What are your pros/cons/questions after watching the previews?

[Riconatic]

Watching Boesthius' new review video, and it turns out Quick Movement and Quick Combat will not be present at launch. Genuinely unbelievable

There is no need to wait (usually) for unit movement to finish. Just move on.

 

[ThERat]

I have a real difficulty to spot units due to the endless clutter. Might be fine early in the game, but there was this Mabozir video in the last age, I couldnt make out the units at all, it was all a dark soup of stuff

 

[Skwink]

I’ve read on Reddit that there are NO hot keys, and players can’t pan the map using arrow keys.

This alone is almost a dealbreaker to me if true.

 

[Skojardu]

Overall I feel like the game is as revolutionary as Civ5 was. Age switching, new building improvements approach, new resource system and army commanders are a lot. On one hand it's great, on the other hand I have a feeling Firaxis didn't have enough time to look at all potential issues with all this system. I don't expect a disastrous launch of Civ5 - Firaxis clearly have more development power now, but I have a feeling we'll need some significant time before all tough edges will be polished.

I don't remember how awful or buggy previous Civ releases were, but 2K isn't a scrappy indie developer; they should have included Quality of Life mechanics, and integrated a Rosetta Stone so you can at least paint your forcibly switched nation into its new implicit language to get into the vibe of the multi kulti paradigm of this new release. It is almost insulting you could buy an advance copy of the game for nearly twice its normal price to get a visually jarring fog of war with randomly highlighted gold tiles but clearly missing functionality. (Fog of War doesn't need bling!} It is frankly sloppy that they rely on modders to buff their game into a usable program. They focused on the overall look (sans UI) to sell the game, and were rewarded by many advance orders. For shame, if I wanted to see artwork, I'd go to my local art museum.

 

[gdr_willter]

I don't remember how awful or buggy previous Civ releases were, but 2K isn't a scrappy indie developer; they should have included Quality of Life mechanics, and integrated a Rosetta Stone so you can at least paint your forcibly switched nation into its new implicit language to get into the vibe of the multi kulti paradigm of this new release. It is almost insulting you could buy an advance copy of the game for nearly twice its normal price to get a visually jarring fog of war with randomly highlighted gold tiles but clearly missing functionality. (Fog of War doesn't need bling!} It is frankly sloppy that they rely on modders to buff their game into a usable program. They focused on the overall look (sans UI) to sell the game, and were rewarded by many advance orders. For shame, if I wanted to see artwork, I'd go to my local art museum.

You know, usually the indie developers can pay more time and effort to complete their masterpiece - while major studios are forced to hurry their business model.

 

[Mr Jon of Cheam]

What I am most positive about is that the endgame looks reasonably tight, without noticeably more micro than early ages, and the game ends when it still feels like the civs are growing, with only more crowded areas having cities running up over every last tile.

Doesn’t have civ6’s long and/or tedious victory conditions, doesnt have HK’s endless mono-districts and long but uninteresting late-game sieges, doesn’t have millennia’s ballooning economy micro to find anywhere for anyone to work.

I’m sure some games will feel like they peak before modern, and getting a good AI setting to create pressure at the end will take some trial and error and have a lot of variability (but isn’t that the point), but the core of the game looks like something that can be built on, as long as that is not more more and features (a la NFP) the AI is categorically unable to do.

Good to hear, I haven't watched much modern content yet. Slightly concerned by the reported lag and load times but hopefully it is bearable.

Struggling to articulate how I feel after watching a lot of the reviews. It seems to me that the foundations are there for something truly fantastic, and they've got a lot of things right already, but it's lacking polish, performance, and basic functionality at the moment.

I expected this but it's somehow more frustrating when I see so much potential, and when I feel so positive about the changes they're trying to make. I know not everyone agrees but I think the series really needed a proper shakeup, the old formula was getting stale, and I remain so hyped on this basis alone. They've got so many of the big things right, but the sheer scale of odd UI problems and missing QoL features is crazy.

 

[evonannoredars]

I expected this but it's somehow more frustrating when I see so much potential, and when I feel so positive about the changes they're trying to make. I know not everyone agrees but I think the series really needed a proper shakeup, the old formula was getting stale, and I remain so hyped on this basis alone. They've got so many of the big things right, but the sheer scale of odd UI problems and missing QoL features is crazy.

Exactly my sentiment. The game looks fun and I'm excited to try all the major changes, but I'm nervous how much the UI issues will bother me.
I've been obsessed enough about learning about this game that missing civilopedia information and similar stuff hopefully won't affect me too much, although I really hope that sort of stuff gets improved either before or really soon after the 11th for the sake of the new non-civ-fanatic players.

 

[UWHabs]

Exactly my sentiment. The game looks fun and I'm excited to try all the major changes, but I'm nervous how much the UI issues will bother me.
I've been obsessed enough about learning about this game that missing civilopedia information and similar stuff hopefully won't affect me too much, although I really hope that sort of stuff gets improved either before or really soon after the 11th for the sake of the new non-civ-fanatic players.

Yeah, I'm sure the devs probably didn't anticipate getting quite as much negative feedback on the UI as they did, and probably hoped that the new feature set would carry the day.

The good in this is that the stuff that's lacking and missing are probably the easiest areas to fix. Like, if the core game mechanics like civ switching, leader combos, age switching, etc... were completely and horribly broken, I'd be very worried. But from all the sounds of it, those are actually in pretty good shape. Even the balance there isn't necessarily game-breaking so far (although once they get 1000x the number of players on it starting tomorrow, I'm sure some exploits will make their way out.

 

[Seek]

The older I get the more I realize it’s about managing one’s own expectations.

Every civ game has released in a pretty janky state, it’s totally to be expected. Comparatively, Civ 7 actually seems quite polished in a number of ways (balance, stability, overall aesthetics). Firaxis has been more ambitious with this game in many ways (civ uniques, multiplatform capability), so having a few QoL things be set by until after release is to be expected and not a big deal to me. Civ 6 didn’t have city naming at release iirc, either..

Expecting a game to be “done” at release in 2025 is unrealistic at best. Literally every game these days is released with shortcomings and the expectation of continued future development (for a dev to not would be tantamount to suicide). Even Baldur’s Gate 3, widely recognized as being the gold standard having a great, polished 1.0 release, and who put off release for years “until it was ready”, had a fairly janky act 3 for months, and the game is still getting QoL additions. Firaxis (2k is the publisher ) is a trustworthy developer who we can expect to fix these minor issues that are outstanding.

I’m not one to give much credence to reviews when we can see hundreds of hours of gameplay already. The game looks fun to me, and every YouTuber who I know and trust has said the core game is really good, despite a few niggles. In fact, most of the gameplay concerns I had a few months ago have been allayed even without having played. I think the UI issues are a molehill being made into a mountain.. Obviously if someone has a major issue with one of the core design tenets like civ switching then that may be a deal breaker, but they can’t simultaneously be bold and please everyone - so that’s to be expected.

TLDR, the game looks really good to me, and I’m psyched to play tomorrow. It’s not perfect but I wasn’t expecting it to be. It will get developed.

 

[joeycitation]

I think my overall impression is that the overhaul of basic gameplay would be really cool and ambitious for a primary game MODE that could really plausibly become the "standard" mode for most players. And it couldve been promoted as such pretty uncontroversionally. But as the SOLE game mode, to the exclusion of the tried and true civ formula of 1 leader/1 civ progressing through the ages, it has way too many unresolved problems in the basic gameplay loop being fun/satisfying to be a likely success at release (at least with the core fanbase, which in the case of civ series is actually a very sizable amount of people).

But that's pure speculation. I actually may be able to play soon after release to see for myself, as a couple friends want to play together and are willing to gift a copy in spite of my hesitance to buy, lol.