Comment by Pannoniae | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pannoniae | Hacker News Reader

(Almost) everything wrong with modern gaming in a neat little package.

  >unfinished base game
  >81% on metacritic, 52% user reviews on Steam

  >Misuse of the term "early access" to indicate advanced access 5 days early
  >5 content packs on release already
  >oh wait not all of them are included in the Founders Edition, some are just promises for later content packs

  >mobile game UI, a huge mess (maybe because Luigi wasn't there to fix 25% of the UI bugs like in 6....[0])
  >mobile game artstyle, Civ4 looked better than this in *2004*
  >they switched from Lua to JavaScript since civ6

  >horrible performance, crashes, stuttering and ridiculous system requirements
  >skin-focused, leader-focused pseudo-RPG "gameplay"
  >who needs engineers or auto-explore in a Civilization game anyway?
  >empire switching straight stolen from Humankind but worse
  >obligatory quests included

  >Denuvo, gimped modding "support" (just the usual)
  >Atomic Age stripped from the release deliberately, to be sold back to you as DLC later
  >AI? that doesn't sell DLCs....
  >storefront disguised as a game

yeah this game is a disgrace to Sid

(apologies for the formatting, I'm not good at this)

[0] https://preview.redd.it/thanks-for-your-contribution-to-civi...

>horrible performance

Cannot support it has horrible performance. Civ 5 and 6 were notorious for having minutes-long turn change times in later eras. Civ 7 seems to finally have fixed that problem for me.

There's some annoying things in it (and also the way they basically copied Humankind leaves a sour taste) but performance it's not, for me at least. It's finally a Civ again with acceptable performance and I hope it stays that way.

I can support it.

On my laptop it takes minutes to load and hung on turn four. I never got past that because reloading also took 5 minutes.

On my desktop, it simply would not run.

I requested a refund as my 5 minutes of gameplay had only measured 49 minutes in steam so I was under the magical 2 hours of frustration limit

> 81% on metacritic, 52% user reviews on Steam

This _always_ happens with new Civ games, though. Definitely back to Civ 4 anyway (I don't remember Civ 3, though I assume it existed); I think Civ 2 _was_ seen as kind of perfect on delivery.

The issue is not so much the user scores, but the delta between users and critics. It strongly indicates the publisher is paying off critics (for instance, with access if not cash.)

Hence "everything wrong with modern gaming"

I mean I think Civ 6 had a similarish delta in the early days.

> It strongly indicates the publisher is paying off critics (for instance, with access if not cash.)

Or just that critics are less temperamental than the average user. If nothing else, the critics have been here before and know how new Civ games go.

Taking a Steam review at random:

> A couple minutes in and it's just... so blatantly unfinished, especially by Civ standards. [...]

I've got to assume from this that this person never actually played another Civ game at launch; the 'especially by Civ standards' is particularly laughable. The last one to feel 'finished' at launch was Civ 2 (or _maybe_ Civ3? I'm drawing a total blank on that one; I know I played it, but I don't remember it at all). Civ4 and on (and _especially_ Civ 6) took a while, and a bunch of patches and expansions, to get good.

(Also quite a lot of the reviews just seem to be indignation that they put Harriet Tubman in it...).

I'll probably pick this up at some point, and will go in with the expectation that it'll be extremely rough around the edges, and get better over the next few years, as is tradition.

I never got the impression that Civ 6 ever caught on. At least in my circles, people still play and talk about Civ 5, but never 6.

https://steamdb.info/app/289070/charts/ vs https://steamdb.info/app/8930/charts/ would imply that Civ 6 was _far_ more popular than 5. And may understate it a bit, because Civ 6 had that rarest of all things, a usable mobile version. The iPad version in particular is basically just the same as the desktop one, and if you have Netflix you get it free.

(Of course, this isn't necessarily the full story, as it was certainly available outside of steam, but I would guess that most users got it on steam.)

I always assume that the popular ones were Civ, Civ 2, Civ 4, and Civ 6, though I suspect I'm biased there (I was way too busy when Civ 5 came out, and though I'm pretty sure I _did_ play 3 I found it totally forgettable.)

Of course Civ 2 had to be perfect on delivery, because there was no online patching back then. Modern tech had made it easier to release unfinished games to test the waters and patch them up later. DLC also didn't exist back then.

Civ 2 actually had a bunch of official and third party expansions, but they weren't as consequential, and it was a complete game without them in a way that its successors were not.

I do recall a mod or scenario where you basically replayed the entire history of Rome in surprising detail. Tons of scripted events.

And obviously the Web was very much up and coming when Civ 2 was released, but I don't think releasing a game through downloads and updating them through the internet was really much of a thing yet when it was first released. As far as I know, everybody ran it from the CD-ROM. Also because that's how you got the awesome advisors (still the best).

It doesn't, civ4 got excellent review scores on release. This is the first one that is significantly below 90%.

I don't envy anyone trying to make games for people like this. It must be demoralizing.

Hey, it ain't too hard! There are many amazing games out there :) They are just usually not made by huge studios.

Maybe the fact you think making a game isn't too hard is part of the problem?

Making a game that people like is hard.

Making a game that has the kinds of fans who will even complain because you changed your internal scripting language will love is near impossible.

(and of course you're not required to like it: I'm strictly commiserating with the developers who have to deal with this type of "fan")

Well, why would it imply that "making a game isn't too hard"? No, I'm implying that there's loads of good games. Of course it isn't easy to make them! But it's very much possible and there's many who have done just exactly that. I'd expect better from a big, AAA studio.

I also don't think it's a best-faith assessment of my critique when you mention that I complain about the changed scripting language. It was a fairly off-hand remark and in the grand scheme of things, "let this be the biggest problem in the game". But it is surely indicative of the deeper rot.

I am not alone in this view... just look at the Steam reviews. It's not that I have irresponsibly high standards - they just consistently manage to sink lower and lower.

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