer almost cartoonish extremes as to your abilities, and the same goes for your neighbors.
Thanks for the move, Tom; it is best on its own
I also felt bad for your poll, because even though it was in the Humankind thread – home field advantage! – there were no votes for Humankind.
-Tom
It’s an indication of just how good Old World is vs anything bad about Humankind, at least in my mind! It’s like asking if someone would rather pick James Harden or prime Michael Jordan for their basketball team. :)
I don’t think Humankind is a terrible game, it just feels very much like an Amplitude strategy title with a Civ focus. Old World feels like an entirely new direction in Civ-style games. I can’t say which you’d enjoy more, but I can say Old World presented me with concepts and mechanics combined in a way that I haven’t seen before in this genre.
I voted Humankind, but it’s an uninformed one as I haven’t played Old World.
One of them is $1 to try via Gamepass. :)
Also consider that maybe the EGS will give Old World away soon!
You just described a terrible game!
Old World.
How about a poll with actual hard choices. ;)
This ones not even a remotely close contest for me. Ok, maybe I struggle momentarily between Old World and shitbonerz…
Humankind is probably the best, modern approach to a Civ clone. While it still suffers from many of the same issues that plague 4X in general, and the Civ series in particular, it does so with style.
It is, in my opinion, a much better game than Civ 5 or 6 or that abysmal spiritual successor to SMAC, but it is still clearly Civ.
It sort of feels like a stoned-retelling of CivIV’s Rhye’s and Fall of Civilization mod brought into the modern era.
If you love Civ, this is your game.
Old World is something a little different (and I hope continues to flex even more into that different space). While it has been called a cross between Crusader Kings II and Civilization.
I don’t think that is exactly right, it is close.
There is definitely a little CK2 in there (let there be more!), and it is clearly somewhat Civ-like, but it also feels like it has some legit war game DNA.
I think OW is a better fit for someone who might be a little otherwise Civ’ed out.
But…
The cop-out answer is buy Old World, then get a $1/month trial for gamepass and play Humankind.
The Neolithic period in Humankind is pretty awesome. You should play it at least once for that.
The problem with a poll like this is that people who’ve only played one of them will vote for the one they’ve played. Or maybe that’s the intent of the poll? I can’t be sure, but I voted for the third option since Humankind is still an unknown quantity to me.
-Tom
I’m busted!
I have no plans to play HK because I played enough of EL to know this studio is not my cup o tea.
Amplitude games feel like slick UI demos designed by a committee stuck in zoom hell of endless whiteboarding sessions.
Any and all approaches work for me; if someone has played only one game and tells me “Forget the other one, get this!” then that’s still useful info. If someone isn’t that over the top or is more deliberate in their approach, option 3 is perfectly good advice. Comments such as yours are quite helpful in figuring out what to make of it, of course, and are certainly appreciated.
Humankind is an enthusiastic game made by a company that loves what it does. And what it does is make a beautifully aesthetic game that has so streamlined micromanagement that you might wonder if there’s a game left in there to play.
Old World is also a game made by a company that loves what it does, here an old school recombination of Civ and Crusader Kings that is first and foremost premised on making every decision it can interesting and strategic.
Amplitude has the aspiration but perhaps not the chops of Old World, but has higher detailed and more appealing assets in exchange. Both have thought hard about how to make Civ Great Again, and both come up with different solutions to different bottlenecks at crucial inflection points in the game. Both have great soundtracks btw, though Old World feels more sophisticated and Humankind has the same notes and timbre of its previous works.
So the answer is clearly to get both!
This is perfect.
I voted Shitbonerz because I haven’t played either game but I like voting in polls for no reason at all.