About The Graphics of Civ VI

[Mustakrakish]

"Is it just me [insert anything]" - questions never grow old. The stubbornness with which humans keep thinking / hoping they're special is amazing

But yeah, there are a few things I don't like about the graphics part. Purely graphical, I hate leaders clipping. The existance of It boggles my mind. You got preset animations (and only so much of them per leader), they don't move freely etc. Why couldn't they eliminate clipping? So much work were put in making those quite good 3d models and animations only to crap it all with awful clipping. In my mind all the work goes to toilet, because all I see is clipping.

UI is awful in many ways but that's another problem.

Settler and religious lenses simply piss me off.

Also I hate the green terrain (grassland and grassland hills), it looks horrible.

 

[MyOtherName]

I think the graphics are like a lot of the rest of the game -- a number of things done fairly well, but together with some unbelievable screw-ups that outweigh the rest of the experience.

 

[Browd]

Moderator Action: Merged with existing Graphics commentary thread

 

[bladex]

Also I hate the green terrain (grassland and grassland hills), it looks horrible.

this they need to add some rock or some details to them to tell you they ARE hills. instead of just a bump in the terrain!

 

[klail]

I thought the graphics were a little cartoony at first but after playing Civ VI for the last month they've really grown on me -- to the point where I love them. I think Civ VI is drop-dead gorgeous.

Also, having wonders on their own tiles is amazing, makes them look so glorious. I also love how wonders in tundra have snow on them -- such a great touch. The districts look great tool. The fog of war is beautiful as well. I also love that the leaders have really detailed facial expressions.

Things I would like changed:

(1) the day/night cycle looks too red/pink at night
(2) i wish they'd replace "armory" with "castles" and make the encampments look like detailed castles once you get this tech

 

[Jimdigriz]

I thought the graphics were a little cartoony at first but after playing Civ VI for the last month they've really grown on me -- to the point where I love them. I think Civ VI is drop-dead gorgeous.

Also, having wonders on their own tiles is amazing, makes them look so glorious. I also love how wonders in tundra have snow on them -- such a great touch. The districts look great tool. The fog of war is beautiful as well. I also love that the leaders have really detailed facial expressions.

Things I would like changed:

(1) the day/night cycle looks too red/pink at night
(2) i wish they'd replace "armory" with "castles" and make the encampments look like detailed castles once you get this tech

The graphics have grown on me too though I think they could do with some more finishing touches. I don't understand the whole day/night cycle thing and switched it off. Trying to see the screen on a night time setting wasn't fun!

 

[RealAntithesis]

I think the art style is fine - the style doesn't have to be the same from one Civ game to another (except for the fog of war, that is bad in Civ6). What is not fine in Civ6 however is the usability and user experience - how all the graphical elements are put together and how the user interacts with them. The UI and the way the map terrain graphics are put together and choice of colours etc are a chore to decipher and navigate through. It's a combination of the map being so busy, with terrain features, units etc not being so easily distinguishable from each other - hills have been talked about a lot but also I find that the primary way I spot units is to look at the coloured icon rather than the unit graphic itself, and UI elements are so small on larger screens and cramped together (some critical UI elements are only a few pixels big and don't scale with screen resolution) and together with the fog of war and the look of national borders, it does place a fair amount of strain on the eyes. Players shouldn't have to carefully inspect individual tiles to figure out what is happening on that tile - it should be inherent in the graphics and the needed information conveyed in a glance (without having to mouse-over to get critical information about whether the tile is a hill for example).

I've already talked about the fog of war, but this is something that Civ5 got right - Civ6 needs to give the player a choice of FOW style - the parchment style really does make the map harder to look at - not only when looking around the map, but the brown parchment fog of war filling in when a unit moves around is quite annoying and disconcerting. The terrain should just darken rather than being splotched out in brown.

 

[P-Dubya]

I've heard and read a lot of complaints online about the Civ 6 graphics, but the people I play with and I love the graphics. They're not perfect- I agree that hills are too hard to discern from plains without going into Strategic View. But the art style I find pretty refreshing. Past Civs have always seemed to aspire for more detailed, realistic graphics. While realistic styles are perfectly fine with me, Civ 6 style makes the world look more alive to me. The colors are so vibrant, and the parchment style fog of war was a perfect touch IMO. And Wonder Placement is another touch I love. No longer do I have to see stonehenge, the pyramids, or some other land based wonder built in the ocean (which isn't realistic at all). And the nuclear explosions only get better and better. The thermo nuke is absolutely mesmerizing.

With Civ 6, I honestly feel like they combined Civ 5 with Civilization Revolution (the first one), and not just in art style but also in being able merge two or three units into a single army. I can't say that I'd want Civ 7 to be like Civ 6, but I appreciate the developers' efforts to give us something new, even if it seems most players absolutely hate it. But the world really looks more alive in Civ 6 to me, and if they revert to a realistic style of graphics for Civ 7, I'd still want that lively appearance.

 

[GIO888]

Graphics are future proofed for the march of the smartphone, I reckon.

Yeah there's a small nod to the younger players, but that's prolly as patronizing as it is transient, cos I'm sure a 20 year old likes rich textured graphics as much as a hard-bitten 50 year old Civ I veteran.

And as I get used to the many-districted megacities of the late game, actually the graphics are growing on me. Don't like the tiny modern ships though!