I do see and respect that this is likely a dead thread and i am quite late to the party and attempting to put my two cents in on virtually everything that’s been discussed, and not organizing it extremely well, so i do want to pre-emptively apologize to mods if the way i’ve organized my thoughts in multiple posts isn’t great, and i do promise that this is the last subsequent post until there’s some meaningful discourse i can hop on.
This viewpoint is pretty contradictory though. You want to rewrite history, but not only is Civ not a history simulator at all, you also balk at the idea of civ switching, which is probably much closer to historic accuracy than previous version.
When you pick George Washington Builds the Pyramids in 4200BC your immersion argument disappears.
I’ll address these first because I do understand this PoV but as someone firmly in the “civ switching should’ve never happened” camp, i think this is a case of people talking about immersion not using the most precise language, and that being misinterpreted.
when people talk about immersion, or “alternative history” with respect to civ, i do think these probably aren’t the best terms to use, mainly because—as you correctly note—civ was never even attempting to be historical.
I think it’s more the case that there’s a certain level of facilitating role-play and imagination. Imagining Empire XYZ to have existed for all of history and very successfully ruling.
The issue ends up being that the immersion in that *fantasy*, not the concept of alternative history, is what people want.
Just a note but taking Egyptians/Romans/Carthaginians to space cannot be the reason why Civ is superior to every other 4X game since it's something you can explicitly do in Humankind and most people here would agree it's not the pinnacle of historical 4X games.
See the main banner of the game, of an Ancient Egyptian astronaut on the Moon:
Nonetheless,
@notNamed is correct — the fantasy isn’t the only thing at play here. It’s moreso that you are immersed *in* the fantasy in a way that Humankind failed to do, for the same reason Civ 7 fails—despite a title of a civ only seeming to be a title, people immerse themselves in said title, and they attach themselves to the civ title far more than they associate themselves to a leader (and as we have already discussed ad nauseum in civ fanatics, you’re not exactly immersed in the roleplay of the leader either because you see yourself in the third person in diplomacy)
For me it’s just a slightly different narrative. For instance I would previously play as Rome and play into the modern age. During the medieval period I was imagining Rome more as a standard medieval European civ, maybe France. Easy to do because you have knights and men at arms.
By modern era I’m now watching my Rome civ but am imagining more as a sort of American empire. That is my closest comparison in my head.
Now in Civ 7, it’s just a bit more explicit. That’s why I don’t have an issue with it.
I do sympathize with this take, but I also think i’ve elaborated why a lot of people feel unequipped to feel this way. For example, when I roleplay my playthroughs, there’s some, implicit or explicit, retention of more of the historical traits than you’re hinting at, for me personally. I don’t think the level of immersion for people in their roleplay is the same, and it prob differs heavily from person to person—which is why *mandating* civ switching doesn’t work for me as much as trying to facilitate that “culture change” through softer means.
I think the broader thing is that civ changing, along with other key failures of mechanics like crises, are all symptoms of the devs trying to hit us over the head with what they want the game to be:
I think crises could work, but there is so many reasons why they won’t that I think it’s a bad idea to include them.
The main issue I think is that they are such an interruption to your gameplay, or should be. They should stop you doing what you were trying to do, so that you could take care of the crisis, but as a player I will probably get annoyed by that.
They also feel like they are taking your civ backwards, rather than forwards, taking stuff away rather than giving you things.
Ideally I think Crises should act like Dark Ages in Civ 6. Essentially they are opportunities for you to leverage the crisis to move your Civ in a certain direction, making choices where there is an element of sacrifice. Conceptually a plague is an overall bad thing for a civilisation, but what if it led to better wage equality for peasants and more social mobility as people died out (as kind of happened in England). What if a barbarian invasion was playing havoc on your borders but made it easier to recruit new troops and your whole society became more Martial.
Civ 6 kind of did these things with dark age cards, for instance internal trade routes became more valuable but I couldn't produce settlers, or science is boosted but culture sacrificed. It is that sort of choice the player should be making. Crises should inherently change the landscape of the game and make players play differently, and have to adapt to them. Above all, there should be a player incentive and bonus for engaging in them, not just penalties.
Overall however, I think Crises are a very hard concept to balance and make work, it certainly isn't easy and the half arsed way it has been implemented has pretty much killed the idea on arrival
Civ 3 (going back to it again lol) and Civ4 had periodic events like Barbarian Migrations and Plagues and weather events that were serious enough to get your attention and engagement, and could do real damage if you played poorly or were unprepared.
This was far FAR superior to Lazy Developer Fiat because the player *had actual engagement and agency*. You let the goddamn player *play the game* instead of deciding for them because you know better than them how to have fun.
i totally agree with this for that reason. Crises suck because they feel like they bash the player over the head going “ALERT ALERT a situation out of your control is changing the fate of your nation”
this should be an implicit component of the game, not a framing mechanic. it goes back to the basic storytelling principle of
Show, Don’t Tell. Why on earth are we just being told, with 0 agency or input for strategy and management, that a crisis outside of our control is dooming our nation as we know it, and forcing us to play differently? What “connection” beyond loose, pre-determined historical/geographical paths do civ transitions have, otherwise?
Whereas a more “showing” approach would have been making in-game periodical crises so impactful that I, as a player, feel obligated to change my strategy, government, culture and beliefs to weather the storm. I shouldn’t just be told that “things are different now”, i should have to have the option to either die by staying the same or live by abandoning what i know.
In this video, you see that Brandon (a planner) gives up the game because he finds that planning is mostly pointless. Dan, on the other hand, is more of a storyteller. He doesn't like that he doesn't really get to tell his civ's story, and instead the story is dictated to him. Obviously these are just two guys, but I think their views encompass the feelings of many.
I identify with both of these, and can’t be bothered to play for these exact reasons.
In film production, there are legal requirements to receive certain types of credits (these have been negotiated by the relevant unions, i.e. producers, actors, crew, cinematographers, etc.). Seems like it would be good to have a similar thing in the game production space.
Gaming is effectively a lawless land in a lot of respects. Game devs are some of the most overworked, overexploited people there are. Rights provided by law in film, tv, literature, theatre hasn’t kept up for games. I always do sympathize with them, even when things like this don’t work out.
I am kinda grim about the prospects to save civ7.
There have been many miraculous rebirths in the recent video game history, but I don't recall one happening when the main source of the game's criticism is its core premise.
Hell knows what you are supposed to do with this as a developer.
Agreed. Honestly, I think strategy games are the worst positioned to ever recover from bad starts because they’re built to be built upon. It becomes so hard to fix the underlying basis for everything else. Versus Cyberpunk or No Man’s Sky just iterating internally on the premise, not fully upending it.
City Skylines 2 and SimCity felt flawed and irredeemable for similar reasons. Can anyone think of any strategy and management game in recent memory that has fully recovered from absolute trash to reasonably good?
This is a bit of a tangent but I really wish they'd stop increasing the workload for leaders and civs. The game genuinely does not need to look any "prettier" than V and as nice as the leaders looked in V, it's clearly a bigger bottleneck than it's worth; both in terms of the workload, and in terms of who it allows them to add. Cut out the full voice acting, or stick people back into portraits, or at the very least just dial the graphical fidelity back. I would rather a mechanically coherent but visually lacking game (not in the sense that it's ugly, but in the sense there's room for improvement) like 4 over a mechanically lacking but "pretty to look at with the UI off" game like 7.
Your opinion would not create a popular game in 2025. Civ IV came out 20 years ago. Nowadays, graphics* matter as much as everything else being compelling does.
*a competent, well-executed artistic vision. It doesn't have to be photorealistic. But at the same time a lot of complaints about VI were because of the more stylised art direction.
To weigh in here, I totally agree with
@Gorbles — a clear art direction is needed even if graphics don’t have to be good (see: breath of the wild on a graphically limited console). In fact, everything civ 7 has done sometimes seems to be in the hopes of reducing art’s role in the game dev system (mostly by delinking leaders with civs to not have to create them all)
There’s been a lot of “but my civ was best” posting in this chat, so this isn’t targeted at this particular message, but this rhetoric is so unhelpful. We all know different people appreciate different civs to different extents. Why litigate which of civ 4-6 is the best when civ 7 could have been “good and distinct” and instead is “bad and distinct”. the options weren’t “bad and distinct” or “good and similar to a previous game”
I don't see this at all.
If Civ 7 didn't have age transitions and civ switching I'm not sure what there really is about the game to differentiate it from Civ 6. Sure there are some elements that seem like improvements, like commanders and scouts. Almost everything else in the game, from city states, diplomacy, religion, upgrading your settlements, feel like mostly downgrades or hardly massive upgrades. There is potential to many of the systems they introduced, for instance I think Towns is a really good idea, but ultimately these feel inconsequential and incomplete.
I honestly can't see what the selling point of Civ 7 would even be without Ages and Civ Switching, the game simply doesn't have enough else going for it right now. How would you convince someone to buy it? 'Hey, do you want Civ 6, but with most of the stuff you liked missing, but hey there are some minor tweaks that are improved, oh and it has nicer graphics.. even if you can't tell what anything is'
The issue is that the game philosophy of civ 7 isn’t the issue, the practical implementation is. As I mentioned above, they totally could have implemented some capacity of civ switching without forcing us to actually switch civs, like by introducing era-bounded “policies”, leader-switching, allowing our gameplay throughout eras to be more affected by our own decisions than pre-determined finish lines. I agree with what you said before that the civ 6 age system made far more sense than civ 7’s eras and crises.
They tried out leader switching first, but to them it didn't work and was less immersive in their opinions because it seems like Firaxis liked to identify with leaders, rather than civs.
As someone who likes to identify as the civ, and not the leader, I think I might have much preferred that. I wonder how many more people would have preferred leader switching to civ switching?
I would’ve preferred leader switching—though you know this since we talked about it at-length prelaunch. It feels more logical—leaders change while a nation stays the same. And before anyone says “but the immortal leader is key to civ”, so was playing as one civ until they arbitrarily killed that.
By "leaders" I'm assuming you mean something like VI's Great People, right?
I like it. I think it would kill two birds with one stone; adding a little more complexity and helping those behind to catch up rather than slowing those ahead down.
Civ 3 did this, with playable leaders as great peoples, iirc.
