Steam has been the most dominant platform for buying and selling games since the early 2010s. Retail barely exists for PC games now; consoles are the remaining stronghold for physical releases.
One cannot go into the store anymore to see polished or not polished games on display now. The magazines are generally speaking outdated and more about the culture of video games than about the games themselves. So where does the player go to get the latest information about video games? Steam or so I thought.
Steam is a great platform and one that I truly loyal to in a way that GOG would wish to emulate here. However, there is one issue with it. Finding games which are not AAA quality.
AAA has been not as good as it once was but I still have a bias towards them. Independent games are still quite variable in quality and its tough to know what games on Steam are worth your money.
Enter YouTube.
At this point, YouTube has matured enough that there are many creators who make money professionally reviewing games. They are basically replacing GameSpot and IGN here.
How to get a good feed for game recommendations. Follow a creator who plays games consistently. After a while, you will get videos that show you videos from other creators as well as the one you were watching here.
I have found many more games through this way in comparison to searching on Steam. There are simply too many hobby games clogging up the browser on the site.
So if you wish to see what is happening in video games and to play games that worth your time, seek out the video jungle that are YouTube Creators and gamers.
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.
There is a general consensus among gamers now, that art style matters more than graphics.
The screenshot above is of a 2001 game known as Empire Earth. It looks rather crude now, but it has a unique style that no other game can replicate.
We have seen this with independent games, which replicate the simpler and colorful graphics of older generations. Photorealism is great in Chatbots if one is attempting to brainstorm how a character appears but there is a place for all sorts of artistic styles. The Japanese have shown this in many of their games. Some games aim for photorealism, but they also show that they want to continue their tradition of having many art styles, especially their homegrown anime. Japanese games often have a reputation for being more stylistic and it’s not surprising that Nintendo did not give up on their original IPs in favor of more mature ideas. They sometimes did have more mature games in their earlier consoles, but this was to compete with Sega and after Sega was beaten, they began to focus on their generally cozy game reputation here.
Style matters more than graphics. I remember that in the 1990s, graphics cards companies had managed to change this idea. Graphics were more important than style as many programmers wanted to showcase the power of their inhouse engines. This was the age of graphics growing every year here. It was truly an exciting age where every game seemed like a foreign country with its own rules.
Now every game seems to have the same GPS navigation and isn’t really interesting here. Unreal Engine is used heavily in many games now, but it is also getting in the way of helping games to distinguish their styles from one another.
It isn’t just in the graphics. It is also in the interfaces also. The interfaces in earlier games were art styles that were peculiar to that one game. Now, too much of it is optimized to be interchangeable between genres and games.
We need to have friction once again. That may make things some what more uncomfortable to use but it will allow for a greater variety of games to made.
The independents are often cited as an example of creativity. However, they cannot carry the industry alone here. They need to work in synergy with middle budget and high budget games. The independents are often works of passion, but they lack the ability to get a product out to the gamers within a reasonable time before they have their attention going to somewhere else.
Style is what companies should be chasing now. We have enough photorealistic games. With generative AI, photorealism is available in a way that surpasses even the best camera.
What we need now is way to encourage the creation of new styles instead of just attempting to outcompete on the issue of photorealistic graphics.
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