It was in one of interviews. I can try to dig it up.
Civ VII Post-mortem: Crafting a redemption arc
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In my opinion, the current analysis is just as good as the original. I don't believe there is any inappropriate analysis driven by bias, and I feel like this comment borders on a personal accusation make without evidence that borders on a personal attack.
I believe his comments about an attempt to address a bug in the Modern Age supports his data driven speculation that lack of technical proficiency is hindering game design for 7 in ways that are unique and not parallel to technical issues in other games. Other than the broad statement, "Many civ games require changes and overhauls," I do not believe there is similarity between the unique problems with 7 versus earlier games, in that 7 suffers specifically from having a need for changes based on structural inadequacies in staff abilities.
I'm not using this as political commentary, it's totally politically neutral. It's just an anecdote about professionalism.
I remember an interview with the President of the Mormon Church by Larry King, in the 90s. He asked if Christian people should "forgive" Bill Clinton, as there was a major scandal around his personal life at the time.
This is a completely inappropriate framing. National leaders exercise authority on the basis of responsibility and trust. People can be forgiven for a personal or moral failing, but that forgiveness doesn't apply to the necessity for trust required for a position of leadership. Being President of the United States - in theory - isn't a job for anyone, it's only a job for someone who is best suited for it.
A better example is an airline pilot. An airline pilot's personal habits, say their potential drug use, is not a matter of personal privacy. The position of being an airline pilot carries with it a degree of minimum trust and responsibility, and anyone hoping to be a pilot must be willing to forgo privacy and leniency on certain issues if they want to be qualified for that position of responsibility.
While a game designer is not in a position of public trust and safety, they are certainly responsible to millions of dollars of expense and revenue in a product. To a less critical, but not irrelevant degree, they are responsible to a customer audience which is entitled to care about about the product.
Speaking about their qualifications in terms of objectifiable characteristics pertinent to the product outcomes is entirely appropriate. No one has a right to a salary, authority, or responsibility over a product if they are not objectively qualified to meet the demands of product development.
I think if personal names were used and highlighted, that would be inappropriate (unless it's a public figure or spokesman and criticism sticks to their public life only). However, from a product post-mortem analysis perspective, evaluating how staff competency affects product outcomes is totally relevant.
We want a better game and so we want management processes to identify the real problems, so it's appropriate for the fan community to combat deflective discourse that blames tangential issues and protects incompetent staff. We are living in a world where studios and audiences are often in antagonistic positions, unfortunately, and my personal opinion is that it's entirely on the shoulders of development professionals to cater to their audience and manage a discourse that creates instead mutual enthusiasm.
To many creative professionals who lack the skills to cater to established audiences, but who are paid in proportion to an established brand's established audience (drawing a premium from the quality of past professionals), engage in a misguided crusade to seek "new audiences" in hopes expectations will be lower over there.
Experienced professionals and new graduates alike are struggling to get hired. Pay is well below what companies are actually able to afford. This narrative continues to not add up. I would blame something rotten in management culture, not the quality of available or potential talent. If I had to guess, based on observational but incomplete evidence, it would be that corporate level decision making is entirely unconcerned with long term planning. Meanwhile, perhaps in response, operational management becomes an old boys' club (see: Bethesda) that supports a few big fat salaries and doesn't want to bring in new talent that might overshadow them.
Nonsense. It is not the customer's job to protect the salaries of the people producing the product they seek to buy. There is certainly nuance in that it would be the development management that deserve the most blame, but if they are hiring inadequate talent, or not paying enough for adequate talent, while that's their fault, it doesn't mean that inadequate talent deserves to keep doing that job. There's decent but inexperienced talent who maybe are hurt unfairly by poor management, and that's unfortunate.
Thenewwwguy
Deity
this is my point. the critique of the talent misses the point here
Thanks for this analysis and sorry for any backlash it might have provoked.
Without commenting on designer skill directly, I do want to talk about Civ 7's overall big problem and hash it out a bit more.
In the most recent patch notes, they comment about not wanting to overcomplicate the UI, referencing the "sheer depth" of complexity in different kinds of yield adjacencies and bonuses. This sort of triggered me, especially because I found Silla to be a bit underwhelming. Silla, like a few other civs, is just a couple extra yields here, some little adjacencies there.
When I think of playing civs like that, it just makes me think, "Well, I just want to optimize as many yields as I can, which involves repeat, rudimentary placement puzzles, and that's it." That's not really playing a strategy game to me. I strongly get the impression, from the patch notes, that they are aiming to create a gameplay experience that forces a casual audience to reflect upon many apparent choices and bonuses, but without alienating the casual audience with major strategic consequences. The "I feel smart doing this, but there's nothing smart about it." It really belies the notion of "sheer depth". More like, endless, barely relevant complexity.
Qajar is cool. There's a very specific set of mechanics that induce an asymmetric strategy: keeping settlements to a minimum. This is cool for representing an interesting, unique strategic choice, something I don't get from Silla (other than maybe if you have control over it, different diplomatic choices, though there actually isn't much strategic depth here).
Even so, the problem with Qajar is it's a one-trick pony. I either succeed in optimizing my specialists while minimizing settlements, or I don't. It's not like there are different ways Qajar's uniqueness could be used, different strategic mixes. Maybe, you could plan to stay tall and tight in preparation for finishing as Qajar, but then you have to play through these long, interruptive Age beginnings, middles and ends before even getting there.
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For civs like Silla, the sense that its unique qualities are giving you strategic options, while not symmetrical to other civs, still grant you meaningful choice, just isn't there. For civs like Qajar, it's more about feeling like you "pulled off" its intended strategy, which you can play a few times to finally accomplish at a satisfactory level, but then you've done it and there's no more meaningful gameplay to be had.
This all boils down to the conflicting design notion that Civ 7 has "sheer depth" in tile placement possibilities and resulting adjacency and bonus combinations, with the notion that the game has to be sufficiently simple and totally balanced so that this sheer depth doesn't actually matter. It's, as I said, just a series of little placement puzzles that grow immediately tedious and substantially lack meaning.
These placement puzzles are also handicapped by incomplete design vision. If cities have layers from history, why is there a bronze age grain warehouse next to my downtown palace? Why can't these cities have little features like avenues that represent the urban version of exurban improvements, reducing the sense of sprawl and fully integrating the concept of a layered, complex city with "depth". Why can't I go into a camera mode to take snapshots of cool cities from different angles to post on social media?
In any event, the only place where civ switching could have been interesting is in offering not railroaded strategic choices solely related to optimizing the available bonuses, but asymmetric strategies which preserve meaningful choice.
The extreme overbalancing of the game is a completely failed design concept and I continue to sense the developers are just committed to this vision and will not change it no matter audience feedback. It seems that the intent of the game was to sell civs like League of Legends characters where there would be so many of them, and they would be superficially unique, but to balance this the game needs to not actually allow any civ to have a meaningful, asymmetric affect on strategic choices. And that the audience of the game is absolutely the less strategically inclined casual console player, who (in the sense of the model customer envisioned by marketing) is looking for a chance to "feel" smart by being given a large set of choices with a couple very obvious optimal solutions that never change, in lieu of any strategic depth that would alienate people that aren't interested in learning the strategy basics or applying them.
You make a good point that in spite of the game's incredibly, impressively restrictive overbalancing, it still shipped with game breaking bugs that are pretty obvious and simple, but aren't being fixed very quickly or very well.
I was reminded, through Silla, that the diplomacy system is streamlined and overbalanced. There's a trade off between paying for peace, or getting yield boosts. If you had way too much influence, or if the initiatives were too strong, you would overboost your yields. If initiatives and other diplomacy were out of balance, then naturally peaceful civs in the lucky geopolitical positions would dominate, or, anyone seeking boosts would get swamped by war weariness.
These systems are far too intertwined. Growth itself - a subject of early contention that was minimally "fixed" - is itself intertwined with happiness, war weariness etc. It's all completely intertwined, and then within this massive, complex, mutually dependent system, they create "sheer depth" of endless ways to vary what sort of adjacency bonuses you get.
I bet you could mathematically describe strategic depth. It would involve describing decision trees which produce wildly divergent outcomes, but how the average varied combination of these choices converge to the same outcome.
I bet you could mathematically prove that the intertwined, interdependent balancing of Civ 7 disallows for strategic depth. That you could not within that system produce wildly divergent outcomes, as it would suppress them.
With this in mind, the junior design staff, while their inexperience has introduced additional quality issues to the game - according to your analysis - can do very little to improve upon the base problems with the game. They're stuck. The core design can't be improved upon unless its broken open like an egg.
I think Civ 7, ages and civ transitions and everything else aside, needs to break eggs.
- Commit to wild asymmetries. This means needing to add a few more systems, like a faith yield, for one. An example from the ideas forum was a "Stability" yield rather than a settlement limit. I commented that a religious civ could have a specific policy that supports Stability and breaks the core tall vs. wide balancing mechanism. However, that policy would nerf your Science or something. So, the idea are unique civs that totally break core systems but pair that with other penalties. When you have asymmetries, you end up with situations where monster overpowered civs can be countered almost every time, however, if you don't correctly identify and implement the counter, you will be totally overpowered by it. That's the design aim, I think, that's needed. It's not what's "cool for casuals".
- Asymmetries that genuinely can't be countered "broken civs" are beloved by the community. Patches always correct these, but until they do, discovering them and exploiting them as a community is bread and butter IMO and not a problem design needs to avoid at all costs. "Perfectly balanced with no exploits" and all that.
- Too much is intertwined in 7 and that needs to change. I'd disentangle government and diplomacy from their simplified relationship to global yield buffs. I'd redesign them to be meaningful, interesting systems, but not ones which are co-dependent on everything else for balance. Asymmetric mini-games. Something as simple as instead of a Science boosting initiative, just going back to trading for technologies. Instead of a culture yield boost, what about an initiative to build a wonder together where the junior partner gets a junior benefit while the Wonder's active in that Age.
- Growth is too tight, and the specialist feature is too intertwined with it. Redefine Settlement limits within the scope of the town vs. cities dichotomy, an obvious natural place to balance tall vs wide strategies that leaves from for dozens of "wild asymmetries". Imagine a civ that only has two town specializations, but the food one is double food, and there is more support for tall cities.
- The specialist feature railroads city development, supports snowballing, doesn't support meaningful choice once you understand how to optimize it, and inherently restricts adding variety to tall vs. wide balance. Just replace this with something else. I've had many ideas but the simplest one is good old city administrators. One administrator per yield type per city per Age. Hiring one works like building a food supported mini-wonder or project, and so you have to inherently specialize cities into select roles unless you have the food to hire all of them and are making super cities. You select your strategy "This will be a gold and production city" and then you queue those to roles in the administrator training queue, and you fill up the training queue a little bit with each growth even if you choose not to improve a tile. That's it. No more endless placing specialists here there and everywhere.
I'd go so far as to say the legacy paths themselves are boring because they are restricted by the overbalance. Some of my wilder ideas for improved victory paths don't actually work within the current balancing.
Thenewwwguy
Deity
y’all might find this post (and the attached glassdoor review) enlightening (assuming there’s any merit or truth to it)
GeneralZift
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Ah I thought the review read familiar, I think this one was posted months ago. It's not strictly going to be gospel because there's not too much pointing at it, but the state of game might have you believe anything.
After this, they did also lay off a ton of individuals from various departments, mostly from art and writing, but also from UI iirc.
So it could point towards a toxic working environment.
To be honest, game environments are awful. Everything from the crunch to the culture to the individuals to the extreme for-profit mentality.
In most industries, regulation is the key towards preventing environments like this. But no one gives a **** about regulating video game development, and video games themselves.
Did Civ 7 spontaneously enter existence, or is it the product of people's work? If it's the latter, some discussion of the qualifications of the people doing the work is certainly worthwhile, and here it was done in the least personal way you possibly can.
It's pure gossip and might be 80% untrue, but it's the single best explanation for the UI issues - which on their face are unforgiveable. For that reason, I give it some credence, in that something like a bit of stubbornness or maybe even arrogance on the part of design management best fits with the overall narrative. The rest of the gossip is just salacious and unnecessary for analysis (though, hallucinogenic substances can induce idea lock-in and egotism, however they are not a necessary condition for stubbornness).
This was a much later issue and shouldn't be considered to be related to the cited rumor.
It points more towards a clash between this particular department and management, which might have produced a toxic environment, but it's not necessarily the case the rest of the studio had toxic qualities. Toxicity can be created by both management and employees, and if one or the other works hard to prevent it, it can be mitigated. According to the gossip, the UI head and their team chose not to accommodate demands of management they found unacceptable, and that created a toxic feedback loop.
The source of the problem has to do with structural features of the capital markets. Companies want billion dollar games, not "mere" profits. AAA is dying, both in losing the ability to retain motivated quality talent (crunch was always a thing but there was once huge collaborative passion), but also the gamer audience is in decline. There's some hope that AA/indie titles will rise in prominence again, since this model has fewer imposed corporate demands and allows for the old fashioned small team collaborative passion that once made games great.
I'd use the metaphor of filmmaking. There have been many huge Hollywood bombs in recent years. Hundreds of millions of dollars to top actors, massive effects budgets, hundreds of effects workers, thousands of film crew, hundreds of hours of acting talent. One or two script writers. Where big beautiful movies with massive marketing and top actors bomb because the story is terrible. You would think Hollywood would realize there is a disproportionate lack of emphasis on writing. They've tried to correct for this with expensive reshoots, multiple scripts, audience testing to find the perfectly tailored audience pleaser. This has often made things worse.
I suppose it's a hard, obtuse problem to solve. A creative will write a script for a movie that soars but then their next movie bombs. Was it the writer's fault the second time, or the director, or studio interference? The way networking and schmoozing in Hollywood works, I don't think the decisions makers are even qualified to pass judgment on creative quality.
What can you do? Have extremely highly compensated top writers who manage entire teams of junior writers, whose collaborate genius produces a set of ideas and writing solutions, which the experience and talent of the lead writer is able to filter, distill and structure into a final product worthy of the millions of dollars of budget to all the other people making the movie? I imagine this would be the solution. But Hollywood greed and all thinks you have no choice but to pay hundreds of millions to CGI studios, where as you can theoretically pay one guy a little money to cover the entire writing process. Why pay a whole highly compensated team if you don't have to? Even though writing will make or break the film.
This is AAA development's problem. "The money" doesn't want to pay for the right amount of quality creative control and design talent. In terms of producing a game and minimum required labor, in theory you could get away with only a few designers, if they're good and design requirements are limited. You have to have dozens of artists, voice actors and so forth. That can't be avoided. But the paradox is, all those artists and voice actors and translators won't help the product if the core design fails in some way.
Seems I again recalled it wrong. Though, Ed Beach is referring the ages system and IMO it is the true design mistake in the game.
Civ 7 director thought the new Ages system might not work, but says it does fix the "number-one issue" - players not getting to the end of their games
"I'm getting so many more reports of people playing all the way to finishing a game"
So the question we're not really getting an answer to is why casual players aren't enjoying this to the degree Civ: Revolution was enjoyed.
I know that during the first two months of playing, there were numerous game systems which I didn't understand until weeks into playing. A stupid one is I didn't know you had to have a railroad station in your capital before any rail could be built anywhere in your empire.
These problems and the bad UI, maybe they turned off casuals?
If the core, first couple of playthroughs experience is positive, why did casuals stop playing. Hardcore strategists might be disappointed, but I know the people on this forum still playing do still enjoy the basic optimization puzzle solving and tactical military play. I wonder where, from the casual perspective, the cut off between positive and negative experience is.
aieeegrunt
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This sounds to me like what playtesting groups they had were long time civ fanatic type people, which is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you want playtesting a game for the general public
Especially if it’s a new feature, and even more so if you are gutting the core identity of the game.
This should have been a very predictable outcome, especially with the concrete examples of Fallout 76 and Halo Infinite staring you in the face
But welcome to Hubris 101.
Leucarum
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Aah thank you. Also makes sense that this article was from before Civ7 launched. I wonder how their data on players finishing games actually looks? I know for one that I almost never play past Antiquity.Seems I again recalled it wrong. Though, Ed Beach is referring the ages system and IMO it is the true design mistake in the game.
I believe I have seen another article about it where it was detailed better but I can't find it. Looks like it is out of existence.Civ 7 director thought the new Ages system might not work, but says it does fix the "number-one issue" - players not getting to the end of their games
"I'm getting so many more reports of people playing all the way to finishing a game"www.gamesradar.com
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Then there is Frankenstein test group where members are truly civ fanatics. Some members have been there since Civ IV. I dont see a problem there per se, but it indeed lacks Joe Average's perspective on the franchise. I know one member is (was) a moderator for Civ 7 Steam discussions page and my perception is that they didnt expect there would be so much negativity toward the game.
I believe casual devs are not to blame. According to a few public (and unreliable) sources (not only glassdoor), it seems that it was a design goal to hide information from the player. I did read from Reddit that nesting tooltips were banned and tooltips should be avoided and minimal. I can't know if those claims are true. But if they are, the burden is on key designers.
There seems to be some kind of "learn by playing" sentiment that not giving information keeps players engaged because they would be exploring different possibilities in the game. But that is not how the world works in the year 2025.
This would be interesting to know. They mentioned that for Civ 6, fewer than 40% of their players ever finish a single game. Actually, it does not sound like a low figure at all.
Source:
In Civilization VII, Empires Rise and Stereotypes Start to Fall
The turn-based strategy game has two Ph.D. historians on the design team and a palpable appreciation of cultures across the globe. It also maintains a deeply colonialist worldview.
Leucarum
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I mean fewer than 40% could be pretty low... But likely means close to 40% so... That is higher than I expected.
I don't know if I neccessarily agree that ages are rhe root of Civ7's problems but they are bound up with the game getting progressively less interesting over time. That I think is the root since it both makes later ages worse and that Civ Switching results in later civs being dead weight.
Thenewwwguy
Deity
biggest reason is “casual players” are a much more limited market with a game that is graphically demanding enough to require dedicated hardware (console or gaming pc), which wasn’t the case with civ rev
aieeegrunt
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Then there is Frankenstein test group where members are truly civ fanatics. Some members have been there since Civ IV. I dont see a problem there per se, but it indeed lacks Joe Average's perspective on the franchise. I know one member is (was) a moderator for Civ 7 Steam discussions page and my perception is that they didnt expect there would be so much negativity toward the game.
I believe casual devs are not to blame. According to a few public (and unreliable) sources (not only glassdoor), it seems that it was a design goal to hide information from the player. I did read from Reddit that nesting tooltips were banned and tooltips should be avoided and minimal. I can't know if those claims are true. But if they are, the burden is on key designers.
There seems to be some kind of "learn by playing" sentiment that not giving information keeps players engaged because they would be exploring different possibilities in the game. But that is not how the world works in the year 2025.
This would be interesting to know. They mentioned that for Civ 6, fewer than 40% of their players ever finish a single game. Actually, it does not sound like a low figure at all.
Source:
In Civilization VII, Empires Rise and Stereotypes Start to Fall
The turn-based strategy game has two Ph.D. historians on the design team and a palpable appreciation of cultures across the globe. It also maintains a deeply colonialist worldview.www.nytimes.com
The fact that they didn’t expect such a negative reaction kind of underlines my point about the dangers of only having an “in” group of long term playtesters (yes men?) like that.
The negative reaction was IMMEDIATE and pretty vocal from the first moment civ switching/era resets was made public, the problem was the “in” group discounted and marginalized us as a “vocal toxic minority”, and places like Reddit discussion was soft suppressed by brigading, selective moderation etc.
Then launch day came and so did logical consequences.
A person's work performance is associated with various factors. The performance of teams, departments, or organizations is even more complicated. There are way too many unknowns for us to be able to comment on this with reasonable confidence.
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