Anyone who had played Civ5 and seen the pre-launch articles had a pretty good idea what to expect, basically Civ 5 in space. If you went in with that frame of mind, it was pretty good.
But you're again just looking at it from the perspective of what I think is somewhat of a sandbox-guy.
From my perspective of somebody who watched pretty much all the pre-release footage and expected a strategy-focused experience... I was pretty pissed after a few hours because of how one-dimensional it played. First game on Apollo was a breeze, and figuring out that Trade Routes are insanely strong and basically remove the need for actual empire development didn't took long either. And those things weren't really apparent from the pre-release footage, because the devs played very inefficiently themselves.
The game was very wide open, you had many different kind of worlds available. With the tech web and affinity system, you could craft some pretty wild civilizations. Civ:BE has a lot of replay value.
Yeah, but why would you want to "replay" a game that wasn't "fun" the first time you played it?
And the tech web and sponsors... sure, replay value, if again, you're a sandbox-guy. For people focused on strategy it was pretty clear that there was exactly one sponsor worth your time (Kavithan at first, later African Union) - because Sponsors didn't actually play differently, they just got bonuses that varied in strength (something that was mostly fixed in Rising Tide) - and one strong path through the tech web (per Affinity). The way the Affinity Victories were designed, requiring exactly one expensive technology from exactly one part of the tech web, already laid out that path pretty clearly, and picking up extra stuff just wasn't worth it due to the very short games compared to other Civ titles.
With Civ5 and now Civ6, the game is basically on rails, you start in 4000 BC already having a pretty good idea of what your Civ will look like in 2000 AD since, well Earth is Earth and the tech tree is basically a one way street.
I'd rather say Civ 5 and Civ 6 have progress that is a lot like a road with many lanes. You can switch between them, and one will be a bit faster than the others (hopefully depending on the map and gameplay situation), but you'll always follow the same path overall, and they're somewhat equally strong, so you can actually switch stuff around without severely handicapping yourself.
Beyond Earth's release tech web was more like a bunch of roads that all lead towards the same goal in the end but take very different routes. That sounds fantastic, until you realize that there's one road that is actually straight and covered in Asphalt, while all the others are mostly little, curvy pathways with lots of rough terrain.
That may again be fine for the sandbox type of player, for the strategy-focused player it's a pretty significant flaw.
A lot of players never gave BE a fair chance, you had:
- the players who wanted a revamped Civ4;
- the players who wanted Civ6;
- the players who wanted their ideal version of a super complex strategy game.
All went out of their way to kill BE in the hopes that Firaxis would produce the game they wanted.
How did you miss the players who wanted a remake of SMAC? o_O
I'll focus on this one though:
- the players who wanted their ideal version of a super complex strategy game.
No. People wanted a decent strategy game with decent depth and decent balancing. Beyond Earth wasn't that. It was very badly balanced, and lacking in depth. And that's not to say I didn't like the game - after all, I then played a total of 3500+ hours of BE, and released more than 40 mods for the game - but these flaws were clearly there, and people were absolutely in their right when they pointed them out.
Anybody who played the game, realized that it's pretty shallow, gave it a negative review and moved on is perfectly in their right to do so, that has nothing to do with "not giving the game a fair chance", that's simply not being happy with the product. I would probably have done the same, if the game hadn't hooked me with its lore and the atmosphere that made me want to see a "deeper" version of it.
So I mean, in the end I do understand your frustration. And I guess that's the flaw of universal rating systems. The game was disappointing to many groups, but at the same time, if you fit in the group that avoids all the problems the other people have with the game, then undoubtedly it can be a great experience. But just because it is for you, doesn't mean that it would be for others "if only they gave it a fair chance!" - they've given it a chance, at least many have, and then reviewed it by how well it managed to entertain them personally.
But what do you mean by a "fair chance" anyway? The game was marketed as a Civ Title, as such of course it creates expectations in people. That has positive sides, and that has negative sides. It got people to buy it. And it got people disappointed because it was portrayed as something that it couldn't quite live up to, because it didn't have the scope of a Civ title, and probably not the budget either.
There is nothing unfair about it. If Firaxis had wanted to calm down those expectations, then they could have done it by declaring that it's a bit of a side-project with a small amount of developers that heavily built on Civ 5's mechanics. The game would have probably gotten a better rating then, but it would also have gotten less sales.
Well the "community" has spoken and you can expect that all future versions of Civ 6+ will just be better looking variations of Civ 5.
That's evidently incorrect, given how many people point out that Civ VI is just too similar to Civ 5 in their opinion.
