Civ VII Screenshot hidden in error message on website!?

Guess I'll put forth an unpopular opinion and say that realistic visuals are uninteresting, boring, and age poorly. Civ6's graphics are dynamic and interesting, in part because of the things you can't do with more realistic looking character models, and will still looking great a decade from now. Compare that to Civ5's character models, which are boring and haven't aged well at all. You can make realistic visuals work and be interesting, see the FF7 remakes, but in a game like Civ7 they are always going to be the lesser choice compared to something more stylized like Civ6.
 
Interesting, but to take another perspective . . .

The Colosseum (if that's what it is, note that most Roman arenas were of that design) appears to be under construction, which possibly means the same construction site, Wonder movie system will be used in Civ VII as in Civ VI.

- And in that case, the 'Quarry' could be a requirement for building the massive stone Wonder close to it, thus making Wonder construction even more restricted by Resource Availability and Terrain than before - hopefully, producing fewer 'Wonder Races", one of the banes of previous editions.

And looking at the terrain, I see what appears to be deciduous 'forest', palm-like 'tropical (rain?) forest', and areas with scattered trees and brush but no real 'forest' - more differentiation in terrain? Previous Civs have shown evergreen and deciduous and tropical forest, but Civ VI reduced everything to Forest and Rain Forest, so this might be at least a slight increase in terrain variation.
 
Guess I'll put forth an unpopular opinion and say that realistic visuals are uninteresting, boring, and age poorly. Civ6's graphics are dynamic and interesting, in part because of the things you can't do with more realistic looking character models, and will still looking great a decade from now. Compare that to Civ5's character models, which are boring and haven't aged well at all. You can make realistic visuals work and be interesting, see the FF7 remakes, but in a game like Civ7 they are always going to be the lesser choice compared to something more stylized like Civ6.
Nowadays i believe your opinion is not that unpopular. But let me say, i personally prefer the civ5 leader models over the civ6 ones. Yes, definitely. I believe my opinion is the unpopular opinion… but that‘s ok.
 
Guess I'll put forth an unpopular opinion and say that realistic visuals are uninteresting, boring, and age poorly. Civ6's graphics are dynamic and interesting, in part because of the things you can't do with more realistic looking character models, and will still looking great a decade from now. Compare that to Civ5's character models, which are boring and haven't aged well at all. You can make realistic visuals work and be interesting, see the FF7 remakes, but in a game like Civ7 they are always going to be the lesser choice compared to something more stylized like Civ6.
I don't think it's unpopular at all. As I remember, the original debate seemed (to me, at least) to be about even on liking or disliking the map graphic style of Civ VI.
And all game terrain will be stylized to be playable. Realistic terrain would simply bury the gamer in details that have no effect on play at the Grand Strategy scale of Civ.

My objection is to the Type of stylization. The extreme cartoonery of Civ VI was, IMHO, too much, and, frankly, always looked to me as if the designers were insulting their audience: as if we alll need extremes of stylization to differentiate between forest and rainforest on the map - and yet, if you remember, hills were hard to differentiate at first even with their extreme stylization.

What the 'leaked' screenshot or mock-up shows, as I noted in the above post, is that possibly they are providing more differentation of biome/terrain in Civ VII, which would probably require some different stylization techniques - NOT 'realism' but possibly a graphic style more subtle in some particulars.

All speculation so far, of course . . .
 
The extreme cartoonery of Civ VI was, IMHO, too much, and, frankly, always looked to me as if the designers were insulting their audience: as if we alll need extremes of stylization to differentiate between forest and rainforest on the map - and yet, if you remember, hills were hard to differentiate at first even with their extreme stylization.
Extreme stylization does make it easier to differentiate things though, especially at a glance. It makes the game a lot easier to player if you can immediately tell the difference between the game's two types of forests instead of having to move your mouse over to the title and see what kind it.

Also, and this needs to said, most people playing the game are almost certainly casual players and that will dictate a lot of design choices, especially in regard to the game's UI elements. Making things as obvious as possible is important, as seen by the various discussions about players stilling missing clearly marked things like climbable ledges.
 
The Colosseum (if that's what it is, note that most Roman arenas were of that design) appears to be under construction,
Or already ruined, I thought to myself, to the exact degree that the actual Colosseum is.

DECAYING GREAT WONDERS!

You heard it here first!
 
Or already ruined, I thought to myself, to the exact degree that the actual Colosseum is.

DECAYING GREAT WONDERS!

You heard it here first!
With the wooden scaffolds around it, I'd say building is underway.
 
With the wooden scaffolds around it, I'd say building is underway

Man, you got good eyes. Ok, well then . . .

MODERN-DAY RESTORATIONS OF DECAYING WONDERS!

You heard it here first.
 
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I get the impression that the volcano's ash cloud separates two different screen shots. The flora between the left and right image don't seem to match up.
 
It's one of the hopes I have for Civ VII. Some sort of mechanic involving aging and plundering wonders.
Or to widen that out a bit, a Maintenance Requirement for City Walls, Wonders, possibly other structures. Basically, if you want to load your city with capital improvements, you are going to have to be able to afford them on a continuous and not a one-time basis.

Then make the Gold Income based a great deal on Long Distance Trade which can decay or be cut off, and potentially, among other things, that could implement a possible 'Rise and Fall' mechanic, in which your Civ slowly decays in its urban infrastructure because you can't afford it any more - a much better model for the 'collapse' of the Roman Empire than sudden waves of Barbarians which, the scholars are now pretty sure from DNA and other evidence, never existed as Invaders but rather as smaller groups of Migrants coming in on Invitation from the Romans.
 
Extreme stylization does make it easier to differentiate things though, especially at a glance. It makes the game a lot easier to player if you can immediately tell the difference between the game's two types of forests instead of having to move your mouse over to the title and see what kind it.

Also, and this needs to said, most people playing the game are almost certainly casual players and that will dictate a lot of design choices, especially in regard to the game's UI elements. Making things as obvious as possible is important, as seen by the various discussions about players stilling missing clearly marked things like climbable ledges.
From what I've seen, the new game ARA is using a technique of close-ups to view the details of city infrastucture while normally the map (which, I believe, is Regions rather than individual tiles) is at a much higher and less-detailed level. That might be what Civ VII (assuming the leaked shot has any relationship to what comes out in the game) is going for: a very detailed City View to show all the purty details while most of rthe actual game play is at a level that keeps all the terrain distinct.

That would be somewhat in line with the Civ VI decision to put everything possible On The Map: Districts, individual buildings in Districts, Wonders, etc. By allowing the gamer to Zoom In to individual Districts and Cities when necessary to place individual structures while keeping most of the game play (moving Armies, Trade Routes, etc) at a less detailed level, they maintain the All Map display style without requiring a super computer to show all the details on every tile on a Huge Map all the time: even Civ VI taxed my old Mac on Bigger Than Standard maps trying to show all the city infrastructure in a Late Game.
 
This really feels like concept and/or cover art to me. It is clearly civ 7 related, and I know we are all grasping at straws right now - but I don't think we should take any in-game visual insight from this.

For example, Civ 6 looks nothing like this (even though we were able to pick a few in-game wonders out of it):

1717796489808.png
 
Please I hope this isn’t the only thing we have to speculate on until August. Otherwise we’ll have 20 pages on here talking about something that may not even be a screenshot 😂

I'm waiting for the 40 min YouTube videos dissection of every screen revealed so far! :crazyeye:
 
This really feels like concept and/or cover art to me. It is clearly civ 7 related, and I know we are all grasping at straws right now - but I don't think we should take any in-game visual insight from this.

For example, Civ 6 looks nothing like this (even though we were able to pick a few in-game wonders out of it):

View attachment 693372
Yeah but that’s not set up like the game is at all. This screenshot is. There are clearly identifiable elements of the game map.
 
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