Interestingly, neither seemed particularly satisfied with Civ 7. For Brandon, the civ switching and ages undermined how he likes to plan out his game and care about the decisions since they would later be undone. Dan, on the other hand, found it difficult to care about his civ, since it would be changing anyway.
It's just weirdly unfinished.
I'd like the ages if they were 1.75-2.25x longer, not using (the especially unbalanced as of now) game speed modifiers. If there were actual constant narrative events with choose your own adventure type choices and alternatives that affected diplomacy. If the crisis was something you could exercise more influence over, either mastering it, taking advantage of it, getting swamped by it (with appropriate "dark age" benefits next age).
Where each age had 1.5 the tech tree in the sense of you're only going to use 66% of the tech tree any playthrough, so it's always different.
Where each age's progression works fundamentally differently (maybe a medieval age with a limited tech tree but a massive culture tree with a huge religion branch).
Take the shell of Civ 7 and do what I said, and it would be really fun.
We're nitpicking the design vision and granted I think we've done a great job of putting the je ne sais quo of design into words, but at the end of the day, I think 7 is just underbaked.
We've proposed ways you could "pimp my ride" with the beater we've been given, without going back and redoing development. Still, the issue is the game is hollow and shallow. And a lot of the feature suite ends up making the game experience worse. Like crises.
I don't turn crises off because they just feel like the whole point of the game. Why have ages and civ switching and a close to an age with no crisis? They're integral to the experience for me. There's not enough gained by turning them off, where civ 7 underneath them is still fun. It's just, still boring, so I play with crisis as frustrating as it is. Oh, and, I'm not playing anymore anyway.
I'm still trying to wrap my mind around accepting the idea of the age changes with narrative events and crisis as a scenario like approach, but then the product we got being so inadequate to the premise. My mind is trying to settle on, "What would have been at least the bare minimum 'more' that Civ 7 needed for this concept to basically work".
Even so, the concept does not accommodate across the ages storytelling or min maxing. I suppose it could. You could bridge between ages better.
- Wars in past ages are referenced in narrative events and lead to bonuses, celebrations, anniversaries in later ages.
- There's variability in the legacy buildings. Wonders related to trade in cities with lots of trade routes look different and get different yields in later eras, otherwise they decline and become ruin. Same for buildings. Some buildings turn to farmland with ruins 3d models.
- Great works! Good god, why don't great works cross ages? They're science, religious, then cultural. There's no reason Modern couldn't accommodate all three as they fill different domains. An association between a great work and a given building can boost the effect the more ages this association exists.
- Ethnic groups. Egyptians lived in Ptolemaic Egypt next to Hebrews and Greeks. Modern Copts lived next to Arabs. You could be the Mughal Empire but still have Persian festivals.
- Leader titles and or palaces. What a miss! If you had a palace like Civ III, then it would visually express continuity across ages.
- Graphs, victory screen timeline maps. Showing your empire growing over time, in spite of age changes.
Anyway, I've made my point.
If Civ 7 is none of this because it wants to be a tight, balanced competitive game with great AI, well, it's none of those things.
It's just not finished. It's a failed development. It's not necessarily the concept, although sticking to the tried and true formula would have left less room for error.
