Gamers – 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.

Wild West Pioneers: City Skylines meets the Wild West

Wild West Pioneers is a city builder game with a focus on resource gather set in the Western Expansion phase of the Old West in America.

Here are my ideas for the game.

1. Outlaws who harass the town

I think that many city builders are in two camps. The cozy ones and the ones where there is some outside pressure. The Caesar Series generally was based on having some pressure on the player while the SimCity series more of a cozy game.

Wild West Pioneers needs to have outlaws and their gangs running around in random events. These events should be based on multiple mechanics in the game. I think it would make the game more dyanmic and interesting. Many cozy games end up being chores and boring simply because the player is just looking at graphs and charts here.

2. More than just resources

One of the issues that I have with city builders in our age is that many of them focus too much on resource gathering here. There needs to be a focus on character not just looking at objects on a screen.

This is one issue that I have had with some of the Paradox games. They tend to be too focused on the charts instead of the characters and the story. City Skylines tends to have this issue also where the game is simply too clean and too much of a movie set. I want to see the life of the town, not just collect resources. Such a gameplay loop is more of something you see in the RTS genre, where base building is more important than the personality of the units or structures.

3. Every citizen needs to be unique

One thing that I want to see in the games is that there is a sense that every person in your town is unique. Considering that Wild West Pioneers is dealing with small towns, this should be something the engine can handle here. Virginia City and Carson City were rather modest but had huge personalities that one even struggles to find in some medium sized cities in our age now.

I think that the personality system is really important at cultivating replayablity so players have a willingness to spend more time exploring the game. Too many games tend to have shallow gameplay. Players want to not have work but to have an experience that they can remember. Video games are not meant to be jobs and the developer should remember that there.

4. Mayor system has to matter in the game

I have recently heard that the game is going to have mayors that you can choose. This mechanic should mean something in here. Make them have unique personalities and have different political parties so that the game is more unique in every playthrough.

5. Elections

I think that having elections in this game would give some more flavor to your towns. While I believe that the game will probably add more features in DLCs if it is successful in here, having elections would help make these playthroughs more dynamic and it bring it into line what players want now. With the size of these cities being smaller than most city builders, I think that this should be appropriate for this game.

6. Trains need to play an important role

In many parts of the USA, small towns were supported by a new technology, railways. Cheyenne, Wyoming began as a railway town, so did many other places. The game has to be able to capture this change and vibrancy of the trains steaming into these small towns. The steam train has been a technology that capture the imaginations of that age and they are prefect visual aspects of a video game which can show off the power of an engine.

Why I switched from Nvidia GeForce Now to Amazon Luna

Game Streaming is still a work in progress and has struggled to truly take off in the way that video streaming did slowly with RealPlayer and then solidifying with YouTube and Netflix.

The issue with Game Streaming vs Video Streaming

Video streaming is an easier concept to understand for most people. Simply have video delivered by digital information transmissions rather than analog signals. Even with the analog televisions, it is a simple concept. You turn on the television and switch to a channel which receives a signal. In many ways, it is still magical experience. You have a screen which puts people in a box and you hear their voices and see their movements. However, it is a concept which is simple to explain to the ordinary customers, especially in an age where tinkering isn’t a popular in our nation.

Video Games have been on the sidelines for many years, unable to break out its role as the strange cousin of the realizable standbys of television and earlier, radio shows. Another issue is that video games are not movies. They are interactive experiences which separates them from movies and puts them in the same place as the circus or sports. This comparison may make some gamers have an inferiority complex as they want to constantly have video games be taken seriously. Even with all the great stories, video games are still seen as a product of immature people even though many of the people making those statements belong to industries that exploit video games for content to make their movies and shows.

The way to change this is Game Streaming.

However, streaming a video game isn’t the same as streaming a movie. The difference in bandwidth is immense and video games began largely as physical objects, now mostly digital and now there needs to be a reliable to stream a video game from a server without requiring downloads or physical means. While some gamers may prefer physical copies, which I can agree with, most people will be satisfied with having a digital copy. However, the issue of storage is coming back one again. On my computer, I can only fit so many games and these huge games are making it tough to enjoy a variety of games, leaving me to play really old games or a single release. Such a situation leads players to concentrate their attention onto a few games or to not even pay attention to their backlog at all, making it tough for independents to make an impact on the industry when players all play the same game.

Game streaming can help bring gamers of all stripes together. Nvidia’s Geforce Now is a great compromise, allowing for a much larger library of games to be played as you have just add your game library and you can stream tons of games that would otherwise be unplayable on her computer. I have already explained how GeForce Now is a great service. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to play the Remastered version of the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

However, I had to switch to Amazon Luna.

Why?

Simply because it’s already bundled with my Prime Subscription. That helps in reducing the cost of the service. With Nvidia GeForce Now, the premium option (the best option) costs $19.99 and it has the best graphics chips in the servers. However, it is not worth the price right now. You have to buy the games separately and this adds to the cost. Some games on GeForce Now are free to play games but other game services have free to play games, so this is not as exclusive or as important as it seems here.

Amazon Luna has less games, but it is already bundled with my prime subscription and that is very important. I do not have to add anymore subscriptions to my account here.

Amazon also provides a Premium subscription with more games which costs more but bundling it with the Prime account is a great move on their part here. They also have other premium subscription choices to link up with other stores. The real star of the show which made me use the service was the inclusion of Skyrim in the service. My steam copy of Skyrim was getting glitchy on my computer and I needed another way to play this classic game.

Skyrim on Amazon Luna plays well and that is all I really needed. My laptop often overheats when playing a game installed on the machine, so I needed a virtual way of passing that issue.

Nvidia GeForce Now is a great service, but I needed to switch as it fits with my budget right now. Battlefield 6 was the main reason why I was paying for the service. As Battlefield 6 has many hackers and issues at the moment, I am going to wait and let the people who work on the game to smooth out any problems so that the gameplay experience is more enjoyable for me and other users.

Amazon Luna is probably the best game streaming service right now if one wants to just play and not have to worry about space on their computers. There is a limitation in games available but that if that really worries you, there are other premium additions that you can add to the service. Many people already have a prime subscription as one can clearly see with all the Amazon vehicles on a daily basis moving around America’s cities and communities. It is worth the money and I recommend that people subscribe to Amazon Luna if they want a way to stream without taking space.

It is also a great way to expose more people to gaming as it can be kind of an elitist space, but game streaming makes more available to those who wish to enter this incredible cyberspace of play and entertainment. The video game industry has great potential, and we need to be able to expand the culture of gaming beyond what we have seen before here. Being able to just pick up and play will bring in new people and maybe ideas so that gaming can start to innovate once again and bring some much-needed creativity into America and the gaming community.