Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

[Maiq]

True but Ben Franklin is a founding father and statesman which helped secure American independence. Similar to Gandhi for India. Not really comparable to figures like Ada Lovelace, Battuta or Tubman

I get the Ada one with there not being any sort of British heavy hitter. As long as you have a "traditional" leader for your civ, who cares if secondary ones don't fit the traditional model?

 

[bladex1200]

I get the Ada one with there not being any sort of British heavy hitter. As long as you have a "traditional" leader for your civ, who cares if secondary ones don't fit the traditional model?

I actually find that someone like Harriet Tubman is much less of an egregious choice (I would have also preferred Frederick Douglass as someone else mentioned before, but I actually have no problem with her inclusion in an "imperial" game) than someone like Lovelace because Tubman's work freeing the slaves ultimately connects quite directly with American nationhood and American imperialism far more than the indirect connection of Lovelace contributing to the sciences (which you could argue gave the British an edge in colonialism, but let's be real it wasn't calculating machines that made the British a maritime empire, by the time their computational dominance came to the fore in the 1930s and 1940s the empire was already starting to collapse).

It's pretty radical to acknowledge, perhaps accidentally, that ADoS have been participants in the American imperial project even as they were victims of it. In their attempts to assimilate into white society since they knew they couldn't escape it (there was nothing for them in Africa, having been torn away from their families for generations), they helped brutally carry out the American imperial project onto the native peoples (think of the Buffalo soldiers, for a very direct example).

 

[Xur]

This is part of the problem with leaders. You get hung up with race, names and all sorts of irrelevant traits that has no impact on gameplay. I wouldn’t care if the leaders were teletubbies if the game was good and the gameplay was superb. Leaders can be modded - core gameplay cant.

 

[Gori the Grey]

To its credit, it has given players alternate, less morally reprehensible, ways to win: science victory, culture victory.

And a lot of players report really preferring to play that way. I used to play only science games. I don't know what made me turn into a rapacious warmonger.

(But yes, the screams when one conquers a city are another one of those acknowledgments within the game of the costs/dark side of empire. I remember when I first started playing for domination wins, I thought, "do I really want to be inflicting this pain on these people?")

Anyway, you've given me a totally new lens through which to view the design decisions, so thank you for that.

 

[Gorbles]

This is part of the problem with leaders. You get hung up with race, names and all sorts of irrelevant traits that has no impact on gameplay. I wouldn’t care if the leaders were teletubbies if the game was good and the gameplay was superb. Leaders can be modded - core gameplay cant.

Various Civ games have proven both can be.

 

[TylertheDestroyer]

I get the Ada one with there not being any sort of British heavy hitter. As long as you have a "traditional" leader for your civ, who cares if secondary ones don't fit the traditional model?

Oh I agree, personally Tubman’s inclusion is really low on my list of things to complain about (personally I also would’ve preferred a president like Washington or Lincoln or even Grant over Ben Franklin too)

Tubman often just gets caught in the crossfire of people disliking the obvious shift towards more obscure historical figures and detached leaders over traditional heads of states as leaders

 

[danjuno]

Leaders can be modded - core gameplay cant.

You clearly haven't been down the modding rabbit hole if you believe this, lol.

 

[Kwami]

come on man this is just sad attempt at justifying failure…. Civ 6 launch peak was nearly double that of VII and even at its lowest (it fell below V’s player counts for a while) its average player counts never regularly fell below 10k

If by "for a while" you mean "about one and a half years until the first expansion released and then again for another long time before the second expansion released", then sure.

 

[TylertheDestroyer]

If by "for a while" you mean "about one and a half years until the first expansion released and then again for another long time before the second expansion released", then sure.

Civ VI managed to double its predessecor's peak at launch, released to positive user reviews, and never fell below 14k players even at its lowest point (which was brief) I also don't think there was ever a point where VI's player numbers were eclipsed by IV's.

The fact that it had less players than V for a while because people wanted to wait for it to be more feature complete product is irrelevant to the fact that VI wasn't a commericial and critical (among its users, not professional game reviews) flop at launch like VII has proven to be.. You're not going to go back and find polls with over 30% saying they hate districts and that their current implementation prevents them from wanting to play the game.

I know some of us here don't want to reconcile with this fact but no, VII's trajectory is not comparable to that of VI's. It's more like Beyond Earth's

 

[Wrenched]

To its credit, it has given players alternate, less morally reprehensible, ways to win: science victory, culture victory.

Possibly, but these concepts, while pleasantly presented in game, are hiding a lot of historical atrocity.

One example is the forced enculturation and assimilation that residential boarding schools imposed upon indigenous peoples. Others include language elimination and forced spread of the dominant imperialist's language.

Science, perhaps more abstract, is also frequently a tool of colonialism. Many scientific competitions are racing towards superior weapons, instruments of warfare/oppression, and more efficient means of resource extraction/exploitation. Scientists have also embraced theories of phrenology, social darwinism, and other theories to support subjugation and imperial expansion.

 

[Gori the Grey]

It's horrors all the way down, then.

"There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" Walter Benjamin

 

[King Flevance]

I think 7 was to be expected. For me, from 4 onwards the game has been moving in this direction. I think less and less effort has been made from 4 onwards to hide the fact that you are playing a board game, not leading an empire. I think the AI has gotten worse since 4, not better. I think less effort has been made to add personality to the game and to add personality to your opponents. Effort seems to have been focussed on initial prettiness and accessibility.

I enjoyed both 5 and 6, i clocked up a few thousand hours in both but could feel the way the game was heading -especially with 6.

Yet sales of the game kept improving each time, 5 sold more than 4 eventually and 6 was the biggest success of all. So i can see why the developers made the decisions they did with 7.

I agree 100% personally. 1-3 shared the same basic system. Governments were the same, tile yields were the same, tile improvements were the same, buildings did the same thing mostly. The economy, governments, diplomacy, units A/D/M was all the same in the first three titles. This 33%-33%-33% metric was not really used back then, they just tried adding new stuff to the classic formula of Civ 1. You could look at Civ 2 and Civ 3 as independent sequels of Civ 1. Civ 4 was a game changer. It reinvented the classic systems and really charged down that road of trying to stay true to form but trying to modernize an outdated gameplay design.

I sometimes think that is part of my dislike with Civ 5. They reinvented the classic formula and then refined it with 4, and then instead of continuing to refine it with 5, they threw it out the window and it feels like they have been trying to reinvent the wheel ever since. Every release of Civ suddenly has to be redesigned from the ground up with an entire new gameplay model of governments, economy, and diplomacy. I feel like the series has barely a trace of a "core" anymore. Especially now with 7's design, which it was pretty much inevitable that some entry would sooner or later "jump the shark" trying to outdo all the others.

I do like some of the ideas implemented in 7. I liked ideas offered in 6. Even 5 probably has something in there that I could be like "I like that" (Moving to hexes was one). But it doesn't matter because any mechanics you enjoy in 7 will probably be scrapped in 8 to make way for the "really cool new ideas" they added in that redesign. It all feels like a big waste of time that is going nowhere. I would prefer titles quit trying to reinvent everything and instead just focus on a couple things each time. Like Diplomacy and government. Or Eras and technology/civics trees. Or economics and trade routes. That way each new Civ title offers evolution and not half good ideas and half garbage. But as you say sales have been trending up, I suspect due to its legacy moreso than its brand personally. But I guess time will tell.

 

[bladex1200]

To clarify all my earlier segues, I don't think Civ7's design decisions were driven primarily to critique empire. I'm just pointing out the design decisions meant to alter its take on history in order to offer critiques of empire kind of fall flat on their face and offer no real biting critique in the way the designers may have wanted/intended, and therefore it's okay from a narrative perspective to change them in favor of designs that would improve game flow and gameplay.

Adding crises and breaking the game into 3 epochs in order to offer a critique of endless scientific optimism or whig linearly-progressive history has fundamentally not really offered a compelling narrative showcase for that critique. So if they want to rework how era transitions work and make crises optional (or even rework the crises themselves), I don't think it will detract from the game's narrative design that much given it's not successful at the moment. The real question is whether any of these proposed changes will alter reception of the gameplay or of the verisimilitude or narrative satisfaction.

 

[Crashdummy]

Adding crises and breaking the game into 3 epochs in order to offer a critique of endless scientific optimism or whig linearly-progressive history has fundamentally not really offered a compelling narrative showcase for that critique. So if they want to rework how era transitions work and make crises optional (or even rework the crises themselves), I don't think it will detract from the game's narrative design that much given it's not successful at the moment. The real question is whether any of these proposed changes will alter reception of the gameplay or of the verisimilitude or narrative satisfaction.

Crisis are already optional (they always were, since launch). They knew that they were doing something controversial. But they needed the 3 minigames to justify the civ switching, which was needed to reduce the amount of work needed to create a new Civ and sell it at more money than they sold complete Civs in previous entries

 

[Leucarum]

With crises optional, continuity mode, togglable legacy paths... At some point, something close to a "classic mode" is introduced by stealth... I'd say if they add some form of Humankind's "transcendance" we'd almost be there...

 

[Gori the Grey]

I don't think Civ7's design decisions were driven primarily to critique empire.

Yeah, I doubt an explicit "critique of empire" ever was part of the design process. Our sensibilities regarding empires just have changed during Civ's run. We've become more conscious of the costs of the glories, less willing to handwave them away. And that will manifest itself in the type of empire-builder that a team will develop. That change in sensibilities explains why "whipping production" dropped out of the game; we just can't feel so ho-hum about slavery as to have it in a game any more, even though we know it was a historical reality.

Since the Civ world is an alt-Earth, it already has the advantage of giving room to imagine that things might have developed differently, including in a less brutal form than in RL. I mean, it has always been possible to play a game where Greece subjugates Rome rather than the other way around. The addition of civs that never were territorial monsters means that even more of the ones that got stomped on in this world are allowed a sort of Montezuma's revenge in the world you roll. Allowing as leaders people who weren't leaders is another step in this counter-factual direction. It's a what if. "What if countries were led by scientists or humanitarians, rather than politicos?" (Don't ask @Wrenched that question, though, because the answer will be "equally effed up.")

But the game's never going to be able to get altogether away from some of the dark sides of empire. The Civ that doesn't include warfare as an option (because that's such a regrettable dimension of how empires are established and maintained) is the Civ that will really flop.

But my Snow White analogy from another post raises what I find to be a fascinating question. Can we come to be so conflicted about empire that it becomes impossible to create an empire-builder?

 

[Wrenched]

"What if countries were led by scientists or humanitarians, rather than politicos?" (Don't ask @Wrenched that question, though, because the answer will be "equally effed up.")

Ha!

I realize what I wrote is a touch darker than is necessary for a playful game. And I see nothing wrong with playing in that mental space within the confines of a game design. Sometimes touching upon those darker subjects can lead to some useful introspection or Aristotelian catharsis. I still see the non domination victories in Civilization as more peaceful. There have been times while playing when I started thinking about stuff like Cultural pressure and wondered, "What is really going on here?". Well, beyond the surface level actions of collecting works of art and having musicians perform concerts.

 

[Crashdummy]

With crises optional, continuity mode, togglable legacy paths... At some point, something close to a "classic mode" is introduced by stealth... I'd say if they add some form of Humankind's "transcendance" we'd almost be there...

I dont know, we still have the tech trees artificially limited, we would still have the ages interruption of gameplay, we would still have buildings being obsolete from one turn to the next, we would still have units upgraded for no reason

We would still be unable to pick Civs to start with

So no, i dont think trascendence is even close to a Classic Mode or to be enough

Again, crisis were ALWAYS optional, and that changed nothing

 

[Kwami]

Civ VI managed to double its predessecor's peak at launch, released to positive user reviews, and never fell below 14k players even at its lowest point (which was brief) I also don't think there was ever a point where VI's player numbers were eclipsed by IV's.

The fact that it had less players than V for a while because people wanted to wait for it to be more feature complete product is irrelevant to the fact that VI wasn't a commericial and critical (among its users, not professional game reviews) flop at launch like VII has proven to be.. You're not going to go back and find polls with over 30% saying they hate districts and that their current implementation prevents them from wanting to play the game.

I know some of us here don't want to reconcile with this fact but no, VII's trajectory is not comparable to that of VI's. It's more like Beyond Earth's

I'm simply correcting misinformation. The facts are that Civ VI had far fewer players than Civ V for a very long time and it wasn't until the second expansion released that VI finally passed V for good.

Don't be surprised if the same thing happens with VII.

 

[canadamufc]

Stealth posted a graph a couple pages back. It showed VI bottoming out at around 25k players during its downtime around 2017. At the time of writing this VII has 5,911 players. I don't think these situations are really comparable.