Back in April 2020 I was watching a game by the name old worldwhich was then available exclusively in the Epic Games Store as well as in Early Access. At the time, it was a promising, if obviously undercooked, game. Now, two years later, it’s so much more.
The game actually made it out of Early Access in July 2021, but since it’s only just coming out on Steam I thought this was the perfect time to revisit and see what’s going on. That’s how I introduced the game a few years ago:
Civil IV Designer Soren Johnson took an ax with him on some longstanding ideas about strategy Offworld trading companyand his Mohawk Games still swinging with their next game, old worldwhich you will endlessly (and inevitably) dub “civilization meets Crusader Kings.”
It’s a rough comparison, but it’s also the easiest way to get things across old world tries to fulfill. In many ways it’s a traditional 4X experience, taking place on a hex-based map as you take charge of one of the ancient world’s most iconic civilizations and then guide them through their formative (or defining) years.
You build farms, establish new cities, explore the map, fight barbarians, research technologies, and engage in diplomacy (and war) with rival factions. So far so Civil. From where old world trying something new is anything between these great genre touchstones.
That “Civil x Crusader Kings” Comparisons remain inevitable because when you start playing, that’s all you see. It’s a traditional 4X experience, with all the construction and combat and expansion and exploration that goes with itbut instead of just managing your empire’s roads and cities, you need to keep an eye on that too Leader.
In old world You don’t play a faction, you play a person with a name and family and so on Crusader Kings You go from there, have children, make friends, build relationships, and control the destinies of everyone around you. When you die, you start playing as your heir, and so on and so on until the game ends.
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It’s not nearly as complex as Crusader Kings interpersonal system that forms the basis of this entire game, but it’s not meant to be. The 4X stuff is what we’re here for old worldand the character building present here is just a very well-executed icing on the cake, as there’s just enough of it to make you feel like you’re running an imperial household (the way it affects diplomacy is great), but it’s not so much so that it feels like it takes you away from the main action of moving units or building cities.
In civilization Playing, your relationships with immortal faction leaders can feel arbitrary. Crusader Kingshas now incredibly complex stats that govern every relationship and conversation in the game, but it rarely feels like real, tangible results are coming from your interactions with humans, because so much of this game’s diplomatic action is behind slower, sometimes immobile systems put.
In old world, diplomacy and imperial management are driven by humans, and when you speak to them you will see direct results. Wars, friendships, alliances, marriage proposals, trade deals, secret missions, there are far more immediate consequences from your conversations old world than we’d get from a Paradox game, making it feel so much more like you’re shaping an entire empire not just through buildings, but through relationships.
Away from the character driven stuff, Those of the Old World Meat and Potato 4X experience is pretty solid. It will of course look familiar to you with its settlers, workers, cities, map exploration and building improvements on tiles surrounding your settlements. If you have played civilization or Endless Legend In the last five years you already know the drill. It’s fine, it ticks all the boxes, although there’s an interesting twist that the way you arrange your units around treats orders more like a resource.
Here I am in 2020 (it hasn’t really changed):
More exciting than that, and unexpected, is a major overhaul of how turns work old world. This is a turn based strategy game and like any other (the name says it all!) you just assume turns work by moving all your units and then hitting a big END TURN button. But in old world, the number of orders you can issue per turn is limited. It is no longer an expectation but a resource.
Turning a gameplay staple into a commodity is a fascinating exercise. When the game starts and your central authority is limited, you only have a handful of orders to issue to your units. You might find that you have a small army of workers building roads, some scouts discovering new lands, and some warriors besieging barbarian camps, all at the same time.
But you don’t have enough commands to move them all. So you have to set priorities. And then keep prioritizing, because many units let you move more than once per turn because you’re issuing that action from a central command pool, not because each individual can only do something once. Sure you can move most units once, that’s fine and a traditional strategy, but you can also move some units a lot if needed, and that’s cool too.
This was by far the most fun I had with the game as it asked me questions that I don’t remember being asked in a game like this when it came to making decisions about the moves and actions of my armed forces. What’s particularly cool is that it’s not only a fresh challenge, but also makes sense thematically. Of course, ancient empires would have trouble communicating with their units at range or in volume!
There are some other small innovations in the 4X space that I’m digging up as well. The way cities must be built on specific tiles but can be claimed before they’re actually built is interesting, and having units like Scouts able to harvest resources directly from tiles helps that the early game hours feel busier and more interactive.
I’m not quite as keen on combat though, which thanks to the hex-based map and one-unit-per-tile design means battles fall into the same trap as the last two Civil Games in which, depending on the terrain, it can quickly become narrow and unwieldy and become more of a meat grinder than a tactical exercise.
I said just call”civilization x Crusader Kings‘ was unfair, not because it’s technically wrong – five minutes with this game will show you that’s the case – but because it undersells the final product. old world is so much more than just screwing a game’s well-loved system into another genre and hoping for the best.
old world feels quite closer to the older ones, almost perfect Civil spin-offs like colonization and Alpha Centauri. Games that took the basic 4X formula and wrapped it in a shorter, more focused environment that traded the passage of ages for some more interesting mechanics. In colonization that meant making cigars out of tobacco and sending them back to Europe. In old world It administers an ancient empire not only through roads and farms, but also through family ties.
A lot of what I wrote about here in 2022 was also included in the Early Access build I played in 2020, so I’ll just repeat myself a few times, but in the two years since I last played it old world has refined and polished just about everything it could. It looks better, its splash art is beautiful, the quests are better written, there are more military units and the interface is smoother.
We’ve seen a number of major 4X releases over the last few years. Civilization VI, Endless Legend and mankindjust to name a few of the most prominent. old world is better than any of them. It’s focused, it’s confident, it’s smart, and it builds on the 4X genre in a way that’s among the most interesting I’ve seen in years.
