Confirmation that Civ 7 did not "steal" civilization-switching from Humankind

[bv98132454]

I truly hope we both get some good alternatives to the Civ franchise and that Civ continues to see success. Isn't that the ideal situation?

I hope so, because I have zero interest in playing Civ 7 as we currently know it.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

I hope so, because I have zero interest in playing Civ 7 as we currently know it.

We hadn't heard.

 

[mackintosh]

Oddly enough, FO76 is thriving now. The people who like that game really like it, and Bethesda has put a ton of content in since the abysmal launch.

Fallout 76 saw a brief resurgence when the tv show premiered, but it failed to sustain this momentum. The average player numbers are pretty much back to pre-show levels. Fallout 4 on the other hand has managed to increase its user base slightly and is still coasting on that jump, perhaps due to ongoing modding support by the community. According to steamdb it's actually outplaying 76 by 2:1.

 

[aieeegrunt]

I don't think Fallout and Halo are dead. Fallout and Halo as live service games are dead though.

What you need to kill a franchise is:
1. Disastrous product
2. Good alternative

This is why SimCity is dead after dominating the city builder genre. It put out a disastrous product, and then viable alternatives came in to fill the gap. By the time EA could bring SimCity back, the alternatives dominated the space it used to.

76 was enough of a debacle that Bethesda got sold off to Microsoft

Infinite’s playercount has completely cratered, and I believe any more development for it has halted. If 343 wasn’t already Microsoft puppet, it would have been firesaled too.

Every franchise is bulletproof till it isn’t. I grew up with the holy trinity of Unreal, Quake and Duke Nukem. They seemed eternal too.

I can’t see Civ switching killing off Civ, there is way too much franchise momentum still, but you make enough gaffes, it can happen to anyone

 

[Professor Phobo]

Fallout 76 saw a brief resurgence when the tv show premiered, but it failed to sustain this momentum. The average player numbers are pretty much back to pre-show levels. Fallout 4 on the other hand has managed to increase its user base slightly and is still coasting on that jump, perhaps due to ongoing modding support by the community. According to steamdb it's actually outplaying 76 by 2:1.

It's still trucking along with a devoted fanbase which, oddly enough, is one of the friendliest in gaming. You'd think with as disastrous a launch it had and Bethesda's various design woes and it's dated, clunky gameplay and engine, it'd be dead now. You never can tell what will or will not survive.

 

[Kwami]

Humankind lost 90% of its active player base within a month of release. People didn't get bored with it. People dropped it because it was fundamentally flawed and never looked back.

How is that any different? Humankind was fun for a couple of games and then it was repetitive and boring. But so what?

Again, Humankind wasn't released and considered "not very good" until Civ7 had already been in development for a couple of years.

 

[Thormodr]

Civilization has a brand name, Humankind didn't. It's really that simple, and may be the thing that saves Civilization.

Yep. Triple AAA games will get a 90% + rating rubber stamped by the big gaming media companies.

I have quite enjoyed Old World but since they are a smaller studio, they don't get the benefit of the doubt like Civ does. They have to fight for things tooth and claw. They are gaining a good reputation with regular updates and engagement with the community, though.

I suspect that Ara: History Untold will have a bit of a struggle, too. (Their marketing isn't the strongest, either.)

 

[Josephias]

Why would they abandon their own design vision because someone else announced a game with a similar - but not identical - mechanic?

It's not that Firaxis would want to abandon their design vision. But it can be imagined it would make things more difficult for them at the ERB meeting with 2K. Someone said it is probably oiled, true, and but there are still questions the suits usually make. As it was commented, if they were taking on an HK failed feature, it would have been difficult to get any approval for it to be included, or a lot of questions about on "How you would ensure it will not fail?". HK having just presented the feature as a big selling point is a different scenario, but also one open to questions, mainly "how will this been as original if someone has presented it already?" "how would you differentiate it?" or just "are you just presenting what Amplitude said yesterday because you have no other ideas?"

i don't how many times this can be repeated

who had the idea first is truly irrelevant to the fact that it played badly in Humankind and it doesn't look to be done in a much better way in Civ VII

You are right in the fact that having the idea first or not has little relevance on how it will be implemented. But having a clear timeline does provides some nuance that invalidates the basic statement "humankind had an idea that proved wrong, THEN firaxis took it for their new game" that seems to be repeated quite a while.

With the timeline presented in the article, the first step of the timeline is "humankind hand an idea that was presented as a big depart from Civ-series, THEN Civ pitched 2K management to include a similar idea in their game": This alone (as commented above) proves they are not the exact "same" idea, as in that case it would probably not been able to make the cut trough 2K Civ7 approval board: Firaxis had probably the need to convince them it would be handled somewat differently to what Amplitude was presenting with Humankind.

Then the second step is (several year laters) "the feature was a failure in humankind, THEN Civ team decided to keep it in their game", which leads to a very different scenario: first Civ'7 feature has already been for a while in development, so dropping it may mean -as core as the game as it is- just re-start a game development from scratch, loosing the work (and money) of several years. Then, humanking failure provides them relevant information on how to tweak and differentiate more their feature to avoid the bigger shortfalls their competitor had (as long as they not are very hardcoded already), or at least to "patch" them for minimal impact. Knowing this "feature coincidence" I'm sure they have had been keeping a look on Humankind and making sure they are able to diffirentiate it so it does not follow the same path. I think it is too early to say the new path will lead to success or failure, but I'm sure it will be a different one for shure.

BTW, I take the opportunity to say: I've played Humankind quite a bit, and I don't find the civ-switching to be one of the worst things in the game - to say the game flops because of that its an overstretch that discards many other things like interface issues, complicated systems, a combat engine that may put you randomly in bad start conditions... there's a lot to investigate on the reasons for its failure. Also a big drop on active users in the first year is something that most games cannot avoid: after the initial hype is passed and new options come, many games loose a lot of active users: it's just a feature fo the lifecicle. To see if a game has been successful or not, I would care more about the number of active users it retains, than to the difference with the number of active users it had just after release.

 

[Civinator]

I don´t understand the continuing discussions about "Civ 7 stealing civilization-switching from Humankind" any longer, since it is shown that the "civilization-switching" during different historical eras with different civilizations, connected by a centralised scoring, exists in the Civ series since the Conquests-Campaign in Civ 3 Conquests (C3C) - and for the Conquests in C3C the Breakaway Games and Ed Beach were responsable. The "civilization-switching" in Civ 7 seems to be nothing else, but a highly modified form of that C3C Conquests Campaign.

The C3C Conquests Campaign was created long time before Humankind was appearing. So it is clear, that Ed Beach had that idea long before Humankind even did exist:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...rom-buying-civ-7.691530/page-22#post-16659526
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...rom-buying-civ-7.691530/page-27#post-16659748

Btw.: So I like C3C, the campaign for me never was the most favorable part of C3C.

​

 

[Vincent_lacruz]

Check out this interview with the devs at Gamescom. Credit to @JNR13 as always for finding this!

Interview: Civilization 7 almost scrapped its iconic settler start, but the team couldn’t let it go

We sat down with Civilization 7's executive producer, Dennis Shirk, at Gamescom 2024 to speak about the upcoming strategy sensation.

videogames.si.com

Ok, I won't try to decide which one copied wich other, that's moot (and both publisher had several games before, and with brainstorming I'm sure most ideas are a decade old by this time...).

But I really liked that interview (thank you for finding it!!!^^), and one of the argument they gave for the chance is that they didn't "just" want CIV 6.5. And THAT is a good argument, seeing the amount of content we have so far in CIV 6, which will, no doubt on that, even increase with all the moders out there^^.

Had the version of CIV 7 been too close to CIV 6, most people would have thought "Why bother, I already have it, I won't buy it just for better graphics...". Overall I will wait for it impatiently (well, I am here trying to find more far too frequently lately, that must mean something^^).

Let's hope they offer a preview week where you can play at a simplified version sometime by the end of the year, so that we can have a better idea of likes and dislikes^^.

 

[Thormodr]

Ok, I won't try to decide which one copied wich other, that's moot (and both publisher had several games before, and with brainstorming I'm sure most ideas are a decade old by this time...).

But I really liked that interview (thank you for finding it!!!^^), and one of the argument they gave for the chance is that they didn't "just" want CIV 6.5. And THAT is a good argument, seeing the amount of content we have so far in CIV 6, which will, no doubt on that, even increase with all the moders out there^^.

Had the version of CIV 7 been too close to CIV 6, most people would have thought "Why bother, I already have it, I won't buy it just for better graphics...". Overall I will wait for it impatiently (well, I am here trying to find more far too frequently lately, that must mean something^^).

Let's hope they offer a preview week where you can play at a simplified version sometime by the end of the year, so that we can have a better idea of likes and dislikes^^.

Yes, a demo would be a great idea. The problem is, would it last long enough to get to Civ switching? I suppose at online speed it might.