My conclusion was that Civ 7 seems to have suffered from a bit of a clashing of at least two different visions (layers of engaging complex systems like religion or factories, which was abandoned for the perfect tight multiplayer experience), and that the vision never cohered - so they just literally last minute patched together a “make it just run” version of the initial vision.
In another thread two points were made relevant to this thesis.
One said that giving the devs the benefit of the doubt, city renaming wasn’t added at first because they wanted to sell the idea of civ switching and found the idea of city names from different eras being an important part of the theme.
I agree with the sentiment actually, but as many point out, how could they “miss” that regardless of new design choices, fans wouldn’t want a basic classic feature? It’s evidence of a locked in mentality hyper focused on making the very particular design vision on civ switching the singular focus. And then, it would only work if we can accept such a singular focus, if that vision cohered. Unfortunately, from settlement caps restricting the number of cities, to weird and sometimes incomprehensible capital switching rules, to the visual language of buildings making it a little unclear which buildings serve which functions, to the slightly tedious and uninteresting overbuilding premise, this singular civ switching focus just isn’t that impactful. But the whole carton of eggs was bet on it.
Next was a comment about how during a livestream someone asked if players could start in distant lands and be the “distant lands civ” and it was said that no one had thought of that yet (of course they’re adding that in). Again, the game vision is forcing us to deal with these distant lands in an essential way during exploration, something many fans find forced and annoying to the point where they only play antiquity. So if you’re singularly focused on that very narrow, tight age system, how do you overlook one of the most central mechanics of it and one of the more obvious questions? On top of the problem of distant lands often being fully settled when you arrive, a thing they had to fix!
There are more examples like this. A lot about this game was sacrificed to a singular vision, and that vision didn’t even come together, with dozens of problems, leaving everything else outside of the narrow vision highly neglected.
That’s, IMO, my most substantive explanation for why the game is not being received well.
I also want to know, what’s with the 1.20 resources? Why did we need more resources and who asked for it? I don’t mind the concept, but how did this emerge at the hallmark addition to reinvigorate launch? It was announced very early so I assumed it was to address problems with exploration or factories but it really doesn’t it’s just… more resources. Was this planned pre-launch? Why was this the thing they focused on? Is it because it’s the only thing you can easily add that the AI knows how to handle?
Resources by the way are the only thing about Civ 7 that adds variability to gameplay. I suppose they’re a huge part of the 4X formula, but then again, here we are again at why people find antiquity fun and not the rest.
