What does any of that have to do with my post, though? Should I stop using basic English pronouns or something? I'm pretty sure that "us" is still the right word, even if you're not happy with the game.
I would be very surprised if part of their thinking wasn't the best way to monetise each DLC item.
I think Firaxis explained their motivation pretty well. They made age reset and civ switching for:
I don't understand the distinction between financial and non-financial decisions. When you make commercial product your final goal is to generate revenue and make profits. There are multiple strategies possible, but every strategy has to be financially solid.
I think the problem is pretty clear that many times the financial needs of the company may be in direct conflict with the desires of the player base. For instance many mobile games kick the player in the face with adverts and paid content and actively try to make the user experience as miserable as possible in order to get them to spend money. In this case I think Firaxis are really not aligned to the player's needs and have prioritised financial returns over user satisfaction.
I don't agree that any of those points are primarily for multiplayer. Snowballing is a big problem in single player games, too. While you might enjoy it, not everyone does. Some players like to still be challenged at the end of the game because otherwise the game gets boring. And some players don't like long games, too, so the single-age games might appeal to them!
The game might not have been as well received as the developers hoped it would be, but I don't think it's fair to say that they didn't concentrate on making a good core product. They very clearly made put a lot of effort into it. You just don't like it.
I don't know if I agree that snowballing is just a multiplayer issue. It really made the end game uninteresting and probably contributed to players stopping early. As devs, if they were putting work into a 1/3 of the game that players never saw I can see why they'd want to try and address that. I'm dubious that multiplayer was their big drive, though undoubtedly a side goal, since the changes are just as valid for single player too..
It's debatable they did enough to ensure the core product was good before releasing it. Let's be honest, the nicest thing I can say about the games reception is that is 'mixed', and that is being generous. Clearly things have not gone the way Firaxis would have liked, and so they are in crisis mode.
I've finished all but one game that I've started so far. That one game just wasn't going well. I finished probably 1/4 of the games that I started in VI. So, for me, the new system does seem to be working out better. I think that it's because I get a new kit when I'm starting to get bored with the old one.
Sure, but your post seemed to suggest that the developers didn't try very hard to create the game because they were focusing on DLC. That seems absurd to me. What is a "right choice" is obviously very subjective.
I really just don't understand why anyone thinks this game was motivated by multiplayer and min/max concerns. What's your evidence for this claim? Multiplayer support was barely even there when the game launched with no teams, no hot seat, and a limited number of players. The civilizations and leaders and city states are all kinds of imbalanced. Nothing about this game screams "multiplayer" to me. Certainly no more than every other Civilization game did.
Cool. I'm glad it's worked out for you. It has definitely had rhe opposite effect for me though
I'd argue it's made it worse since you don't go back to a level playing field, you go back to a state where the human has invariably prepared better than the AI. By saying you need AI scaling with time... Doesn't that prove that snowballing is still there?
If its the one i am thinking of, they handled combat well for the time as well.
Yeah, it just strikes me as the kind of fallacious logic that's abundant here that just because they don't like a design decision, it must have been a decision that was made in antithesis to players' interests.
Players would be happy if they receive huge games for free. Developers would be happy if players would pay them huge amount of sums for money. That's the conflict, which could only be resolved by compromise. And compromise means company tries to sell product, for which players will agree to pay enough to cover company expenses and a bit more. You can't go more or less financial here. When mobile games have tons of adverts and paid content, it's not greed, it's separate model - freemium, where vast majority of players don't pay for the game and ads serve dual purpose - get at least some money from free players and annoy them enough to convert to paying minority. Totally valid strategy if most of your players don't want to pay.
I'm pretty sure they did a lot of research before doing this. They could make a mistake, but the thing is, we still have very little information about whether it's successful, or not. I made some post about this, but in short, the sucess will depend on sales which will come later on a bit different audience.
Snowballing is problem for both, but things like playing shorter ages or having more strict balance between civs are surely more MP-focused.
There are plenty of examples of games that were paid games, that still leaned heavily into additional purchases to fuel company profits, and were ultimately unpopular because of it. I think it can be quite rife in the industry. Live service and multiplayer versions of games are very popular with companies because they provide long term regular revenue. That really doesn't always align with what gamers are looking for. I highly doubt the majority of the civ fanbase are looking to play Civ as a multiplayer experience, so making major design decisions based on improving the multiplayer experience, which have knock on effects on the single player experience, would be considered poor decisions.
Maybe they did. I still think Civ 7 feels very far away from a game we will look back on in 6 years whilst still buying DLC.
In my experience the age progression mechanic gets weird in MP and masks a lot of other stuff. In a lot of board games this sort of mechanic creates an interesting push/pull between players wanting to end a game, vs those who want to drag it out, but in 7 it's very uninteractive as a mechanism, and players can push it forward hard if they want, so when I tried it, it kind of becomes a race to get your snowball first if that makes sense?
We'll just have to disagree about the shorter ages. I think they're a big benefit in single-player games, too, and they'll be even better once the developers add victory conditions to each age so that it can be played standalone.
