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Look Good, Feel Good

Look Good, Feel Good

The Emperor
August 08, 2023

Hello again citizens and welcome back to the Nero Gaming newsletter.

We’re like the perfect hot dog at the Colosseum—you can’t wait to tell your friends how great we are (even though they won’t believe you).

Here’s what we have for you today:

Why Anno 1800 goes hard in the paint 👊
Kerbal Space Program 2 blows up on the launch pad 🧨
New Orc themed city builder looks epic ⚔️

Anno 1800’s Helpful Visual Design

Ubisoft’s beloved city builder Anno 1800 is a stand out success in the genre. It has an addictively fun gameplay loop that rewards long term planning and requires thoughtful strategy in construction, trade, diplomacy and military action.

Though the game is hard, it feels really smooth.

Challenging? Yes. Frustrating? No—at least not in a bad way.

The Emperor’s take on why that’s the case? It goes a long way with very helpful visual design elements.

Let’s look at some examples:

In the image above, the player is about to place down a fire station. Importantly, one can see the reach of the station (green roads) and where the other stations are already located (right next door, in this case).

“What’s holding up the weapons supply?”
“Uh… we need more pigs, sir!” 🐷

This one is awesome—when you click on the building to manufacture products (weapons, in this case) … you can easily see all the required input materials. Each button maps to the building associated with gathering or manufacturing the corresponding item.

“The power’s out again. Worse yet—No more coffee!”

In our last example, you can see this unhappy citizen is deprived of coffee, electricity and lightbulbs.

However there’s a special warning on the coffee: it needs to be imported from the new world. (Without this, players are at risk of going from island to island in the “old world” looking for one that supports coffee growth). We love to see it.

All in all, the Anno 1800 team is crushing it on the user experience side.

Perhaps they can help revamp the Ubisoft connect launcher which—if I recall correctly—was in fact sent straight from hell… 👿 👿 👿 👿 👿!!

KSP 2 is not a winner (so far)

The sequel to the mega successful rocket scientist simulator “Kerbal Space Program” is off to a very rocky start.

Compared to a 95% positive on the series first title, KSP 2 has a 50% approval rating according to steam reviews.

Despite being one of the most highly anticipated games in the space, it appears KSP 2 has received incredibly negative reviews on steam for an all too familiar reason: The game was not ready for launch.

The level up in modern gaming (via digital distribution) is that players can expect a game to receive years of maintenance, support and content updates (sometimes for over a decade).

In return, smaller teams can often publish directly (keeping more of the revenue for themselves) and also aren’t ruined if a game isn’t perfect at launch. Early access has become a norm—especially in single-player titles—with the trust that the devs will still ship a playable game and use player feedback to improve any shortcomings.

It seems, though, that KSP 2 may have taken this trust a bit too far and has a tough road ahead to have any hope of getting back to an appealing review score on steam.

Orc Warchief: Strategy City Builder

There’s a new game that has the Emperor excited—one where Imperial plunder and pillage can truly be celebrated for the elite art form that it is.

Sharpen your axes and check out the store page for upcoming “Orc Warchief: Strategy City Builder” (a bit of an odd name, to be sure).

From the trailer and images it looks to combine elements from traditional city builders with combat gameplay reminiscent of Mount and Blade or perhaps Total War: Warhammer.

We love a good playstyle fusion and, if implemented well, this could a solve a core problem with the city builder genre: Late game boredom.

Many times, city builders try to answer the “Now What?” question for late game players with decoration elements or achievements. It will be nice if the “Now What?” could be answered potentially with “Kill the filthy humans!”