Poll: For Civ VII, which art direction style do you prefer?

[pokiehl]

My preference is something stylized. Civ 6 has been out for over 6 years and doesn't look dated, which is an accomplishment. So, I hope Civ 7 also gets a style with a long lifespan.

 

[Henri Christophe]

I voted for cariacature. I think graphics isn't that important and make something more clean could allow the developers of games do more civs.
I guess with a cheaper graphic designer it can allow the game to have more then a hundred civs.

 

[mitsho]

My vote is also for stylized, but in the style of an Early Modern Painting. Such a colour palette would also allow for other things like armies or trade routes to stand out and make it not necessarily important to have a realistic 3D world.

 

[Abaxial]

On the subject of art style, take another look at that video recently posted that was issued as a trailer for Civ VI. There are quite a few differences in the art (map/units/UI) compared to the actual finished game. Which do you prefer?

 

[TempusFugit]

Absolutely realism, but obviously in a stylized and abstracted way that makes for good gameplay and readability that isn't worse than it is in Civ 6 or 5. Even better than that would be if they mixed the realism with inspiration from western art history and world art history, which is very rich and suitable for the game. I want my Civilization games to feel dignified, not cartoony and comical. Some comedic touches can be great, such as the optional advisor panel in Civ 2, but the comedy shouldn't be forced on the players.

Giving you a pretense simulation of an alternative world history while you play your strategy game has always been an important part of this series. I don't care about memes about Gandhi. I want to play games where I travel back in history, and get to experience it in new, dynamic and exiting ways.

The depiction of the leaders in Civ 6 took a lot of inspiration from Pixar and studios that have copied their style. This took out some of the joy of diplomacy for me. (The very "gamified" diplomacy system in Civ 6 didn't help either). But far worse was the way the landscape, the plant life, the buildings and the units were depicted. They style Firaxis used here looks very inspired by the one Blizzard uses, or inspired by the many other studios which have copied the Blizzard style. I don't think it is very suitable for a Civilization game. It looks far too unreal, too clean and sanitized. I can't imagine any people living in those buildings, any civilization building them, or any life residing in those forests, which look like very cheap models.

When I play Civ 2, 3, 5 and even number 4, I look upon the game map as a map and an abstracton of the reality of that game world, but I also look upon many of the things which are happening on the screen as glimpses of history in that world. In Civ 6 I am unable to do that, and only the abstracted map remains.

 

[TempusFugit]

Stylized. Realism ages poorly, and too many people actually mean "edgy, grimy, murky" when they say "realistic."

I'd personally like to see a painterly style, a sort of Pre-Raphaelite/Romantic look.

The most realistic looking games of the time tend to age a little worse than more stylized ones. But this argument is often exaggerated a lot. A lot of games with graphics that went for realism in some aspects, in both 2D and 3D, have aged very well.
Besides, I don't think how well a look ages is very important, partly because it is highly subjective, and partly because games first and foremost are made to be played here and now.

Civilization is a game which uses a very abstracted view of reality, and it is a strategy game, so obviously it wouldn't be sensible to give it graphics as realistic as in a first person game. But I would be very happy if instead of deformed and sanitized "Pixar" characters, we could get something which recalled real people with all their imperfections and interesting aspects. To me the Pixar style was as offensive as if they had gone with the generic anime style. Both of those are heavily lacking in real humanity.
This is far more important to me than how realistic or stylized the depiction is.

I also don't think many realism proponents "actually mean "edgy, grimy, murky" when they say "realistic.". That sounds more like something a realism "opponent" would say ;-)

But I aboslutely agree about a Pre-Raphaelite/Romantic look. A mixed style where they used inspiration from several different art epochs would have been even better, but obviously that would be a lot more costly and harder to pull off well, so wishing for that would be very wishful thinking.

 

[TempusFugit]

In a game where you can wipe out other civs, raze huge cities and nuke people, keeping it more cartoonish is best, IMHO.

Civ IV or VI style is fine, IMHO

I disagree with this, but obviously this isn't a question of right and wrong but two very different preferences.

In my games I don't nuke people that often, and when I do, I want to feel the gravity of the situation. Razing cities is something I prefer not to, though Civ 5 certainly gives you a perverse incentive to do so. But that is probably more because I'm usually a megalomaniac imperialist in these games, not a destruction for destruction's sake kind of person.

I do sometimes feel bad for the people I conquer though, even though they are entirely imaginary. Especially when they have been good neighbors for some time.

You wrote "wipe out other civs" so I assume you meant the usual civ parlance of kicking out one of the factions of the game. But I've seen several people misunderstand the concept of conquering other civilizations in the game before, where they assume that one civilization getting extinguished meant that all or most of their people also got extinguished. Which is not what the civilization games have tried to simulate. Deliberate genocide is rare in this series, but switching to fascism in Civ 3, where you lose two population points when you do it is an example. But enormous civilian casualties because of war and politics is something the series have never shied away from, and I hope it stays that way. War and politics should be depicted as the brutal and often merciless things they are.

I can understand the wish for these games to not get too dark, and I agree with that, but I think the best compromise also includes and shows you some of the more unpleasant aspects of history.

 

[TempusFugit]

The leader art is bad enough -- the worst in the entire series -- but nothing else about Civ 3 looks particularly good to me either...

The leader art in Civ 3 is comparable in quality to the one in Civ 4. Both are way too caricatured and not that good. But I really like that the leaders and the background changed during history. It wasn't perfect, but all Civ games require some suspension of disbelief to be able to "believe" in the simulation and story of the game. For Civ 7 I would love to trade away all those fancy animations and textures for having all the leaders being depicted in four different ages. Unfortunately I'm probably part of a small minority for that one.

The unit art in Civ 3 was really great looking, though. The terrain grahics were not great, but they were not bad either. But they definitely went for a "photorealistic" style, as far as the limits of prerendered 2D art from 2001 allowed them to. But it could have been realized better. The mods by Sn00py's and Rhye's improved the terrain graphics a lot, though they also got the somewhat Mesopotamian look switched for a more European one. For that reason I like to use both the original and modded terrain for my Civ 3 games. Civ 3 with Rhye's terrain looks better than Civ 4 to me, and a lot better than the dull and sanitized look of Civ 6. But there's no accounting for taste.

 

[TempusFugit]

I would want want the artstyle to be somewhere around civ4’s. It is kind of a happy medium between civ6’s super cartoony style, and civ5’s ultra realistic grimdark style.

That's a really weird way to describe the style in Civilization 5. "Grimdark" is probably one of my least favorite ways to describe things also. I guess for some games like "Darkest Dungeon" it is suitable, but I often see it used where it makes absolutely no sense.

 

[pokiehl]

That's a really weird way to describe the style in Civilization 5. "Grimdark" is probably one of my least favorite ways to describe things also. I guess for some games like "Darkest Dungeon" it is suitable, but I often see it used where it makes absolutely no sense.

Civ 5 suffers from the trend of the late 2000s that saw excessively unsaturated, drab, brown-green color palettes. That’s what he’s referring to and that’s what most people dislike about it, I believe.

 

[TempusFugit]

Civ is definitely not about history. It’s just a game with historical flavor. That’s why I don’t mind cartoonish leaders & graphics much.

Hard disagree here. I think this "historical flavor" is a very important part of the game for a majority of the player base, even if not everybody likes a more realistic graphic style.

If Firaxis released a game with the same kind of mechanics, but which focused on gigantic Japanese robots duking it out, only a small fraction of us would buy that game. And if the theme instead was just abstract geometric figures, the number of people buying it would probably be even less.

 

[Leucarum]

I agree with people separating out how the leaders look to how the map looks.

Honestly they could probably make any leader style work!

I don't want a hyper-realistic map because the examples of that which i have seen have all been more difficult to scan and interpret than a stylized map. Maybe firaxis would be the ones to prove this wrong but the likes of humankind or Civ 5 were not as easy to understand st a glance (at least for me).

 

[TempusFugit]

Civ 5 suffers from the trend of the late 2000s that saw excessively unsaturated, drab, brown-green color palettes. That’s what he’s referring to and that’s what most people dislike about it, I believe.

Even so, he could have described it in a much better way. Buzzwords doesn't communicate things very well. Especially when they are misapplied.

While I can understand this critique of the Civ 5 graphics to some extent, I do think those graphics hold up well, and for me they are still a joy to play with. Any game will look and feel dull if somebody plays it for a far too long a stretch, but if the Civ 5 graphics still look dull to someone when they revisit them after a long time, then I guess they are just not their kind of graphics.

I also think that the opposite of unsaturated graphics is a huge problem in the games industry. While I love colors both in real life and in games, there are a lot of games which takes excessive saturation way too far. Bright colors and plays of light can be really beautiful, but when designers throw every color possible into every scene in a game, the end result is not very pretty, but instead excessive, unreal and ultimately dull.

Social media and smartphones with all their filters seems to have changed people's taste for worse in a lot of aspects, I guess I am just fighting against windmills here, but I strongly dislike the excessive colors and sanitized unreal look that is getting more and more common in the way that nature and people are depicted. For example forest landscapes and northern lights with way too excessive colors that you never see in real life. I strongly prefer that games that uses a realistic style doesn't get too excessive in their color use either. With more stylized visuals I can accept it more, and some of my favorite games like Heroes of Might and Magic 2, have a very colorful look. Some saturation and exaggeration can definitely be good, but it shouldn't be taken too far.

 

[TempusFugit]

I agree with people separating out how the leaders look to how the map looks.

Honestly they could probably make any leader style work!

I don't want a hyper-realistic map because the examples of that which i have seen have all been more difficult to scan and interpret than a stylized map. Maybe firaxis would be the ones to prove this wrong but the likes of humankind or Civ 5 were not as easy to understand st a glance (at least for me).

Civ 5 and 6 are definitely harder to read than the older games. Especially Civ 1-3 which are in 2D. But did you find Civ 6 easier to read than Civ 5? I didn't, and for both games I need the simplified map to plan cities and other aspects related to resources. Overall I found Civ 5 a little easier to read than 6, but that may just be because of my greater familiarity with it.

I think the move from 2D to 3D is more important here than many aspects of realism like proportions and the like. The Heroes of Might and Magic series is a good example here. When Ubisoft bought the series, the had Nival develop the fifth entry. While that game turned out quite well in many respects, many players hated the move to 3D because it made the map much harder to read. And it wasn't a move towards greater realism either. On the contrary you could argue that the realism went down, since Nival used more deformed body proportions in their designs like in the Blizzard style.

Since Civilization 7 highly likely will be in 3D, I think it is fair to assume that we will need the simplified map to plan out certain things still, and it is a nice tool to have available. But hopefully it will be easier to spot hills in this version of the game.

 

[fy00sh]

I think the next Civ ought to aim for a much much more realistic map, where cities are significantly smaller than they are at present. I don't mean smaller as in lower population, I mean physical size. Have a seamless zoom feature to help with placing districts and wonders, and use that similar zoom for handling battles between units if necessary.

something i think might be cool is if on the larger scale, we operate with hexes, while on the smaller scale they get cut in thirds to form rhombuses. but also that kind of tessellation would maybe look a bit weird, idk. some variant of larger tiles getting split into smaller sub-tiles

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

I've been wondering if we even need tiles. Just give every object a roughly circular footprint that can't overlap with objects of the same class. Adjacency can bee determined by many X are within a certain radius.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

something i think might be cool is if on the larger scale, we operate with hexes, while on the smaller scale they get cut in thirds to form rhombuses. but also that kind of tessellation would maybe look a bit weird, idk. some variant of larger tiles getting split into smaller sub-tiles

I considered that when it comes to placing districts and wonders on smaller sub-tiles within a city tile. It could work.
The other option would be to make it to where most districts and wonders wouldn't be buildable outside of the first ring, until you reach Urbanization.

 

[shaglio]

I wouldn't mind if they took Civ 5's realistic terrain design and spruced it up with Civ 6's bright color palette.

 

[TempusFugit]

If one looks at the "30 years of Civ" videos, one would see that nearly all of the iterations look more or less cartoony, like a caricature. Civ5 took that in a different direction, as did BE. Civ6 moved back to the cartoonish style, which surprised players who first entered the game with Civ5. I voted for "cartoonish", just because that's consistent with the franchise.

I disagree with this. In the dichotomy between realism and "cartoony", Civ 1 and Civ 2 both kept a middle ground, where some of the depictions go for realism and some are more stylized. How much this was a deliberate decision or not is hard to guess.

In the case of Civ 1 the resolution was so low, that the finished product doesn't look overtly realistic or "cartoony" in the end. This is par of the course for many games in 320x200, which often are open to interpretation. But have a look at the mountains and forests in this example. They are clearly going for a "photorealistic" satellite look here, like in Civ 3 and Civ 5.

Screenshot of Sid Meier's Civilization (DOS, 1991) - MobyGames

Orders list

www.mobygames.com

In Civ 2 the main map did get a little more abstract and unreal look than in Civ 1, with clear representations of cities and units standing out from the terrain by being depicted in a different angle. The way the units and cities are drawn could be described as "cartoony" or just stylized, but if cartoony, it is a very moderate cartoon style that respects proportions. On the other hand the game used a lot of FMV with real footage or 3D graphics, increasing the realism.

Screenshot of Sid Meier's Civilization II (Windows 16-bit, 1996) - MobyGames

Standard view - two tanks attacking San Francisco

www.mobygames.com

Civ 3 went for a very realistic style, with the exception of the leader graphics, which were caricatured, though not in the excessive way that they were in Civ 6. The terrain and the units have a very realistic look to them, as far as what the confines of the technology and overall abstract representation allowed.

Screenshot of Sid Meier's Civilization III (Windows, 2001) - MobyGames

These War Chariots are the special unit of the Egyptians. A victory triggers the golden age for this civilization.

www.mobygames.com

Civ 4 mostly went in a more "cartoony" direction than Civ 3, but in a far less excessive way than Civ Revolutions or Civ 6.

Screenshot of Sid Meier's Civilization IV (Windows, 2005) - MobyGames

By holding the right-mouse button over enemy units, you can view a readout on your odds of winning a battle against them.

www.mobygames.com

Civ 5 went for a more realistic look which was very stunning when it was new, and which I think still looks very good.

Screenshot of Sid Meier's Civilization V (Windows, 2010) - MobyGames

This Frigate has earned enough XP for a promotion.

www.mobygames.com

And then there's Civ 6 of course.

Sid Meier's Civilization VI (2016) promotional image - MobyGames

Screenshot from Steam

www.mobygames.com

 

[Daniel Boone]

Civ 5 suffers from the trend of the late 2000s that saw excessively unsaturated, drab, brown-green color palettes. That’s what he’s referring to and that’s what most people dislike about it, I believe.

Yeah, maybe “grimdark” wasn’t the best word, but that is what I meant by that.