user746383
King
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- Sep 28, 2002
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People complain the new changes don't fit the game, don't work (i.e., are buggy), and/or are unfinished, rather than that there are changes.
The hate for Civ7 will end the series, if not soon then eventually
- Thread starter aelf
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I dont see how that would put Firaxis in a better position.
On Steam, they have ~1M sales with 50% negative reviews. Lets assume those customers who left negative reviews never existed.
Now they would have sold 500k copies with 100% positive reviews, right?
That is equally bad. Uhm, no, my mistake, it is worse. It is a 50% cut to revenue.
stealth_nsk
Deity
1. There are 10K negative reviews, not 500K. Extrapolations don't work like that as people who left reviews are not random selection.
2. I think even with this you missed my point. Firaxis expected better acceptance from old fans despite radical changes, but they were ok if small share of fans who dislike the game will not buy it or at least not buy at full at full price. So, it's not like they expected large crowd of fans not buying the game.
aelf
Ashen One
I think you are way too rigid in your worldview and don't seem to be able to understand the notion of a spectrum, not to mention you have a penchant for describing what you disagree with as a strawman. So I don't think it's possible to have this discussion with you. Have a nice day.
I don't think that a Civ6 2.0 would be a guaranteed immediate commercial success. The problem would be that it would inevitably be worse initially in some aspects than Civ6. How many people would shell out $70 for a Civ 6 with more beautiful (but less readable) graphics, commanders but only 20 civs? It would also likely release in an unfinished state, buggy and with major UI issues (since the external circumstances would not be different). And then there would be complaints about features missing or streamlined to much (dumbed down for consoles!!). DLCs would be too pricey and favorite civs (Britain!) would be DLC. It might also get a 50% approval rating, but some of the negative reviews would come from different people.
aelf
Ashen One
queenpea
Emperor
I don't think that Civ VII with commanders, towns vs. cities, new independent people mechanics, no builders, unstacked cities/districts, mix/match leader/civ, and revamped diplomacy would really have been considered Civ VI. Of course, that's a matter of personal opinion. I think it is hard to argue that Firaxis walked away somewhat from the 30/30/30 formula that delivered previous successful titles that managed to innovate, earning their roman numeral while not alienating a critical mass of players.
A strawman is an oversimplification of your opponent’s argument so that you can easily defeat it. Labeling anything that isn’t a radical departure from prior entries as “Civ 6 2.0” exactly that. If you stop using straw man arguments, I’ll stop calling them straw man arguments.
I have said that there is a range of what is acceptable within the franchise numerous times (in other words, a spectrum) in threads that you were active in. In fact, it is the crux of my argument. The problem is that Civ 7 went far outside that range. Myself and others have described exactly our issues with 7 and what we believe brings it outside that range.
As far as being rigid, this is the first Civ game that I feel this way about.
Ornen
King
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2006
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- 646
A.) I don't think the new ideas were very successful, especially the era changes (as I mentioned before). I think it's a very cool concept that has very little impact other than civ swapping and changing up the minigame objectives. not a fundamental change to the game design / philosophy.
B.) I think a lot of the "new ideas" are just digging deeper on Beach's preexisting tendencies, such as favoring micro-level minigame features/objectives over macro level strategy & diplomacy. another tendency is making civs matter a lot more, but everything else macro a lot less.
C.) he's holding onto a lot of ideas I never really liked to begin with, like swapping out policy cards and dumb leader agendas like "you have mountains so I don't like you"
in short, I think the 'new ideas' didn't go far enough and/or dug deeper into the design philosophy & tendencies Ed Beach brought to Civ 6, when those tendencies were effectively played out to completion by GS.
Naokaukodem
Millenary King
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- Aug 8, 2003
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- 4,287
To the OP, only one remark : I don't think Firaxis made changes for the sake of competition with other games : not only the name "Civilization" guaranties minimum sells at a first glance, but no game as to today looks like Civ1 to Civ7. They are doing changes to justify a new sequel, because as we have seen in this very forum, the expectations for one were very high. (and also, the sells of Civ6 may have reached a low threshold)
I do think that Civ franchise became a forum game / social network game / reviews sites game. As shown in Civfanatics, people love to talk about it, to the point they even prefer talking about it than playing it. The main attraction of Civ7 has been all the speculation, expectation and theory crafting, which has contaminated all the internet like the plague. People will play the game only to give their opinion about it.
Your post is a good illustration of it : you don't talk about the game but just care to do a somewhat new claim about the beginning of the end of this franchise, according to some lack of information and other theory crafting. Those threads are ridiculous. I'm not saying I can't do such myself, but yeah, that's my feeling now. Of course, you have the right to say whatever you want as long as it follows the site rules.
I do think that Civ franchise became a forum game / social network game / reviews sites game. As shown in Civfanatics, people love to talk about it, to the point they even prefer talking about it than playing it. The main attraction of Civ7 has been all the speculation, expectation and theory crafting, which has contaminated all the internet like the plague. People will play the game only to give their opinion about it.
Your post is a good illustration of it : you don't talk about the game but just care to do a somewhat new claim about the beginning of the end of this franchise, according to some lack of information and other theory crafting. Those threads are ridiculous. I'm not saying I can't do such myself, but yeah, that's my feeling now. Of course, you have the right to say whatever you want as long as it follows the site rules.
aelf
Ashen One
These are changes that people are also very critical about.
queenpea
Emperor
Whether or not they are criticized, the point I was trying to make was that you could remove civ switching and ages from VII, and you still have enough changes to justify calling it Civ VII and not Civ VI 2.0.
Sagax
Emperor
- Joined
- Nov 9, 2013
- Messages
- 1,770
Ironic that a Civ 7 defender on this forum came up with a bigger doom-and-gloom post than any Civ 7 “hater” could.
As you pointed out, it’s all a spectrum, and some players find some of the changes in Civ 7 to be too far on it. And it is the job of a game developer to be in tune with their player base and hit the right balance between new/exciting and old/familiar. Just because a game company is bold enough to make big changes to their franchise doesn’t entitle them to positive reception. A bold move is exactly that - bold, with all the risks involved.
People “hating” on the changes is not a direct attack on the new concepts as a whole - but rather that these new concepts, at their current level of execution, have failed to impress. You alluded to this in your post, but stopped at “we don’t know if better execution would help, it’s all academics, meanwhile the reviews clearly point at disliking the change, not execution”. To which I say, from years of working with clients and end users: your average consumers don’t have the required expertise to form correct remediation plans, and won’t be surgically precise in pointing out the root causes of their dissatisfaction. The dissatisfaction itself, however, remains valid. Without knowing better how to execute the current design, of course they will point at the change itself. And again, it is the developer’s job to correctly collect feedback and weigh in on better execution vs abandonment of the feature. This is precisely what’s happening with 1UPT, and I see no reason why eras or civ-switching cannot follow the suite in the future. And it won’t happen without criticism in the first place.
All that is to say, unless we have clear cases of personal threats and veiled ideological biases (which are present, but nowhere near being the driving force), I don’t see how the current discourse is paving road to the end of the franchise. Not in the far future, since so many other things could go wrong by then. As for a quick demise in the short term… if that happens, I genuinely can’t see that as the result of the discourse. Instead, I’ll see that as the result of 2K chasing the short-term money and folding at the first signs of financial loss, and choosing to abandon the ship instead of owning the results of their experimentation and trying to set things right.
As you pointed out, it’s all a spectrum, and some players find some of the changes in Civ 7 to be too far on it. And it is the job of a game developer to be in tune with their player base and hit the right balance between new/exciting and old/familiar. Just because a game company is bold enough to make big changes to their franchise doesn’t entitle them to positive reception. A bold move is exactly that - bold, with all the risks involved.
People “hating” on the changes is not a direct attack on the new concepts as a whole - but rather that these new concepts, at their current level of execution, have failed to impress. You alluded to this in your post, but stopped at “we don’t know if better execution would help, it’s all academics, meanwhile the reviews clearly point at disliking the change, not execution”. To which I say, from years of working with clients and end users: your average consumers don’t have the required expertise to form correct remediation plans, and won’t be surgically precise in pointing out the root causes of their dissatisfaction. The dissatisfaction itself, however, remains valid. Without knowing better how to execute the current design, of course they will point at the change itself. And again, it is the developer’s job to correctly collect feedback and weigh in on better execution vs abandonment of the feature. This is precisely what’s happening with 1UPT, and I see no reason why eras or civ-switching cannot follow the suite in the future. And it won’t happen without criticism in the first place.
All that is to say, unless we have clear cases of personal threats and veiled ideological biases (which are present, but nowhere near being the driving force), I don’t see how the current discourse is paving road to the end of the franchise. Not in the far future, since so many other things could go wrong by then. As for a quick demise in the short term… if that happens, I genuinely can’t see that as the result of the discourse. Instead, I’ll see that as the result of 2K chasing the short-term money and folding at the first signs of financial loss, and choosing to abandon the ship instead of owning the results of their experimentation and trying to set things right.
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There are people who seem blind to the problems with the game. I'm not sure why. Obviously subjective taste is a thing. I myself had to play the game a bit to start to sour on it, the better I knew it and the less novel it was. Maybe some people haven't played as much?
Either way, the discourse and narrative around the game go back to the initial gameplay reveal. I was there live on the official YouTube channel and chat was saying this:
- "WTH this is just Humankind II, I can't believe they did this. F"
- "Egypt becomes Songhai then Buganda, lol, no wonder they just lazily copied Humankind, they're typical woke devs who would rather spread a message than work hard."
Still, there are a ton of us who played the game, gave it a chance, welcomed the change... and it's just not a good game. It's streamlined and underbaked, and therefore hollow and repetitive. It's so unfinished and underbaked in some instances, that it's embarrassing, almost insulting to the user base that the devs and Firaxis execs thought they could get away with it. $30 for the DLC and then the HMS Revenge fiasco are like the nail in the coffin. More substantively, the absolutely terrible explorer and Modern Age culture victory represents how the game is underbaked and shallow. Like, that's the best they could come up with?
Not even mentioning the DLC, it's weird how they showcase these narrative historical events for China and Egypt, which are weirdly like almost AI generated and substance free ("the military officer devotes study to his books but then there's a marriage dispute" +50 culture). Like, what about actual history? Battles, court drama, invasions, infrastructure projects, cultural moment? And then how most Civs have next to no narrative events. Like, they should have just not included any narrative events that were civ-specific like they're just letting us know just how unfinished the game is.
The real reason people don't like the game is that it's boring and repetitive. Progress has been streamlined into cookie cutter decisions that get time limited before you have to start them over again with slight differences. And then, those difference quickly become repetitive themselves. Railroad Tycoon was a fun victory once or twice, now it's hardly different from the cookie cutter things I do everywhere else in the game. Add in the fact that most of us didn't even understand how factories worked for our first few playthroughs, and the tedious and cumbersome UI in slotting resources and how many times can you deal with it and be frustrated by it before getting tired of it? Eventually, the game just doesn't offer anything anymore.
Even the fun of military is messed up by stupidity. Buggy commander upgrades that either don't work at all, or if they do I'm not sure how. Clicking on a unit to do a ranged attack but you have to click on "just" the right spot or it deselects. The tedious nature of unloading from commanders. The bugged visuals that frequently ruin immersion as unit models stay behind while their unit icon marches forward. The fact that even on deity I'm not even getting that far into commander trees and half of the features - especially naval and air - go unused. The buggy airstrip problems. The fact the AI still doesn't really use naval or air that much. About the only real improvement is AI is much smarter at defense and in that lone context will bait you in for a surprise counter-offensive.
The experience is just massively underbaked, made twice as bad through frustrating UX, and then what we do get becomes repetitive and pointless very quickly.
This is why people aren't liking the game.
stealth_nsk
Deity
Please reread what I wrote. It starts with the words "Firaxis expected"
EDIT: grammar
It's a bit revealing. It's sort of like admitting "guys, look, we all know the game is bad but we have to stop saying it out loud, we could lose the franchise don't you know."
I'm not accusing them of thinking that, I'm just agreeing with you that this is the vibe of this specific post IMO.
Yeah I just wrote out a brief screed about how the game is just underbaked. You don't even have to start talking about the changes. The game's unfinished and there's enough to talk about there to conclude Firaxis is actively insulting its customers and it's just a matter of whether we're tolerant enough of that, in enough love with the franchise, to put up with it or not.
I mean, I'm having flashbacks right now just thinking about how I get kicked from production menus and go back in and the tab resets and it's a nightmare just to set up a build queue.
And I'll never start harping on this. What were they thinking with the modern age culture victory? And then, the religion system just sucks.
I'm just launching on a segue. I don't think the discourse should be about the conceptual changes themselves. The game is so insultingly bad for other reasons. There was a major development SNAFU of some kind and the execs thought they could just force it out and charge up the wazoo and that would just be fine.
stealth_nsk
Deity
I disagree with you completely, based on what I was written before. Firaxis strategy, as we could see it,was a bit risky (although any strategy is risky in one way or another), but pretty solid and the plan was good. Execution wasn't perfect, but again, it's not uncommon in software development. And while Firaxis was likely expecting better acceptance, there's nothing indicating that Civ7 will be a financial failure yet.
Speaking about the amount of negativity, some people could be very loud on chats, forums, etc. but Steam shows mixed reviews, with as many positive reviews as there are negative ones. And both are about 1% of total Steam sales.
So, I would stay far from both ends of the spectrum. Civ7 clearly has problems, but it could still end up being a great success.
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