Tag: Civilization 7

Why Civilization VII is a terrible game: Civilization VII should have been a PC-Centric Game

Civilization VI is better than Civilization VII because it is for PC Gamers and its shows in the terrain and size of maps.
A warrior unit exploring a diverse terrain in Civilization VII, featuring plains, hills, and water.

Civilization VII is continuing to fall in obscurity on Steam. The company, Firaxis Games is still living in a reality where they believe that the game is successful. However, it seems that they are more interested in pushing with their multiplatform games which are not selling on the charts. This inability to think critically about their game is why the game is doing so poorly with gamers. Civilization V is currently ahead of the game consistently now. Why is this? Simply because it is not a PC centric game.

Being a PC centric game makes sense for Civilization. When they announced this game, I was suspecting that the quality would suffer. I was right and I should have been more careful here. Civilization VII doesn’t even respect its title, its not about civilization but about city states. PC-centric games tend to be big in scale not just tiny mobile games. That is what Civilization VII is missing.

I think that we should understand what it means that the game is on all these platforms here. It means that the team is wasting their time trying to milk the game for all its worth and not trying to build something sustainable.

I honestly believe that Civilization VII is going to be dark age of the Civilization games.

It isn’t selling well, and it does not have big player base on Steam. Civilization VI is already ahead of it.

Civilization VII should be made for PC gamers and then they could move towards console games.

Console games have their own territory and PC games have theirs. The obsession with putting the game on Meta’s VR systems is just a sign of a company that isn’t serious about the game.

They no longer seem to care about their player base and just want to hide behind videos and screenshots.

It would be better if someone else would make Civilization from now on, because they are not doing a good job with it.

Civilization VI will still be the Emperor, while Civilization VII will be sulking in the shadows as a game that will be obscurity and a lesson in that game studio’s reputation depends on the gamers.

Civilization VII is a game without a soul or passion.

Creating video games is tough. Being a programmer in the modern industry is like walking on knives. You have so many obstacles that are getting in the way and rewards are either great success or a failure which prevents from really enjoying the act of making games. Unlike other programmers, who tend to be rather focused on dry ideas and concepts, programmers are artists not accountants. This means that they have a creative spark in them.

That creative spark in a company is difficult to maintain. Civilization VII represents a series that is increasingly become more casual and not for the original group of fans who kept it going in the 1990s up until the release of Civilization V in 2010.

Civilization V was seen by many to be a downgrade from Civilization IV. Some have said that Civilization VI is a reaction to Civilization V while trying to fuse Civ V and IV in one cohesive whole.

However, it is clear that Civilization VII was a reaction aganist such compromise.

The team on this game seemed to be more interested in change than in continuity.

However, they did not even seem to put enough effort to make the change worthwhile. It is not even competent enough in order to keep the interest of players. Right now, Civilization VI is ahead of Civilization VII.

The early 2010s Civilization V, is still able to garner many players and is not far behind in player counts when comparing Civilization VII.

Creativity without spark is simply being a person on an assembly line who makes competent pieces that fit into a grander whole. This game is not able to convey that to player.

Civilization VII is a game without a soul or passion. It is clear the video game industry is clearly rusting and it is going to take new thinking to get out of this rut it is in.

Civilization VII does not get it audience.

Civilization 7 is a game that seems to forget what made the previous games, in spite of their changes, worthwhile to play. By making us switch our civilizations in three mini games, the game no longer has the same gameplay loop which has gave rise to the phrase, “One More Turn”. It is this phrase which gave Civilization such staying power that many other games do not have. This is why Civilization has been so successful for so long and yet it seems failure has finally overtaken the mighty Civilization series.

Civilization VII’s peak Steam player count has stagnated under 100,000 while Civilization VI was around 162,000. This is a clear sign that Civilization VI was in better shape than Civilization VII at the same time of its release.

We also have to understand that Steam had a smaller userbase in 2016. While it was much bigger than in 2010, when Civilization V was released, it was still before the Coronavirus hit the industry and would be affecting many work flows in companies. Such delays were causing quality dips in many games, and we can clearly see that with Civilization VII.

However, it seems that in this time, companies are more willing to hide the incompetent nature of their jobs on a game. Firaxis Games, which used to be making incredible games, were now spending their time trying to make a political instrument, which one could see creeping in since Civilization V.

However, in Civilization V, this political activism is largely kept to the sidelines, largely in its manual, which talks about environmentalism.

By Civilization VI, it seemed that they decided to hide activism in more subtle ways, such as warmongering penalties, but Civ 6 seemed to be more of a return to form as the game did not explicitly attempt to demean European civilization.

Civilization 7 basically has India and China have three civilizations for each of the three mini games. England wasn’t even added until the latest patch and they did not even have the right leader for it. Choosing Ada Lovelace is not the right approach as he was not even a political leader in England at that time. Victoria was used in Civilization VI so another leader that could have been used could have been King Edward VII or King George V, however, they chose a woman wasn’t even influencing political events in the country in that age.

Civilization VII does not understand that its audience is largely male and is highly engaged in learning about history. Casual fans are not who make this franchise profitable in the eyes of the corporate people. It is the hardcore fans, who are a tough group but are the ones who support the series in a way that casual fans are not interested in the same way; they view Civilization as a means of recreation but do not have the same ties to it. The Civilization Revolution games, are a

This is one of the reasons why Civilization VI seemed like a return to form but Civilization VII saw the series return to the mobile game and console centric gameplay. This game was released on more consoles on release than any other title which is not actually helping it. By releasing it on so many platforms, the game is not polished on the platform which actually matters, the PC platform.

It is clear that Firaxis Games does not understand its own audience.

The need for game companies to grow beyond their fanbases is a double-edged sword in actual practice. We have an issue here where the video game industry is going through a cultural change. The game industry is more influenced by what they see on the app store than anything that one would have seen at the legendary conferences of the 1980s and 1990s.

The video game industry at this time is more about pleasing an invisible audience than anything sustainable. This is why many post-Covid games are flopping. Many companies simply have no passion and are throwing the sink at the wall in order to gain the biggest possible audience. They have forgotten the artistry and as a result many games are suffering because of it. Civilization VII is one such game and will be considered the “Dark Ages” of the series.