I don't see why people keep saying that like its a bad thing, does everyone hate Aardman or something?
Civ VI Pedro has Civ V Pedro beat in the personality department hands down, in Civ V he sat behind a desk and just talked at you after all.
Aardman is cartoony. Last I checked, Civ wasn't a cartoon, but a complex turn-based strategy game simulating a parallel-universe world with mankind's greatest wonders and achievements. And given the divergence from Civ V to VI graphics I think people found it humorous and disappointing (both) that the graphics had shifted so much into something more befitting an 8-year old's favorite history cartoon (which is perfectly fine, if a cartoon is that which you were after to begin with).
Maybe in the personality department, yes, VI's Pedro has V's beat. But
Civ V's Pedro had more presence, is more historically accurate in appearance and gravitas, and he has better music to boot. Presentation-wise, the leader screen background makes a difference. Civ V's Pedro is a guy with a Hollywood film crew filming him in a magnificent studio and a sunset in the background, as he, dignified, works on the papers before him while talking to you. He *looks* like a leader, in a suitable environment. On the other hand,
Civ VI's Pedro stands awkwardly with his hands near his groin in front of a smudged painting.
[M]y claim was that Civ VI's leaders were less caricatured compared to Civ IV's leaders. Ultimately my point was that Civ hasn't attempted realistic graphics since about Civ III and, if anything, Firaxis has been gradually moving away from that style ever since.
Civ IV's leaders were caricatured, but also more realistic than say, VI's Pedro, whose nose is pure cartoon. Many of Civ IV's leaders, like Pericles and
Julius Caesar, looked a lot like their historical counterparts, unlike say, VI's Roman leader, Trajan, who looks like
Julius Caesar from the Asterix comics. I think an exaggerated leader is fine so long as it still looks like that leader. VI's Pedro does *not* look like
the serious, Darwin-like Pedro of history. At all. And Victoria in VI looks...too easily amused.
Re: your not caring about the art style, I think gameplay is more important than the art style too, but aesthetics matter when you're trying to create a parallel-universe game featuring mankind's greatest achievements. A sense of wonder is hard to achieve when staring at a cartoon Pedro's giant nose.
Civ V was a definite shift towards more realism, both in making the leader screens more detailed and animated (taking up the vast majority of the animation resources), and in terms of making the world seem richer and more detailed. So I don't agree that "Firaxis has been gradually moving away from" a more realistic style. If anything, VI was the outlier.
IV may have had exaggerated graphics, but the leader screens showed more fidelity and detail to the historical personages, aka a form of realism, and the wonder screens were also quite realistic. The unit icons were also fairly detailed as opposed to cartoony (compare IV's unit icons to VI's unit icons--a vast gulf of detail separates the two).
At the end of the day Firaxis can go for a 2D pixel-art style for Civ VII and make the whole thing look like Advance Wars, as far as I care the whole debate is irrelevant compared to how the game actually plays.
The "debate" only started in this instance because you decided to snarkily criticize what I predicted Civ VII would have. As far as I care, this is not a "debate". What you prefer and what I prefer are distinct from what may reasonably be *predicted* of Civ VII, which is, after all, one of the topics we were invited to speculate about.
