![]() ![]() Something that on the face of things looks like a UI overhaul actually requires the game to be looked at from a completely new perspective. The fact that the console version of RimWorld has been in development for x years speaks to the amount of work that's gone into this process. As soon as it gets released, we'll hopefully work on Ideology." It already provides so much additional content with things like psychic powers, new weaponry, and all the quests that came with it. "We knew Ideology was coming, but made the decision to focus on Royalty. "The evaluation stage and the development time that the game has had began long before Ideology was released," Mann tells me. When I ask whether they're holding off on Ideology for now because it may add too much complexity to the game too quickly, I was surprised to hear that it's more to do with how long the console version has been in development for. However, only Royalty is launching alongside the console version of RimWorld. ![]() ![]() The PC version of RimWorld has two expansions, Royalty and Ideology, which add things like psychic powers, royal titles, and the ability to turn your colony into, say, a weed-smoking hard-partying tech cult. That meant cutting all superfluous animations from the UI, and making the controller, in Sylvester's words, 'feel transparent.' "We'll be in a situation where even as players are going through two- or three- or four-button sequences, it's not slowing them down at all." While Kevin Mann's studio, Double 11, did the core design for the console version, Sylvester insisted on the game supporting high levels of skill. "By putting in simplified things, you let people interpret everything in sort of a narrative way as opposed to looking at it in a movie way." "We weren't going to be able to focus on animations and pretty pixels all over the place," he says. This stripped-back look, according to Sylvester, leaves much of the narrative-building in the player's imagination, which is a big part of the game's appeal. In the way of visuals and UI, RimWorld has always been function over flashiness. The idea is that over time players will build up muscle memory for button sequences that will almost instantly get them to their most-used menus. This is a game where you can make priority tables for each individual colonist, ranking the level of priority they should give to the 16 or so task categories in your colony it's a game where you set and adjust work schedules and uniforms depending on the season, organise what goes in which stockpile, and set automation on such things as deciding whether a dead colonist should be sent to the cremation chamber or the butcher's block. So RimWorld, which is coming to consoles on July 29, is riding something of a wave, but the depth of tinkering and micromanagement in this game arguably goes beyond even those games listed above. But times have changed, and in recent years we've seen 4X games like Civilization and Humankind, as well as deep grand strategy titles like Crusader Kings 3 and Stellaris, come to consoles - undiluted in their depth. These games require keyboard shortcuts, endless mouse movements, and the kind of attention spans that, historically (and probably erroneously), haven't been associated with console gamers. Until recently, 'simplistic aesthetics' and 'complex management' would've been precisely the kinds of concepts that would prevent a game from coming to consoles. ![]()
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