Civilization VII is set for a major update that finally let players stay as one civ through all Ages, as the boss of parent company Take-Two has admitted: “we got it wrong.”
Civilization VII is over a year old now, and has fewer players on Steam than both Civilization VI and the 15-year-old Civilization V. When Civilization VII launched, players highlighted issues with the user interface, a lack of map variety, and a lack of features they’d come to expect from the franchise. But some veteran Civ fans also didn’t get on well with the dramatic changes developer Firaxis made to the game.
At launch, a full campaign in Civilization VII was one that went through all three Ages: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern. Once the Age is completed, all players (and any AI opponents) experience an Age Transition simultaneously. During an Age Transition, three things happen: you select a new civilization from the new Age to represent your empire, you choose which Legacies you want to retain in the new Age, and the game world evolves. The Civilization games had never had such a system, and it proved divisive.
While Firaxis launched a number of key updates in a bid to turn sentiment around, and Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick indicated to IGN that he was confident Civilization VII would eventually prove to be a successful project, developer Firaxis suffered layoffs in September, and the game is still stuck on a ‘mixed’ user review rating on Steam — its core platform.
Speaking to Game File now, Zelnick took responsibility for Civilization VII’s struggles.
“Every time there’s a new Civ, the team at Firaxis thinks about: ‘How do we push the envelope far enough that it makes sense to buy this new game? And how do we preserve what people love enough so that they’re not disaffected?’ And we got it wrong with Civ VII, but it wasn’t for want of trying. And again, I take responsibility for it,” he said.
“So we’ve made a bunch of fixes. We’ll continue to make fixes. The game is a really good game. And it’s certainly a profitable enterprise for us. But this is one where I think what we tried to do was a bridge too far, from the consumer’s perspective.”
I haven’t played Civ 7, but it’s mostly for lack of money, because honestly? In no world can I call this change “wrong.” This is experimentation to me. I like experimentation. And for that matter, I like the concept too. Civilizations change throughout history, that’s how that works! And it can introduce opportunities to fix the issue I usually have with Civ games where I run out of things to do (like exploring) and get bored before the game’s over.
Now, I have no idea if it actually pulled that off; maybe they fucked it up bad. But most of the complaints I’m seeing are from folks who really mostly just seem like they didn’t want their cheese moved. And while that’s understandable, I think we’ve got enough Civ games that do the usual Civ stuff by now. If you want that, why not just play 5 or 6?
I really, really hope this doesn’t prevent future Civ games from trying new stuff out. Triple-A games take few enough risks as it is.