Gran Turismo 6 has Microtransactions, but it's Not What You Think

Gamers have a love/hate relationship with microtransactions, which quickly became somewhat of a dirty, groan-inducing word. We expect in-app purchases in mobile games since a.) these titles are often free to download, and b.) even if they cost some dough, it's anywhere between $0.99 and $6.99.

Throw microtransactions into $59.99 console game, and prepare for a heated debate.
That said, here's something to chew on: Sony's Gran Turismo 6, which debuts this Friday for PlayStation 3, contains the dreaded "M" word.

This initially made us recoil, but Sony was quick to point out that unlike some games on the market, it doesn't lock GT6 behind a pay wall. According to the publisher, in-app purchases are entirely optional.

In typical Gran Turismo fashion, you'll earn credits used to unlock new cars. From what Sony tells us, developer Polyphony Digital balanced the game in such a way that you'll be able to acquire every single automobile through good old-fashioned gameplay.

If you're impatient and can't stand the thought of driving a Honda Fit for two hours, you're free to stock up on credits with some cash. These are the increments: 500k – $4.991M – $9.992.5M – $19.997.5M – $49.99 Sony dangles the carrot, and it's certainly tempting, but again, the decision to buy credits is entirely your own. Otherwise, the amount of credits earned increases as you win progressively difficult events, similar to prior Gran Turismo games.

It would appear, at least for now, that microtransactions are here to stay. At least on the positive side, not everyone's out to raid your wallet. Nor should you avoid all games that feature it. In some cases, you can forget it exists altogether. We doubt people will find a common ground when it comes to "pay to win," but for those of us who'd prefer to step behind the wheel of a sports car sooner than later, it's a cool means to an end.

Gran Turismo 6 releases December 6th for PS3.

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What you think of games where characters are talking to the player?

There’s some movies and games where main characters discuss with the player. Usually they discuss with the other characters in-game, but sometimes somebody discussed “outside of the game” (or movie) to the player.

I belong to the clan who thinks this really breaks the immersion, and thus I don’t like it when characters make side comments directly aimed to me as a player.

I’m playing Sword & Sworcery game on ipad and while the game otherwise is really interesting, I can’t but help getting slightly annoyed by certain moments.

What you think of this type of storytelling?

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What you think of games where characters are talking to the player?

There’s some movies and games where main characters discuss with the player. Usually they discuss with the other characters in-game, but sometimes somebody discussed “outside of the game” (or movie) to the player.

I belong to the clan who thinks this really breaks the immersion, and thus I don’t like it when characters make side comments directly aimed to me as a player.

I’m playing Sword & Sworcery game on ipad and while the game otherwise is really interesting, I can’t but help getting slightly annoyed by certain moments.

What you think of this type of storytelling?

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What you think of App Store censorship?

If I had a grocery store, then to me it feels natural that I get to pick what fruits I’m selling there. There might be fruit providers who want me to sell their fruit, but shouldn’t I get to decide what fruits I sell?

Sure, it might sometimes (or even very often) feel not fair, or not logical (perhaps I just like orange more than bananas), but still… it’s my shop. I get to make the rules, right?

If something external force would determine what products I should sell in my shop, I feel that would be very bad situation. Imagine if there was a law that said that if you sell your games directly, you must also sell coffee cups promoting “save the whales” – good cause sure, but in terms of freedom pretty shitty.

As the shopkeeper I need to listen to my customers (or won’t have a shop very long..) but in the end it should be my freedom to have 100% control over items I decide to sell.

What you think?

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Poll: What do you think of the new Daily Bonus in The Sims Social?

by Joe Osborne, Posted Jan 24th 2012 10:00AM

Remember when you were all freaking over the Daily Bonus in The Sims Social? Well, hopefully those days are over, since Playfish has changed the feature to update with world time, rather than individual time. It's based on GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), but at least we don't have to remember the exact time we last logged in anymore. Confused? Allow Playfish to explain:

The Daily Bonus will now reset at midnight GMT. This means that if a player logs in at roughly the same time everyday, they will now see the daily bonus popup. Previously, this may have not been the case, because you had to wait a full 24 hours from your previous login. Players will no longer have to remember when they logged in last. Logging in at a similar time each day will be fine. If a player is playing the game during the midnight GMT reset time, they may need to reload in order to receive the subsequent daily bonus.

Surely, you remember the old Daily Bonus, in which players had to log in just after the 24 hours previous in order to receive the bonus. Now that the new Daily Bonus has been around for a few days, we were curious as to what you thought of the change. So, without further delay...
Have something unique to add to the conversation? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.

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Tags: daily bonus, ea, Electronic-Arts, playfish, poll, simcash, sims social, the sims social daily bonus, the sims social daily bonus change, the sims social simcash

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Think Facebook games stink lately? Then make one in Pixaquarium

Come on, you know after witnessing the umpteenth bug in FarmVille you said to yourself, "Hell, even I could do this better!" Well, now's your chance to make good on your foolish statements made in anger, with Pixaquarium Game Maker by Stuntbird Games. More of a creation platform than a game, Pixaquarium gives players the tools to make their own games within the game, albeit far simpler ones that are governed by a template.

You have control over nearly every aspect of the games you create from background artwork to your character's image and the shape of your enemies. But what's most interesting about this is that players can share their game creations with friends, according to a release. Sure sounds like it beats sharing gifts.

"My oldest daughter was bringing me drawings to put into that game," Stuntbird Games President Dean Ruggles said of his inspiration for the game in a statement. "I realized that a game that was as much about creativity as play could be fun. I thought of it as active entertainment, which is new in the game world, in that Pixaquarium is all about being artistic and inventing a new world to play in."

While I wouldn't agree about this type of gameplay being new, it's one of the first Facebook games I've seen clearly geared toward the little ones. Especially those who might have dreams of making their own games. The game is revolved around players uploading photos or other images to play with in the game. So imagine scenarios like a player making a game that includes their best friend to share with them.

It sounds like a great opportunity to increase the meaning of sharing content in Facebook games, but I would imagine kids will need their parents' help with the editor. (As for playing the games, that's as simple as avoiding the bad guys and collecting stars.) As simplified as it is, it might be a bit too much for the single-digit crowd. Regardless, nothing beats making a mini game of yourself slaying aliens and goblins in less than a few minutes, but prepare to pay if you want to save your work.

Click here to play Pixaquarium Game Maker on Facebook Now >

Do you think user-generated content could take off in Facebook games? If you could make any Facebook game, what would it be? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.

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Facebook's Sean Ryan: 'I think Google's a viable competitor'

So, the heat is on then, huh? During an interview with Gamasutra, Facebook's Director of Games Partnerships Sean Ryan (pictured far right) called Google a "viable competitor," likely referring to its all but confirmed Google+ Games effort. Ryan, who joined the company six months ago, has big plans for Facebook and its role as a games platform. And he's not afraid of Google nor the massive Japanese social game companies DeNA and Gree, who bought Ngmoco and OpenFeint, respectively.

"At the end of the day, we're not so much about a game network," Ryan said to Gamasutra. "We're about the social graph, and everything you can do through it. So there's no reason we can't partner with everybody. We're a very partner-driven organization in general. It's just a matter of trying to figure out how that makes sense to both parties."

In other words, Facebook could just offer DeNA and Gree deals that they couldn't possibly refuse, though that's speculation at best. Facebook has some more ... concrete plans when it comes to how it will handle games on the platform from here on out. Well, at least Ryan knows what's best. First of all, the landscape for Facebook games has changed, and the copycat games must go.

It's no question it is harder to break into the top ten, just like it is in any business," Ryan told Gamasutra. "What we're seeing is, I don't think you can, right now, put out a clone of a clone of a clone and be successful. There's no question. You need to put out a well-targeted, well-designed game." (Can somebody say, "hallelujah?")

Better yet, Ryan and his team are considering a "concept of a lighter-weight social layer, that you and I can be friends without necessarily being friends," he told Gamasutra. For more on what Ryan thinks of the state of gaming on Facebook, check out in the interview in full here.

[Image Credit: Liz Mangelsdorf]

What do you think of Ryan's ideas and thoughts for Facebook gaming and its competitors? Do you think Ryan can turn Facebook into a more effective games platforms? Answer in the comments. Add Comment.

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Wot I Think: Total War: Shogun 2

Shogun 2 is set to be released on the 15th of March. For the past week I’ve been playing the single-player campaign, and I’ve written up my thoughts on this below. What I haven’t done is play any of the multi-player. While Sega did provide a multi-player test for press and other interested parties, I don’t really see the point of talking about it until there’s a live service. That should, all being well, arrive with the game’s launch on the 15th. We’ll take a look at it after that time.

So then: how do I get busy with that shogunate?

Let’s start at the beginning. THE BEGINNING OF TIME. Actually, the beginning of Total War will probably suffice. 2000's Shogun was what started it: a two tier strategy game set in ancient Japan. The turn-based campaign map saw you moving armies about between provinces, in a mild Risk type game of unit-production and army-positioning, while the battles between armies could be fought in real-time on a 3D map. This has set the template for the series and, despite colossal movement in all kinds of directions, this structure remains largely the same in 2011.

The Total War games are not interesting because they are tightly-honed, rule-governed systems, as many RTS games aim to be. They can’t be said to be interesting because they are perfectly balanced, or cleverly structured in terms of progress over time. Nor are they interesting because they represent any kind of state of the art in technology. They are interesting because they represent a kind of exploratory simulation: what might it be like to govern in era x, and what can you do with a limited set of military, economic and diplomatic tools. While the Total War games take history as their inspiration, they are a counter-factual, and an abstract take on the processes of history. They are a big “What If” that allows you to play with war in unlikely situations, and see what might happen if Denmark had been a ruthlessly aggressive power throughout the Middle Ages.

The issue with this wide-open, sandbox approach to strategy was that when it gets too big, then things start to become messy. Empire was arguably a step too far, and consequently everything suffered. Shogun 2 is a step back, and everything has benefited. Because of the tighter focus on the single island of Japan, and the more comprehensible mechanics of spears, swords, horses, archers and not too much in the way of gunpowder-based conflict, the game is better encapsulated, and a purer Total War experience. Sadly that means it is also far less interesting than Empire as an experience. While flawed, Empire was at least braving new ground, and its scope was titanic. I’ve enjoyed Shogun a great deal, but I am nevertheless filled with a kind of longing for Empire’s silly, all-encompassing vision. Sure, the release was buggy and it took months to be patched into happiness, but it was nevertheless something a little different. Shogun 2's ambitions are much closer, much more in line with the previous games, and as a result it feels overly familiar. If you have played every Total War game, then nothing here will surprise you too much, and if you require novelty, then that might just be a problem.

So then: to the heart of the beast. First up it’s worth taking about the presentation of Shogun 2. This is possibly the most gorgeously a strategy game has ever unfurled its banners. Everything in every aspect of the game is exquisite. Partly this is because the Japanese theme makes for great design, while our Western medieval iconography seems a bit kitsch by comparison. The menus, the mist on the hills of the battle-maps, the aggressive bark of the ninja, the calligraphic UI elements, it all unites into one of the most rich and delicious experiences in gaming.

Choose a clan, and you can begin your struggle for dominance in the Sengoku period of Japanese history. The Tokugawa won in real life, but you can change that. You start off on the campaign map and you get your first taste of the of the aesthetics with the typically thorough clan presentation and follow up tips. The tips are generally explained to you by a wife or geisha woman, in quiet but insistent tones. Like all the voice-acting in the game, it’s well pitched. The battle-maps’ reports from livid and disgusted lackeys (“A SHAMEFUL DISPLAY!”) are a highlight, but it’s all consistent and strong.

The map itself is laid out as if on parchment where it is outside your visual range, and as you explore this it rises up into 3D, returning to the blackness of a fog of war when you don’t have a unit in the territory. The map becomes busy as the – very busy – as the game escalates. Again each region has a couple of outlying points, usually a port and a secondary village, which can be upgraded separately to the main castle settlement, and can also be attacked and damaged by raiding armies.

Development of your regions relies on two things. One, of course, is income, which can be modified in a number of ways – through developing farmland, developing road infrastructure, and developing sea trade (a simplified version of Empire’s trade routes) – and then through the mastery of the arts. The arts consistent in what are essentially two talent trees, one more martial, the other more domestic. Skills on this tree take a certain number of turns to develop, and their development will often by tied to clan goals, for which you will be rewarded. Of course the clan you’ve chosen will also have some basic bonuses, and have a weaker or stronger starting position, and this will have some influence on the arts you intend to master. Since you can only work on one at any particular time, and you will need certain arts to unlock particular vital technologies, deciding what to work can be crucial to early success. The turn-based progression here always creates some oddness, and I found myself hammering through turns to get to the skill I needed to expand.

That early success can be hard in any game played above the normal difficulty setting. I didn’t find “normal” to be too much of a challenge, but it was enjoyably tense thanks to pesky Christian rebels keeping me on my toes on the campaign map. I was able to win several battles against serious odds vs normal battle AI, which eventually seemed boring. Hard, however, was a little different. In anything over that the easiest starting positions I found myself getting seriously hammered in the early game, and it took some real grit and a bunch of replays to make progress. The campaign map difficulty does seem to be quite something, and I can scarcely imagine how impossible the top tier “legendary” difficulty must be. Surviving more than a couple of years must become the ambition at that level. The battle AI… well let’s come to that in a moment.

Surviving at any level seems to hinge on your honour. The honour of the Daimyo (clan leader) pretty much dictates your ability to work through alliances with other AI leaders, and dishonour (generated by attacking an ally, leaving disloyal generals alive, or becoming Christian) can have other ramifications within your own provinces. Remaining honourable is – as you can imagine in game designed around aggressive expansion – tricky. But so is staying afloat without some serious bargaining with the other clans, who are inclined to team up against you if you’re looking too much like or threat, or even the slightest bit like an easy target.

Agents too have a distinct and important role, too, although I admit that found the aggressive ninja to be far less use that others, such as a metsuke and monk, who have a positive effect in controlling your own territories. Offensive actions are relatively easy to come by and master, but a rebel army springing up in a lightly defended region is far more dangerous than any clan, when you’ve got your big armies at the frontiers of your realm. Keeping things together in a larger empire is also crucial when the current shogun finally decides to call you as the big enemy. This happens about half way into the campaign, and sees the other clans align with the Shogun against you. It’s a good halt for any military momentum you might have built up. Where you might have been able to flatten the map in other Total War games, here you necessarily run into a greater challenge.

So then. That battle AI. At easy and normal I didn’t find it to be any real challenge. Larger armies were easily convinced into entering my traps, and would blindly charge my forces entrenched on higher ground. Cavalry thought it was okay to run headlong into spearmen, and so on. On hard they are rather more cautious, and more likely to flank you effectively. Not that it always works – baiting with weaker units still means you can often draw off cavalry, although they will almost always avoid being drawn into a dangerous position versus missile units. Hard difficulty and higher on the battle AI seems to mean the enemy forces simply put on a more effective display, with missile units retreating to higher ground, and units selecting an appropriate target to attack – although I have yet to see them properly move behind other infantry for protection. I suspect the limited number of units is part of what makes the AI more consistent, but it is also the careful use of cavalry. The hard AI does seem comfortable the kind of harrying and attacking from the sidelines that these units need to undertake. Additionally, you won’t encounter too much in the way of artillery (although there are plenty of siege weapons and such), and although firearms are present, the game leans less on simulating them, and more on pushing you towards melee.

Combat on the field is extremely pacey, too, with units covering ground quickly and rapidly resolving their fights. I had to use pause more than I usually do to keep track of actions in the larger battles.

Sieges – which I was a bit worried about at the preview stage – actually seem pretty tidy, too. The earthwork basis of the castles means that any infantry unit can, pretty much, climb the walls of your castle, and this means there’s always a straight way in for any siege. It also means that as an attacker you can always come at the fort from several directions and often outwit the AI into not defending all its flanks. That said, it can do the same to you when you are defending. I was even surprised to see an enemy general dismount his cavalry and climb up to get inside and finish off my decimated defenders on a map I assumed I had won. Because the castles are much more open, much of the fighting is actually within the grounds. While you can hold the “battlements” such as they are, they don’t sit atop a wall like Western fortifications, and once you’re up the wall you’re back on a battlefield. Ultimately, I began to rather enjoy sieges, which had been something I’d begun to avoid entirely – auto-resolving all the way – in the previous games.

Oh, and naval invasions are working, too.

Speaking of naval stuff – the battles at sea are rather lovely, both in terms of being visually splendid and far easier to deal with than the Empire battles, but I couldn’t help feeling that the nuance of land battles was missing. With a larger force, and more missile boats, I would always win. I never really developed tactics in any meaningful way. At least with big sailships you know you needed to bring a big broadside as often as possible, here it’s a bit more like driving tanks in a more basic RTS. There wasn’t a lot more to it than that. It feels like these are really just in there for colour, and so I just built a large fleet and auto-resolved my way to victory.

There is – at least for my personal tastes – an still imbalance in all this. I found the campaign map difficulty pleasingly yielding on normal, with the battle maps being far too easy. I’d like to have been able to play on hard battle-map AI, and normal campaign AI. (In fact, wasn’t that an option in previous Total War games? Because it’s not an option here.) It feels like the game is tuned to someone else’s difficulty tastes, which wasn’t true of earlier instances of the series.

So, final words: a tight, coherent Total War offering. It’s a bit of a system hog, I suspect. My God-like monster PC chuntered a bit on the very highest settings and the biggest battles, so although the game can look dreamy, I should imagine it’s going to have to be scaled way back for the average gaming PC. Apparently the DX11 support is in a follow up patch in the coming weeks, too, and I should imagine there will be some bugs emerge in that time. I haven’t found anything game-breaking (just a glitch or two), although some other press types are reporting occasional CTDs.

The game is out on the 15th, and there’s no good reason not to buy it. I mean I guess there are reasons, as I’ve outlined, but anyway, just not good ones. You’ll make your own mind up.

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Wot I Think: Fate Of The World

Indie climate change strategy game Fate of the World was finally released last week, following two years in development from Oxford-based studio Red Redemption. I’ve been looking forward to this ever since the beta, and I’m thrilled to finally present Wot I Think.

In the year 2085, Europe is rotting.

The last of my funding has been spent on famine aid, which I discover is being diverted to the frontlines of Europe’s war zones to feed the soldiers, who fight against a backdrop of inactive nuclear reactors. My agent who was in charge of implementing a continent-wide adoption of state of the art genetically-engineered crops has vanished, almost certainly abducted by any one of my antagonists. It is with emotionless eyes that I read that in the city of Barcelona, “corpses are stacked on street corners like firewood”.

Let me walk you through what went wrong in this game of mine. I think that should tell you everything you need to know about Fate of the World.

So, this was my attempt at the Fuel Crisis scenario, which sets you the simple task of reaching the year 2120 without the global temperature increasing by 3 degrees or the human development index (or “HDI”) falling below 0.5 (HDI being calculated using life expectancy, education and income, and 0.5 being just above the HDI of India or Mongolia today).

As with all Fate of the World scenarios, the way you go about bending the world to your will is through a single elegant mechanic- by playing policy cards in each region. You assume control of the GEO, a (fictional) global organisation with supreme authority that receives funding from every country in the world, and then you spend that money buying “agents” (card slots) and implementing policies (cards). Finally, you end your turn and let five years tick by. Got that? Good. Here’s your blank slate:

Now, rather than telling you precisely what challenges you’ll face and why this game is as engaging as a fire in your own living room, I’m just going to tell you exactly how I managed to turn Europe from a prosperous region into a tattered warzone in just 60 short years.

First stop: Africa! One nuance of Fate of the World that everybody learns the hard way is that if you ever stop improving a region’s quality of life directly, they’ll get angry, pull your funding and rip away your jurisdiction for a decade or two. Since Africa isn’t exactly the terrifying climate-change hotspot as, say, China, the USA or Latin America (with its horrific deforestation), people tend to ignore it. The result? Africa drops you like a hot stone and you lose a chunk of your funding.

That wasn’t going to happen to me this time! No sir. I kicked off my game by funding education throughout Africa, setting the continent on the long treadmill towards (I thought) clean industry and technological advancement.

Picture this decision as me unwittingly cutting the brake lines on my car. Meanwhile, I began implementing a very different policy elsewhere, that could be likened to removing the steering wheel- I encouraged rapid adoption of nuclear power in America, Europe and China.

Because, why not? Nuclear power is comparatively clean, no? As I learned while fiddling with the beta, biofuels bring risks that nuclear power doesn’t. This could only be the correct path.

Over the next 40 years I made an incredible number of decisions, pinching pennies to fund research into various fields, anticipating some consequences of a global temperature increase and countering only some of them (short version: Russia gets particularly fucked! Who knew?), but these two early decisions are the ones I want to highlight.

Circa 2055 the end-of-turn event ticker came up with something interesting.

Resource shortage: Oil: 35%, Coal: 12%, Uranium: 5%.

My brain began bucking inside my skull like a mechanical bull. Uranium? The fuel nuclear power stations run on? There’s a limited amount of that?! Why was I not informed? Over the next 15 years my hungry-hungry network of nuclear power stations continued to gobble up remaining reserves until the global shortage reached as high as 50%, causing energy shortages across the world’s developed nations.

Worse, while I’d dropped carbon emissions significantly in these nations, I was stunned to find that Africa’s emissions had doubled since the game began, way back in sweet, innocent 2020. Why? Because my policies of education, drought protection and so on had improved the continent’s HDI so much that the population was not only spiralling upwards. But people were earning more money than ever before, had greater demands, and the entire region was undergoing schemes of modernisation and urbanisation at an aching carbon cost. I could drill environmental awareness into the African population while pushing renewable energy as hard as possible, but it’d still take decades to pull these emissions down. The damage was done.

Within another 10 years, a shortage of both oil and uranium brought about a total economic meltdown, and a famine struck the regions which imported most of their food- America, Europe and Japan. While this reduced emissions, with the four horsemen of the apocalypse- famine, war, pestilence and death- essentially doing my job for me, it also meant I had absolutely no funding to turn Africa (and the Middle East, actually) around. Those two big decisions I made at the very start had turned into terrible poltergeists, haunting my every move and tipping over my delicate models.

Fate of the World is, as an educational videogame, a masterpiece. I feel confident saying that now. The game’s structure of simply playing cards and seeing what happens next is a brilliant idea, executed wonderfully, and it’s brilliant because it’s so galling. The game sets out such a clear, crisp objective- stopping climate change- gives you a selection of wonderful policies to play with, and asks you if you know how to save the world. You do, of course. It’s obvious. It’s this policy, and that policy, and maybe this one too.

You click the lovely, chunky button that ends your turn, and the game’s mighty simulation ticks on another five years. And then guess what you find out? You find out you’re an idiot. Not because your plan doesn’t work, but because there are side effects that never occurred to you.

There are actually a load of parallels with Spacechem, the other great indie puzzler we’ve been gifted with this year. While that’s a game about designing circuits, both of these games share a design where the objective is immediately apparent, the journey towards that objective is massively engaging because it sees you building your way towards the solution constantly, and the “difficulty”, the actual puzzles, emerge only from solving unexpected problems with your own plan. The effect this has on the human brain is fearsome. These are puzzles that, once started, you just cannot put down.

But where Spacechem was simply beautiful, challenging entertainment, Fate of the World is something more important and striking, because your own plan only ever goes wrong because of your own ignorance. The first thing you do when something goes wrong is desperately tear open a region’s telemetry and start picking your way through all those graphs and numbers like a boffin riding the caffeine high of a lifetime.

The addition of reams of statistics for each country is the biggest addition to Fate of the World since the beta, and it’s an absolutely vital one because it lets you try and determine where you went wrong. If emissions are creeping up in a country despite you banning coal power stations, you can pull open the telemetry and see a bar chart showing the region’s emissions since 2010, with each bar broken into many different colours, each showing a different emissions source.

This way you can see that it’s mass deforestation that’s the problem, for example, or you might notice that nothing in particular is increasing, tentatively pop open the population chart and blanche as you discover that the number of humans here has doubled in the last 40 years. In which case, it’s time to pop out the One Child Policy card- or not, as you’re already close to this region losing patience and throwing you out. Better to do it on the sly by sterilising the ol’ water supply.

This greater transparency of information doesn’t just make the game fairer, or create the minigame of poring through data, hunting for clues- it makes the game that much more educational. As well as learning, say, when we can expect sea levels to have risen by a metre, how we could theoretically halt climate change by scattering clouds of reflective material into orbit, why this would be a bad idea, or what the effect of Europe banning the petrol car might be, you also end up absorbing more specific information on what percentage of our emissions are due to agriculture or transport, how you calculate HDI, what causes deforestation and everything in between.

All this said, the final release of Fate of the World does disappoint in several regards. Another big addition since the beta is the game’s built-in encyclopedia, providing friendly explanations for some of the game’s more technical terms, like fast-breeder reactors or smart grids. Wonderful.

Except not only have they not provided a hotkey to this encyclopedia on relevant cards and events, when you do memorise the term you don’t understand, quit what you’re looking at and open the encyclopedia, you have to click down through an alphabetical listing of hundreds of terms to find what you need. Who knew saving the world could be such a chore?

Second, the game isn’t bug-free. I had one policy card in my game which could only have been a placeholder and while that was the only glaring error and Red Redemption have already released one patch, this Steam thread warns of still more under the hood.

(On the other hand, this one talks of some upcoming DLC which will introduce migration, and how excited I got when I heard that speaks volumes.)

But this is comparatively small stuff next to the towering achievement of this game as education. Five hours spent playing Fate of the World is not only a good time, it leaves you with astonishing amounts of information about combating climate change, and if you went all-out and read all of the encyclopedia entries as you went along I cannot imagine learning any faster with a flesh-and-blood teacher lecturing you on the subject and setting homework.

Hidden in this game, beneath the glossy art and comedy warning about adorable species becoming extinct because you are no good:

…is, I think the future of education. I believe that. Not because it’s fun or moreish, but because when you genuinely want to succeed at something and not only have to fix your own mistakes, but want to, I feel like you retain immeasurably more information.

If we can get really good at this- if we could consistently marry entertainment and education as flawlessly as Fate of the World does- it would transform the planet. Which perhaps isn’t the message Fate of the World had in mind, but it’s still one worth thinking about.

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