Yeah, recently in one of the livestreams(?) Ed Beech said Carl has been re-organized into a design team, separate from the developers/programmers.
LP is like their practice run.
However, for long term "Civ 7" I really think Firaxis should acquire engineering talent from outside (Amplitude?) or a new game engine or even a whole studio!?
Imagine what they could do with HUMANKIND's game engine? Next gen modding based on Unity. Very impressive.
Civ VI has legacy from Civ IV(?) or before.
E.g: map scripts have been ported Civ V -> Civ:BE - > Civ VI AFAIK.
Everyone speculates on what 7 will be like. But what if there is no 7? What if they're just not up to it and decide to open new franchises? Mobile games, superhero games, whatever.
It's weird, real weird, that there is ZERO info on 7. Makes me wonder.....
Given that developing games intended to sell millions of copies takes several years to accomplish, the *business* decision to invest in a 7th Civ game was made long ago. Based on the Steam data for number of weekly players and reported sales data, Civ5 and especially Civ6 have been profitable. Since Civ6 is the first game in the franchise to be available on consoles -- though with some challenges -- it seems unlikely that they would walk away from those customers after offering them only one game.
For them to choose *not* to develop and release a Civ7, to walk away from a franchise that defined a genre (historical 4X games), doesn't make business sense. I will grant that Civ BE was not as profitable as Civ5, but they (and the parent company 2K) have used Civ6 to show that the franchise has a fan base who will pay for content and produce profits across multiple platforms.
New games require more investment in marketing to achieve name recognition; they will have a lower ROI. Midnight Suns has huge name recognition with the Marvel tie-in.
Yeah, recently in one of the livestreams(?) Ed Beech said Carl has been re-organized into a design team, separate from the developers/programmers.
LP is like their practice run.
However, for long term "Civ 7" I really think Firaxis should acquire engineering talent from outside (Amplitude?) or a new game engine or even a whole studio!?
Imagine what they could do with HUMANKIND's game engine? Next gen modding based on Unity. Very impressive.
Civ VI has legacy from Civ IV(?) or before.
E.g: map scripts have been ported Civ V -> Civ:BE - > Civ VI AFAIK.
Speaking generically, because I'm not a games developer myself, most in-house engines contain code from pretty much every previous entry in the franchise. This is a good and bad thing, in that technical debt becomes much more relevant, but you can also leverage literally decades of expertise within a specific field (and game engines benefit from excessive specialisation).
The common champions of game engines, Unity and Unreal, both suffer from the "FPS-first" problem, in that's what they were originally designed for / from. This is why you see a lot of games in the strategy space, particularly the ones with enough history behind them, using established in-house engines (Relic Entertainment with Essence, historically Command and Conquer with SAGE, etc). This is changing, but you also have generational issues in that UE4 is pretty different from UE5 (in terms of starting from scratch), and don't get me started on what I've heard about Unity feature development from devs who use it.
This is completely separate to hiring practises, mind you (even Unity and Unreal teams benefit from the industry-wide reliance on C++). I've recently passed the decade mark at my software job (this puts me firmly in the "not young but not old" camp ), and even though I work in regular software, I can tell you we still rely on code that's a decade old. Sometimes there isn't a better alternative. The nuts and bolts are the same nuts and bolts, after all.
I've recently passed the decade mark at my software job (this puts me firmly in the "not young but not old" camp ), and even though I work in regular software, I can tell you we still rely on code that's a decade old. Sometimes there isn't a better alternative. The nuts and bolts are the same nuts and bolts, after all.
But sometimes products engineer themselves (!?) into obsoletion.
Then the parent company has no choice but to acquire technology to replace it.
E.g: Apple's NeXT acquisition which repurposed NEXTSTEP OS as Mac OS X.
At least since Civ:BE Firaxis have been pro-multicore. (Beyond Earth was very AMD friendly).
BUT Lua is not a very good language for concurrency.
Or at least the way Firaxis has been using Lua. Their code hasn't any coding conventions for concurrency.
This is easier to do in a language like Scala or even Java.
It's no wonder Civ VI was plagued with "pending turn" bugs at launch. (In fact it has returned with Leader Pass!)
LUA has coroutines for concurrency, which I'm completely unfamiliar with because I continue to be successful at avoiding LUA, except when I try my hand at modding games that use it So I don't know if / how Civ leverages it so much (I looked at the map scripts for Beyond Earth, mainly figuring out resource placement, but that was a while ago now).
I would argue Java is . . . not the easiest It's alright if you're not handling Swing I guess (which is how I cut my teeth on Java, years ago. Regrettably haha). But that's a whole other thread. It does make me wonder what modding will look like in a theoretical VII.
Well, since HK (and the mess ES2 was left in) is good evidence that Amplitude has been gutted by SEGA, a lot of former Amplitude employees are probably looking for jobs...
Well, since HK (and the mess ES2 was left in) is good evidence that Amplitude has been gutted by SEGA, a lot of former Amplitude employees are probably looking for jobs...
No, the one thing Civ will NOT do is lose the personalities that keep the game distinctly Un-Blandlike, now that they have hard financial evidence that they sell games. Unlike Humankind, which provided that evidence, Civ VII, whatever else it bungles, will keep the Leaders and as many other named personalities as they can stuff into the game, including but not limited to some kind of named "junior leaders" (Governors, Administrators, Bureaucrats), Great People (although probably not the same categories) and whatever other kind of named critter they can come up with.
Designers can make a bland game out of any system or set of game mechanics applied to any background. We've all, if we've played any number of games for any amount of time, run into games that were apparently designed to be primarily a substitute for a Soporific Drug and to find everything interesting in the background story and strangle it before it becomes apparent to the gamer, or provide the gamer with systems and mechanics designed to make him want to beat on his computer until it all stops.
These were the only two things I liked about HK. I liked the idea of events, but HK's felt hamfisted and were inferior to Amplitude's previous games' quests.
I'm not a huge fan of events in my strategy games, and HKs were especially annoying. I felt I was being bugged by pop ups while I was trying to play. Old World was better.
If Civ 7 were going to do 'events' I think the best option would be more interesting/souped up versions of the city-state quests. But limited to like one active one at a time.
Oh, clearly I don't think they are being trained for the TECH.
I think they are being introduced to the process of design a civilization with leaders possessing unique abilities, synergy, how the fan base reacts, what are expectations, how does this perform, etc...
I've mentioned this before, but my understanding of content-DLC like the LP is it's to keep art resources working while the developers work on the next game engine. Pre-DLC the game industry would contract art talent closer to the end of the development cycle, then let them go, then rehire closer to end of the next development cycle. So Civ 7 wasn't ready for leader models yet, keep the art team paid until then.
However, for long term "Civ 7" I really think Firaxis should acquire engineering talent from outside (Amplitude?) or a new game engine or even a whole studio!?
Imagine what they could do with HUMANKIND's game engine? Next gen modding based on Unity. Very impressive.
Humankind's graphics, while beautiful, made it really hard to read information from the map. All districts blended into one another, all those 574 types of subtle terrain biomes made me unable to discern lands in terms of economic value... And the most epic fail was this game's insistence to have 7! height level differences of land combined with readibility problems combined with combat system's insistence on insane height bonuses. Result: constant inability to discern between those height levels, and resulting military disasters.
Another problem with so many height levels, and the rule "one height level difference creates a ramp, more than one create an impassable cliff" is that they turned entire continents into artificial, absurd tunnels and labyrints. Oh, you turned into wrong direction when exploring? To bad, you are now trapped on the Chinese plateau for 10 turns until you find an elevator down. That's why I hope civ has no more than like three height differences you can always cross plus impassable mountains - more depth here would look and feel great cosmetically, just please don't turn continents into snakes and ladders.
Humankind is like that in every aspect: makig awesome first impression on you, and then you discover yet another disastrously unfun implications of a 'cool' mechanic. Don't even get me started on its fundamental idea resulting in faction identity and emotional connection to the game nonexistent, as you play in a messy caleidoscope of nations changing faces every 30 minutes.
You are not in the minority who think HUMANKIND is bland.
Yes, it is missing Sid Meier's pixie dust magic.
Perhaps it's because HUMANKIND doesn't have zombies, vampires, mickey mouse governors or nuclear Gandhi to humour us
Areas it is superior: influence and civics, stability mechanic, design of historical cultures, balanced units and cultural traits (i.e. not OP) and most of all an AI that will challenge you!
But @Krajzen is right HUMANKIND can do with considerable simplification and refinement esp. for maps and terrain. Perhaps for HUMANKIND 2?
As Firaxis have now a separate design team (a great idea Ed!) it is in a position to refresh engineering.
A good sign?!
I feel like that would be rather like Bethesda deciding they're not making Elder Scrolls games anymore. "This franchise makes bank. Let's abandon it!" said no corporate entity ever, even when a franchise might be better off abandoned. (Certainly not saying that Civilization should be abandoned.) New IPs like Midnight Suns or Starfield don't indicate an abandonment of well-established IPs.
Two things I sincerely hope they explore and integrate from Old World:
- The order system, which I think is a stroke of genius
- In a lesser way, the Ambition system… I think some kind of ‘mini-quests’ like that can alleviate some of the less active turns that sometimes comes up in Civ, especially in the end game
Personally, I didn't find much to like in Old World. The order system looked good on paper, but I found it to be a cumbersome, irritating constraint. I also despise getting pulled out of building and expanding in order to balance internal politics and dynastic bull plop. They managed to take the most tedious parts of EU4, there.
I love HK conceptually, but it just doesn't have the same grasp on my imagination that Civ does. Also, the maps are difficult to 'read' at a glance, and the way districts and the economics work is kinda opaque. I'm also not a fan of the way that sieges work. It's too overwrought. I do like the way cultures evolve from one era to the next (and I don't care that it's not constrained to a historical paradigm), and I don't have issues some complain about tracking which rival is which after they change cultures. I also find the customized leader characters to be very fun.
Personally, I didn't find much to like in Old World. The order system looked good on paper, but I found it to be a cumbersome, irritating constraint. I also despise getting pulled out of building and expanding in order to balance internal politics and dynastic bull plop. They managed to take the most tedious parts of EU4, there.
I love HK conceptually, but it just doesn't have the same grasp on my imagination that Civ does. Also, the maps are difficult to 'read' at a glance, and the way districts and the economics work is kinda opaque. I'm also not a fan of the way that sieges work. It's too overwrought. I do like the way cultures evolve from one era to the next (and I don't care that it's not constrained to a historical paradigm), and I don't have issues some complain about tracking which rival is which after they change cultures. I also find the customized leader characters to be very fun.
I pick up Old World and play a few minutes every now and again.
Regardless of its critical acclaim it has very few active players. Less than half of HUMANKIND.
What is great about HUMANKIND is the quality of the game and its stability.
(Though it too is famously suffering from the "Pending Turn" bug, which is a concurrency problem).
It's more rock solid than Civ VI which seems to be getting more exploitable and buggy with every new content pack. (Though Firaxis have fixed a few things like Dramatic Ages and stability on super size maps).
HUMANKIND's foundation is more modern being based on Unity.
Well, from When will Civ 7 arrive we've migrated to What should Civ 7 'borrow' and what should it avoid like the Plague from other 4X games.
May need to start a new thread, folks . . .
Or perhaps it was because Humankind was designed by a soulless corporate committee that now occupies the burned out husk of Amplitude. FYI Amplitude used to make games with personality; ES and ES2 are oozing charm, and even EL has its moments.
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), and even though I work in regular software, I can tell you we still rely on code that's a decade old. Sometimes there isn't a better alternative. The nuts and bolts are the same nuts and bolts, after all.
