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Distant Worlds 2: A 4X King Not Quite Ready for the Throne
A 4X game that could be the best there’s ever been… if the designers would pivot their attention toward actually making things fun.
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 way. 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…
