Gameplay ideas – My Game Reviews

Why Civilization VII is not a success in 2026

Civilization VII is going to be one year old this week, and it is clear that the game is struggling to compete with the fifteen-year-old Civilization V and also its immediate predecessor, Civilization VI. This is clear sign of a game that has not met the expectations of the fans of the series and the casual audience that should have been flocking to this game which had multimillion dollar marketing and a pedigree behind it. This is a sign that the series in its current trajectory has played itself out and needs to return to what makes Civilization great. It needs to be an experience of constructing a breathing world in an history sandbox.

The developers didn’t even bother to have England as a civilization on launch. They were putting content behind walls and making you, the consumer pay more for at best a mediocre game. This microtransaction method is flying in the face of the fact we used to get a full game on launch with the previous titles. They sold England as an microtransaction like a piece of scrap to make more money on a project which was lacking energy and any sort of vision that went beyond deconstructing their own game.

I have spoken a lot about the issues of Civilization VII and why it is inferior to the previous games:

Another issue that I haven’t really spoken about is the need for competition. Civilization VII’s failure can be seen as the inevitable decadent phase of every human endeavor. The soul of humans extends to the objects we make here.

Civilization VII was taking the fans for granted in a sense. It is decadent style over the shallow substance.

Music is great and graphics are good, but that cannot sell a game anymore like in the past. You need to have good gameplay, especially if you want players to stay around in here.

Civilization VII is basically 3 mini games in one. The game deliberately takes away choice from the player. You reset every single age, and I find such a mechanic not something that really fits with Civilization. The blobbing issue with players becoming too powerful was just a part of the game. The developers were concerned about that too much. Civilization is not a game that is meant to be solved but experienced holistically. The approach they took to fix this issue was taking away the soul of Civilization. These games are sandboxes not linear experiences with some flexibility but one is aware that these games want to focus on the structure of that game.

Civilization games tend to be more focused on making a world rather than just playing a game. That is why the atmosphere of the Civilization games is really important. Civilization II, while an ancient game now, had FMV(Full Motion Video) of actors as the advisors. That creates character and somehow they have taken it out of the recent games. It is too much of a board game. While that may appeal to mostly console gamers, the PC genre is where the true spirit of the Civilization series is. They made a choice of porting it consoles just to squeeze out more money and that did not help the game.

Why is that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is still doing well on Steam Charts a year into the game been on Steam? It’s because the game appealed to its audience, regardless of the creative choices. They kept the spirit of the original game alive in the sequel and improved upon its core gameplay mechanics. When you look at the voice actors in the behind-the-scenes videos or promotions, they seem to be putting energy into the project. Caring about a paycheck isn’t enough, you need to impart your own personal spirit into whatever project you are working on. Civilization VII has only a small amount of that in there, mostly in the music in my opinion. Everything else is pedestrian in its quality in comparison to the previous games.

Civilization VII was looking for an audience which doesn’t really care about Civilization. That’s why the game is struggling to compete with the older civilization games.

The game needed real competition. The video industry has been clustering around the same developers who have gotten comfy having no one to challenge them. Civilization VI began showing this complacency and Civilization VII shows that the series needs to be made anew.

To make a new civilization game, the developers need to return to the roots, and that means Civilization I. Make it simple but complex enough for the modern age of gaming. They need to remove the board game mentality and leave that for an offshoot here. would have given us a real Civilization game.

The important thing is that they need to appeal to the fans and expand their audience without sacrificing the spirit of the original games. Simplicity in video games is really though now with Unreal Engine being so popular but there is a hunger for it which is different from previous gaming generations. People want style not photorealism and I think that bringing that back to Civilization would help to revitalize the Civilization series and return the approval of the fans and casual audiences.

Civilization 7 is the worst game in the series.

Civilization 7 is the worst game in the series. There are some who want to say that it has new ideas and not recycled ideas. I am guessing these are casual gamers or people who are easily swayed by marketing because this is basically SimCity Societies from 2007 in a Civ Game.

The issue is that the players who played the older games before Civ V have been seeing the changes and that it is becoming very much like Angry Birds and other forgotten mobile games, just a brand to put on mediocre gameplay and hide it with marketing.

The UI is terrible and when compared to Civ 1, it shows the generational changes and the maliase we are currently in this culture.

The Civ switching was a concern of mine earlier on and I see that Fraxis was lazy and put in a bunch of leaders who are not leaders but Great People.

The game does not have England in the game but hides behind a DLC and puts in a person, Ada Lovelace, who was not a political leader, phlisophical, or spiritual leader in any sense. The leader of England should be a King or Prime Minister. I would recommend King Charles II of the Restoration Era.

The Shawnee were put in the game for politics and yet Confucius can rule them. Do not use the CIV has never been about history. It has a tech tree which contains many of the most important technologies in human history. This is not a very good argument to using here.

The crisis system is lazy and does not provide context for what is happening. Having every Civ move into the same age is silly and makes the game too easy. There needs to be consquences to not being able to catch up in tech or economics. Having a reset does not make the game challenging. The Civ Switching doesn’t even stop the snowballing that they say they wanted to not have.

It is clear that the game has increasingly become attached to politics in America more and not just a game about history.

The map generation is terrible and worse than 20 year old games.

The positive reviews are people who generally enjoy simpler, easier games. While Microsoft is no saint of a company, they have made AOE 4 into a game that appeals to casuals and power users. They even encourage people to improve their tactics while also being a great platform for teaching history about multiple cultures, without being myopic about it.

Civilization 7 is the worst in the series. Civilization V was a strange experiment on launch but they did not railroad the player into 3 mini games.

Starfield and Vehicles: Pros and Cons

In the above image, a vehicle in Starfield is clearly visible. I saw this vehicle in one of the random settlements that appear in the game. It is clear that we can have vehicles in Starfield, but should they just be props in the game or should they be something more? That is the question here in this entry.

The issue that many people have with Starfield is that the game does not have vehicles that the player can use. This has been a sticking point for many players, especially those on Steam, who are a very active minority who are constantly trying to critique this game. Those who are more generous to the game tend to congregate on Reddit. While there are many complaints that abound about this game, it is clear that the game has one particular issue that people have been clamoring about for many months. That issue is the inclusion of ground vehicles into the game. As of right now, it seems the game is simply too big for one player to handle. This is of course, the complaints of a certain group of players, who want the game to be more like Skyrim. However, Starfield is a new game and people should respect that.

The man behind the game, Todd Howard, was probably right in saying that they didn’t need ground vehicles in the game. The game is just not designed in that way. Currently, a lot of planets in Starfield have tons of foliage in them. This is great aspect of Starfield and truly separates it from older games. The older games usually had variations on a color, rather than being planets with multiple biomes. The inclusion of multiple regions on these planets makes them more interesting and allow for great amounts of player interaction with those areas. However, many players have been complaining that these procedurally generated planets are simply too big in size.

The issue of size when it comes to the vehicle question in Starfield is an interesting one. We have a game that more variety in its environment than most video games on the market. You can have snowy forests and also tropical ones. There are also barren planets that are mostly one biome and others that have incredible savannas and gorgeous coastlines. However, Starfield is something of a victim of what is known in the video game industry as feature creep. It seems that Bethesda was more interested in throwing everything at this game than being conservative and making a more traditional game. Of course, this is the studio that made The Elder Scrolls Arena in 1994; they are known for being experimental and ambitious. I believe that makes Starfield a truly unique game. It is not just trying to be a traditional game but something that you truly live in as another character.

However, that means playability is an issue with those who just want an experience that does not require tons of effort and investment.

I think that the main issue with vehicles in Starfield is that the planets are largely made by computer not the human. The plants, animals, and buildings were all made by human hands, but the way that they are represented in the world is done by the computer. To have vehicles in Starfield would mean that the game would have to change the way that environments are made in the game. The game’s environments are not built around having vehicles in the game. There are tons of areas on Jemison for example, that are full of foliage, and I believe the team at Bethesda was not going to spend time trying to program many physics into this game. The vehicles that would be in this game would collide with these trees and even animals and that takes a lot of time to program correctly. They obviously wouldn’t want the vehicles clipping through the environment as this game is pretty high budget. With this game already costing tens of millions of dollars, it is not surprising to me that they decided not to include them. They already were putting many features into the game. Putting in vehicles would have probably put a great strain on their resources.

However, incorporating vehicles would be quite a task in this game that the player uses because they would have to redesign the game and its structure. When you look at the way in which Starfield was marketed to gamers, it is clear that the game was meant to be used by people who are walking on the planets not using vehicles to drive around in the game. A great comparison to make with regards to this issue is Mass Effect, especially the original game, this game, which was made in the mid 2000s by BioWare, and then released out onto consoles in 2007 is one of the most influential science-fiction video games. However, Mass Effect was always advertising the game as something that was made to use the Mako vehicle. This vehicle was highly prominent in how Mass Effect was presented to the public. While the player can walk on these planets, it isn’t the main aspect of how these planets are supposed to be experienced in the game. This way of experiencing planets in Mass Effect would remain consistent throughout the series all the way up to Mass Effect: Andromeda, which did see a change towards a more Starfield style gameplay but was still heavily reliant on the way how it was done in previous games.

Starfield is probably going to have vehicles included in the game at some point. However, I expect that their use will not as freewheeling as one would led to believe. Of course, there will be modders who are going to try their hand at loosening some of the restrictions and make it more like a No Man Sky type game. There are already mods that have allowed for players to free roaming space travel as well moving ships across planets. I believe that inclusion of vehicles will probably stick out like a sore thumb, but I expect that the people making the game will probably do a competent job at trying to implement it into the game. While it may not be the most useful feature in the game, I think that it would add some complexity and help to alleviate some of the issues that players have with this game.