Yeah its good. Let me get it straight though, this game isnt done, its not half done.
Still here? Good. But its incomplete in a good way. They have done early access by getting it playable & fairly polished and then adding depth bit by bit. Its stable, which is good. So what you have is a quiite solid and polished feeling half done game. I like it.
I have been playing a crime family, spreading my various scams & rogues across the city. I am the al swearengen of 1411 London in deep winter.
A family declares a feud with my family? I murder the head of that family. This was quite risky as justice is pretty harsh in this game, but no city guards were nearby and none of the witnesses have (so far) brought it to the attention of the authorities. I dont care who I snap on the way up , coz I aint coming back down.
It tells great little stories. Soon after the above my boy gets old enough to throw stones at my enemies windows. Thats right Cedric, A few cold nights out in that city will teach you a few things about life. He is aged 7.
Rod, do you control a specific individual in this version? Like, drive them around the environment? That was a thing Guild 2 added which I didn’t think ultimately paid off, at least how it was implemented there. I was perfectly happy with the first game’s jumping-between-building-menus interface.
@Nightgaunt
They keep it here but you can also automate a fair amount. So you can park your head of household working and gaining exp while you deal with the rest of your business empire and dynasty.
@Oghier
Yeah its fun! I cant check that resolution as my monitor doesn’t do it but I can tell you it supports windowed mode so you wont be stuck.
I played the first Guild a little. Great little game, though the bugs were out of control and the UI was hidden – like, you had to know to click on random places on the screen to find stuff.
Somehow Steam has never suggested this to me. I loved the original in all its flawed glory. I think when 2 came along I didn’t have a PC that would run it. It appears development is still chugging along.
One reason I haven’t jumped in on this game (after playing various Guild 2’s, and also being a fan of 1400 back in the day) is that there are no building interiors in the game, apparently.
One of the joys of the original game for me was the way you could futz around with the interior of your home and such.
The original Europa 1400 has a special place in my heart. I worked in QA at a small wanna-be publisher and one of my jobs was to help evaluate prospective partners. We got a pile of JoWood games, in the hope we might do the North American distribution. We rarely got PC-centric strategy games, but this was JoWood’s thing, so I tested extremely slow train simulators and an extremely slow wild west ranching simulator, and then… this medieval economic simulator with incredibly deep social and political features. And multiplayer! I got the whole QA team playing that game for a couple afternoons. It had an unfortunate tendency to crash every hour and a half or so, but it was so engaging we would just boot it up again with new ideas for how to, you know, make perfume better this time.
The magic formula is there in that original game, the simulated small town, and its… I’m going to call it “intimate complexity.” Give me a dozen rooms that are also UI screens; don’t give me a character I have to drive around. If Crusader Kings 2 can be a monster hit, so can a game that is CK in a town of 100 people.
That sounds incredible! It also really captures what I thought Europa 1400 (aka The Guild) was all about. I’ve been looking for a game like it ever since but nothing seems to come close. I absolutely loved stacking the local elections in my favor, as I recall. Unfortunately I remember reading that all the sequels that have come out since have been riddled with bugs so I haven’t touched them, but I’d really love to see more games take a go at this formula.
The thing that is weird is… it’s not like Guild 1 or Guild 2 were especially technically sound either, especially if you went MP with it like we did. For some reason though, this one makes me pause too.
The “original” The Guild was actually already the 3rd game in the series. The first two were Die Fugger and Die Fugger 2. After that the Fugger familiy - very old money; centuries ago among the richest families in the world and therefor very powerful, even when dealing with kings - sent the publisher Sunflowers a C&D. Die Fugger 2 was basically through commercially, so a deal was struck that this game could continue to sell, but no new game could be published. Sunflowers had just hit it big time with Anno, so they saw no need to risk a law suit for a mere solid hit like Die Fugger.
Die Fugger 3 was renamed and then picked up by (I guess even sold to, but memory is foggy) Atari. Before release Atari decided AAA console games are the shit. At this point some of producers had already left for JoWooD, because they had seen the signs. The Guild went to JoWooD too, after both publishers came to an agreement.
Before and after release apparently a lot of adventures happened. The climax was that the lead designer and co-owner of the studio was kicked out of the official foums, after disclosing the slight disagreements publisher and developer had about how much patching should be done. The designer sided with the community, of course. JoWood was not amused.
So this quietly came out of EA the other day. Is anyone taking one for the team? Steam reviews are decidedly mixed, but how much of that is due to the troubled development?
