Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

[UWHabs]

Yeah, I mean, I see certainly how some of the big points of 7 are the most divisive in the series, moreso even than stacks of doom vs carpet of doom, or square tiles vs hex tiles, or districts, or any of the other number of features in past games. So I don't dismiss anyone's dislike or hate. And frankly, some of those certainly might be enough that some people will absolutely never work with the game.

But we have that now, so the question is how does the game and the series move forward. This game is going to be around for a while. The real questions going forward are sort going to be focused on 3 parts:
-How can they bring in something of a feature set to get those people who were/are hesitant about civ switching and ages? Can they get most of those people back by adding in more continuity options, refining what happens in the transition, and just add a boatload more civs so that everyone has logical paths? Or will they need to do a more fundamental redesign to get those people back?
-Second, how can they get back those people who maybe tried the version and didn't like it for other reasons (clunky UI or other reasons)? What else do they need to fix ASAP to not lose more people, and what pieces still need some TLC for people to give the game another shot?
-Finally, how can they do all of that without alienating the not insignificant portion of the population who is still playing and enjoying the game?

 

[Crashdummy]

I want it to succeed, because I worry that if it is not, we might not see a civ 8, or worry about the long term stability of the franchise.

I mean, as much as the whole "pack it up, start on civ 8" crowd wants that to happen, frankly, that's not really how development in the industry would work. Maybe the commitments are not contractual, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people bought 7 expecting some level of continued support and development, some levels of expansions and updates. Shutting it up early and moving on to 8 is going to cause a lot of resentment by a lot of folks, and basically you run the serious chance of alienating all the folks who actually enjoy 7, while trying to appease the people who didn't give it a chance. Maybe it would pay off in the end, but it's a very tough play. Everyone who hated 7 or didn't give it a try will wait when 8 is announced to see how it hits, and those that liked 7 in a lot of cases might not rush out to see if 8 ends up breaking the stuff they liked from 8. You basically have to hit a perfect release, otherwise you basically lose all your audience.

Sure, maybe you see some of the writing, and you maybe don't plan on having 3 expansions and 14 leader passes for the version. But I also think casting off the game as un-salvageable is also being a bit drastic too. I don't think 7 is that far off from where 5 was at the same stage.

C

Thread 'Is Civilization V the worst game of the series?'

Feb 17, 2011

Hello ya all been away for quite a while but with Civ 5 being the biggest disappointement ever I took some time off of the forums but I am now back and want to share some thoughts and know why you all think Civ 5 was a great failure.

For me the main reason was the overhype CIV 5 got that made everyone not like it. We were promised CIV 5 but instead we recieved CIV REV2. This was a slap in the face of the old fans the fact they simplified the game so much it´s not enjoyable.

So I wanna hear youre thoughts?

• Caeserportugal
• Replies: 98
• Forum: Civ5 - General Discussions

Thread 'Do you think that the expansion will really improve this game?'

Feb 9, 2011

Vote and discuss. I personally believe that an expansion works only if the game beneath it is good to begin with, IE as BTS was for Civ 4. In case of Civ 5, the fundamentals need to be fixed before anything else...

• lordsurya08
• Replies: 78
• Forum: Civ5 - General Discussions

or you can probably flip to any of the 150+ pages in the civ 5 rants thread to see a lot of complaints: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civilization-5-rants-thread.401228/

Now, is 7 in a worse place than 5 was? Yeah, probably. 5 even with all the complaints on the forums still kept a better public place. The reviews of 5 weren't nearly the same place they are with 7. There was plenty of skepticism that expansions for 5 would be able to fix the problems.

The biggest problem i think Civ VII has is that, IMHO, to be able to fix it you would need the design team to abandon their vision

I think that to fix Civ VII, they need to make a Classic Mode and abandon the Ages-Civ switching mechanics, and that can be done, but it would mean that the guys that pushed for those mechanics need to admit they were wrong and they have to make the decisions to change them

I dont think they will be able to admit such mistakes

In Civ V, what needed to be fixed were not design decisions, so there wasnt any necessity from any top dog to admit mistakes. I think designers ego is what will prevent the game from being fixed and they will try to blame the game doing badly on the wrong stuff

 

[mbbcam]

I feel like on one level, there might be projection going on - assuming that what one wants is what most people want, so if everyone else likes it, one would like it too.

In psychology it's called the False Consensus Effect.

 

[Gorbles]

In Civ V, what needed to be fixed were not design decisions

I'm happy to agree to disagree on a lot of things, but given that you're discussing the game that most people credit with a change in designer post-launch, you couldn't be more wrong here.

Though Googling did provide this gem of a snippet from Shafer's role with combat (and presumably hexes) for CiV. It also mentions the rule of thirds!

Gamasutra - News - Shirk: Sid Meier's 'Rule of 33s' Reigns For Civilization V

Dennis Shirk, producer for Civilization V, explains to Gamasutra the Sid Meier-created rule for sequels:

web.archive.org

 

[Gori the Grey]

just add a boatload more civs so that everyone has logical paths

This is the one I think I might try, with a massive, inexpensive DLC that creates at least 10 viable historical paths, for people who want to play "the same" civ from stone age to space age.

Imagine Civ VII had initially released with eight more equivalents to China and India. More than ten total would be better, of course, but at least ten. And for all ten there was also a leader appropriate to that historical civ and whose abilities intersected well with each of the three civlets making up the civ.

They just quietly allowed the option to mix and match civlets and mix and match leaders instead of playing three historically connected civs. Didn't make it the featured element of the game. People who were open to it would give that a try. Find it fun. Say on these forums why they find it fun. But the historically-continuous threesome was the norm. The reason for the Ages is the different-game-play-mechanics-in-each-age (treasure fleets and all that).

There still would have been griping: "so few civs!" But maybe not wholesale rejection.

Then later the DLC could be the civs for which there are no known historical leaders or no historically continuous connections (because some of your players have gotten used to swapping one age to the next). A given DLC gives another linked threesome plus a leader for those, plus two disconnected civlets plus an not-connected-to-any-particular-civ leader.

Maybe they wouldn't have so alienated half of the fan base.

Well, anyway, if you think that might have been received better, then that would be a kind of grounds for this approach to winning back the players they lost. While leaving in place the structure that some fans are enjoying.

 

[Krajzen]

What are you reading here? There's a fair degree of recasting of Southeast Asian history in the 1920s, with Luang Wichit and the desire to 'build' a Thai racial identity out of a more diverse (Lanna, Shan, Isan) group, a unity that is then deployed against claims in Cambodia and Malaysia. Earlier sources (the Chiang Mai Chronicle, the Camadevivamsa) posit a religious, not racial/ethnic split. In fact, if we look at ethnonyms in the area, from "khonmeuang" to "thai" to "kinh", it's often "city" people or "free farmers" versus "lawa," "kha". In island Southeast Asia, there's a similar tension between Europeans and locals over racial identification.

I might point you to Thongchai Winichakul, Anthony Reid, David Chandler, Charles Hirschmann (Anderson uses H and Thongchai in his chapter on the region in Imagined Communities). Emmerson as well on the naming of the region.

Liebermann's "Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in global context, c 800-1830" where he refers to Reid a lot (the entire book is a response to Reid's "Age of Commerce", agreeing with many of his ideas but refuting or modifying others). Plus I've read Chandler's "History of Cambodia". Liebermann actually slightly criticizes Anderson's famous thesis, arguing that Indonesia was a particular case of blatantly "artificial" modern (colonial) construction of identity but in case of mainland SEA the local ethnic (? whatever you name them) identities were... more complex and longer story. Anyway, both Liebermann and Chandler (and Bowring in his wonderful "Empire of winds", and Kiernan with his history of Vietnam) moved me rather further away from civ7 approach of "radical and total identity changes across history" and closer towards "you know, previous civ games take on continuity was an acceptable break from reality if we can't have anything more subtle, and sometimes it even has historical excuses".

Like, Liebermann writes just enough about the precolonial divides and tensions between Burmese and Mon and Tai peoples, or Chandler about the long ancient continuities of Khmer culture, for me to have even harder time accepting all those peoples just casually and suddenly transforming into each other wholesale in the game. Sure, if the game somehow fluently modeled long transformation of Mon(Dvaravati) into Thai culture, or Pyu into Burmese, or Gauls into French, or <neighboring culture x> into <neighboring culture y> then it'd be superior to the old super essentialist notions. Unfortunately, since the change is sudden, volatile and overnight (from the perspective of a player) and into out-of-context spectacularly different cultures, the impact on a lot of players is very emotionally dissonant. It's as if my character in the RPG campaign changed gender, race, class, origins and character every act. Sure, I have more mechanical toys on the table, but who or what am I after all? And why do my Khmer have to perish before modernity if they have survived IRL? It's not a freedom to choose an identity, it's being forced to change my identity.

 

[Verified_Confection_Being]

This is the one I think I might try, with a massive, inexpensive DLC that creates at least 10 viable historical paths, for people who want to play "the same" civ from stone age to space age.

Imagine Civ VII had initially released with eight more equivalents to China and India. More than ten total would be better, of course, but at least ten. And for all ten there was also a leader appropriate to that historical civ and whose abilities intersected well with each of the three civlets making up the civ.

They just quietly allowed the option to mix and match civlets and mix and match leaders instead of playing three historically connected civs. Didn't make it the featured element of the game. People who were open to it would give that a try. Find it fun. Say on these forums why they find it fun. But the historically-continuous threesome was the norm. The reason for the Ages is the different-game-play-mechanics-in-each-age (treasure fleets and all that).

There still would have been griping: "so few civs!" But maybe not wholesale rejection.

Then later the DLC could be the civs for which there are no known historical leaders or no historically continuous connections (because some of your players have gotten used to swapping one age to the next). A given DLC gives another linked threesome plus a leader for those, plus two disconnected civlets plus an not-connected-to-any-particular-civ leader.

Maybe they wouldn't have so alienated half of the fan base.

Well, anyway, if you think that might have been received better, then that would be a kind of grounds for this approach to winning back the players they lost. While leaving in place the structure that some fans are enjoying.

I don't know about others, but on principle at this point I will not be buying DLC in order to get to what I'd consider the base game. If they try selling additional civlets so you can have the full civilization experience for launch Civs, they're leaving my money of the shelf.

 

[itix]

But we have that now, so the question is how does the game and the series move forward. This game is going to be around for a while. The real questions going forward are sort going to be focused on 3 parts:
-How can they bring in something of a feature set to get those people who were/are hesitant about civ switching and ages? Can they get most of those people back by adding in more continuity options, refining what happens in the transition, and just add a boatload more civs so that everyone has logical paths? Or will they need to do a more fundamental redesign to get those people back?

That is a good question. Cities Skylines 2 has been on my wishlist for two years now. It bombed on release and while everyone is telling it is good now, I am still hesitant. I'd like to have it but I always have other interests when it is on sale. I guess it is just due to a lost reputation.

Colossal Order is a tiny studio, so Firaxis should have a better chance to pivot Civ 7. At least in theory.

 

[Kwami]

This is the one I think I might try, with a massive, inexpensive DLC that creates at least 10 viable historical paths, for people who want to play "the same" civ from stone age to space age.

Imagine Civ VII had initially released with eight more equivalents to China and India. More than ten total would be better, of course, but at least ten. And for all ten there was also a leader appropriate to that historical civ and whose abilities intersected well with each of the three civlets making up the civ.

They just quietly allowed the option to mix and match civlets and mix and match leaders instead of playing three historically connected civs. Didn't make it the featured element of the game. People who were open to it would give that a try. Find it fun. Say on these forums why they find it fun. But the historically-continuous threesome was the norm. The reason for the Ages is the different-game-play-mechanics-in-each-age (treasure fleets and all that).

There still would have been griping: "so few civs!" But maybe not wholesale rejection.

Then later the DLC could be the civs for which there are no known historical leaders or no historically continuous connections (because some of your players have gotten used to swapping one age to the next). A given DLC gives another linked threesome plus a leader for those, plus two disconnected civlets plus an not-connected-to-any-particular-civ leader.

Maybe they wouldn't have so alienated half of the fan base.

Well, anyway, if you think that might have been received better, then that would be a kind of grounds for this approach to winning back the players they lost. While leaving in place the structure that some fans are enjoying.

Maybe, but the developers explicitly rejected that idea because it would be too constraining. They couldn't include any civilizations that didn't have a viable three-age path. That's a lot of lost potential.

Or are you suggesting that they include ten "full path" options and some random ones that otherwise wouldn't fit? Maybe that would work better, but then we'd all be asking why some civilizations aren't "complete".

 

[Gorbles]

And why do my Khmer have to perish before modernity if they have survived IRL?

They don't have to perish, I believe is the point. Regardless of how well it's being made, the intent seems to be continuation, not "replacing off-screen". Judge Firaxis on the execution, for sure, but I don't think given how much you carry of your empire from one Age to the next, that the assumption has to be that they perished (leaving behind at least one city, various settlements, all with the previous Age's names, nevermind the military you built up with the Commanders and their customised perks).

Certainly, I understand the immersion break from such a thing happening quite suddenly. What do you think would help that? Within the general constraints of the game we currently have.

(folks who think transitions are completely immersion-breaking and need to be removed: I know your position already!)

 

[Leucarum]

I doubt a full-path approach helps, ultimately you're never going to seal all the holes.

It also appears that the return to a loading screen is something we're stuck with.

I think making switching optional really is the most realistic option for Firaxis... Let civs be played in later eras with appropriate scaling and a choice of tradition trees related to their traits. It's already there in mods and it would go a huge way towards fixing immersion to have something official...

 

[Xandinho]

I doubt a full-path approach helps, ultimately you're never going to seal all the holes.

I’m a supporter of the idea that giving as many civilizations as possible fully fleshed-out historical paths would go a long way in reducing these immersion breaks. However, very few civilizations would actually benefit from this, and how much work would it take? How long would it require? Would the game even be profitable in the long run to justify it? On top of that, it would also mean adding some fairly obscure civilizations, and I’m not sure they’d be willing to go that far.

 

[Andrew Johnson [FXS]]

Liebermann's "Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in global context, c 800-1830" where he refers to Reid a lot (the entire book is a response to Reid's "Age of Commerce", agreeing with many of his ideas but refuting or modifying others). Plus I've read Chandler's "History of Cambodia". Liebermann actually slightly criticizes Anderson's famous thesis, arguing that Indonesia was a particular case of blatantly "artificial" modern (colonial) construction of identity but in case of mainland SEA the local ethnic (? whatever you name them) identities were... more complex and longer story. Anyway, both Liebermann and Chandler (and Bowring in his wonderful "Empire of winds", and Kiernan with his history of Vietnam) moved me rather further away from civ7 approach of "radical and total identity changes across history" and closer towards "you know, previous civ games take on continuity was an acceptable break from reality if we can't have anything more subtle, and sometimes it even has historical excuses".

Like, Liebermann writes just enough about the precolonial divides and tensions between Burmese and Mon and Tai peoples, or Chandler about the long ancient continuities of Khmer culture, for me to have even harder time accepting all those peoples just casually and suddenly transforming into each other wholesale in the game. Sure, if the game somehow fluently modeled long transformation of Mon(Dvaravati) into Thai culture, or Pyu into Burmese, or Gauls into French, or <neighboring culture x> into <neighboring culture y> then it'd be superior to the old super essentialist notions. Unfortunately, since the change is sudden, volatile and overnight (from the perspective of a player) and into out-of-context spectacularly different cultures, the impact on a lot of players is very emotionally dissonant. It's as if my character in the RPG campaign changed gender, race, class, origins and character every act. Sure, I have more mechanical toys on the table, but who or what am I after all? And why do my Khmer have to perish before modernity if they have survived IRL? It's not a freedom to choose an identity, it's being forced to change my identity.

Ok these are indeed some good sources. Liebermann is really interesting, especially. Kiernan is a part of a competition within my own alma mater between "left" area studies (Anderson etc) and "right" area studies (Keith Taylor) that came about over the question of the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese war in Cambodia.

Speaking purely historically here, I think we can arrive at a middle ground.

First of all, historians are more likely to over-privilege the elites (especially the literate), so we have to be careful as to who is saying what. If Jayavarman says "we Khmer must eradicate those Cham," it does not follow that most of his people also feel the same way. Anthropologists are limited to near-present perspectives - and here we do get some "civ-switching" examples (with the large caveat that this is "switching" at the individual level, not the empire or kingdom) - Edmund Leach's Kachin-Shan movements (essentially this: people in the uplands of Burma are largely bilingual and bicultural, and over a generation can move between being a lowland Buddhist [Shan] to an upland animist [Kachin] in ways that reflect more what is advantageous at that time - see also James Scott's Art of Not Being Governed.) In my own work, I had many people tell me things like "oh, we were Phuan, but we had to stop being Phuan and become Thai" or "we speak Lao, and we do Lao things, but we're not Communists, so we're Thai." BUT if we're saying "does the kingdom as a whole change in the blink of an eye..." no, of course it does not. In Insular SE Asia, we do see people "change" to Malay, or to Portuguese, or to "Eurasian" ... on the basis of conversion. That is to say, a person of biological Malay ancestry who converts to Catholicism becomes, according to early censuses, "Eurasian," even though nothing biological has changed. But, again, this is an individual or community level, not an imperial one.

For what should be pretty obvious reasons I'm not going to comment on this as relates to the game. But, sure, point taken. I think the truth really depends on at what scale we mean, and what sort of person we're talking about.

 

[reddishrecue]

Even if they brought back the Aztecs, I doubt that this would bring back up. I don't think that at this point civ 7 could be fixed with bringing back a certain civilization even on the other continents and sides of the world.

 

[itix]

Maybe, but the developers explicitly rejected that idea because it would be too constraining. They couldn't include any civilizations that didn't have a viable three-age path. That's a lot of lost potential.

Or are you suggesting that they include ten "full path" options and some random ones that otherwise wouldn't fit? Maybe that would work better, but then we'd all be asking why some civilizations aren't "complete".

In another thread, @Siptah had an interesting proposal. What if you could rename your new Civilization? You start as Roman, in the exploration, pick another civilization but keep the original name or rename it to anything you want.

There is no need to even start as Roman but call it anything you want.

 

[Verified_Confection_Being]

Anthropologists are limited to near-present perspectives - and here we do get some "civ-switching" examples (with the large caveat that this is "switching" at the individual level, not the empire or kingdom) - Edmund Leach's Kachin-Shan movements (essentially this: people in the uplands of Burma are largely bilingual and bicultural, and over a generation can move between being a lowland Buddhist [Shan] to an upland animist [Kachin] in ways that reflect more what is advantageous at that time - see also James Scott's Art of Not Being Governed.) In my own work, I had many people tell me things like "oh, we were Phuan, but we had to stop being Phuan and become Thai" or "we speak Lao, and we do Lao things, but we're not Communists, so we're Thai." BUT if we're saying "does the kingdom as a whole change in the blink of an eye..." no, of course it does not. In Insular SE Asia, we do see people "change" to Malay, or to Portuguese, or to "Eurasian" ... on the basis of conversion. That is to say, a person of biological Malay ancestry who converts to Catholicism becomes, according to early censuses, "Eurasian," even though nothing biological has changed. But, again, this is an individual or community level, not an imperial one.

For what should be pretty obvious reasons I'm not going to comment on this as relates to the game. But, sure, point taken. I think the truth really depends on at what scale we mean, and what sort of person we're talking about.

I don't think you're making a convincing argument even for a middle ground. You are throwing in the word Civ switching to attempt to describe individuals changing culture between two cultures that co-exist. That isn't Civ switching. Civ switching is one culture going extinct and being replaced by a new culture that didn't exist before. None of your examples fit that. Perhaps we should first establish what Civ switching means to you, and whether you think it's represented in game well?

Civ has never tried to model the culture of its population either though. You literally play as the Jayarvarman figure and if you say "we are at war with the cham" all your people are at war with the cham. The closest it's got is having pops have different religions within a given city. So I'm not sure that saying it depends on the scale is useful when we have a known scale that it's been applied at in game. Perhaps we need to define and agree what scale we interpret that as too, so you we can map that to the equivalent scale from history.

 

[Kev1916]

But we have that now, so the question is how does the game and the series move forward. This game is going to be around for a while.

-Finally, how can they do all of that without alienating the not insignificant portion of the population who is still playing and enjoying the game?

Just my opinion I dont think this version of Civ will be around that long, they will try again to flog an overly expensive expansion and squeeze a bit more out.
Then like other failed games it will slowly and quietly just stop getting time, money and resources spent on it , put out to pasture.

If people are leaving Civvi and getting bored I dont see how adding another mini game is going to make things anything but worse

Adding in dozens of new civlets even if they mask the "offal" pricing model will certainly not help much .


Re numbers Civ Vii is pulling in about 10% of the total player numbers Civ 5-6 .
That to me is pretty insignificant.

If those numbers stand the test of time , then why waste resources , call it a day and move on

 

[stealth_nsk]

Fact's are most people who hate "something" will not even buy the new game ....

For Civ Vii one of it's many problems is many of the people who bought the game actually "hate" it .
Yea sadly I really doubt many of developers took that into consideration when they lost their jobs

The definition of hate is a slippery one, I've seen very negative reviews on Steam with more than 300 hours in game.

We also don't have any statistics on people hating the game so much that they'll not buy it. Yes, we've seen those people in the polls here, we see their opinion expressed in Reddit, Twitter, etc. But at any given post/poll we don't see more than about 50-60 of them. This doesn't mean there aren't thousands of them - it's totally possible. We just don't have any info on it.

 

[aieeegrunt]

They don't have to perish, I believe is the point. Regardless of how well it's being made, the intent seems to be continuation, not "replacing off-screen". Judge Firaxis on the execution, for sure, but I don't think given how much you carry of your empire from one Age to the next, that the assumption has to be that they perished (leaving behind at least one city, various settlements, all with the previous Age's names, nevermind the military you built up with the Commanders and their customised perks).

Certainly, I understand the immersion break from such a thing happening quite suddenly. What do you think would help that? Within the general constraints of the game we currently have.

(folks who think transitions are completely immersion-breaking and need to be removed: I know your position already!)

The age transition touches nothing. My units don’t magically teleport in the middle of a war. My navy is not suddenly relocated to the middle of a lake. Cites don’t get changed or degraded. My people don’t transmogrify into a completely different culture.

That reduces the break to a loading screen. I mean that’s not a big deal

 

[NickTheGreek!]

Re numbers Civ Vii is pulling in about 10% of the total player numbers Civ 5-6 .
That to me is pretty insignificant.

If those numbers stand the test of time , then why waste resources , call it a day and move on

just abandoning the game and moving on to something else is a no go imo. Their reputation as a studio would never be the same after that, at least for me. They need to make it work for as many players as possible. If after that it still does not make sense financially to keep churning expansions then fine, but finish the game with having mostly positive reviews, don't bury it under the carpet.