Was Civ IV the last great Civ game ever?

[TheMeInTeam]

It's hard to define a game as the "last great ever". We'd look pretty silly if new management or even a new designer took over and made civ VI or 7 in 5-10 years and it became one of the defining TBS games played. Hell, it could happen 40+ years or after our lifetimes. Foever/ever is a loooong time after all.

Even so, I'm not liking the trends one bit over the past 5+ years.

DLC is a different can of worms. IMO, it's not DLC that kills games, but designer priorities. Quick dollars are appealing to short-sighted individuals, but much of the greatness in products is the association and confidence in the brand. What comes to mind when one thinks about EA? Blizzard? Mojang? Microsoft? Firaxis? Bethesda? Strategic Studies Group? Different things. Some recognition, but likely most people won't recognize all of them (only because I snuck in SSG possibly ). However, consumers carry expectations and willingness to buy games from each of these companies based on a combination of marketing and previous track record. Firaxis/2k sold out on the civ V in the figurative sense, and while V can and has done well financially, the sullied brand of a game that to this day holds major basic design flaws (not to mention an entire non-functional aspect) will leave a mark on the reputation of a company that has not been known for many supreme titles outside of its flagship.

Would you trust the current leadership with alpha centauri 2? The guys who made the first one, fresh from microprose, aren't exactly high-impact contributors anymore...though I suppose that wouldn't HAVE to remain the case. Oh well. AC analogy is a dead one anyway due to the IP issues there.

 

[AJ11]

It's hard to define a game as the "last great ever". We'd look pretty silly if new management or even a new designer took over and made civ VI or 7 in 5-10 years and it became one of the defining TBS games played. Hell, it could happen 40+ years or after our lifetimes. Foever/ever is a loooong time after all.

Even so, I'm not liking the trends one bit over the past 5+ years.

DLC is a different can of worms. IMO, it's not DLC that kills games, but designer priorities. Quick dollars are appealing to short-sighted individuals, but much of the greatness in products is the association and confidence in the brand. What comes to mind when one thinks about EA? Blizzard? Mojang? Microsoft? Firaxis? Bethesda? Strategic Studies Group? Different things. Some recognition, but likely most people won't recognize all of them (only because I snuck in SSG possibly ). However, consumers carry expectations and willingness to buy games from each of these companies based on a combination of marketing and previous track record. Firaxis/2k sold out on the civ V in the figurative sense, and while V can and has done well financially, the sullied brand of a game that to this day holds major basic design flaws (not to mention an entire non-functional aspect) will leave a mark on the reputation of a company that has not been known for many supreme titles outside of its flagship.

Would you trust the current leadership with alpha centauri 2? The guys who made the first one, fresh from microprose, aren't exactly high-impact contributors anymore...though I suppose that wouldn't HAVE to remain the case. Oh well. AC analogy is a dead one anyway due to the IP issues there.

Personally, I can live with the bastardisation of Mechwarrior that Microsoft did with Mechwarrior 4. The basic game play is still there, and the storyline wasn't that bad. Granted there wasn't much original storyline needed when 99% of the stuff was done for Microsoft already with the Battletech books (this is especially visible in MW4:Mercs; just name additions, really). They had to do something about boating, and the weapon type slots was a fair compromise.

SSI did a lot of good games in its day. The Krynn series was very well done, even if some of the spells were far more powerful than it should be, which I suspect was due to either platform restrictions (i.e., computing power problems) or a misunderstanding of the original rules that got propagated throughout the golden box era. It was also one of, if not the FIRST company to integrate romance options into its games (Treasures of the Savage Frontier had a rudimentary form of it). Yes, this was first done back in the 1980s, long before Baldur's Gate!

Blizzard have some pretty solid games, too. I can't comment on the more recent games, but Diablo 2 was pretty good. My problem with World of Warcraft is philosophical more than anything else. I simply refuse to pay money to play a game that I have ALREADY BOUGHT! This is the same reason why I never played Everquest or anything of the like.

Bioware dropped the ball with Dragon Age 2. Will wait and see if they can redeem themselves.

Obsidian was pressured into releasing Neverwinter Nights 2 too early and the last third of it showed. This one is also on the wait and see list.

Bethesda had some pretty good games, but it dropped the ball badly with Star Trek: Legacy. Never quite forgiven them for that. Oblivion was a big mess in many ways, most especially AI (not that Morrowwind had a gem of an AI). Skyrim apparently already needed patches, less than a month after its release. This one is edging quickly towards the "consider very carefully before buying" list.

Firaxis is firmly in the "consider carefully..." list with the train wreck that is Civ5.

EA (gods, how many should I name? From Final Fantasy X-2 until today!), Wizkids (or whoever that holds the Mechwarrior/Battletech IP and created the abomination that is Dark Age) and Wizards of the Coast (frakk you very much for DnD 4.0, *censored*; if I wanted to play Diablo 2, I'd fire up the computer!) are proven idiots who look only at the short term, not the long term. Every time I see one of their logos on the product, whatever it is I am looking at (be it book, game or Holy Grail) goes right back on the shelf.

 

[shakabrade]

I would say that Bethesda, although corporation, still cares for its fan base.

It is true they failed with Oblivion and Fallout 3, but they listened to the community and made it better with great expansions. New Vegas is a solid standalone fallout world based RPG, much better than fallout 3, and New Vegas DLCs are really worth it.
All I can say about Skyrim, as a Morrowind hardliner is it has managed to invoke Morrowind feeling in me and it's a grand game, unlike Oblivion which was huge disappointment.
As for bugs and patches, I don't care for them as long as game is fun and has an interesting storyline. Not to mention Skyrim is reasonably cheap (around 30 euros) for 250h of gameplay.

Definetly a way to go.

 

[Elite]

I bought Civ V on release and have the following comment:

Civilization V sucked for Multiplayer, but was OK with Single player(CIV did better for SP and MP though)

I would say that Bethesda, although corporation, still cares for its fan base.

It is true they failed with Oblivion and Fallout 3, but they listened to the community and made it better with great expansions. New Vegas is a solid standalone fallout world based RPG, much better than fallout 3, and New Vegas DLCs are really worth it.
All I can say about Skyrim, as a Morrowind hardliner is it has managed to invoke Morrowind feeling in me and it's a grand game, unlike Oblivion which was huge disappointment.
As for bugs and patches, I don't care for them as long as game is fun and has an interesting storyline. Not to mention Skyrim is reasonably cheap (around 30 euros) for 250h of gameplay.

Definetly a way to go.

I thought Fallout 3 was amazing, Oblivion was fun, Skyrim? eh, toooooooo looooonng of a start(a game is supposed to have a 5 minute start up, not 20 minutes!) I fell asleep before I even got to the main town I was supposed to go to, Oblivion's start was quite interesting and once you got out of the prison, it was an open world to explore, Skyrim felt too restricted...

New Vegas? more like Fail Vegas... I just couldn't get into it compared to Oblivion or Fallout 3(obviously both of us have our opinion's) I did like Fallout 2 though.

 

[vranasm]

so true! I've been putzing around in Dragon Age II since I bought it for $5 bucks recently. Arrrgh! Such a skeleton of former D&D games. So cheap and lazy.

I bought full prize...and this definitely hurts... and what hurts more is, that I have to agree with you...

DA II is ^&$!@*$%!@($

 

[Optical]

Civ5 is really age of decadence for Civ.

Civvers are a dying breed.

I was surprised when I realised I was among youngest on this forum since people have been telling me I'm too old for playing games for some time.

There are younger Civvers out there. Me for one - I'm fifteen.

I'm sorry to say I agree that I think CiV was likely the last 2K/Firaxis Civ game. They really have stuffed up IMO with V and have lost a lot of credibility, or at least that's what I'm seeing here. And the CivFanatics community is a pretty good indicator, as it's the largest Civ site out there. Once you lose a dedicated fanbase, you don't get word-of-mouth spreading of the game, and that's important.

 

[Akbarthegreat]

DLC is a different can of worms. IMO, it's not DLC that kills games, but designer priorities. Quick dollars are appealing to short-sighted individuals, but much of the greatness in products is the association and confidence in the brand. What comes to mind when one thinks about EA? Blizzard? Mojang? Microsoft? Firaxis? Bethesda? Strategic Studies Group? Different things. Some recognition, but likely most people won't recognize all of them (only because I snuck in SSG possibly ). However, consumers carry expectations and willingness to buy games from each of these companies based on a combination of marketing and previous track record. Firaxis/2k sold out on the civ V in the figurative sense, and while V can and has done well financially, the sullied brand of a game that to this day holds major basic design flaws (not to mention an entire non-functional aspect) will leave a mark on the reputation of a company that has not been known for many supreme titles outside of its flagship.

Very well said

There are younger Civvers out there. Me for one - I'm fifteen.

I will be in less than a month

 

[AJ11]

I will be in less than a month

There goes all the off-colour, double-entendre, R18 jokes... Damned kids...

 

[tox_von]

civ 3 i think is the best civ still. Theres more victory path balance some of the new stuff like vasal states apostilic palace united nations stuff corporations was never perfected. Civ4 still needs an expansion to fix some of the things about it i think.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

There goes all the off-colour, double-entendre, R18 jokes... Damned kids...

Now now, all you need to do is spend a short period of time on xbox live and all of a sudden it's painfully obvious that a person needs to be very, very young for those things to be censored and/or over their heads. The things I've heard in call of duty from the mouths of people half my age !

 

[Optical]

Your average high school being a fairly good example.

 

[ajsciri4]

I don't see a way for them to improve on Civ 4... if there is, I guess it isn't impossible for them to make a better game, but it'll take a lot of hard work and dedication that they seemed to have lost with Civ 5. So, of course it's a possibility, it's just very faint...

 

[Kid R]

Without getting into talking about the game development business, which obviously has some serious issues it has to work out, I thought Civ 5 was a brave attempt as far as it went. They tried to bridge the gap between two markets, and actually for all our moaning I suspect in the boardrooms it is a qualified success.

They could see a smallish group of low-profit, but faithful and influential nerds and poindexters (ourselves), and wanted to try and build a market combining certain qualities of them with certain qualities from another larger segment, the high-profit but fickle and cheap-thrill-hungry jocks (no disrespect, although I doubt many read this board ).

And personally I have some sympathy if that really was the aim. I can't stand the really low level TBS games which require half an hour for each move and have interfaces so detailed you have to put your face right up to the screen to select the correct little flag or stats tab. Civ 4 is just about as much detail as I can stand - I was really looking forward to an interesting take on 1UPT from civ 5 for example.

Anyway was 4 the last great Civ game? I vote a hopeful no. I hope the suits see potential in contining their crossover attempt, and I have faith that developers interested in working on strategy game design will often be ones who like playing the games they're working on, rather than just the graphics and glitz or even the money side of the business.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Without getting into talking about the game development business, which obviously has some serious issues it has to work out, I thought Civ 5 was a brave attempt as far as it went. They tried to bridge the gap between two markets, and actually for all our moaning I suspect in the boardrooms it is a qualified success.

It's not that civ V was a bad concept. It was a project management disaster and the designers decided that having a working title wasn't the priority. Their short-sighted board might see that as a success, but competent design teams know where that road leads.

And personally I have some sympathy if that really was the aim. I can't stand the really low level TBS games which require half an hour for each move and have interfaces so detailed you have to put your face right up to the screen to select the correct little flag or stats tab. Civ 4 is just about as much detail as I can stand - I was really looking forward to an interesting take on 1UPT from civ 5 for example.

And here is where they started stepping on their own land mines. If you want a game that is effectively catered to more casual players or those who prefer the game to be more fast-paced, here is a list of things you DON'T do:

- Make it so that the majority of people playing the game spend 1-3 hours per game on between turn times.
- Make MP completely unplayable for over a year, and then still drop people and be unplayable for more than 3-4 people after that.
- Hide the rules of gameplay from the player, not mentioning them anywhere (was just 2 weeks ago my friend learned of a mechanic that civlopedia doesn't mention, that is important to gameplay). Civ IV and V are chalk full of this crap too.
- Make the UI lag so much that a human being can actually give commands faster than the game can process them.
- Little things, like faster methods to offer trade agreement renewals etc.

Civ V in its present form is a train wreck. It doesn't fit "hardcore strategy game nerds" OR "casual fan picking up the game" well. People who don't know any better tolerate it, or in some cases blindly follow the series because of its name. The reality is that we got an unfinished product on release that still isn't finished today and possibly never will be, that makes mistakes in basic gameplay that games from 10 years ago got right.

All of this, and I haven't even argued against its AI, which is atrocious like all strategy game AI .

Anyway was 4 the last great Civ game? I vote a hopeful no. I hope the suits see potential in contining their crossover attempt, and I have faith that developers interested in working on strategy game design will often be ones who like playing the games they're working on, rather than just the graphics and glitz or even the money side of the business.

Firaxis track record for this has been horrible though. Civ IV is the best of the 3 games they released so far, but it has gobs of issues of its own that hold it back from truly being one of the best games of all time. I have never seen such flagrantly irresponsible patch behavior or half-finished expansion mechanics. Not that everything was rosy back in microprose games, but games of that time in general weren't up to snuff. HOWEVER, at least in civ II when you pressed a keyboard shortcut it actually did the shortcut. Why is it that civ IV couldn't handle that? Why is it that civ V doesn't even bother to try?

I stand by the assertion that the design team that made civ V can't make a good civ game. It's outside their scope. Either the IP gets shipped to competent designers, whatever shackles 2k has over an otherwise good design team are removed, OR the people involved change dramatically. With the current culture/design philosophy, a good civ title is impossible.

 

[AJ11]

HOWEVER, at least in civ II when you pressed a keyboard shortcut it actually did the shortcut.

Actually, the best thing that CivII did for the series, above and beyond the obviously better graphics, was to get rid of that settler/worker glitch in Civ that made even winning at the highest difficulty laughably easy.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

I think that Civ5 is a classic, shining example of the phrase "Style without substance." It's as though the big shots at 2K sold their souls to make a fast buck at our expense.

I don't think that Firaxis will ever (be able to) make a game like Civ4 again. There's too much to be gained in the fast dollar, and the stupidity of the consumer market. In a couple of years, they'll trot out Civ6, with all of the false promises that they made for Civ5, and the public will have forgotten what a mess Civ5 was and buy it up like hot-cakes.

This is the same mass of consumers that will buy half of an Oreo and pay twice as much for it, if it is in a spiffy package and is called "mini" something. (For non North Americans, these are the so-called "Thin" biscuits/cookies, where you get less than a tenth of a package of biscuits/cookies, but pay almost, if not more than the full package price.)

As a modder, I was excited about the possibilities of having a new Civ game to tinker with. That feeling wore off after about three games of Civ5. I couldn't believe the state of the released game! I will admit to being a bit of a perfectionist, but I would never release a version of BAT in that state! I have made some goof-ups with a build and released it, or made an error or two on release, but I try to patch it immediately. I think that most of the other modders here would agree. We try to put our best work out there for people to enjoy. If you can't do it right, don't bother. I had that drilled into my head as a young girl, and it makes a lot of sense even now.

I suppose us old folks that believe in quality are a dying breed.

As for the "big, sloppy kiss to all the fans" we were promised for Civ5, for Civ6 they'll have to up that one with a Victoria's Secret model, some champagne and strawberries, and a nice hotel room to get me to buy it.

And I get to keep the model.

 

[vincentz]

Nice avatar LM

I really hope they will make a VI. And that they will do it right.
For me the favorites have been the 2 & 4, while 3 and 5 was imho nogood. (Especially 5 which is a joke only surpassed by CivWorld)

I see tons of potential in making a CiVI. Some of the mods here clearly shows that there is much room for improving IV, and alot of ideas that wasnt technically possible could easely be implemented by a dev.

However, the trend in game developing nowadays is ... streamlining (...how I have come to hate that word ) and as such I believe CiVI could become even worse than CiV.

The problem is that they wont make a great game. Instead they'll make a game which they think the masses will buy (CivWorld f.ex.)

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Nice avatar LM

Yes, there's nothing like a lovely Irish lass in emerald... <sigh> ...but I digress...

However, the trend in game developing nowadays is ... streamlining (...how I have come to hate that word ) and as such I believe CiVI could become even worse than CiV.

Notice how "streamlining" goes hand in hand with the new media buzzwords "scandal", "sensational" and "breach of ethics"? Well, sort of, from a sarcastic point of view, anyway. We have become a society of convenience and sound bites, and things that don't require much thought. Why should video games be any different?

The problem is that they wont make a great game. Instead they'll make a game which they think the masses will buy (CivWorld f.ex.)

They'll make a fast buck from the people that don't care about re-playability and value in a game, and then move on to Civ7 which will be "More stripped down for your convenience! Why trouble yourself by giving armies boring old commands? Who wants to manage cities? Just sit back and watch while the AI does it all for you!"

I think I'll take up needlepoint instead.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I suppose us old folks that believe in quality are a dying breed.

It's not a question of age. It's a question of intelligence.

Civ V is baffling in a lot of ways, but one of the bigger ones to me is that it still sold well. I do very much doubt that trend continues with shoddy gameplay as TBS isn't exactly a super popular genre with dozens of kids to convince to buy it yearly (a la call of duty). However, it did work for civ V, even if it forced them to bribe/convince "professional" (the mere idea of that in retrospect seems laughable) review publications to rate it well.

Anyway, quality is a cyclical thing. If the series devolves too much maybe someone competent will take over the TBS genre again.

 

[K.Murx]

Ah yes... the old times... were not better at all.
Yes, there were good games back then, but all of you seem to have forgotten the chaff which existed back then, and exists now. There are plenty of good games around (Shogun 2, new Deus Ex, Skyrim, etc.).
And *every* major developer has had some train wrecks (except Valve, maybe - although I have played none of their games). Sometimes, they learn from them, sometimes, they get bought by EA. And some manage to go bankrupt in time to avoid the latter fate^^

And actually, in my opinion the "odd" iterations of Civ (1,3,5) have always been somewhat worse than the even (2, 4, 6?). Firaxis seems to push major new stuff into these odd releases, which get polished in the even ones. Hopefully this time as well.