[R&F] Governors are kind of immersion breaking.

[Starwars]

I agree as well. I can't get my head around why they chose to make characters, with special art, of the governors in particular. It's just... a weird decision to me. And yep, personal preference, but the art is horrible. So I definitely hope someone mods them out.

But most of all, I don't really *understand* why they did it. Unless they have some grand plan of making the governors more active in a "story sense" with some dialogue and stuff (and let's be clear, I would personally really hate that), but as is... it just feels strange. I mena, it would make more sense to have some of portrait or personality connected to stuff like units (please don't do this btw Firaxis) but having these guys be named and with portraits? I dunno.

Oh well.

 

[narmox]

Oh, stop blowing smoke to sound nice. It's not just an "ethical diverse range of governors". It's an "ethical diverse range of governors" that has a clone serving every known world leader with exactly the same name, personality, and appearance every single game every single time without fail, working behind the scenes to manipulate every world government against each other, even against the countries that they might or might not have at one point originated from, for no obvious reason but perhaps to achieve dominance over their other failed clones.

It's stupid, don't try to hide it behind diversity.

Waiting for the mod where the Civ leaders rally together to rebel against the sneaky governors who have been pulling the strings all along!

 

[CPWimmer]

Seriously, this is a Game where colonial Australia exists in 4000BC can war with Kongo over tea plantations, while building Stonehenge. Who then can have John Curtain enter a 3000 year war with Gandhi that leads to nuclear apocalypse and the destruction of the Roman people who worship Confucianism and follow Communism and who was lead into war by Boudicca... but an ethical diverse range of governors is where the 'Immersion' breaks down for people.

I agree 100% with you Bite, but I can understand where the difference lies for those that find this to be the breaking point.

I see 3 main areas for concern that combine to make it different then John Curtain building Stonehenge in one game while fighting against Kongo all in 3000 BC, and then turning around and playing as England in another game going out and conquering Washington DC and finally capturing Stonehenge that they built, right before you completed it.

1. These governors are literally the same every game. There is no variation (outside mods) and there is no competition (unlike great people and wonders). You have a very limited choice, and you will always have that same choice, every single game. You may make different choices in each game, but after 5, 10 or 30 games that will get tiresome to some people.
2. They are, unlike every other artistic item in the game, multi-cultural. The art style has been trying to get more unique for each civ in all other aspects. And in the biggest case where things are somewhat multi-cultural (great people), there is an attempt to have a general lack of cultural distinction in the art for both their icons and their depiction on the map.
3. The clone factor. "Why is Victor hanging out defending your capital, when clearly he is back home in mine!" This is probably the most problematic to people. They even had to add a "no duplicate leaders" option (which is on by default) in one of the earliest patches because of how much people hated the possibility of playing against a clone of themselves.

Again, I don't find them annoying - and I think the pseudo-history/entertainment balance that civ has always strived for is part of the charm of the game. However I do understand the desire for either unique culture specific, or highly generic versions, of these entities in the game.

 

[SharTeel]

Seriously, this is a Game where colonial Australia exists in 4000BC can war with Kongo over tea plantations, while building Stonehenge. Who then can have John Curtain enter a 3000 year war with Gandhi that leads to nuclear apocalypse and the destruction of the Roman people who worship Confucianism and follow Communism and who was lead into war by Boudicca... but an ethical diverse range of governors is where the 'Immersion' breaks down for people.

Indeed, sometimes I really don't understand people

 

[Ryika]

Seriously, this is a Game where colonial Australia exists in 4000BC can war with Kongo over tea plantations, while building Stonehenge. Who then can have John Curtain enter a 3000 year war with Gandhi that leads to nuclear apocalypse and the destruction of the Roman people who worship Confucianism and follow Communism and who was lead into war by Boudicca... but an ethical diverse range of governors is where the 'Immersion' breaks down for people.

Well, all of these things are explained by "Alternative universe where everything is weird!", an "ethnically diverse range of governors" is not really, as Civs are still presented as Civs, there is no way they would just have access to people from all ethnicities in the world as it was generated by the game. It just drags you out of the fantasy of your Civ, and yells "We don't actually want to have to do all that extra work, so here, multiculturalism!" right into your face. I don't think it makes sense at all, and is a cheap, lazy way of doing things.

In my opinion, the Governors should either represent the name scheme and the ethnicity of the people of the Civ, or, what would be way cooler, dynamically generate the names and ethnicities based on your own Civ and the Civs around you that you're trading/on friendly terms with, to "simulate" the cultural exchange that is happen there, the "dialog between Civilizations, and show that hey, you're actually friends, and things are happening between your empires.

THAT would be an "ethically diverse range of governors" done right, in detail that is worthy of Civ. The Governor system as it was presented simply is not. It's on the same level as creating Civs and then giving them generic city names because you don't actually want to research what cities belong to a given Civ. Sorry, I'm not happy with that at all, and the underlying accusation that it has something to do with the fact that the Governors are "ethnically diverse" is insulting.

 

[Thormodr]

I can sympathize with the Op. I do like the idea of governors and it’ll be fun to use them. For some Civs that are multicultural by nature, like America, they’ll work fine. For others, they will hurt the immersion and that is an important thing for a lot of people. I also like the cartoony style for Civ games and the fact that the franchise doesn’t take itself too seriously but I think they have gone a bit too far here. Some of the governors I can live with but the Eggplant governor is too much.

At the very least, give them Civ specific names.

 

[Ivan Hunger]

Unless they have some grand plan of making the governors more active in a "story sense"

The governors are pitting all the leaders against each other.

They are the true villains of Civ 6.

 

[Cagarustus]

I personally think the governor system is interesting. How much it adds to the game will be determined only once we play it.

The art style is good; I’ve no complaints about them. It would’ve been a mammoth task to have unique governors for each civilization.

I guess we’ll see once it releases.

 

[Gedemon]

Seriously, this is a Game where colonial Australia exists in 4000BC can war with Kongo over tea plantations, while building Stonehenge. Who then can have John Curtain enter a 3000 year war with Gandhi that leads to nuclear apocalypse and the destruction of the Roman people who worship Confucianism and follow Communism and who was lead into war by Boudicca... but an ethical diverse range of governors is where the 'Immersion' breaks down for people.

I understand your reasoning, but the breaking point is different for every player, it's a matter of "last straw"

Mine was broken long ago for example, and I'll need a lot of modding time (and the DLL source code) to be able to restore it and finally start playing civ6.

There was immersion breaking elements in every iteration of Civilization, but civ6 add even more, so the breaking point is reached for more and more people (as in "No duplicate leaders") and so the devs should now really add "if it doesn't break immersion" to the infamous "gameplay trump realism" rule when they want to add new mechanisms.

 

[Gorbles]

Kinda funny a lot of the complaints are about "multiculturalism" being the breaking point for people. People have literally, in this thread, defended the use of Elvis Presley as "appropriate", but multiculturalism is just "the last straw".

Are there better solutions? Sure. They'd probably have taken more time to implement though. Everything in games development is on a strict resource budget, the biggest of which is time. Well money, technically, but that's directly converted into time (for the team members working on the project).

 

[Art Morte]

I don't care about immersion that much, I can create it in my head if I want to.

But I do think it may become boring to see the same handful of governors in every single game. Would it have been too much work to make, say, three different versions of each type of Governor, all with the same abilities?

 

[Ryika]

I understand your reasoning, but the breaking point is different for every player, it's a matter of "last straw"

Mine was broken long ago for example, and I'll need a lot of modding time (and the DLL source code) to be able to restore it and finally start playing civ6.

There was immersion breaking elements in every iteration of Civilization, but civ6 add even more, so the breaking point is reached for more and more people (as in "No duplicate leaders") and so the devs should now really add "if it doesn't break immersion" to the infamous "gameplay trump realism" rule when they want to add new mechanisms.

Having thought about it a bit more, I think a lot of it actually boils down to the design philosophy of "virtual board game" which seems to be very heavy in Civ VI, vs. "empire simulator", which seems to be an afterthought in Civ VI. In an "empire simulator", the main purpose of Governors would be: "What do they do for your empire, and how can we make sure they're flavorful, but fit into the overall narrative?", in a "virtual board game", the main purpose of Governors is: "How can we make sure Governors are flavorful characters?" And I think from that perspective, they're done a good job with Governors as far as I can tell from what we've seen so far, but it's just not what I personally want out of the game.

The same "problem" already somewhat existed with Great People the way they're implemented in Civ VI, but at least there you could use the excuse that yeah, it's prominent personalities, and they had to add something, because the way the system worked in Civ V was kind of boring. Now you just get a cast of no-names implemented in a system that could have been a lot more immersive if that had been their focus, but it obviously was not.

Maybe I'm just getting old and newer games just aren't for me anymore. In a few years I'm probably sitting here, whining about how much better Civ 4 Civ V was than Civ V Civ VI.

 

[Gedemon]

Kinda funny a lot of the complaints are about "multiculturalism" being the breaking point for people. People have literally, in this thread, defended the use of Elvis Presley as "appropriate", but multiculturalism is just "the last straw".

Don't merge arguments, the point about Elvis is that you'll never see him on the map or any screens outside those related to "your" civilization, so it was "your" Elvis, he was unique.

 

[Morningcalm]

For some civs, like America or Mongolia, the governors won't be immersion breaking as such. But for the Cree--clearly yes. I don't know why they couldn't just generate Civ-specific names for the advisors and change their graphics slightly--would make it less immersion breaking.

 

[Architect]

It's about identification when you look at the city bars. People will know very quickly what each governor does and which one is which. If it wasn't their face it would be a letter. This would be way less obvious for players. Having multiple pictures for each governor just muddles this.

Making them caricatures like they are also helps this identification process.

Do you already know what each governor kinda does just by looking at their picture? Think about that.

 

[Goliht]

Don't like them. Too Revolutions looking as well. Fine on an Xbox.. on Pc I expect better graphics. Guess we'll need to wait for proper youtube videos to see how they perform. Fat chance firaxis will tell the truth in anything they make.

 

[Metecury]

All it would take is either civ specific governor art or culture group specific governor art like they did for units. If it was something relevant enough to make ethnically diverse troops specific to civs I do not see why governors would not follow the same pattern and logic.

 

[RohirrimElf]

I mean, they are cool mechanic and all but...

...I am slightly upset at the fact that even if I play bronze age Kongo, isolated from the entire world by sea, deep in the jungle, I employ some white and Asian ladies and gentlemen. With names like Viktor. Just how the hell did they get here? Or to medieval Japan, or Inca, or really any civ because they are so ethnically diverse?

I am not sure what is worse: this or the fact they are going to return to guide every civilization we play, as some sort of time-travelling party. Civ shouldn't have returning characters apart from civ-specific leaders. So not only I will assign white conquistador-looking guy to oversee my Mbanza Kongo, I will have a deja vu of appointing the same exact guy to Tenochtitlan in my earlier Aztec game.

On top of that all, I almost never before complained on cartoon art style... But here it is so over the top it seriously lookes like taken straight from mobile game or Pixar movie.

Oh and they are not some sort of background aestethic. No, you are going to see those faces constantly. Hello, Chinese emperor, here we get some random barbarians from far west to guide Middle Kingdom.

Personally I would honestly prefer if they had only titles (Castellan, Educator etc), color code and symbol for everyone of them, and name generated from particular civ's list. Well there are mods but...

What do you think?

If you like this kind of stuff Europe Universalis 4 would be just the game for you.
For me personally. I`ll understand it is a game and it is the best one on the market for this genre. Before firaxis should tackle unique culture advisors for each civ, there are 1001 more things that needs fixing first.
Like diplomacy, lots of UI improvements or combat AI. If we lived in a perfect world i would agree with you.

 

[Dustbrother]

Yo

I got to chime in on this one. It does seem like a really bad design decision. Say if I play a game and hire Magnus to run one of my cities, I'm assuming that every AI player can also hire Magnus. If I'm playing in a multiplayer game, every other human player can hire Magnus. This just makes no sense. Why wouldn't you use a system similar to great people generation and naming? I'm not a player who really needs immersion but this seems like a very unnecessary flaw.

 

[Cerilis]

Would it have been better, if the governors were modelled after real (great) people? Or had been kept without names to begin with?