"They've been asking for full-screen leader screens for a while. They want to be part of those moments. They want to be part of that realism. They want to believe that they're in the scene. That is definitely fan-driven."
I've just got to ask the fans, us, is this what we really wanted?
No, you're right, they've dropped the ball on this one. The fans hate realism.
Most fans would rather the majority of the game was in simple black-and-white or at most sepia graphics so they could focus extremely on what must be better gameplay elements, like the combat system.
More to elaborate plus my viewpoint: The fan community will divide into partisan and contradictory camps about most anything - this is true about most videogames in general though. But you have thread after thread and so on where some fans will say they hate realism so you'd think they must be against this - but others are the opposite, and then you have people who contradict their own views anyway at a whim and who knows.
I personally wasn't crazy about fleshing out leaders more like this, it's low on the list of actual "realism" things I would have wanted (better city views, palaces, advisors and so on I would have put first) and could be considered overall a distraction of resources from gameplay. For instance I'd still rather have more options in the diplomacy screen, I still worry we'll never have meaningful reasons to interact with other civs a continent away. No techs to trade or anything similarly ubiquitous, no one's going to want to trade many resources because they would lose happiness/strategic resources, and when you meet someone on another continent you probably won't care much about their secrecy pacts and so on against their neighbors.
But the bottom line: In this case, it's very very obvious why the devs did this, because it comes out as a polished and high-class result in the final product, that makes for great advertising and casual promotion of gameplay. Can't deny the leaders do look snazzy. No matter if they destroyed or excelled at some abstract part of gameplay, that wouldn't impinge on the public's views and sales of the game and so on. And there's nothing wrong with this imo, maybe I wish we had full control of sound/similar options, but otherwise I'm cool with it.
edit: One more thing - in vanilla civ4 there's already an option to "disable pop-ups" by now anyway, can't recall if it was in the original but definitely by BtS. It works almost exactly the same as what we saw in civ5, I thought that was a weird thing for them to be talking about in the preview - we already can turn off tech, building notifications and so on until we're ready later in a turn.
Oh and one more thing on top of that.
The game HAS to have "pop-ups" during AI turns for diplomacy. There's no other way, unless they did something stupid to cripple the AI just for human "comfort." If it's the AI turn and they need to talk to you for diplomacy, before they end their turn/it goes to another AI, that is going to have to be a popup. No way around that one, I think that might be a couple of instances people saw though. I do believe they've been honest about giving options/removing popups in general, and I also believe it's, like, not much of a change from civ4, but I've got to say some of this criticism could have been mistaken.
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