Sid Meier’s Civilization 7 is a tale of experimentation in the direction of simplification. Where adjacencies and snowballing mechanics rule the day in Civilization 6, age resets and civilization swaps run rancid in Civilization 7. Altogether, the Civ community largely believes that Civilization 7 is a steep downgrade from Civ 6, and the reasons why aren’t all that difficult to spot.
Civ 6 took most of its initial flak from players due to its art style and unintuitive gameplay: Civ 5 had a semi-realistic, mature take on its artwork, while 6 wore its more cartoonish, exaggerated style on its sleeve. To this day, you’ll find Civ players who just don’t really mesh well with a cartoon-esque Abe Lincoln, and although it definitely divided the community on an aesthetic basis, it didn’t affect the gameplay beyond an immersive degree.
In terms of gameplay, Civ 6 expanded the sheer level of complexity of the series with adjacency bonuses, civic cards, and new religious mechanics that made each facet of gameplay benefit one another to some degree. Religious civs could plan around science, science civs could foster a healthy amount of culture generation, and cultural civs could do everything. In fact, every civ could theoretically do everything through one channel or another: Civilization 6 is beautifully designed, from a gameplay perspective, but it is also very difficult to figure out (culture victories are absolute nightmares.)
And where Civ 6 expanded gameplay with an emphasis on massive city-planning depth, Civilization 7 condensed gameplay with an emphasis on immersion and player protection. During the lead-up to the game’s release, Firaxis, Civilization’s development studio, would not stop talking about late-game boredom. Time and again, the developers would mention the fact that players, upon reaching the end-game, would usually just quit the session and start a new one the next time they hopped on the game.
In the eyes of Firaxis, this was a problem that absolutely needed to be solved. To be sure, it is a problem, though most players would have sought to solve it in ways that Firaxis didn’t seem to be privy to. Specifically, Civilization 7 employs methods of condensing gameplay to prevent snowballing and, subsequently, prevent the complexity of the game from rolling into the stage of a game where it feels more cumbersome to manage all of one’s units before ending a turn than it does to just stop playing.
In theory, this method had potential. In practice, it was executed with a style that almost looks like contempt for previous Civ games. One passionate Steam reviewer, Petey Pan, writes:
Basically, skip this one, play Civ6 – it’s the better game. They could release DLCs to add mechanics and all that to Civ 7 – but the whole age and legacy victory conditions have ripped out what made a Civ game a Civ game.
“Civilization 7 is a steep downgrade from Civilization 6” could be summarized thusly: You cannot play as a single civ, and when you do play the game, the game creates the objectives for you.
In Civilization 7, you play as a single leader, not a civilization. When you change eras, you change civilizations. This one change destroys any sense of possession a player has with the civilization they’ve built up to a point. “Will you build a Civilization to stand the test of time?” Evidently not, Firaxis. Evidently not.
The prerequisites for winning a game in Civilization 6 were singular: win the space race for a science victory, convert everyone to your religion for a religious victory, suck in tourists for a cultural victory, conquer all civs for a conquest victory, and get 20 diplomatic points for a diplomatic victory. How you got to any of these victory conditions was completely up to you. All that matter was that you did, indeed, get to them.
In Civilization 7, winning a game is more about cracking down on arbitrary mini-objectives to farm good boy points until you have enough good boy points to finally win. Early game wins do not spiral into stronger late games, but instead are handicapped after an era changes: unit’s positions reset, advantages over other leaders are chopped down, and the game essentially begins again.
And how remiss would it be to not mention that this is, in part, normal for a new Civ game? Generally speaking, a Civilization game releases and then:
- Players used to the previous game struggle to adapt
- The changes are jarring and, usually, take a year or two to warm up with players
- Patch notes roll through and make changes to often maligned aspects of the game
- Slowly, the game becomes more accepted until it finally becomes the de-facto best game in the series.
On the one hand, it’s entirely possible that Civilization 7 has a life yet to live. On the other hand, the biggest problems in Civilization 7 are not down to aesthetic dismays or things that can be solved with difficulty options or balance changes.
The problems with Civilization 7 that most severely burn its own players are down to the core gameplay design. Simplified city building, simplified unit control, rail-roaded end-game objectives, and all of that without the ability to control just a single Civilization. One wonders if the name of the franchise shouldn’t become plural.
Let’s hope for the success of Civilization 7 in the future (and fast development of Civilization 8 so we may leave it behind.)
You must be logged in to post a comment.