World Diplomat

[h1] Intro[/h1] How bad is it? Let me start off by saying that World Diplomat is possibly the worst game I have played or reviewed on Steam (or anywhere for that matter). It was one of 3 titles that I had picked up from our curator’s group, and frankly, after playing this, I felt like giving up gaming altogether. I was also debating whether I should even bother to review it, but after discussing it with my fellow curators, felt that other players had to be warned. I was interested to try World Diplomat not just because of personal interest in geopolitics, but every so often, one can discover hidden gems amongst small, independent studios / developers. The blurb for World Diplomat claims that you’ll “embark on a diplomatic journey to impact the world with skills and strategy.” Frankly, this should have been a warning bell but I missed it. I figured that ineffective and vague copy doesn’t automatically mean it’s a bad game, right? Wrong. If you can’t be bothered to refine or hone the communications that will market your game, and potentially earn you money, can we expect anything more from the game itself? In this case, clearly NO. [h1] Likes [/h1] [b] Zero. Nada. Zilch. …

This should be called a Carne Ross simulator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Diplomat . You play as a freelance diplomat, selling your negotiation skills to whoever, whenever; in the interests of creating utopia. It's been nearly 40 years since the last true 'World Peace' game (Global Commander, or The Armageddon Man in Europe, 1987). Balance of Power (1990) was arguably anti-war (albeit geopolitical realpolitik) and therefore, as a a virtual remake, Precipice (2019) also qualifies. The sad fact is that, post-9/11, most modern period grand-strategy games (including the Cold War period) have focused on military solutions, with diplomatic options coming in at third place, behind economics. World Diplomat challenges that paradigm - your aim is to avoid war (by negotiating a settlement before war starts, or brokering peace if not). The basic loop is to attend conferences, where you hope to network with potential clients. These then offer you a mission (contract) to attend a meeting being held in a number of days. You can build a schedule of upcoming meetings and move from one to another. Attending the meeting, at the correct time (having prepared with a visa, hotel booking…

[h1]TL;DR[/h1] 0/10: Overly-priced and heavily AI-dependent game that has been abandoned with numerous bugs in which this reviewer has been given numerous blank checks of confidence that the developer will "look into it" and the only thing that's happened nearly two months later, is that the developer has released other games. [i]Author's note: This review has been revised to be negative because the game has been abandoned with bugs. The information provided below in this review is for archival purposes only.[/i] [h1]Overview[/h1] The great thing about casual games is that the player can feel good playing them. Such is the case of [i]World Diplomat[/i] in which the player brings world peace, prosperity, security, and happiness to our wonderful planet Earth in real time. But how does one go about accomplishing the aforementioned goals? By traveling the world and attending meetings where the player can engage in one of three actions (along with a certain posture) which will hopefully be successful, and earn the player a positive score with the mission patron, a positive score with the patron's nation, money, and XP. The player will certainly need a lot of money and XP so they can…