Okay, let's go over this one bit at a time.
Actually as you may recall the earlier Civ titles had a pretty hard end date and while you could play on after that, you didn't get a 'win' unless you won in the games timeframe. Equally, if you think a military victory (or cultural or space or diplomatic or whatever) is the game complete then you've kinda missed the whole point. That's how Civ gets you to play again. This time let's try the Romans with an economic game. Start over, play through. They've made this more explicit by increasing the pace of the game too. In the days of old a Civ game could literally take weeks but today you can crack through an 'Epic' game in a few evenings.
Not sure why you're making this comment, since I didn't say that Civ was endless. I said that I played it and beat it and didn't feel compelled to play again. I have only played single player once. I have played multiplayer several times, but always at someone else's behest. I've already 'beaten' the game, and frankly the game doesn't provide enough variety in my opinion to be worth replaying, which is sort of my point about games designed around victory conditions.
And I will also point out that 'if this is how you did it you missed the point' can just as easily be turned around against your previous post, where you claimed that endless games didn't give you an incentive to replay. Well, you missed the point then. See how that's a futile argument? That's why I didn't make it when I addressed you, because it works both ways.
As to whether an 'end' constitutes 'victory' is essentially a moot point. Perhaps it's right to say Stellaris shouldn't necessarily have explicit victory conditions but that doesn't mean it should lack a finite end point. After all, what are you going to do once you've finished the tech tree and conquered the galaxy anyway? Responsibly manage inflation for a hundred million years? So there's going to be an end no matter how infinite. Making that of the games choosing not the players is important to emphasize replayability.
I am capable of stopping myself from infinitely playing a game just because it doesn't tell me to stop. I am not a robot compelled to continue cycling a task merely because I haven't gotten to End If. Are you legitimately concerned that you might be drawn into an endless cycle of pressing the equivalent of 'End Turn' just because the game didn't tell you it was okay to walk away?
(edit: Missed the last sentence, which changes things. A better response regarding 'end points' in games will be found below)
Anyway, the game is going to have the possibility for break-away nations, and presumably larger empires will be more at risk of this than smaller ones. See, you're already thinking inside the box of a static game whose only direction is forward (toward victory conditions). Most 4X games don't have an element of instability like Paradox games do, which keep things complicated even when there isn't war going on. And that is one big reason why I think they should avoid victory conditions being a crucial element of the game; because they are already good at developing games that don't require them.
Minecraft may be successful but it's an utterly different kind of game and trying to bridge from one to the other certainly is speculative. What you're saying is (in essence) that every first person shooter would be better if it was just one big level of infinitely spawning bad guys that literally never ends because in minecraft you can play on one world forever. No. That is not the case.
That is actually not what I am saying. You asserted, without evidence, that the new players needs an end point in a game in order to invest themselves in it. I pointed out that not only do the vast majority of 4X games include an endless mode (one that I think is handicapped by the game being designed around victory conditions), but many of the highest grossing games in history have gone against that logic. I also pointed out that your notion that a new player needs an 'end' to the game to get invested is silly, because how is the 'end' of a game supposed to impact an uninvested player who has yet to reach the ending? The way you get a player to invest in a game is to build an interesting world with interesting mechanics that appeal to that player. You are overburdening your position with unmerited importance in order to make it sound like a stronger argument, but the fact is that the 'end point' of a game doesn't matter to anyone other than a player who is
already invested in the game. Because uninvested players
never reach that point.
In minecraft the fulfillment comes from creation - From physically obtaining and placing bricks until you make something amazing at the end. And then you do it again, something bigger, something cooler. You iterate. Over and over. Every project has an end, even if they are all in the same world. You still go around in circles but you do it in a different way. FPS games have levels or matches, RPGs have branching paths and RTS games you start from the beginning again. Even giant open world sandbox games have missions to contain what you are doing and point it in a direction. As for MMOs - In Wow you raid to get the good gear or you craft to make gold or you make a new character to try out something different. In all those cases you are iterating, in fact often more than iterating, often you are straight out grinding; repeating content over and over.
Games are always repetitious to some degree. That doesn't make them less fun; that thing you are repeating should be fun and you should want to do it lots of times over but in essence you are doing the same thing very many times. Balling those up into discrete bites is important.
Great, now once you demonstrate that Stellaris is a game completely devoid of interesting, non-repetitive stuff to do, then your argument will hold some water. I agree, a boring, endless game would not be much fun. An engaging, well-designed endless game with many varied ways of playing, will tend to be received well. In that we evidently agree. I hope we can also agree that Stellaris will probably be a pretty good game. And as such, being endless should not be a problem for them.
It's nothing to do with giving people credit or not. As human beings we like experiences that feel complete; where we feel we've gotten to a concrete ending. Just getting bored and walking away with no other potential for closure makes for a much much worse experience because that's what we walk away remembering. It's a story untold, something left unfinished. The impact of an ending too early (I so nearly did it!) is so much better than an ending that never comes (So what do I do now?).
'Getting bored and walking away' is typically not how endless games end. Typically, they end because the player wants to try something new. A new idea grabs them, a different race, a different style of play. They restart because there is nothing more exciting than that opening period where you're still exploring the galaxy/world and establishing new colonies and determining the shape of the world. They stop playing a particular game because they are less interested in where it is going than what potential a new experience could have. And if they're familiar with Paradox's titles, then maybe they just stopped because they accomplished their own personal objectives, because I think by now we're all pretty used to making up our own objectives.
If you 'get bored and walk away' from a game, that is because the game is not entertaining, not because it lacked an ending. If a game still has stories left to be told, who is the developer to tell me when to stop playing? What are the chances the game will end at the precise moment when you are finished with it? What about that galactic catastrophe event that just kicked off? What about that war that just started? What about the third of your empire that is on the brink of revolt? Do you really want the game to step in and tell you that you've won because you reached some arbitrary victory condition? Have you won? Have all of your problems gone away? Are there really no more stories to tell in this world you've spent so long creating?
I just don't understand why you think that is preferable to just letting people decide for themselves when a particular story has run its course. It is hardly my intention to insult, but I am wondering if it is a difference between people who err toward creativity and imagination, versus people who err toward numbers and concrete things.
That doesn't mean that an endless mode is a bad thing, just that it shouldn't be the default state of the game. The game that you get the first time you hit the button should be a self contained experience, it should give you a story. And stories have endings. Without an ending it's lacking something. Maybe it's triumphant or bittersweet but whatever it is, it's a moment you'll remember, that finishes the experience on some kind of note. Without that it just fades away into kinda nothing.
Dude, it matters. We tell stories like this because those stories are good. Games do it over and over in loads of ways. Every quest is a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Cutting off the end is a bad idea. Imagine a book or a movie with no end, that literally just has an interminable middle act that has infinite content that doesn't actually ever come to a conclusion, just spins it's wheels for a hundred hours. That's some weird experimental stuff right there. Games are different, sure, but 'endless' still has an end, it's just not a very satisfying one. As a developer it's a much much better idea to give players stories they can tell and remember fondly than to have remember the last time they booted the game up being nothing interesting or exciting, just kinda the same stuff over and over that I made no discernible progress in.
I will end on this.
The best stories are the stories that we tell ourselves (and each other) through our experiences, through our unique paths through a game, the situations and events that nobody else has ever experienced. They're stories that are the result of a good imagination and a good box of tools to craft them with. The best stories are the ones where the developers take their hands off the wheel and allow the players to self-determine their own destiny, their own path, and their own end.
The first person to read a book is the novelist who wrote it. Writing a novel is an endless thing. It ends precisely when the author decides it is done. They likely have a skeleton of the book in mind as they are writing, but as we all know from various authors, stories grow in the telling. At some point, the author has to decide, these are the conditions under which this story will end, and however I get there, come hell or high water, I will end this book.
You can choose to consume media, experience stories as they are dictated to you, or you can craft them yourself. That is one of the things about sandbox games that people enjoy, nobody is telling you how and when your story has to end, nevermind how you get there. And I don't think it's a stretch to say that 4X games have traditionally fallen inside that realm of games that give you a world within which to fashion your own stories. And if that is one of the purposes of the 4X game, to fashion your own stories, then be the author of that story and stop expecting someone else to end it for you.
My opinion.
My previous post on the subject still stands.
