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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tomBitonti" data-source="post: 6357868" data-attributes="member: 13107">Something I've noticed in the space of iOS (on the iPad Air) is a dearth of interesting strategy games.There are lots of very pretty games, and board game emulators, and games which handle a single focus very well, but exploration / strategy games are quite limited.I'm sure there are lots of good puzzle games out there, but that's not been the space I'm looking for, so I can't speak much to it.One example where the underlying engine has a huge potential which has been vastly underused is Warhammer Quest: The game engine is very nice, and the graphics are excellent, but the game never tries to go beyond the basic structure of the board game (which it implements very well).  There is a huge space for an open ended campaign world to be build, which is almost entirely untapped (the game provides very limited campaign packs, each with a handful of increasingly difficult encounters, but not very playable once the party power has increased to meet the final encounter difficulty).In the space of online MMO's (especially World of Warcraft) is the shift from an open world immersive environment, with a player gradually gathering meaningful state, and with lots of interesting and detailed locations which are truly explorable, to more of a world with strictly defined entertainment value: Instead of having a dungeon with a dozen paths and a lot of replay value, a dungeon is reduced to an unbranched string of boss encounters with a very limited replay value, and as a result, a quite fixed entertainment value.  There is a parallel reduction of the space of player options, with much less of the combinatorial space exposed to players as a character options sandbox.In both cases, what seems to be in play is a bounding of the value of an offering: A product of a fixed dollar cost is set very deliberately to provided a fixed entertainment value.  An open sandbox with very high potential entertainment value is specifically avoided.  The goal is to maximize revenue by limiting replay value.  A consequence of the goal is the placement of bounds on the complexity of the game.That outlook highlight another key detail: The focus on entertainment value as opposed to the goal of creating a very wide potential play value.Thx!TomB</blockquote>

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