Is Civilization forever dead?

I just got the news that Civ 6 is dropping soon and I rushed out to read what I could about it. Wow, talk about underwhelming. Is Civilization forever gone? Are we now stuck with iterations of the abysmal Civ 5 forever?

I was hoping that Civ 5 was an aberration....now it looks like I'll be stuck playing Civ 4 forever. Man, what a bummer.

Then again, maybe I'm being overly harsh. We still know very little, but nothing here screams 'we're forsaking Civ 5 as an abomination and returning to a more serious strategy experience'. The idea that multiplayer games can be completed in a single session, for example, is a bit worrying for what it seems to imply for the complexity and depth of the upcoming game.

For people who can't grow up, grow beyond their pre-established comfort zone, and hate change, then yes, Civ is dead, all music and film & TV sucks now, and everything was way better in the good old days.

For people who aren't scared of change, no.

Yep. It died in 2010 with Civ5. Along with stacks of doom.

I liked Civ V, and I'm going to like Civ 6 too. It's not dead at all for those of us that like it.

You're making ultimate judgments on the fate of the series from three screenshots, 1 video, a handful of interviews, and the internet reaction. Overly harsh seems a fair statement.

I understand if you didn't care for Civ V. It took me a while to get accustomed to the changes after my time with IV. But it's very clear that this game has many key differences from V and those may be enough to change a few minds. But the developers will never call V an abomination and frankly neither will most players. A lot of people enjoy V. A lot of people recognize the flaws in V and came together to make it better.

As for multiplayer, are you suggesting that being able to set aside an evening with friends to play Civ and being able to actually finish the whole game is a bad thing? I may need some clarification to understand where you are coming from.

jjkrause84 said:

[...] now it looks like I'll be stuck playing Civ 4 forever. Man, what a bummer. [...]

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Why a bummer? Apparently you like that game, so what's wrong with sticking to it?

Civ 5 has been a commercial and, especially after BNW, a critical success.
I can understand That Firaxis is continuing down that path instead of reinventing the wheel (again).

And to be honest, I think Civ 5 is a great game, and it looks like they strengthen the good points and try to improve the bad points (eg the overhaul of the 1UPT-system).

It might be terrible, but it also might be the best Civ yet.

Civ 6 PRE-orders are Steams #1 top-seller.

The one-session multiplayer is an abbreviated game option, covering a couple of eras. It's not a whole game.

Civ 5 BNW was pretty deep, many people thought. Civ 5 Vanilla was not. Civ 6 seems as though it's dropping nothing from BNW.

Haters gonna hate. Long live Civ!

jjkrause84 said:

I just got the news that Civ 6 is dropping soon and I rushed out to read what I could about it. Wow, talk about underwhelming. Is Civilization forever gone? Are we now stuck with iterations of the abysmal Civ 5 forever?

I was hoping that Civ 5 was an aberration....now it looks like I'll be stuck playing Civ 4 forever. Man, what a bummer.

Then again, maybe I'm being overly harsh. We still know very little, but nothing here screams 'we're forsaking Civ 5 as an abomination and returning to a more serious strategy experience'. The idea that multiplayer games can be completed in a single session, for example, is a bit worrying for what it seems to imply for the complexity and depth of the upcoming game.

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Civ5 is one of top 5-10 played games on Steam now. After 6 years. That's enormous success. That's the success no other strategy game on the market can count on. Saying civ5 was a failure is ridiculous (and nobody cares about opinions of some niche group of hardcore retro veterans). Civ5 was a critical, financial, community and modding success. It sold in 8 million copies iirc, almost 30% of all sold copies of all civ series titles ever.

If you and a bunch of civ4 fans still think civ5 was total failure that's fine, don't expect civ4 2.0, it will never happen, move on or move back to civ4. I loved Civ5: Brave New World (it has very high user reviews on metacritic too) and I am very happy new civ game will be based on this legacy.

Oh and by the way, I tried playing civ4 and strongly disliked it when compared to civ5. There are many people like me who don't care in the slightest about civ4, deal with it (and don't say stuff like 'You prefer shiny graphic to depth', half of my favourite strategy games are 10-15 years old and second half are spreadsheets of paradox interactive).

Krajzen said:

Civ5 is one of top 5-10 played games on Steam now. After 6 years. That's enormous success. That's the success no other strategy game on the market can count on. Saying civ5 was a failure is ridiculous (and nobody cares about opinions of some niche group of hardcore retro veterans). Civ5 was a critical, financial, community and modding success. It sold in 8 million copies iirc, almost 30% of all sold copies of all civ series titles ever.

If you and a bunch of civ4 fans still think civ5 was total failure that's fine, don't expect civ4 2.0, it will never happen, move on or move back to civ4. I loved Civ5: Brave New World (it has very high user reviews on metacritic too) and I am very happy new civ game will be based on this legacy.

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I would suggest that Civ V achieved its incredible popularity in part because it was less rich, less complicated, and less challenging--that is, worse--than Civ IV.

Civ 5 was a huge success. Civ is only dead if you consider Civ to only include the series up to Civ 4.

What is dead may never die, but rises again, stronger and with improvements on many of its core systems.

CaiusDrewart said:

I would suggest that Civ V achieved its incredible popularity in part because it was less rich, less complicated, and less challenging--that is, worse--than Civ IV.

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Could you please elaborate on your position?

part of the fact civ5 sold so well might be simply due to the fact that gaming in general exploded in popularity, it's kinda unfair to compare it to civ4 imo

Ryuu Falconwing said:

Could you please elaborate on your position?

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Sure. I'm not saying that Civ V is a bad game. Judged purely on its own merits, it is pretty fun. But in comparison to Civ IV--in my mind, the greatest strategy game ever made for the computer--it suffers. I think that Civ V found success by keeping a lot of the really fun and appealing aspects of the Civ series (a sense of progress, the fun of building things, etc) and making things simpler and easier than they were in Civ IV, so that they could easily appeal to more people. But to people who played and loved the strategic depth of Civ IV (or at least to me, anyway), it seems shallow.

CaiusDrewart said:

I would suggest that Civ V achieved its incredible popularity in part because it was less rich, less complicated, and less challenging--that is, worse--than Civ IV.

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disagree about complexity. civ5 is a game that adds depth through complexity. civ5 has some depth and at the same time it is alot less punishing. the gap between bad play and good play in civ5 is magnitude less than in previous games. civ5 is definitely aimed at the casuals. they enjoy beating the abysmal AI to death while loosing nothing.

still, civ5 lost many civ veterans, but it gained an enormous crowd of casuals.

jjkrause84 said:

I just got the news that Civ 6 is dropping soon and I rushed out to read what I could about it. Wow, talk about underwhelming. Is Civilization forever gone? Are we now stuck with iterations of the abysmal Civ 5 forever?

I was hoping that Civ 5 was an aberration....now it looks like I'll be stuck playing Civ 4 forever. Man, what a bummer.

Then again, maybe I'm being overly harsh. We still know very little, but nothing here screams 'we're forsaking Civ 5 as an abomination and returning to a more serious strategy experience'. The idea that multiplayer games can be completed in a single session, for example, is a bit worrying for what it seems to imply for the complexity and depth of the upcoming game.

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no doubts about it - civ5 is astonishingly successful. with civ5 Firaxis feels that they have hit the nail on the head. any civ game Firaxis makes will be a rehash of the successful civ5 formula.

if you expect civ6 to be something geniunely new - you will be disappointed.

I disagree. I think the way things like city-states, 1UPT, religion, trade routes and combat were implemented in Civ V makes it superior to IV.

I can't go back to IV now.

jjkrause84 said:

now it looks like I'll be stuck playing Civ 4 forever. Man, what a bummer.

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That's harsh - Civ IV wasn't that bad.

I can understand That Firaxis is continuing down that path instead of reinventing the wheel (again).

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If anyone should be used to repeatedly reinventing the wheel, it's surely Civ players.

CaiusDrewart said:

But to people who played and loved the strategic depth of Civ IV (or at least to me, anyway), it seems shallow.

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I played Civ IV, including a revisit recently. I like the diversity of options, and indeed the recent revisit prompted me to reevaluate that aspect relative to Civ V - and Civ IV is ahead by some way.

But diversity is not depth. Civ IV had very little strategic depth - there were two or three core strategies you could pursue, supported by optimal mixes of civics and optimal paths through the tech tree to unlock them and beyond,
and all but one of those ultimately boiled down to 'expand as fast as you can, choose a resource type per city and spam the appropriate +X% modifier buildings in it'. That's an exceptionally shallow approach to specialisation (Total War: Rome 2 did the same and it felt like a dumbing down even of the previous TW system, in a game series not historically noted for the complexity of its strategic layer).

Civ V ultimately failed in its go wide vs. go tall effort to vary playstyles; go wide was (almost) always possible, but go tall was the path of least resistance, and of lowest risk since early expansion required gambling on there being suitable city spots in sufficient quantity in your vicinity to be worth the effort. Sadly for a Civ game, going tall is also the path of least interest for a game of this nature. That was however a failure of implementation, not an effort to 'dumb down' - the developers wanted to permit more varied strategies to succeed than was historically the case in Civ.

Do we need a second thread about whether Civ6 is too similar to Civ5, especially since there's next to no information yet.

I will say this, a lot of Civ games start with fewer features. Those features get redesigned from the ground up for an expansion pack. This game seems to be taking some of those Civ5 systems rather than reinvent the wheel. But it also feels like quite a few systems are being changed dramatically enough that you'll be playing a different style of game.

Very dramatically. I'm still not sure I'll like the way districts function but I'm trying to be optimistic.

That on its own almost seems like enough of a radical departure from V to merit being considered something entirely different.