Civilization 7 is in development

[haphazard1]

The real question is how era transition mechanics which were never going to be fun, such as downgrading cities to towns and forcing the player to fully redo the empire setup, made it through playtesting....

This x1000. I am reminded of the story about an earlier Civ game and the idea of having 'dark ages' as a kind of anti-golden age. But they discarded it because it just was not fun for the player. Why didn't someone at Firaxis realize this about the age transitions?

[TheArchduke]

I think they were too timid.

You either do a real crisis which does damage like in Stellaris and let the player overcome it.

Or you do not do a crisis at all.

Right now the crisis is the developer.

[Cornflakes]

[…] reaffirming the meme that it takes two expansions for a Civ release to become a good game)

For me Civ 6 peaked at vanilla final patch (which if I remember correctly came around the time of the first expansion or even after). The expansions added too much to the game, that my enjoyment dropped. Too many levers to pay attention to with new mechanics introduced. Too many decisions to make, or too many things to keep track of in order to play well.

Civ6 was also the first in the series that I picked up shortly after release and then continued with the expansions at release. I picked up 3 and 4 after the “complete” editions came out, and abandoned 5 after just a few games … partly due to hardware compatibility, but mostly because I didn’t like it enough to upgrade my hardware. Instead I turned to Civ4 multiplayer

[Sullla]

I wrote up another report of a Civ7 game based on abusing a bug associated with the Great Wall. This is probably my last Civ7 report for a while since there's not much more to be said about the gameplay that hasn't already been said:

https://www.sullla.com/Civ7/TGW-1.html

[Brian Shanahan]

I think the section at the end, "The Journey So Far, and What’s Ahead", strongly points towards that being the case. There will be an overhaul, and they do mention things which didn't work out, such as age transitions and lack of replayability. They also talk about how these things will take time to address - so I think it is quite likely that when they do address them, it will come as part of the first expansion (and then it introduces a whole lot of new problems, and it takes another expansion to fix them, reaffirming the meme that it takes two expansions for a Civ release to become a good game)

The real question is how era transition mechanics which were never going to be fun, such as downgrading cities to towns and forcing the player to fully redo the empire setup, made it through playtesting.... the meme about two expansions may be alive and well, but arguably no other Civ release had such a bad starting position

But I'm not as pessimistic about the game being abandoned like Beyond Earth and Starships - if only for the cynical reason that Firaxis have to try to salvage the game and bring in the cash they undoubtedly promised to Take-Two/2K before they get the budget to work on Civ8. Civ is supposed to be a big money-maker, and for all its problem is still in the top10 bestselling releases this year (according to the numbers shown at Summer Game Fest). If they manage to salvage this release, there's still a strong potential for many DLC sales - and DLC require a much smaller budget than the next game in the series. Whether it's a good thing is a different question.....

Bigger releases have been very quickly abandoned, on even better sales. Civ 7 has all the hallmarks of the bad live service game lifecycle, the next step of which is a half hearted tinkering around the edges which pisses of the remains of the player base, followed by an abandonment and then a press release/interview from a Bobby Kotick type blaming the fans for "expecting too much".

The thing about the game is, if it sold well large and huge maps would have been sold as separate mini DLCs. Firaxis and 2K went into this game looking to nickle and dime the fanbase, because that's what every company does in late-stage capitalism and they'v3 gotten rid of anybody capable of coming up with ideas.

[Brian Shanahan]

The real question is how era transition mechanics which were never going to be fun, such as downgrading cities to towns and forcing the player to fully redo the empire setup, made it through playtesting....

This x1000. I am reminded of the story about an earlier Civ game and the idea of having 'dark ages' as a kind of anti-golden age. But they discarded it because it just was not fun for the player. Why didn't someone at Firaxis realize this about the age transitions?

What little playtesting was done probably never expanded beyond the first age, as that's the only one even vaguely balanced.

[pindicator]

I feel like the thread title is still valid:  Civ 7 is (still) in development

[TheArchduke]

I wrote up another report of a Civ7 game based on abusing a bug associated with the Great Wall. This is probably my last Civ7 report for a while since there's not much more to be said about the gameplay that hasn't already been said:

https://www.sullla.com/Civ7/TGW-1.html

What great fun to look at the great walls.

Now only if the game was better.

There are some weird decisions like the razing.

It was worse the devs wanted you to loose influence for razing settlements.

[Sullla]

I'm not trying to pile on Civ7 but I did feel the need to collect my thoughts together into an article on how and why the design choices went wrong. This one is simply called What Happened?

https://www.sullla.com/Civ7/WH.html

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Yeah, you've nailed most of it. I had more fun than most, I think, because I didn't care at all about civ-switching and enjoyed the city-building and combat (at first), and I haven't booted up Civ VII in about 8 weeks now. I'm still playing 2015's Wars of Napoleon, and other ancient games besides, but carve out time for VII? No, thank you. Haven't bothered, even with the new patch. Might get around to it at some point.