Civilization VI is simply a better game. I bought both Civ 6 and 7 when they came out. This means that this is when they were new and did not have dlcs or many patches. The difference between the two cannot be clearer. Civilization VI had its detractors in the beginning, mostly in the area of it being cartoony and too impressionistic in its art style.
However, the game came out in October 2016 complete and many new features and refinements of what came before. The game was modernizing the micro which many old players enjoyed. Unlike in Civilization VII, there is a degree of control with how one runs their civilization. There is no plopping of improvements on the map, you have make to the choices for yourself and see how they affect your civilization in the game.
This is what is sorely lacking in Civilization VII. It is that choice and control which I enjoy.
It is not simply that control however, it’s the feedback one gets one playing in the game world of Civilization VII. It feels like a flat and uninteresting game. It just seems that the team that was working on it have no passion for it.
Civilization VI is clearly the one you should playing now.
Starfield and Steam have an uneasy relationship to say the least when one looks at the reviews. When I bought the game, the Space RPG was sitting at Mostly Positive. After people began attacking the game because YouTube’s algorithm was boosting such negative videos, the rating went to Mixed. People often call it a mixed bag and there are many reasons for such a change in the ratings that I have already talked about on here. Generally, the negative reviews are understandable however many of such criticism can be stated about Skyrim or any Ubisoft game. However, the blandness of Starfield which many people talk about is more of a product of Bethesda’s emphasis on realism. However, I strain to see how one can call it bland when one can go to Neon, which has a clear visual style in comparison to New Atlantis. These criticisms stem from a culture of stagnation in video games that are more interested in rehashing visual styles of old games on the NES and SNES then in accepting that nothing everything is going to made in that style.
Steam players are truly passionate in way that most people in Modern Western culture are not. However, they can be quite myopic with how they review games. Reviewing a game on Steam sometimes gets tied up in one’s political ideology. Another is that many people are in a nostalgic mode which I have often tried my best to avoid. I enjoy respecting the past, but video games are inherently not a media that lends itself to a style of art that stagnates.
In 2025, I hope that the developers of Starfield and the Modding community continue to improve the game. They should take what they see on Steam into account, but they have to remember that this is only slice of gamers. There are many players of Starfield who were Xbox gamers and some who also use Xbox Game Pass. Steam gamers are truly passionate about games but they can also be elitist and try to be myopic about game styles
What we see in Starfield’s reception is an industry in stagnation.
When the gaming industry was in the sixth generation with the rise of the Playstation 1, Nintendo 64 and the Sega Saturn. The games were changing quickly in the graphics. The SNES glory days of 1992 and 1993 had been transformed into the 3 dimensions of palaces and creatures in Mario 64. One can see a clear change in graphics in modern games from the early 1990s to the late 1990s. Even the early 3D games of 1992 were charming but crude by the late 1990s.
MechWarrior 2 by Activision was released in July 1995 and was a stunning game but one looks at MechWarrior 3 and MechWarrior 4, it looks as if thousands of years have past in development of gaming graphics. MechWarrior 2 was also more advanced than the original MechWarrior game of the late 1980s. However, the change between 2 and 4 is huge.
When one looks at older RTS games such as Dune 2 and then looks at Science Fiction RTS games such as Starcraft and then the Star Trek Armada games, the difference is striking. While Star Trek Armada II looks uglier than the original, a product of cutting corners to allow players on their 2001 Computers to support having hundreds of ships on the screen, the graphic fidelity is a huge canyon. While Dune 2 was a monumental game in the creation of the RTS genre, rather being more of an experimental game such as the Atari 2600 Game, Utopia, it was still a crude game that isn’t easy to replay in the current age. However, by the creation of Starcraft, RTS games had become more formalized in their designs and now one can see the current way in which RTS games appear to the player. In my view, RTS games have largely looked the same since even the time of Blizzard’s classic Warcraft I, when the company was more interested in breaking boundaries and not just relying on the IP in order to make money and sucking its creativity out of people working at the studio and ruining their own company’s visions.
People are used to what they have been seeing for the past 15 years. When it also comes to the transformative Sixth generation of consoles, many gamers grew up in that time and have fond memories about it. These people have grown up and are now writing the articles in magazines and the sites have a bias towards those games. There were many other games released in the 1990s; many such games were not that great; however some were trailblazers in new genres. Instead we are stuck on the old games and styles that were once innovative but are now preventing the industry from being able to embrace creativity or even revive old franchises that should have been given another look instead of being abandoned by the companies.
Thankfully, Starfield was made and we have the foundation to continue improving it. I hope that 2025 has many successes for Starfield and the modders who are making it more interesting and unique in its styles.
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.
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