Yeah. I think this is a key point.
A pretty large segment of the people who post on forums like this want the game tailored for the expert and near-expert. People who play the game dozens and dozens of times, and get to know/hate all the loopholes, all the exploits, all the choices with a clear best answer, all the areas where the AI is unable to follow through on its threats, etc.
But a pretty large segment of the buying public buys a game, plays it a few times, and that is it. Which leads to quite a different perspective. Thinking through my own experiences, the first time or two that I played the orginal civ, the first time I played any succeeding version, the first time I played Rise and Fall, I can still get a glimpse of this perspective. It’s a different game, more of an adventure into the unknown, more of role-playing a civ through the ages, and far less a strategic analysis of the rules. Except that, well, I will come back to the except.
My sense is that at least since 4, Firaxis has been increasingly concerned about the latter group. I’m thinking that this is basically a business decision, thinking that like all companies, they need growth, and the less hard-core audience is required for growth. The outsized personalities of AI opponents fits this well. They have put a lot of resources into making you despise your rivals, which has a much broader appeal than detailed strategizing, min-maxing etc.
I understand Firaxis’s concern. They are big and secure compared to indie developers, but PC gaming isn’t all that big a pond, and they are by no means an entertainment giant, their resources are definitely limited. And their priorities seem to be to broaden appeal as opposed to catering to the near-expert crowd, who they hope can be mollified with multi-player and mods. And perhaps they really have no choice; it would be extremely difficult to expand the audience for the game without expanding features, and expanded features makes good AI ever more expensive to pursue, and good AI is really the only way to satisfy the expert crowd.
But despite the fact that I personally enjoy the game immensely (I am aggravated by several things, but I clearly come back to it over all the alternatives out there), I have a sense that their business decisions are transforming Civ into a very un-cool game. Wherever you go and read about gaming, smart people are slamming the game, such that it is embarrassing to speak out and say you think it is a lot of fun… and THAT alone is likely to sink their plans to grow the base.
Further, I think they are overlooking a fundamental shift in the audience for games. Nowadays, a huge portion of gamers watch gameplay online before ever buying or at least before playing much… so they are far quicker to become knowledgeable players, who then complain far sooner about the repetiveness caused by unclosed loopholes and exploits. It’s all well and fine for players like myself to say, “Hey, I know that that is OP to the point of broken, so I won’t use it.” From what I am seeing, a large number of people have this compulsion to take shortcuts to discover all the exploits, but then don’t enjoy the game because of the exploits… and then put the game down, creating negative buzz. Probably even worse for makers of CRPGs whose audience tends to look up all the spoilers ahead of time, but then doesn’t like the game because the adventure isn’t very adventurous. But also true for a strategy game like Civ.
But let’s face it, if Ed Beach asked me for advice as to direction, I wouldn’t know what to tell him. Because the other route is fraught, too. Catering to the hard-core from past versions is always going to be problematic, because of the nostalgia factor. People get attached to myriad different details from a past versions, so pretty much no matter what you change, you’ll have a crowd howling over missing that wonderful aspect of the past version.
