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Dealing with the past

Let's talk directly about the elephant in the room that no one has noticed yet: I am not my brother! There, it's out. I go by the name of Michel and I'm actually Matti's editor and therefore presumably his biggest fan - after all, I've read all his texts. Someone has to do it.

Said brother seems to be suffering from a lazy fever at the moment, as he asked me to write this guest review of The Guild 3 because he hasn't played it himself. And there's a reason for that.

If I understand the etiquette of this blog correctly, you always have to point out very, really VERY clearly any nostalgic glorifications that make an already subjective evaluation even more subjective. In this case, we both share a more or less deep love-hate relationship with its predecessor, The Guild 2, and its partly fan-edited remake, The Guild 2: Renaissance. It was one of the few games that we could agree on with two very good friends at the time and that we all enjoyed equally.

The four of us sank hours, probably days, into this edgy economic simulation, which knew how to interweave the prosperity of our medieval trades and crafts with the intrigues of political entanglements. In the end, the goal was always the same: create a strong family dynasty that controls the fate of its town with power and money. If you were particularly ambitious, you could even expand your influence across several historical Hanseatic trading hubs on larger maps in a later addon.

In terms of professions, the game offered four branches of work: the patron, the craftsman, the scholar and the rogue. The former took care of the physical well-being of the virtual inhabitants of the world with the help of the food produced on his farms and sold in his inns. His style of play was similar to that of the craftsman: create, create, build farms, milk cows, bake bread rolls.

The scholar, on the other hand, was a different matter, as he could offer comparatively few worldly goods and still had to earn his money somehow. For him, it was important to position himself as favorably as possible on the market, for example, and to attract believers. In the evening, you had to time an evening service well and, just as importantly, have a generous amount of wafers in stock. In true medieval style, these were then, rather than being bought, given out in exchange for donations, so that the poor clergy had the chance to get in the top ranks. Financially, that is. Not directly with the boss.

The shady one in the quartet of professions likewise had a special gameplay. If you chose a thieves' hut, for example, which then unleashed bustling bag cutters on the city, you could enjoy one of those wonderful synergy effects that The Guild 2 had in store for you right from the start. Traditionally, pickpocketing is particularly good where there are lots of pockets. Makes sense. How convenient that the preachers mentioned one paragraph above had little else on their minds all day long than gathering large crowds of people at the market and evangelizing them properly. Who paid any attention to the absolutely inconspicuous, hooded figures who gleefully reached into everyone's wallets as they passed by?

These highlights probably only begin to convey the, in the truest sense of the word, thievish joy that one could develop with the guild. It was particularly enjoyable if, through skillful marriage (an art that seems forgotten today), you could win a spouse for yourself who brought other talents into your family tree. If a cleric and a kleptomaniac married, for example, you can already guess how much fun was involved in this joint venture ...

And I haven't raved about the political opportunities yet! With increasing prosperity, you could gradually buy higher to noble titles (also in true medieval style) and use their influence to apply for political office. Is your competitor squeezing your profits with his production? Become an auditor and simply paralyze this annoying forge for a day! Are you facing a series of charges for alleged shady dealings simply because you kidnapped the mayor or relieved your neighbor's horse and cart of its load? Then being a judge is just the job for you! After all, you can judge such difficult situations much better if you know what it's all about.

It was a good time and if you've read this far, you're probably wondering when this article will finally be about The Guild 3 . Wasn't that on the thumbnail? Why am I not writing a review of the second game, or better still: Why aren't we still playing this old treasure today if The Guild is such a guarantee of enjoyment?

Simple answer: Because it doesn't work. The game is simply terribly buggy, comparable to a traditional Battlefield on release day. We put up with it with the patience of youth (or was it stubbornness?), but every multiplayer game, without exception, sooner or later reaches the point where the game goes 'out of sync' and you're forced to stop or continue playing alone. Thanks for that.

Want an example? Unlike my brother, I have no journalistic aspirations, but at least I wanted to get the job titles right (I wasn't sure about the patron). Quickly started The Guild 2: Renaissance , opened a new game, Ah - there it is!, tapped out, crash. Wam.

I don't know how long hordes of coders from the community spent their time volunteering to get this game running with patches and mods. The whole thing apparently went so far that in the end the publisher bundled the products of these eager people into the aforementioned Renaissance-addon and released it officially. A lot of cool features and new professions were added, but in the end it was of little use.

So I was all the more excited when The Guild 3 was announced at some point. We skipped a few eons of development time, a miserable Early Access, even, if I have it right in my head, a change of developer and landed in the here and now. Michel, who now writes about himself in the third person, has finally decided to have a tête-à-tête with the successor to this faded femme fatal to see if she will play with his feelings again.

I have hope, but no expectations - those can only be disappointed. So let's go!

A pleasant surprise right at the start: this new lady in my life is obviously her mother's daughter. Whichever studio was ultimately responsible for this design decision, I want to throw kisses around because they've incorporated the original sound files from game 2. Call me a nerd, but this is the kind of thing I like, it makes me feel picked up, the juvenile in me rejoices.

The euphoria quickly fades, however, and the next few minutes (hours?) are extremely clumsy, almost bumpy. The user interface of The Guild 2 was already no mean feat of usability, so it surprises me that it can be made even worse. It feels like all the controls are somehow still there, just somewhere else. It's as if all the buttons, menus and tables had been thoroughly stirred once and then left to harden on the screen. My fingers, confused by the cozy soundscape, want to unpack the old routines again, the muscle memory makes the cursor twitch to buttons that aren't there at all.

Alright, you want to be different, you're not your mother, I can accept that. I would have been happy with a bug-free version of The Guild 2 but so be it, I'll take your word for it. And indeed, there seems to have been done (more) solid work here. I don't notice any obvious or even game-destroying programming errors. Instead, there are gentle improvements here and there, such as a significantly simplified application process for political positions (in the past, you had to traipse halfway across the city to the town hall). The “I'll-buy-the-gold-mine-and-be-the-richest-in-10-minutes” strategy also seems to be passé. Control over such important raw material deposits can now only be leased in an expensive auction and only for 24 hours. After that, you have to dig into your pocket again. Interesting touch.

One or two weeks go by and I keep going back to the savegame, my in-game wealth grows. In the meantime, I'm even having fun and frantically trying to scrape together just enough money and / or influence (an additional currency) to get hold of office X or build farm Y.

And suddenly, just before I see the victory screen, a realization hits me that my subconscious has been carrying around for a while, like a relationship that you don't want to admit is doomed to fail: this game is boring.

Ironically, it's not the bugs that ruin The Guild for me this time (I did find a few). Everything just feels lifeless and disjointed. For example, your own farms are set up in such a way that they simply always produce profits. The production loop is set up with a few clicks, then the transporters (commendably autonomous) run around and supply the workers with materials. The proceeds from the products always generate a profit, no matter what. In my opinion, you'd really have to be aiming to go bankrupt in The Guild 3 for it to happen. If in doubt, just wait and you'll be golden again.

That doesn't sound fundamentally wrong at first (after all, I did end up in debtors' prison in the first few minutes of the second game), but it is symptomatic of the game. In an economic simulation, the economy should somehow have a certain significance and require a little intuition and strategy. Instead, you snowball your way to the top, because the second production facility inevitably brings more money, the third even more and so on.

At the same time, the system reduces itself to absurdity because the goods cycles, i.e. the absolute core of games of this type, are completely irrelevant. On the contrary: you are even penalized for setting up sensibly matching operating chains, because your own transporters usually run stubbornly to the market, fetch (aka: buy!) whatever is needed for production and then the whole thing goes back with the finished goods. Of course, they look at which of the various markets they can get something cheaper or where they can get rid of their stuff at a higher price. However, the fact that they have their own iron smelter right next to the smithy, which provides them with the ingots they need for free, is a fantastic money-saving tip that nobody seems to think of.

Well, perhaps that's a little unfair. After all, I could determine the routes that my brave transporters should take myself. However, what is called a 'trade route' in other games mutates into a spit route in The Guild 3 . I'll spare you the details now, but when I see how quickly and easily you can do the same thing in Anno in a fraction of the time and with a tiny percentage of the clicks in the last 4-5 installments of the series, I wonder which time machine the developers stepped out of. In fact, in some places you have to override the game mechanics so that you don't completely fill up your own workshops.

Overall, the game only creates complexity by turning processes that should be completed with just a few clicks into an ordeal, during which I often had to set the speed to 0 so that the in-game day wasn't already over. My jaw really dropped when I realized that in The Guild 3 you can really only select one person at a time and send them through the area. Selection frame? Grouping? Nope. It worked in the second game though.

If you ever try to ... er ... backstab an enemy, you must first select your henchman (if necessary, move the camera to your residence, because henchmen are managed via this), then select the attack command from the corresponding menu and finally click on the target (if necessary, back across half the map). And then do the whole thing 10 times. Incredible. This results in around 40 clicks plus wild camera movements for a process that should normally take no more than 3.

Moreover, there is no such thing as free wayfinding. Without exception, everything takes place on the fixed paths provided by the roads. Hiding in the forest is therefore no longer possible. I only noticed this fact really late on, obviously my residual blindness was still too great to see it.

This is probably another unfair criticism, as the aforementioned programmers presumably first had to sweep up the shambles of their predecessors. However, it is by no means the only thing that is so annoying about this game. Somehow they have achieved the feat of making the current installment look graphically worse than the I-don't-know-how-many-years-old second one. This claim cannot be upheld in a direct image comparison, but here's an example:

There are now horses on whose backs you can plow through the world much more quickly. Great thing, but it looks really sh*tty - as if Barbie Horse Adventures from 19-Hundred-Shoot-Me-Dead had been crossed with Tipp-Kick. About once a second, the front and hind legs move away from each other mechanically and sometimes unhealthily stretched out, only to return to their 90° angle. The back and rider remain stubbornly at the same height, which makes the whole thing look more like a strangely arranged mini carnival float or a chevalicious hoverboard. I don't know if you can relate to my descriptions, but any plastic riding animal impaled on a pole and tied to a children's carousel is more dynamic than these antiquated ragdoll attempts, even without the help of Mary Poppins.

I could go on and on, but my word processing program has just reminded me that I've clearly broken the 2000-word mark, and that's for a game that I wouldn't even recommend. Perhaps it has become clear in the meantime why I chose the title I did.

To summarize: The Guild 3 as of the end of November 2022 is a very solid alpha version of a new edition of its predecessor. It successfully tries not to be a bug-fest, but it would need a more or less completely new user interface and some core mechanics would urgently need to be reworked so that they make sense.

On the other hand, features that have already been implemented should perhaps present the player with their own meaningfulness, as I simply ignored a good part of the interaction options, while bitterly missing others. I got to my destination either way, but there is a certain tooltip that I would have liked to have been displayed on the first or at least the second loading screen. Then I would have known earlier that I could let my employees level up automatically. Oh, how I cursed.

In addition to the gameplay, there is also a massive lack of late-game motivation. Ok, I've unlocked a nicer house. Ah well, I can make a fancy family sword. Great, but why? I just need money and I'll get it anyway. It seems to me that The Guild 3 is trying to salvage as much as possible from its predecessor and at the same time keep it stable. Both noble goals, but obviously not compatible with each other.

Maybe this game will be patched at some point and be actually fun, maybe there will be a great 4th game. Until then, I'll wait and remember the past with pleasure.