Civ VI reviews on Steam

[sonicmyst]

Even though I am preoccupied with XCOM WotC and Original Sin 2 right now, I still love Civ 6. Firaxis has made Civ 6 different from previous civs and despite the flaws, me having it played for 1000+ hours speaks for itself.

I think everyone those who are stilll undecided may try the free demo of Civ 6 in steam to try it. Then I hope you could come up with your own decision based on your experience.

 

[Pythakoreas]

You know I have never looked at the reviews, this thread seemed to indicate they were all bad....

What you say is incorrect and speaks volumes. Lots of emotive negatives and lots of positives that say yes things are crap in certain areas but I like the game. Its a mix and it does make me wonder how you expected me to believe such a thing without looking.

To me this is the most telling set of statistics. I do feel Firaxis is not testing or fixing things fast enough and I doubt all your efforts will make the tiniest difference to their planned budgets and shareholder margins. They have done this long enough to know we are sucker enough to spend additional money for a more finished game later.
I'm happy with the money I spent and came in knowing what I was getting.
Maybe you should be angry at yourself for buying it too early?

Speaking of skewing statistics, one of the most common ways of introducing skewed results is relying on voluntary response, which is very common in social science. People who are willing to even write a review on Steam are people who possibly enjoyed it in the first place, therefore positive reviews outnumber negative ones.
It's possible that Valve did this on purpose as telling people that reviews are positive are better for sales.
You could argue that Civfanatics will have disproportionately more positive reviews by same logic. This is a fan forum, people who bother to come here like Civ6 a lot in the first place.
If you open steam review section Recent reviews are mixed, what you showed in your graph are Overall reviews.
If you bothered to read the "most helpful reviews" as selected by Steam negative reviews outnumber positive reviews by far. People who are actually given a voice are leaving negative reviews as opposed to most people just leaving there a sentence as review as sign of satisfaction.
It's possible that Recent reviews are more negative due to expensive and underwhelming DLC practices and the game not getting better a year into release.

Not trying to take sides but I just had to point out, sounds like something straight out of my social science statistics class.
As of right now I'm torn between $80 CAD well spent for 200 hours of gameplay vs. $80 CAD spent for incomplete game that got slightly better 9 months later that I could have picked up during Steam sale.

 

[God of Kings]

Speaking of skewing statistics, one of the most common ways of introducing skewed results is relying on voluntary response, which is very common in social science. People who are willing to even write a review on Steam are people who possibly enjoyed it in the first place, therefore positive reviews outnumber negative ones.
It's possible that Valve did this on purpose as telling people that reviews are positive are better for sales.
You could argue that Civfanatics will have disproportionately more positive reviews by same logic. This is a fan forum, people who bother to come here like Civ6 a lot in the first place.
If you open steam review section Recent reviews are mixed, what you showed in your graph are Overall reviews.
If you bothered to read the "most helpful reviews" as selected by Steam negative reviews outnumber positive reviews by far. People who are actually given a voice are leaving negative reviews as opposed to most people just leaving there a sentence as review as sign of satisfaction.
It's possible that Recent reviews are more negative due to expensive and underwhelming DLC practices and the game not getting better a year into release.

Not trying to take sides but I just had to point out, sounds like something straight out of my social science statistics class.
As of right now I'm torn between $80 CAD well spent for 200 hours of gameplay vs. $80 CAD spent for incomplete game that got slightly better 9 months later that I could have picked up during Steam sale.

However, those with problems with the game are more likely to post a negative review than those who are happy with the game would post a positive review as well.

 

[Pythakoreas]

However, those with problems with the game are more likely to post a negative review than those who are happy with the game would post a positive review as well.

Basically any "customer review" should be approached as a voluntary response sample. Although it is a valid way of sampling and it is faster than other methods, it is flawed in the sense that it usually generates skewed results.

With these Steam reviews it is more apparent that these "positive reviews" are coming from people just leaving a sign of satisfaction than people actually having a say on what's in the product, because there is a "Most Helpful Reviews" section that is separate to "Most Recent" section.

Reviews that are upvoted in "Most Helpful Reviews" are actual reviews and negatives outnumber positives. "Most Recent" sections are more representative of typical customer reviews where people come to say they like it and that's it. Even then I'm astonished that it's pretty evenly split. Civ6 does have its flaws but it's not a disaster.

 

[Siptah]

The problem with steam reviews is also that many people don't change their reviews as the game gets patched or expanded. And some others that review it later (with an expansion), play the game with expansion, but write their review for the base game.
The DLCs seem to suffer extremely from the high price for the Digital Deluxe Edition - but we all know that with 6 instead of 4 DLCs included, it was a real bargain for everyone. Do the reviews change? No. Some old reviews complain about things that are patched out. Do they change? No. The Summer Patch is probably responsible for some negative reviews as well. Many of the bugs will be gone at some point, but the reviews will stay. The exception are probably people like you find on this forums: fans of the series that come back to game again and again, because they really hope it gets better. Those might also change their reviews to positive at some point.
And just a general statement: I don't think there is an overly positive sentiment to civ VI in these forums, maybe if you look only at the newer threads in the civ VI forums. But if you go back to last October and read from there on, you see a flood of posts indicating how bad people think this game is. Civ IV is still the most praised here - at least it feels to me like that.

 

[calad]

So if I understand you correctly, your entire opinion of the game is based on the negative opinions of others without having experienced the game yourself?

Fascinating!

Are you saying you cannot have a credible opinion without experiencing thing first yourself? How about touch a hot iron, I can positively recommend it.

It is not my fault that negative opinions are the most helpful. They make fantastic list of broken features: war, trade and diplomacy. Game that is cheaper and have these features functional is called CiV5.

 

[Siptah]

Are you saying you cannot have a credible opinion without experiencing thing first yourself? How about touch a hot iron, I can positively recommend it.

It is not my fault that negative opinions are the most helpful. They make fantastic list of broken features: war, trade and diplomacy. Game that is cheaper and have these features functional is called CiV5.

Well, it really depends how much you dislike the things personally, and I don't think it is easy to estimate without playing yourself. Watching a good Let's Play according to your play style is incredibly more helpful for such things than the best review.
You give a good example: war. If you like the combat and wars in civ V, you won't be put off by civ VI, since it is the same unbalanced mess again. (which I personally found fun in civ V and in civ VI despite that by the way).
Trade with AI was always bugged in civ VI - but only a small part (relics) that increased with the last patch (Great Works of Art). I don't buy relics and GWoA from the AI, so I don't have a problem with that. And the AI doesn't seem to trade it among them. So this doesn't put me off, and I guess many others as well. If you don't ask for those things, you might not even notice that it isn't valued correctly.
Diplomacy seems the most obvious problem, and I guess every civ V player notices that. On the other hand, they introduced a new system for it, and I'm confident they'll work on it with patches (they already did, making it better and worse at the same time). If you go back to civ V, it feels rather shallow - it already did when going back from BERT.

 

[DJ_Tanner]

Are you saying you cannot have a credible opinion without experiencing thing first yourself? How about touch a hot iron, I can positively recommend it.

It is not my fault that negative opinions are the most helpful. They make fantastic list of broken features: war, trade and diplomacy. Game that is cheaper and have these features functional is called CiV5.

A hot iron is objectively hot, a video game, while having some objective qualities, is far more subjective.

For one what is considered 'broken'. As nothing mentioned is objectively broken, they all are in the game and work. Now they may or may not function in the way you would like them to, but that, again, is subjective.

 

[Victoria]

@calad, based on the below quotes you appear not very objective and as you have corrupted the statistics to suit your need and never actually even tried the demo your points of view have little Kudos.
We know the game is still in a similar state to what civ IV and civ V were, it is a fanatics forum. We play regardless because we still like whats there regardless. Your stats were wrong and no you are quoting what is wrong from steam feedback like we do not know. I really am at a loss as to what you are even doing here. Of course you are allowed an opinion.....but based on what? Statistical gymnastics currently.
Civ 6 is not civ 5, it is newer and different. How can you compare prices? They are not the same game. i avoided 5 early for exactly the same reason you are avoiding 6 early, however I am enjoying the journey and chaos of 6... most of the time.
Just say you do not want to buy the game because its not fully developed, thats fine, full respect and kudos.... but come on, be rude, mislead with statistics and continue to be rude... no respect for that sir.

Good luck finding non-biased opinions of CiV6 in fan forum.

because here even if Firaxis says CiV6 was a flop fans would do some mental gymnastics to explain why this is not a case and how they enjoy playing CiV6.

I absolutely had no idea what you said,

So if you want to live in your bubble I wont bother you anymore.

How about touch a hot iron, I can positively recommend it.

 

[Karpius]

Are you saying you cannot have a credible opinion without experiencing thing first yourself? How about touch a hot iron, I can positively recommend it.

When it comes to something as subjective as a game, I am saying exactly that.
I will allow that you, yourself, might decide to not even try the game based on the bad reviews of others (while ignoring good reviews) which is your choice. But you cannot tell those of us who enjoy the game that it is 'broken' and therefore undeserving of our enjoyment.

Its sort of like saying you read bad reviews for a certain movie, and therefore the movie must be broken.

If the game were broken, it would not operate. It would not start. or it would not respond to commands or otherwise not function. The software may have some flaws in its decision making that some of us find annoying or odd, but it is not broken.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Are you saying you cannot have a credible opinion without experiencing thing first yourself? How about touch a hot iron, I can positively recommend it.

It is not my fault that negative opinions are the most helpful. They make fantastic list of broken features: war, trade and diplomacy. Game that is cheaper and have these features functional is called CiV5.

lol, well we have a bunch of professionals, ie scientists, safety workers, medical professionals, and various other veterans in the workplace that have verifiable credentials to support these claims so they get put in safety manuals. So you don't have to do the research yourself, or get killed having to do it. There's also millions of years of natural selection and instinct to protect yourself. I admit, not having evolved the ability to avoid terrible games is annoying though. In any case, the analogy is pretty weak.

Let's just say when someone claims that they are a Civ veteran and highly knowledgeable of the franchise, there is no way to tell if they're a deity expert in all games of Civ, or they just spent 100 hours of playing Warlord in one game. I would go as far to say you don't even actually have to play the game to write a review! And mind you, I do know many experienced Civ players who think this game is too easy, and thus trash, and I do respect their opinion, because you know, they actually gave it a chance without bias.

So when you borrow other people's opinions, especially from randoms on steam, it's a bit hard to take seriously. So when you come on here, people certainly have a valid reason to judge you based on it. Who are you? What victories can you speak of?

And even on this very forum, I have noticed a lot of the complaints are because of well, how should I say it nicely, user error, or a lack of flexibility.

https://steamcommunity.com/stats/CivV/achievements/
https://steamcommunity.com/stats/289070/achievements

But of course with about 22% of people finishing chieftain in civ 5, and 35% finishing chieftain in civ 6, I do not think the overall skill level is that high. And these games are already much easier than their older counterparts. Yes, they may have simply ragequit because the game was too annoying, or the mechanics are not worth learning, or the game is too tedious, or they they didn't even play it, but my observation through multiple games in these discussions across the net, and yes even reviews, is that people really don't know what the hell they're doing and get frustrated quickly. Then they write angry things on the internet. I would know, because I sometimes am one of these people, and I don't really know what the hell I'm doing either. (though I can most definitely beat chieftain)

So let's just say when I have so little respect for firsthand observations, that I am incredibly skeptical of secondhand ones.

 

[Victoria]

I think one of my problems is I work in the software world on one of the largest most lucrative pieces of software out there. I mean the money spent on licenses per use is in the thousands. Huge amounts of money. I teach tekkies how to deal with it including patching it and one of the things I am always saying is that when a new version is released it takes about 20 patches to start working sanely.
Its life now, you want the software early its gonna be crap but at least you can use it. In the case of Civ 6 I am not surprised every time they fix something they break something else... its quite funny and also sadly quite common.The annoying thing is the diplomacy break is quite bad and they really should have reversed the changes there at the very least.

 

[Archon_Wing]

I think diplomacy is fine except for

1.) Broken trade deals. But this is trivial to workaround, just don't exploit known bugs
2.) Late game "We are winning, they fear us". This is obnoxious and beta-level. It is fine in theory, but implemented really bad
3.) Overvalued Alliances

So diplomacy isn't too bad until mid-late game. Now, I think they should be pretty ashamed of these blatant errors mind you; and while I agree the diplomacy game is pretty weak, I don't think it's completely without merit. I actually do like the friendlier ai early game/less friendly later on flow a bit better then people denouncing you off the bat. I will say that on King at least, I am able to sign research agreements late into the game when I'm trying to go to space and still remain friends with 1-2 civs by the time I win.

The worst thing about the patch is generally the settlers being more expensive, once again because moar war, like we needed that.

 

[Ryika]

Basically any "customer review" should be approached as a voluntary response sample. Although it is a valid way of sampling and it is faster than other methods, it is flawed in the sense that it usually generates skewed results.

With these Steam reviews it is more apparent that these "positive reviews" are coming from people just leaving a sign of satisfaction than people actually having a say on what's in the product, because there is a "Most Helpful Reviews" section that is separate to "Most Recent" section.

Reviews that are upvoted in "Most Helpful Reviews" are actual reviews and negatives outnumber positives. "Most Recent" sections are more representative of typical customer reviews where people come to say they like it and that's it. Even then I'm astonished that it's pretty evenly split. Civ6 does have its flaws but it's not a disaster.

You're correctly identifying the problem of a voluntary response sample, but then ignoring the fact that those also exist when it comes to which reviews people vote up or down. Your "average player" will not be reading other people's reviews like... ever, or at least most of the time, those votes most likely come from people who are either dissatisfied with the game, but have not given up on the series to the level that they're willing to leave it behind entirely yet, or people who feel the need to defend the game from those people, with only the occasional "normal user" stepping in to read what other people have to say about the game.

I would argue that currently we do not have any way to measure people's actual satisfaction properly, the closest one is maybe the actual number of people playing, or more accurately, the number of people playing everyday, combined with the amount of time they spend playing on average (which you can approximate by measuring the average player numbers at any given point of a day and comparing them to the total number of players who played the game hat day).

 

[nzcamel]

it is a fanatics forum.

*cough*Civbabies forum*cough* Fanaticism not allowed.

The annoying thing is the diplomacy break is quite bad and they really should have reversed the changes there at the very least.

Yeah, I'm astounded their was no response within a few days.

 

[Pythakoreas]

The problem with steam reviews is also that many people don't change their reviews as the game gets patched or expanded. And some others that review it later (with an expansion), play the game with expansion, but write their review for the base game.
The DLCs seem to suffer extremely from the high price for the Digital Deluxe Edition - but we all know that with 6 instead of 4 DLCs included, it was a real bargain for everyone. Do the reviews change? No. Some old reviews complain about things that are patched out. Do they change? No. The Summer Patch is probably responsible for some negative reviews as well. Many of the bugs will be gone at some point, but the reviews will stay. The exception are probably people like you find on this forums: fans of the series that come back to game again and again, because they really hope it gets better. Those might also change their reviews to positive at some point.
And just a general statement: I don't think there is an overly positive sentiment to civ VI in these forums, maybe if you look only at the newer threads in the civ VI forums. But if you go back to last October and read from there on, you see a flood of posts indicating how bad people think this game is. Civ IV is still the most praised here - at least it feels to me like that.

Civilization 6 is still incomplete software a year into release. If it gets negative reviews it might be representative of the fact that it used to be a disappointing purchase for a year. The game can improve and start getting positive reviews but it doesn't change the fact that it carried a $80 CAD price tag for poor content, the reviews are to stay.

 

[Siptah]

Civilization 6 is still incomplete software a year into release. If it gets negative reviews it might be representative of the fact that it used to be a disappointing purchase for a year. The game can improve and start getting positive reviews but it doesn't change the fact that it carried a $80 CAD price tag for poor content, the reviews are to stay.

The price tag is a completely different topic - imho it's easily worth those $80CAD once you've played 3 or 4 games, which probably most people did. But this differs heavily from person to person (and country of course). And some people also like to judge civ games different from, let's say XCOM - no one would complain about a great XCOM game in which you invest less than 100 hours total. But for civ, it is not good value or poor content if you get bored after 200 hours...

 

[Pythakoreas]

You're correctly identifying the problem of a voluntary response sample, but then ignoring the fact that those also exist when it comes to which reviews people vote up or down. Your "average player" will not be reading other people's reviews like... ever, or at least most of the time, those votes most likely come from people who are either dissatisfied with the game, but have not given up on the series to the level that they're willing to leave it behind entirely yet, or people who feel the need to defend the game from those people, with only the occasional "normal user" stepping in to read what other people have to say about the game.

I would argue that currently we do not have any way to measure people's actual satisfaction properly, the closest one is maybe the actual number of people playing, or more accurately, the number of people playing everyday, combined with the amount of time they spend playing on average (which you can approximate by measuring the average player numbers at any given point of a day and comparing them to the total number of players who played the game hat day).

On Steam store if you scroll down to the very bottom you'll see the review section. Right there for average players to see. But aren't they the same people who didn't get the achievement for winning on Prince difficulty? (70.4%) Are they even relevant?

I'd say the fact that there are people from both sides defending the game and tearing it down makes "Most Helpful Reviews" pretty representative of gaming community. If you want to have your review upvoted in the first place people must agree with you in the first place. When claims are irrelevant people don't even have a voice to begin with.

 

[Siptah]

On Steam store if you scroll down to the very bottom you'll see the review section. Right there for average players to see. But aren't they the same people who didn't get the achievement for winning on Prince difficulty? (70.4%) Are they even relevant?

I'd say the fact that there are people from both sides defending the game and tearing it down makes "Most Helpful Reviews" pretty representative of gaming community. If you want to have your review upvoted in the first place people must agree with you in the first place. When claims are irrelevant people don't even have a voice to begin with.

You don't get achievements if you play in offline mode. I guess some people do that. And others don't finish any games despite playing a lot. I'm not sure how it is with mods. In civ V, mods disabled achievements. In civ VI this seems to be different. I don't know if any mods disable achievements - at least those that change the ruleset.

 

[DJ_Tanner]

Basically any "customer review" should be approached as a voluntary response sample. Although it is a valid way of sampling and it is faster than other methods, it is flawed in the sense that it usually generates skewed results.

Not necessarily it is a little more nuanced than that. What you are talking about is the response bias, and it is not simply a bad thing or just because the potential exists does not mean the data is of poor quality, in fact most studies are designed around eliciting some response bias, that is how you target a subsample. As for other potential bias, without anyway of testing the data for potential bias then it is pure speculation about what may or may not bias the results and arguments can be easily made for both sides of your point. Although I have never seen anything that would suggest that Steam Reviews offer any systematic bias which would unfairly bias results. That being said the usefulness of a review is pretty debatable.