Boredom with CIV5 demystified

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Great insight in the last two posts.

Complex, deep enriching strategy games are indeed an endangered species.

Better to chase the casual market.

Good news for Firaxis and 2K games. Bad news for Civ fans. :(
 
I have a very close friend who is a casual gamer. And he annoys the crap out of me. Not because he's a casual gamer, but because he's casual in everything. I played World of Warcraft for more years that I dare to say aloud and I have a pretty clear picture of what kind of people are casual players. They are casual in everything. They can't be bothered with anything. They learn over five years what others learn in a month.
I think that's a pretty poor generalisation and I question whether you overvalue the importance people place on games and gaming. I say this as a 35 year old that used to be much more interested in games than I am now, I tend to find the average game these days quite shallow and boring and as such I've adapted to play games in a much more casual manor than I perhaps would have in the past. It certainly doesn't mean I take everything casually but more reflects the fact that games are pretty trivial to me.
 
Great insight in the last two posts.
Complex, deep enriching strategy games are indeed an endangered species.
Better to chase the casual market.
Good news for Firaxis and 2K games. Bad news for Civ fans. :(
Commercially, that would seem to make sense. BUT guess what: Civ5 currently fails both potential markets. It is neither fish nor fowl. Plenty of people like it - and I like it - but plenty of people, even the people that like it, are not addicted to it - not in either way that alpaca so well describes. The core gamers know what's wrong with it and can ably describe why. The casual gamers just drift away and look for something else; it's not their self-appointed task to analyze a game's strengths and weaknesses, but they certainly know when they no longer feel a compelling identification and immersion - they know when they've stopped having fun and they move on.
 
This audience is more predictable and large enough to justify the production budget you need for the spectacle and gimmicks that will guarantee your sales.

I suspect this is a big reason why Civ5 turned out the way it did. As game development budgets have gone up over the years, so have the risks involved.

All the changes they made constitute a fair amount of risk: 1upt, hexes, combat, the interface, and so on. That's a lot of new systems, a lot of code to write, a lot of room for things to go wrong. And the more you add, the greater the risk of going over budget and missing your release date. Wiggle room is inversely proportional to the quantity of dollars involved.

I think the rest of the game is bare-bones simple because they wanted to get the new stuff right, and felt tacking on anything else was too risky. Even if it all worked flawlessly, they could still overwhelm players with it (particularly new players, but Civ vets too). More layers can be added later, but only if the core of the game provides a solid foundation for more complexity, and then only after people have mastered the new stuff.

Or so I imagine their thought processes went. And maybe they were right, since even the no-frills core of the game doesn't play very well yet. One thing I agree with the OP on (though I would argue it differently), is that the rewards system in Civ5 is poor.

How much worse might the game be with a couple more complex systems teetering on top?
 
I think that's a pretty poor generalisation and I question whether you overvalue the importance people place on games and gaming.

World of Warcraft has around 12 million subscribers, three times the population of my country. Farmville with its 80 million players is a par with Germany. Fallout: New Vegas sold in 5 million copies 3 weeks after its release. Starcraft 2 will sell in more than 7 million copies till end of the year. Modern Warfare 2 sold in over 20 mio. copies. These are not trivial numbers.

World of Warcraft: 12 mio. x $15 monthly subscription equals $180 mio. (minus expenses) pouring every month into Vivendi.

All the changes they made constitute a fair amount of risk: 1upt, hexes, combat, the interface, and so on. That's a lot of new systems, a lot of code to write, a lot of room for things to go wrong. And the more you add, the greater the risk of going over budget and missing your release date. Wiggle room is inversely proportional to the quantity of dollars involved.

Maybe its me, but I expect of a game developer to be on top of changes like these. All the expensive stuff (sounds, graphics, actors, videos) are pretty much independent of core game design. Intro video and music could've been used for anything from a real-time Settlers game to a fantasy RPG with builder elements.
 
All the expensive stuff (sounds, graphics, actors, videos) are pretty much independent of core game design.

A room full of code monkeys generally isn't cheap either, unless you run a sweatshop like EA. And lots of studios just license their engine, while Civ5 was built in-house. That is never ever ever a trivial thing to take on, no matter how good your people are. It's a big job.

Also, given how aggressive they've already been about their DLC, they must be thinking a lot about generating revenue over a long period. They're trying to break out of the standard PC game business model, and its single-minded focus on selling boxes. You're not going to do that with a crappy game, as so very many failed MMOs have proven.

And all that expensive stuff is money flushed if the game bombs, which is what often happens when project managers fail to keep developers' feet on the ground.

Or...maybe CivRev+ is what they really wanted to create. Hard to know. I'd still rather see simple but solid, than complicated but broken. And what we got was simple but wobbly.

You linked an interesting article, that mentioned the reactions of chimps to varying rewards (not going to summarize it, people should just go read it themselves). Consider each game as a reward. Civ3 was lettuce. Civ4 was a grape. Civ5 is back to lettuce again, and so we're throwing it back at the developers.
 
Hi, I'm a CIV player. I'm not a bigshot like Sid Meier or a company like Firaxis. But I know stuff. Hell, I'd have to be really dumb not to know at least something about computer gaming. After all, I've been playing computer games for 18 years now.

I've been flying in planes for years. Perhaps you will let me design the next one you fly on? I've been watching TV, using computer chips in my PC, driving cars on streets, going to the doctor but still I resist telling them how to improve their device/work/product.

Not trying to troll, just trying to point out you can't really open your argument like this. Though I'm sure in a car forum somewhere theres someone pointing out how they could make the latest model CTR better with their eyes shut and that the old model BTU was better due to X Y and Z.
 
I have a very close friend who is a casual gamer. And he annoys the crap out of me. Not because he's a casual gamer, but because he's casual in everything. I played World of Warcraft for more years that I dare to say aloud and I have a pretty clear picture of what kind of people are casual players. They are casual in everything. They can't be bothered with anything. They learn over five years what others learn in a month.

Yes, those kinds of people exist in the world, they make up the majority of it. If money is what you want, you'll plug your game into the pool of mediocrity and you'll get your money. For now.

...dude. Are you seriously making a sweeping generalization of casual gamers?

Really?

'cause while I might not care to spend the energy and focus to determine what the exact best way to apply enough DPS to take down a red-conned Elite in 18.9seconds, and I may not give a care about foraging out the precise sequence of actions necessary to achieve a spaceship victory in the least amount of turns, but that doesn't translate to every other aspect of life or work.

Hell, man, I've been playing every iteration of Civ since 1 came out, and I've been casual about it every inch of the way, because, y'know, it's a game(or even a toy), and how I play it has no bearing at all on how I run my film production company.
 
If it was a good toy, putting me into a position that I could actually believe myself to be leading an empire to glory, or if it offered enough gameplay variability that I could try a ton of different strategies and have fun in many different ways with them (but mostly winning because it's not very challenging), I would be happy.

Then it would be Master of Magic.

Much safer to avoid alienating the casual and semi-casual audience... mechanics that are intuitive only to people who don't think about them, the illusion of a challenge (satisfaction when 'overcome' without the risk of frustration), the works. This audience is more predictable and large enough to justify the production budget you need for the spectacle and gimmicks that will guarantee your sales.

This is the basic problem. Computer gaming is going down the same tired road that movies went down in the last decade. The problem isn't a lack of ideas, it's a lack of funding for risky, cutting-edge projects that can become massive cash cows...but also can flop. Investors demand consistent returns, and executives are faced with a mandate of producing those returns or finding themselves out on the street, so gambling isn't an option.

Best guess is that we'll start seeing more games from "independent" producers that have small development teams, comparatively clunky graphics and superior gameplay. Delivery platforms like Steam provide the necessary infrastructure to distribute the content. Now somebody just has to figure out how to market that content.
 
I've been flying in planes for years. Perhaps you will let me design the next one you fly on?
Not trying to troll, just trying to point out you can't really open your argument like this.

Sure I can. If you flew every day for the last 20 years of your life in hundreds of commercial airplanes I want you as passenger comfort consultant over some jet engineer with five PhD's who takes a train to work. You disagree?

I'm not questioning the coding, the graphics, the art. It's all solid. What I do question is the "passenger comfort" or "flight experience". Does it really take a Senior Engineer at BAE to determine that keeping passenger cabin temperature at 10C is not the way to save on fuel?
 
World of Warcraft: 12 mio. x $15 monthly subscription equals $180 mio. (minus expenses) pouring every month into Vivendi.
Blizzard is own by Activision, and has been for some time. The company is even called Activision Blizzard now.

They don't get $15/month from all of their subscribers. A lot of them come from Korea, China, as well as other low-wage countries like Brazil and Russia. In the asian countries in particular, playtime is cheaper and is often paid for by the hour or day, rather than by the month. Most people in Korea and China play games in cyber cafes and don't own computers or the games, instead they rent time on them.

Then, throw in exchange rates from foreign currencies.

Anyway, the point is Blizzard are probably only making about $100m/month out of WoW.
 
Blizzard is own by Activision, and has been for some time. The company is even called Activision Blizzard now.

And Activision is owned by Vivendi.

...dude. Are you seriously making a sweeping generalization of casual gamers?
Really?

I picked up the word casual as a response to Alpaca's post. I have no problem with casual players. I do have a problem with lazy bums who can't be bothered to think or move their fingers even whille playing the damn game. In my dictionary, casual gamers are people that simply don't play often (and can be skilled in playing as any hardcore player, possibly even more so). I'm sorry for the misunderstanding.
 
I picked up the word casual as a response to Alpaca's post. I have no problem with casual players. I do have a problem with lazy bums who can't be bothered to think or move their fingers even whille playing the damn game. In my dictionary, casual gamers are people that simply don't play often (and can be skilled in playing as any hardcore player, possibly even more so). I'm sorry for the misunderstanding.

Got ya. That makes much more sense. Thanks.
 
And this means games only exist as an economical niche.

Before I am going to comment on your statement, I would like to give this quote:
But I know this: if I play a computer game, I don't want Sims, I don't want an MMO and I don't want any form of mediocrity. I'm paying for the game exactly not to be a mediocre waste of time. If the developers are not happy with the profit they are making from the Civilization players worldwide, maybe they should start looking for another job. I'm pretty sure they were not starving all these years.

The point is, a TBS like Civilization always has been some kind of niche product.
In its niche, it was very successful.

Giving up that niche means leaving the environment in which you have been successful, trying to explore surrounding for which you may not have been equipped.

People say that the biggest and strongest living carnivore would be the icebear. So, only knowing this we would expect him to even dominate jungles and Serengeti, no?
Yet, it doesn't.

Let me give another example.
Porsche (the car manufacturer) is well-known for their sportscars. High-priced, quite exclusive sportscars. One could even say they dominate that market to a certain degree. Almost anybody only slightly informed about cars knows what a 911 stands for.

Now, nevertheless, during the past 10 or 12 years they have issued other cars, too.
Boxster, Cayenne, Panamera.
All these cars are sportive, too. They have to be, since they are made by Porsche. People just wouldn't accept a middle-class sedan from Porsche.
What ever they do, they have to create sportive cars. And they do and have done so.

Nevertheless, the new types were not called "911-casuall" (Boxster), "911-SUV" (Cayenne) or "911-limousine" (Panamera).
Because they went into different niches with these cares, niches in which a 911 doesn't fit.
They had to get different names as otherwise people would have had expectations which could not be fulfilled.

Coming back to Civlization.
Civilization was a niche product, played by a special kind of customer. That doesn't mean that these customers would be any better or worse than the customers for RTS, FPS and what not more.
But, clearly they are different. They have different intentions about which kind of game to play, how to play it and what to expect from their game.

Civilization to a certain degree was a label like "911".

Trying to move this same label (more) into the mass market may be successful in the short term, as people are thrilled to get "their" Civilization (911) now, which previously was out of question.

At the same time, long-time customers are shocked.
To appeal the mass market consumers, things have to be stripped.
Civilization has been reduced in terms of functionality, choices and options. The equivalent would be to have a car called "911" but with less powerful engine, no sportscar interior, weaker brakes and worse road handling...
For the mass market, it may still appear as a very sportive car, but for the long-time Porsche driver the new car has lost what made its fascination.
And after some time, the new customer may detect that his new car is not so good in transporting things for a whole family. Suspension may be uncomfortable (even if not as hard as in the previous 911s), seats aren't really made for people with more than 200 lbs and so on.

The result may be that when releasing the next generation, you won't have any of both customers anymore.
Your traditional customer won't forgive that you've changed the 911 for the mass market, the new acquired customer may have already changed the car for a pickup.

Civ5 has genes of a Civilization game, but isn't it anymore.
They should have given it a different name: "Sid Meier's Civ: Exploring New Frontiers" or whatever.
The undisputed weaknesses would still be around, but it wouldn't have to compete against a game in which class it no longer plays.

Firaxis/2K wanted to make a quick buck out of the brand name. Seems that they succeeded in this.

Personally, I doubt that this can be repeated. I doubt that Civ6 (if it were ever to come) will be a big success.
Old fans are lost, new fans most probably will not be that faithful. After all, Civ5 is for the mass market. You rarely find much dedication amongst mass market customers.
 
Are we descending into Casual versus Hardcore here? Allow me facepalm.

Edit: seems not - let's focus on the main topic then :)

Done. Alright, back to topic.
I have worked as a professional game designer and project manager on two Nintendo DS games. I have spoken to executives of several major publishers and heard their take on the market. The truth of the matter is: yes, the wide and narrow market demographics are traditionally very distinct from each other. However, appealing to the one or the other DOES NOT make a game's design better or worse.

First off, yes, Civ 5 is only an average game, mainly because it was not sure what it wanted to be. That can be blamed on its design philosophy or whatever, truth of the matter is: it is not a game en par with its predecessors.

What makes great game design? Accessibility. The phrase you are looking for is "easy to learn, hard to master". The Warcraft and Starcraft series are, truth be told, good examples of how this works. With just the right amount of polish and challenge, a game can very well appeal to casual gamers - i.e. those who do not expend the major amount of their free time for gaming - and "hardcore" gamers - i.e. those who do.

Civilization however is, by concept and execution, a product of the times before this imaginary divide appeared, before the accessibility part of game design was focused on more on more by the big-market companies. Until the mid-2000s, complex and beautiful was in, but with the advent of the Wii and larger online distribution platforms, the focus shifted towards simple and stylish, which is not the same thing.

Civilization was caught in the middle, with Civ IV suddenly becoming a niche product. The Civ series suddenly seemed no viable commodity anymore, faced with the immense casual market. So Civ Rev was launched in an attempt to cash in on the phenomenon and, more importantly, reconcile the premise with the new market reality. Rev was a test run, however, for Civ 5, which tried again - and failed.

In the end, Civ 5 is a product of its time and a clear expression of a series and all its creative heads - Sid Meier as creator but first and foremost the game designer(s), publisher and everyone else involved not making a definitive decision about whether to tend to the main market or a now perceived niche (i.e. strategy gamers) which might still be bigger than ever before.
 
I think the rewards are there, but they're too small. The wonders are too weak. The multipliers are too low, or the base number being modified is so low (hammers, for instance) that the multiplier has almost nothing to multiply.

And nothing really grows. Trading posts and mines have the same gold and hammer values from beginning to end. Any given farm only gets a boost once in a game. Same for lumber mills. Cities themselves fly through the first few pops in no time thanks to maritime food, and then grind to a crawl. In neither mode does the next citizen's appearance generate much excitement.

It ends up feeling very linear. I think the people most disappointed with this game are those who expected more exponential growth in their empires. And there's very little of that to be found in Civ5.

That's why:
civ4 sucks sp mode
civ5 is nice in mp mode

Humans are the only ones who can leverage the game in its present state. Bonus or not, you are playing humans, which they make any game interesting in some point.
You can lose your capital and still win. Not in civ4. That's the major thing that i like in this new version.

But me too i want more bonus to be able to do more strategies. More options.

Otherwise, civ4 BTS is the reference for the majority of players who play sp mode. Expansions may give some good tastes but don't count on that much.
 
In the end, Civ 5 is a product of its time and a clear expression of a series and all its creative heads - Sid Meier as creator but first and foremost the game designer(s), publisher and everyone else involved not making a definitive decision about whether to tend to the main market or a now perceived niche (i.e. strategy gamers) which might still be bigger than ever before.

Do I believe that a Civilization game can be designed in a way that it is appealing to both masses and long-time fans? Yes I do. I really, strongly do. I have nothing against Firaxis or 2k or whoever earning money on their product. I'd love nothing more but Civilization to keep going as a franchise. But at the same time I choose to disbelieve that such "strong names" as Sid Meier or Firaxis can't find a better solution than offered in Civilization 5. If anything, slapping your name on every product since 1990 should grant you much more ways to find the best minds in the gaming industry and beyond. At least for a constructive phone conversation on a particular problem. I mean, seriously, Sid Meier has no access to academics, professors, doctors of sciences? Bah.
 
But didn't they get close with CIV IV?

A few aspects of the game should be paid attention to.

First combat. Casual gamers often like combat. SOD's are killing for both casual and hardcore gamer (see below for the mistakes of the Civ V 1upt implementation).

Second make certain complexities optional. Odds can be confusing or frustrating for casual gamers. Make a model that will allow to make espionage, religion optional (for example change victory conditions for culture when playing without espionage). But also let the player know what kind of effect the settings have (and changing them) on the game.

Third do not hide the modifiërs. When looking back at my first games without bull and bug I still can't figure out how was be able to continue. Now I now why thing are happening (even without clicking tons of menu's). And no, I don't have time to figure it out myself. Thanks to the community I like CIV IV. But thats not the way it should be. I had to dive in some stuff a casual gamer would never do.

Change is good but when they do not learn from previous mistakes the will not earn my money.

But after all I think Civ games are dying because they (the casual gamers) tend only towards graphics. It takes a lot of time te create new complex graphic engines. For shooters not a problem just cut the single player time to 10 hours and put some dumb AI's in it. It will be a best seller. Civ games don't work that way (CIV V 1upt implementation).
 
The point is, a TBS like Civilization always has been some kind of niche product.
In its niche, it was very successful.

I agree with your post. I can see why the devs'/publisher's decision to make the game more accessible was made. Unfortunately, being accessible while still being deep is quite difficult, and so is being a toy while being a game, too.

To reply to Bibor, I believe WoW actually delivers on both counts. I haven't played it much personally but I have a friend who's the epitome of a core gamer and he played WoW for years, in a guild. In WoW, core gamers have PvP, strong bosses you can only take down by big-time cooperation (which requires a likewise cooperation to distribute the loot fairly) and what I call the Quest for the Best Gear. Casual gamers have a fun gameworld and can slay a couple of monsters and occasionally even find nice people to play with.

Are we descending into Casual versus Hardcore here? Allow me facepalm.

I hope not. If you understood my post as a "vs" scenario, I think you filtered it through a preconception. I didn't make a value statement, but saying that all players want the same thing from the games they play is obviously stupid, so to discuss what different players want, it makes sense to try to find the underlying "archetypes", the far ends of a spectrum if you like.

I'm not sure it was a good idea for Civ to try to leave its niche. It was living in that niche quite well and I don't think Civ4 or BTS sold badly. Even if you assume the decision is sound, the execution was done badly by people who are apparently not too good at designing an enthralling toy, or a deep game. Civ5 neither captivates nor challenges, so I would agree that it's not a good game. I still think a lot of the basic design decisions could work if revisited properly, though - but I'm not sure if the current team is up to the task. Time will tell.
 
The basic problem is that you can't go halfway to casual. Casual gaming is instant gratification: hit a button and a unit pops up in a few seconds or a minute, not hit a button and and a unit pops up after you hit "enter" 75 times. It has to be extremely easy - Civ 5 is still too hard for a mass market, because you can't win at a normal setting the first time that you play, and it lacks a ridiculously simple set of intro missions. It's too long - two hours tops, one hour normal is the norm for how online games are designed. And it's still too complex. Civ Rev had tiny sales relative to the genre, which should have been their hint: the FarmVille crowd won't go for anything much more complex than Minesweeper.

When we talk about small markets, etc. it's worth remembering that the prior entries in the series sold millions, and a comparable quality new game would have done at least as well. They put out a mediocre game because they were dreaming of tens of millions of sales. I hope they end up with hundreds of thousands instead (the only sales links I've seen are in the few hundred K level, but I couldn't tell if that included digital downloads). That way perhaps they'll make a game that plays to their strengths.
 
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