As promised in the reception thread, here's a more substantive post on what I think is going on in the bigger picture pertaining to the topic.
First, we have to acknowledge that Civ is not some kind of special case, and while we are all tempted to respond to developments about it emotionally due to our own personal bias towards it, to obtain useful insights, we have to take a step back and see things for what they are. Yes, this will be a meta discussion. But discussions about the game's prospects, reception, and commercial viability are meta discussions. And instead of a meta discussion based off of shaky empirical or circumstantial evidence with any linkage to the game's content itself being influenced by personal likes and dislikes, I want to raise the bar a bit.
Second, I think it's safe to say that, in general, people tend to dislike change, especially when it comes to something they're comfortable with. If you disagree with this, you should probably stop reading here. But you may want to peruse relevant literature on this topic (such as
this).
With that, I think we can start with an illustrative example of the
Heroes of Might and Magic series.
Heroes of Might and Magic 3 might be one of the best turn-based strategy games of all time. Compared to its predecessors, it's simply bigger and better. By the time all the official expansion packs had been released, it's practically massive. So what could the developers do for the next iteration of the series? An even bigger game - more factions, more buildings, more creatures, more artifacts? It would really start to get unwieldy. There was not a whole lot more room to grow in those simple directions, not for a brand new entry to the series. So what did they do? They decided to streamline major parts of the game and add interesting, meaningful decisions at each stage. And lots of players hated the changes. Lots of them had good experiences with the series that culminated in HoMM3. They had certain ideas of what the series was about, and the changes, while not really deviating from the flavour of the series much, didn't conform to those ideas. They just wanted more of what HoMM3 offered, although how a new viable game could improve on that entry substantially was a difficult question. So HoMM4 is, by and large, considered a failure.*
*Of course, the thing that truly spelled doom for it was 3DO's financial troubles. But after the success of HoMM3, HoMM4 was definitely not close to being as successful. Sounds familiar?
HoMM4 was, in some ways, a victim of HoMM3's success. Its predecessor was so iconic that the many people who loved HoMM3 expected a sequel that was could satisfy their wants in the same ways. They rejected streamlining, for example, because it reduced the variety of creatures you could recruit in one town since you had to choose between Building A and Building B. A design decision that introduced meaningful decision-making and allowed new features to shine more (fielding heroes on the battlefield) was disliked because players saw it purely as a reduction, a downgrade.
And I contend that the Civilization series is going down this route.
Civ6 is not, I'd argue, as iconic as HoMM3 was as an entry in a series. But it does have a much bigger playerbase than its predecessors. Many people love it. But, again, with success comes a price. Its many players are comfortable with what it offers, have formed ideas about what Civ games are or ought to be about based on it. Yes, there have been substantial changes introduced to the series previously. But not as much was at stake back then. Imagine the furore today if something as drastic as 1UPT was introduced in Civ7 (maybe we don't need to). Each time substantial changes are introduced, the series loses some players and has to make up for it by winning over new players. But what happens when the playerbase is huge and comprises a large proportion of the available players out there?
The immediately commercially safe solution is to make Civ6 2.0 as a new entry. Don't rock the boat, introduce minor changes and improvements, maybe in a new skin. Indeed, a majority of players would approve of that approach. But there's a problem with that. Developing a game at this scale is a multi-year project. It's waterfall as waterfall can be. You can't release minor updates that change things here and there until you get a brand new Civ7. And if you do decide early on to make Civ 6 2.0, how would you know it's future proof? What if competitors innovated successfully within the next several years and you'll be releasing a game based on a decade-old model? And you don't have the luxury of simply changing the time period the game depicts to keep it fresh, like say Call of Duty or FIFA. So there's risk in being conservative too - the risk that your product is already stale when it's taken out of the oven. So you gotta try to innovate, you have to decide to do so early in a multi-year process, and you have to take the risk that players might dislike the new things.
And then what happens? As it turns out, players do dislike them in Civ7. Of course, there are problems with the execution. But a content analysis of reviews that was done elsewhere shows that a good half of negative reviews talk about the changes, not merely execution or UI issues. Is there a possibility that better execution would have made the changes more palatable? Sure. But that question is academic now. Either players will come to accept them as time goes by and improvements are made, or they won't. And if I base my prediction on the current discourse, I find it hard to be optimistic.
If that's the case, where would it leave us? If investment is still forthcoming, the logical thing would be for Firaxis to make Civ8 a lot like Civ6. Maybe introduce a few well-liked features from Civ7. Would that be successful? Maybe. By then they'd be a new generation of players who haven't played Civ6, so it'll be fresh to them. But then would happen for Civ9? Do the same song and dance?
As I mentioned, Civ is not some special case, and products and franchises are subject to creative destruction. If a series can't innovate because of the baggage it carries, it will eventually become outdated and be replaced by competitors. Will we be lucky enough to have Civ9 before that happens?
This is what makes rooting for a series a dicey prospect. We might love it and want it to continue. But can it escape the usual traps and eventual decay? Judging by how people react to Civ7, I suspect not. And, yes, nobody can control how people feel about the game. Players will like or dislike a product as they will, but the pattern of their preferences drives that very same process of decay. And I think what we're seeing now is that process taking root.
Whether you like Civ7 or not, you should entertain possibility that we're seeing the beginning of the end.
