PCGamer has published an article about the top 100 games, which you should be playing this year. While this is time-wise tight, with an average of 3 days per game, you need to make a selection, so we are very happy that this is not too hard: Old World has been included in the list! From the article:

“Fraser: I’ve been waiting a long time for a historical 4X game that can give Civilization a run for its money, and here it is. Mohawk Games has taken all the best parts of the venerable series, but focused on antiquity rather than all of human history. Every turn represents a year, which allows Old World to take a more intimate approach, exploring characters instead of just empires. 

There are plenty of innovations, like an Order system that teaches you to prioritise what actions you want to take that turn, but it’s definitely the Crusader Kings-style characters and abundance of narrative events that feel like the most important addition. Leaders age and die, get married, have children, plot against rivals, and you’ve got a whole court of people to worry about. It’s Civ reimagined as a life sim and RPG. 

Evan: As you said, the lineage system adds a layer of passive storytelling that I didn’t know I wanted in a 4X. Very interested to see how the next Civ responds to Old World.”

Other honorable mentions from the list, of interest to our readers, are probably “Anno 1800” and “Crusader Kings 3”, which should be enough to fill up this year.

Discuss this article in our forum: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/pcgamer-%E2%80%9Cthe-top-100-pc-games%E2%80%9D-including-old-world.673257/

The developers of Old World have released a new patch.

They have made various tweaks to the religious components and also added more events, among other things.

Discuss this patch in our forum: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/old-world-patch-september.673147/

Follow this discussion on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mohawkgames/status/1436075294314704896

Soren Johnson has added a new blog post, about why the characters were added to Old World. Have a read here: https://www.designer-notes.com/?p=1714
An excerpt:

“Simply put, characters add a dynamism to Old World that prevents it from reaching ECS, the usual fate of most 4X games. The most obvious way characters disrupt the game’s stability is via diplomacy. Simply having foreign leaders actually change – from death or abdication or even deposition – over the course of the game makes a huge difference. Perhaps you have a great relationship with Phillip of Greece but not so much with his heir, Alexander, because you offended him at a dinner years before? The latter’s eventual ascension (unless, say, some unfortunate accident might come to pass) will mean that your diplomatic status with Greece could go from good to bad. The amazing thing about this outcome is that it flows completely naturally from having real characters who age and die; players aren’t shocked when relations change and, indeed, expect them to change.
It is hard to articulate how significant a departure this is from a tension that has always bedeviled Civ games – that players expect diplomacy to be predictable, but predictable diplomacy inevitably becomes boring. Players will frequently rant over “unpredictable” or “random” AI leaders who suddenly go from being a friend to an enemy. These shifts are necessary for games to not slowly calcify from their earliest diplomatic states, but there are few ways to make these changes thematically palatable when the leaders never change. Civ games have experimented with all sorts of opinion modifiers that give a reason why a leader might change their opinion of you, but the most natural reason is that there is now simply a new leader who has a new set of relationships, memories, and opinions.”

Discuss this blog post in our forum: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/soren-johnson-on-characters.673117/

Follow this discussion on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SorenJohnson/status/1435440586052579329