Distant Worlds 2: A 4X King Not Quite Ready for the Throne

Move over, Stellaris–there's a new 4X champion in town.

Do you recall the first time you played the perfect strategy game? I've loved simulation-style games ever since I started playing Majesty on my dad's old Compaq laptop back in the early 2000s. You could set your kingdom up and watch its little heroes and heroines wander around, tackling all manner of complexities on their own. It seemed magical.

A few years later, when Galactic Civilizations hit the scene, I fell for it hard, loving the feeling of having so much apparent depth in a galactic setting. As a die-hard fan of space opera, nothing could be as exciting as actually taking part in my own space empire!

And yet, over the years, I've found myself increasingly frustrated. There are too many abstractions in games like Stellaris for them to hold my interest for long. Though I've played Stellaris for hundreds of hours, I've recently found it nearly unplayable, since its gameplay loop is almost always exactly the same, and it feels too flat when it comes to elements like economics, combat, and culture.

Mods for Stellaris, always one of the best parts of the game, have been slipping away as well. This appears to be due to the constantly updating game and added DLCs, which have made it less fun for modders (who put hundreds of hours into content development) to maintain their work.

Enter Distant Worlds 2. This game differs from Stellaris's abstraction-prone gameplay in almost every wat. DW2 is a simulation.

• Want to collect resources? Actual ships have to mine them, each individual ship mattering for your overall industrial health.
• Up against a more powerful empire? Raid their supply ships and keep them from gearing up for an invasion.

And, unlike so many games, your own empire is filled with realistic simulation elements. You don't have to worry about some part of your empire falling apart because you forgot to tell your AI to do its job.

This, incidentally, was one of my biggest beefs with Nebulous: Fleet Command. It made no sense to me that I should have to real-time micro-manage every aspect of the damn ship during combat. Realistically, a trained crew should be able to handle most aspects of combat without being constantly told what to do!

Combat is another are where this game shines. In DW2, combat feels so much more dynamic and engaging than in Stellaris because it's possible for smaller ships, or less-powerful empires, to actually hold up against more powerful foes – through the careful use of tactics and positioning. As one reviewer put it: the game is "delightfully unbalanced." Sometimes, you're up against far more powerful foes, and in those times it's still possible to win!

The critiques

Lest you think I'm just giving Stellaris a hard time, however, it's important to delve into the flaws of DW2. Some of which are... odd. For a game this involved and interesting, it's a little surprising how big the gaps are in its playability. This feels like a beta of a game, almost ready for the big leagues.

• Lack of hand-holding: The game is very complex, the tool tips are overwhelming, and the tutorials are just walls of text. This feels like it's either a problem of developers who are too nerdy to realize their UX is a mess, or a matter of the whole thing still being early development.
  • Fix: A step-by-step guided tutorial, preferably attached to an in-game story mission, that guides players through the basics of the game in a really fun way.
• No player-centric aspect: What's there to actually do in this game? It's such a good simulation that it simulates most of the fun out of the gameplay. I literally wrote this article while playing the game, which sort of defeats the purpose of having a game on at all. It's the equivalent of having a mildly interactive picture-frame in the same room.
  • Fix: Better storytelling/interactive context. Give the player something to interact with. Things that are fun to micromanage a bit.
    • A customizable (and more powerful) "flagship" that is intended to be player-controlled. With a unique crew and capabilities that the player ends up caring about and feeling pride in building (a la "X4: Foundations").
    • Dynasties of leaders, so that the player can immerse in the internal cultural side of the empire.
    • Storytelling RPG content with choose-your-own adventure style plots and fun scripting.

• Lack of storytelling: There's nothing in DW2 to actually care about. Each empire basically does its own thing, more or less in the same way: and the AI takes care of everything. Are there technically little stories and missions? Sure. Do they feel like anything more than binary choices with opaque outcomes? Nope. This is one area where Stellaris pulls ahead slightly. While still pretty bland, there are a lot of tiny story aspects in Stellaris (and some modders have even built on those more).
  • Fix: It's sorta self-explanatory--provide more story! Each race should have lots of story content that pops up in small chunks. It could still be automated out for those players who don't want to deal with it, but for relatively low-energy, the game could be spiced up a lot. Give us details of what happens on the away missions of explorers; tell us what happens to the psychologies of crews on deep-space missions; provide details about the intricate political maneuvering planet-side; tell us what the spy escaping capture had to go through! While the economics is simulated, the stuff that actually makes a game engaging has been all abstracted out.
• Inability to customize: One of my first big disappointments in this game came when I tried to customzie a starship. A big tooltip warning appeared when I tried adding a third engine to my little escort ship design, "THIS HULL CAN ONLY FIT TWO ENGINES." Wait, what? Then why is there a hardpoint for a third one? You also can't build custom races, which is just a MAJOR blow to anyone who loves telling their own stories through games like this. Honestly, I expect that the lack of custom races is one of the biggest reasons DW2 fails to come close to matching Stellaris in terms of popularity. I don't play games like this so I can wallow around the poor flavor text of a pre-created race–I want to tell my own stories!
  • Fix: Pretty obvious: Allow for way wider customization. Custom races. The ability to rename star systems within your sphere of influence. Better starship customization. The ability to alter colors and design pallets. The ability to add customizations for social dynamics, political behaviors, economic policies (what if I want space-socialism, gorramit?). For all Stellaris's many faults, I can use it as a platform to tell stories. In DW2, I'm just an observer to a complex number crunching routine.
• Bland flavor: I've been touching on this already, but the sheer lack of flavor in this game is really staggering. Where there is flavor, it feels half-baked and underwhelming. And, where there isn't flavor... well, that just feels like a gaping maw of number-crunching. Bring on a writing team (hire me!). Get someone to build out the various aspects of the flavor text in this game so that it reads better, is better differentiated, and so there's more of it.

Conclusions

Distant Worlds 2 is incredibly impressive for its ability to simulate the living, breathing trade arteries of an interstellar civilization. But the game as a whole feels like an early beta. There's no story, no RPG elements, little customization, little content and context, and not a single gameplay loop that can't be better left to the AI.

At the same time, this is the platform for what might be the best 4X game of all time. With the underlying simulation pulling a lot of incredible weight, the designers should now focus on giving players something to actually care about. Give players some story and RPG content. Allow us to customize more so that we can become invested in our own creations. Enhance the flavor and dynamic interactivity of the game, and you'll easily take the throne for best 4X game on the market.

Should you buy it? Grab it on a discount from GOG or some other source. It's worth playing around with for a little bit, if only to watch the empire grow and do its own thing. It can feel overwhelming at first, but the game basically runs itself, so don't worry. Just do what the advisor tells you and you can watch your little empire expand. Maybe you'll lead a space battle or two.

However, if you're looking for the next game to really sink your teeth into, this isn't it... yet.

I'll just keep my fingers crossed that the developers take me up on my suggestions because a fleshed out DW2 would be a thing of real beauty.

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