Was there this much backlash for previous Civ games?

[sixty4half]

Yes, there were a lot of complaints about 5 and 6 when they first came out.

6 absolutely sucked and barely got better. Mostly due to firaxis' decision to not make the AI available for modification.

There were new mechanics in each that were controversial among the community.

 

[Methos]

And I'm saying this as someone who enjoys both Civ IV and Civ VI a lot (not V though, V can take a long walk off a short pier as far as I'm concerned).

I find this interesting. I enjoyed IV and V a lot and couldn't stand VI. When I first started playing VII I was worried I had wasted my money, but after playing it for a while I've really come to love the game. I just had to get used to it.

 

[Leyrann]

I find this interesting. I enjoyed IV and V a lot and couldn't stand VI. When I first started playing VII I was worried I had wasted my money, but after playing it for a while I've really come to love the game. I just had to get used to it.

Honestly, it's primarily V's design philosophy of punishing the player for doing the wrong thing, as opposed to rewarding them for doing the right thing, coupled with a very rigid idea of what the right and wrong things are (namely: build exactly 4 cities, obsess over the little number next to the smiley face on the top of the screen, and forget all dreams about building an empire).

What I find very telling is that I had a lot of fun playing Civ V - until I started playing other games in the series. I got into Civ IV right around the release of Civ VI because I saw a lot of people here saying they liked IV better than V, and ever since I touched IV and VI I just couldn't stand V anymore. I didn't even manage more than a hundred turns when I booted the game up again half a year ago with the express goal of doing an entire playthrough all the way to the end to familiarize myself with everything I disliked about the game (as I hadn't played it in almost a decade) in case I got into an argument over whether or not it's a good game.

 

[King Flevance]

It always needs to be pointed out that every sequel's release is compared to a more realized and expanded version of its predecessor. Civ 7 has not had 2 expansions and DLCs yet or a long chain of patches that focus on its dialing in its mechanics that are unique to its design. But it is being compared to every version that has. Familiar features are missing, causing disappointment if you enjoyed those features and expectations are being met with unexpected results as no one's expectations are 100% spot on because none of us are psychics. Some are pleasantly surprised, and others are not.

Part of all of this comes down to: there really were just fewer people talking about past games in this same franchise. Consider the fact that on these very forums the General Discussion for Civ VII, released one month ago, has 257,000 posts, while Civ VI, released almost a decade ago, has 424,000.

This is a pretty good metric, I think. I cross referenced steam forums to find that WAY more discussion happens here than on Steam about any given installment of Civ. (By hundreds of thousands more) If you are a Civ fan, you will come across people talking about civfanatics and find your way here. This comment intrigued me so I figured I would look a bit more into it also. I added up all of the messages (not threads) for everything except Technical Support (As it would give "credit" of popularity to any version that had more problems for people.) and Creation & Customization. (As that will be highly influenced by which version offered more modding tools.)
For anyone curious, Civ 4 (released source code for modders) wins by a landslide with 1.6M. Then Civ 3 & 5 tie with just over almost 700k and almost 600k respectively.

The threads where people just simply had a desire to discuss the game with others online in different ways are where all the other categories fall into.

Civ 3 - 1,194,900 (Over 24 years) (49,787.5 posts/year average)
Civ 4 - 2,222,800 (Over 20 years) (111,140 posts/year average)

Civ 5 - 918,100 (Over 15 years) (61,206.7 posts/year average)
Civ 6 - 466,700 (Just over 8 years) (58,337.5 posts/year average)
Civ 7 - ~68,500 (6 months) (11,416.7 posts/month)

What I find interesting about this statistic is that it suggests that this community has shrank. That may not be true, but activity has certainly declined. I was not very active on these forums in 5&6's life cycles. Plus, it is still worth noting the modability of 3&4 vs 5&6 even though I left those figures out, since a very active mod community will drive activity up in the community as a whole. You could argue something like reddit but that is hard to track and I am not seeing big numbers of discussion anywhere online.

It is impressive the amount of activity Civ 7 has generated in such a short window. A corrected error has made it less impressive, and more standard. Time will show how much staying power it has. Those numbers could theoretically trickle off now that launch has passed, or they could shoot up with updates.

 

[Siptah]

Civ 7 - 258,500 (1 Month)

I generally agree with your post (and looked at the same numbers around a week ago), but it would be better to say 6 months for civ 7, as concrete discussions started last august.
Also the numbers are completely flawed: civ 7 includes the 174k of the ideas & suggestions forums that goes back to 2004 in parts.

So, what we are looking at with civ 7 is something along the lines of 80k posts in 6 months.

It is impressive the amount of activity Civ 7 has generated in such a short window. Time will show how much staying power it has. Those numbers could theoretically trickle off now that launch has passed.

The fact that civ 7 is criticized so much, and that it includes more civs and leaders (and thus speculation) certainly leads to many posts. In contrast, I was surprised how "small" the strategy & tips section is, for example.

 

[Gedemon]

Could you post any evidence that it's small? We've seen review-bombing of various projects by anti-woke bots before and it was in many thousands.

When I wrote "we don't know", we really don't have enough information. Like literally. The number could be anything between 0.1% and 99%.

loaded the steam bad reviews since Feb. 25th, searched for some key words being mentioned in the page:

UI 646
age 153
map 128
bug 104
DLC 76
price 70
gameplay 69
unfinished 45
crash 21
woke 2

so, yeah, 0.1%

 

[stealth_nsk]

loaded the steam bad reviews since Feb. 25th, searched for some key words being mentioned in the page:

UI 646
age 153
map 128
bug 104
DLC 76
price 70
gameplay 69
unfinished 45
crash 21
woke 2

so, yeah, 0.1%

1. So, you searched for 1 word related to anti-woke and 9 words for other reasons? Doesn't look like a fair approach.
2. Please read my other posts here. There are things about anti-woke crowd usually not mentioning anything about it. Also about reviews in other language.

It's really cool that you do such research, but it's not relevant. You just ignore the potentially biggest part.

 

[Gedemon]

1. So, you searched for 1 word related to anti-woke and 9 words for other reasons? Doesn't look like a fair approach.
2. Please read my other posts here. There are things about anti-woke crowd usually not mentioning anything about it. Also about reviews in other language.

It's really cool that you do such research, but it's not relevant. You just ignore the potentially biggest part.

you asked for evidence, I provide, show yours now.

and if I report to the number of reviews it's even less than 0.1%

 

[Leyrann]

1. So, you searched for 1 word related to anti-woke and 9 words for other reasons? Doesn't look like a fair approach.

Bro, he is comparing 10 separate terms. It's not a 9v1. It's a 1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1. And woke is decisively the least common.

2. Please read my other posts here. There are things about anti-woke crowd usually not mentioning anything about it. Also about reviews in other language.

"It looks like the facts aren't on my side but actually they are bad facts bro, I swear."

You are a conspiracy theorist.

 

[Disgustipated]

Civ 5 most definitely had significant and vocal negativity surrounding it at release.

I was one of them. I felt like civ 5 was utter garbage at release. I went back to Civ 4. One unit per tile was my main gripe, but I also found the game bare bones and boring. It certainly got better with expansions.

 

[GoneFishingX]

Firstly the amount of people obsessively trying to prove there isn't a significant backlash to Civ 7 from the gamergate crowd is really bizarre to me. Of all the comments made in this thread, the single mention of gamergaters leaving bad reviews (once) has created about half the responses in this thread. I personally don't think steam is having that issue compared to more obvious examples, but to try so aggressively to disprove it instead of engaging in all the other topics of this thread is wild to me and makes me think some of you have a vested interest in that type of culture war discourse.

Having been on this forum since the warm up to Civ 5 (and been playing Civ since 3) I can say confidently that Civ 7's backlash is nothing new for the franchise. The scale and visibility is what is new to me. Every civ game's new feature (1UPT, Unpacking cities, civ switching) has always met with complaints. Since civ 5 the games have always had a DLC roadmap for the inital year after the games release and that has always met with complaints. People complain that Civ games ship with less features in it's initial release than the previous game did. Civ 6 still has lots of people complaining about it's art style.

You can tell me that those complaints are more valid this time (i.e. DLC is $30 instead of $15; or civ switching is more game changing than anything else), but to pretend it's new is being very historically illiterate. It's just more visible in places other than on civfanatics for the first time.

I think the people who've talked about the massive review and internet cultural change are more likely on the money. My opinion is that Civ 6 was the actual first main stream hit for a civ game. Now that there's a non-niche audience, game discourse culture has come to Civ. Metacritic's user reviews are at 39%. I dunno if I'd say Civ is being review bombed, but the hate is pretty disproportionate to the state of it's release. In terms of features and function it's better than 5 on release, and has way more features than Civ 3. Civ 6 is still the gold standard for features on release, with civ 4 being a close second.

 

[KayAU]

It seems people are still somewhat divided on Civ 5 even after all these years. Yes, I remember it faced a lot of criticism on launch, much of which I would at least consider valid, or even outright agree with. I was one of the people who liked it even in its initial state however. To me, the advances it brought to the table were just far more exciting than the initial problems were problematic. Hexagons, for example, made the map so much more organic. The time of rivers only turning in right angles was gone. Speaking of the map, it now had natural wonders. And city states. I liked how the quantities of resources now mattered. I liked the impressive leader scenes, and how much personality the leaders had. And I loved how different civs now had unique features. There was a time, remember, when civs were different only in name and maybe starting techs, and a later time when each leader just had two traits out of a generic pool of traits. With Civ 5, every civ played differently, a concept which Civ 6 brought even further.

Then came the patches and expansions, which adressed many of the original complaints, and filled in the areas where the game was lacking. Religion, for example, went from being missing in the game, to being the most interesting it had been in any civ game (in my opinion). And finally, came overhaul modpacks like Vox Populi, which I feel is the best Civ experience to date.

It would be great if Civ 7 could have a similar trajectory.

 

[Leyrann]

It seems people are still somewhat divided on Civ 5 even after all these years. Yes, I remember it faced a lot of criticism on launch, much of which I would at least consider valid, or even outright agree with. I was one of the people who liked it even in its initial state however. To me, the advances it brought to the table were just far more exciting than the initial problems were problematic. Hexagons, for example, made the map so much more organic. The time of rivers only turning in right angles was gone. Speaking of the map, it now had natural wonders. And city states. I liked how the quantities of resources now mattered. I liked the impressive leader scenes, and how much personality the leaders had. And I loved how different civs now had unique features. There was a time, remember, when civs were different only in name and maybe starting techs, and a later time when each leader just had two traits out of a generic pool of traits. With Civ 5, every civ played differently, a concept which Civ 6 brought even further.

Then came the patches and expansions, which adressed many of the original complaints, and filled in the areas where the game was lacking. Religion, for example, went from being missing in the game, to being the most interesting it had been in any civ game (in my opinion). And finally, came overhaul modpacks like Vox Populi, which I feel is the best Civ experience to date.

It would be great if Civ 7 could have a similar trajectory.

I guess a major problem with Civ 5 is that all the things it can lay claim to, Civ 6 also has. It has nothing unique going for it, and that causes it to be held back by what it doesn't do right.

Civ 4 lacks all those things you mention compared to the newer games, but it has a more sophisticated tech tree, a better expansion limiting mechanic, stronger AI, more strategic improvement decision-making, et cetera going for it. Meanwhile Civ 5 has... I'm tempted to say leader screens but when I booted the game up last year I wasn't actually all that impressed by them. I can't think of any other positives it can boast that no other Civ game has, though.

 

[stealth_nsk]

you asked for evidence, I provide, show yours now.

and if I report to the number of reviews it's even less than 0.1%

Bro, he is comparing 10 separate terms. It's not a 9v1. It's a 1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1. And woke is decisively the least common.



"It looks like the facts aren't on my side but actually they are bad facts bro, I swear."

You are a conspiracy theorist.

Ok, let me write it once again.

Reviews from anti-woke community could be of several types:
1. Directly complaining about the game being woke, written in English language. We know such post are there, but there are not so many of them.
2. Directly complaining about the game being woke, written in other languages. Those are also there, I've posted a link. I can't say how many of them are out there.
3. Written by people who dislike the game for representation, but not writing it directly. We can't say if they are there or not, but such things were pretty common in other projects targeted by anti-woke community.
4. Similar to previous one, but written by bots. Similar situation, we can't say whether they are there or not.

FAQ:
1. Search for some keywords in first category doesn't anyhow claim categories 3 or 4 aren't there. Those facts are irrelevant.
2. I don't claim categories 3 or 4 are there and how many of them. I claim what could be there and we don't know how many of them are there if any. By formal logic this statement doesn't require proof.
3. Once again, I don't claim they are there. You're calling me "conspiracy theorist" for things I don't say.
4. Before presenting facts, start from formal logic. Could you somehow proof that posts complaining about UI are not written by people who are actually dislike game for "wokeness"? Could you distinguish bot post from human one? If not, you don't know too.
5. I've written all this before, some things twice. Please read before reply. Please read the whole this post before reply.

P.S. From the first post of this thread I identified this as a potential reason, claiming that I don't know if those things are there.

 

[King Flevance]

I generally agree with your post (and looked at the same numbers around a week ago), but it would be better to say 6 months for civ 7, as concrete discussions started last august.
Also the numbers are completely flawed: civ 7 includes the 174k of the ideas & suggestions forums that goes back to 2004 in parts.

So, what we are looking at with civ 7 is something along the lines of 80k posts in 6 months.

The fact that civ 7 is criticized so much, and that it includes more civs and leaders (and thus speculation) certainly leads to many posts. In contrast, I was surprised how "small" the strategy & tips section is, for example.

I appreciate you catching that. I have adjusted the original post to reflect the numbers. I also caught the "New Members" thread goes back to 2005. So that number I adjusted the estimate to be 68.5k for Civ 7.

I am a little shocked at the overall drop in numbers outside of Gen Disc in both 5 and 6 as well.

 

[bbbt]

I dunno that "anti-woke" reviewers actually affect much in popular video games. Not that many people are going to buy and then return a game just to leave a review.

Kingdom Come 2 is sitting at "very positive" and yet that game has the wrath of said crowd because the first one was one of their holy grail and the second has apparently "gone woke".

I can't imagine there would be a lot of people mad about Harriet Tubman who hadn't already bailed from some of the leader choices in Civ 6.

From reviews, I'd say #1 reason for the bad reviews is the UI/bugginess/lack of basic features that were in other civ (auto explore, restart, coop multiplayer, etc.). Every civ has had this problem, but 7 seems worse than most (I think I've had more crashes with 7 in 50 hours than 6 in 15000).

#2 Is specific game mechanics, mostly the ages.

Add in the early March DLC also leaving a negative taste for a lot of folks, you get "early access game with day when DLC money grab wait a year til it's on sale" repeated in a lot of forums.

 

[Krajzen]

Civ 5 most definitely had significant and vocal negativity surrounding it at release. Between the one-unit-per-tile implementation and the game's performance, it was under heavy fire. The difference is that, back then, there wasn't a social media economy (both financial and attention-seeking) thriving on negativity.

Civ5 on release was a DISASTER. But Steam was in its infancy back then, so it was spared reviews it had deserved - I genuinely think it could get even more roasted than civ7. It got beaten up for:
- messed up performance and bugs
- messed up balance (obviously OP policies and units, like early horsemen and liberty tree) (I remember policy trees being rebalanced every patch because every time devs made another one OP and other useless lol)
- very barebone experience when compared with how rich late civ4 was, with the common complaint being fairly accurate observation that there is nothing interactive to do except for building cities and waging war
(no religion, espionage, UN, ideology, archeology, great works, tourism and trade routes)
- truly catastrophic AI, I'm talking "it doesn't know it needs several units to take a city, sends lonely ones on the suicidal charges" or "attacks only with 10 ranged units, obviously can't take a city at all, they all slowly die"
- horrible "diplomacy" with AI being able to and willing to backstab and attack you at any given moment, with literally no way to have any substitute of alliance or stable friendly status, and inexplicably always finding a reason to be hostile

Hence games devolving into the misery of having nothing to do in the barren, unbalanced, crashing game, except fight the entire warhammer 40,000 world of traitorous psychopathic AIs who also make release civ6 AI look like Alexander the Great with their braindead coma level military tactics

Like seriously, I know immediately who had been there in this time by the insistence that civ7 release is some unprecedented situation, early weeks od civ5 on these forums was like a battle of Stalingrad lol, Soren Johnson left Firaxis blaming himself for the game's state and the first Mongolian DLC got changed into FLC as an apology for the state of release

Honestly compared to the utter trainwreck that was civ5 release civ7 is significanty more conductive to optimism because far less of its fundamental mechanics are roasted by the playerbase

 

[user746383]

A potential reason that you don’t actually know is there or not but is definitely a factor in the low user reviews? Come on man..

 

[kaspergm]

I guess a major problem with Civ 5 is that all the things it can lay claim to, Civ 6 also has. It has nothing unique going for it, and that causes it to be held back by what it doesn't do right.

While that is true if you only look at whether the feature is there or not, there are features that were better designed in Civ5 than in Civ6 - World Congress being the most obvious example. Civ5's policy trees was also a vastly superior system to the Civ6's policy cards imo. And finally - and I know not many people share this opinion - I feel Civ6 goes too far in making each civ unique, in the sense that I feel it often shoe-horns you into a very specific play style, where I think Civ5's civilizations were often more open in their design.

 

[AD1730]

I guess a major problem with Civ 5 is that all the things it can lay claim to, Civ 6 also has. It has nothing unique going for it, and that causes it to be held back by what it doesn't do right.

Civ 4 lacks all those things you mention compared to the newer games, but it has a more sophisticated tech tree, a better expansion limiting mechanic, stronger AI, more strategic improvement decision-making, et cetera going for it. Meanwhile Civ 5 has... I'm tempted to say leader screens but when I booted the game up last year I wasn't actually all that impressed by them. I can't think of any other positives it can boast that no other Civ game has, though.

For me, I'm a Civ 5 person because I generally don't like any of Civ 6's additions to the game. I'm actually struggling to think of a single thing that Civ 6 added that I liked. I found most of Civ 6's additions to simply be more complexity for the sake of complexity rather than actually improving gameplay. I like districts to an extent in theory, but not in how they were executed.