Even this won’t be enough. Each age is still basically a disruptive reset of the game.
It’s interesting looking at metacritolic where formal reviews give the game a score of 79 out of 100, while the player score is 3.7 out of 10, and the Steam score is 49% positive / 51% negative.
A great example of what bullshit much of the gaming press spouts. People will have spent their hard earned money on this trash based on nonsense reviews.
Now we have this constant stream of “news” from the devs / publisher about how they’re going to fix their broken game.
Civ Vii is fundamentally a broken game, released by a big publisher to be a DLC machine like it’s predecessors. But unlike Civ VI, or games like Cybperunk 2077 or No Man’s Sky, it is fundamentally broken as a design. This isn’t going to be redeemed with patches and content updates like those other games; it needs to be fundamentally be rebuolt. It’s unlikely the publisher will have the patience or willingness to fund that.
I think once we get through this financial year the publisher will decide to cut it’s losses, release a couple of crappy DLCs next year rather than actually fix the game and possibly even move on to Civ 8. They’ll talk a lot about how they listened to gamers for Civ 8 - glossing over the money gamers have wasted on this shit fest.
I have yet to play Civ7, Civ4 and Civ5 work fine for me and I am not bored of them (there are also a lot of total conversation mods to play if I am looking to spice things up).
If anything I need to start playing Civ6 (only have 40 hours which is nothing compared to earlier releases).
I am honestly surprised they have a mere 3.7/10 on metacritic.
A great example of what bullshit much of the gaming press spouts. People will have spent their hard earned money on this trash based on nonsense reviews.
Individual reviews for sequels are useless, across the board now.
What we need is dual reviews. One player that had never played the franchise before, and another that has. And the more beloved or large a franchise is, the more involved that second review needs to be.
Because sometimes new players coming in to beloved franchise have a better time because they don’t have preconceived not goons of what the game “should be”.
Just because something is changed, that doesn’t make it inherently worse. Fans are the worst critics, across the board in every type of media. While they sometimes have valid criticism, they also often don’t.
Other times, changes are objectively bad, for both new and existing players. The only way to really know is to get both perspectives. And that’s hard to figure out looking at random reviews on various sites. The reviewers don’t always provide their previous experiences for context very well.
A great example of what bullshit much of the gaming press spouts.
I imagine, the problem is mainly that they need to publish review scores after one or two weeks of playtesting. How such game mechanics feel long-term is hard to judge in that timeframe.
Wasn’t the issue more that unique buildings from your civ weren’t being carried through your ages?
It’s pretty funny to me that Humankind was able to make this mechanic work, and then Firaxis stole it so poorly that they’ve had to throw it out.
It seems pretty common for Civ to borrow mechanics from games and not implement them too well lol.
Wait…
It wasn’t even an option?
I thought it was just an option to switch, but if it forced you to switch every age, no wonder everyone hated it.
I wish they’d actually find what the problem with the mechanic was, instead of throwing it out altogether. The previous Civs already do the one-civ through the ages thing already so people can already play those. I don’t even think it’s that mechanic which was the problem, rather than the rushed state of the game which has impact in the UI and its balance.
Called it the moment they announced it - you can’t reset the game progress midway and have it still feel good. It’s too far of a departure from the ”one more turn” formula that makes Civ addictive.
Once again, AAA studios prove they do not understand the fundamentals. Building a custom civilization composed of multiple micro-factions that rose to power and influenced the empire in different ways was not the problem. The problem was every single fucking building turning OFF 6 turns after I finally finished the damn thing.
The Age system is the only thing that has made me curious to try the game at all, so it’s very strange to see them backing away from it. The main reason I haven’t played a Civ game since 4 is because I haven’t felt like there was a strong reason to buy a new game instead of just playing another round of 4. The Age thing is at least different enough to be interesting.
By the way, Unciv is an open-source reimplementation of Civ5, well, except that it has 2D pixel art graphics.
I’m not deep enough into Civ5 to be able to judge e.g. the quality of the AI or whatever (I remember it being somewhat disappointing to me in both games), but yeah, in terms of actual gameplay mechanics, it’s pretty comparable.
And the low-res graphics are actually kind of cool, since you can just leave it running in the background, or also play it on your phone without the battery draining too much.
I didn’t play much of 6 (I did not like the art style), and skipped 7 thus far since 4 and 5 fill my civ fix.
But I am sorry, what the hell did they do? Someone please explain
I love how this comment section is largely “I’ve never played Civ 7.”
That says a lot.
I haven’t played 7 either. Frankly, it’s behind other grand strategy games in my backlog queue (Age of Wonder, Distant Worlds 2, some others), so I probably never will. Why would I, when I can load up a 4/5 total conversion, and 7 doesn’t offer more of what I’d want, like bigger scale or ‘smarter’ AI?
I’d take an optimized/expanded 4/5 over it.
…It feels like Firaxis is in trouble without a shake-up.
Didn’t buy because of this functionality. Found Old World and got my “civ fix” there instead.
(Not saying they’re exactly the same, but when you’re looking for something new … )
