This week’s launch of Civilization 7 – well, for Deluxe Edition buyers at least – has been met by some mixed reviews, both from the press and early adopters of the new game.
While most reviews on Steam highlight the game’s potential, as it expands on the series’ 4X gameplay with the concept of historical ages, but they almost universally criticise the game’s UI, and there’s smattering complaints over the map variety and sizes, and various other quality of life deficiencies.
In response, Firaxis has released a statement acknowledging the issues, and highlighting the three key areas that they will be addressing as soon as possible:
Over the last few days, the team has been poring over your feedback, including our most recent Steam Reviews during the Early Access period. As stewards of the Civilizationfranchise, we hold ourselves to a high standard and always strive to create the best game possible. Civ would not have come this far without you, and your opinions matter greatly to us.
In response to your feedback, we’ve identified three key areas that we’re prioritizing work against as quickly as possible. We will share a development roadmap as soon as we can, but our focus is on the following:
-
- Prioritizing UI Improvements: Our top priority is improving the UI. We need some time to digest all of your feedback, but some areas that we’re already looking into include making UI interactions more intuitive, improving map readability, fixing areas of polish like formatting, and more. We’re committed to getting this right, and will share more details as soon as we can.
- Implementing Community-Requested Features: Several key features that we’ve seen you ask for will be included in upcoming patches as free updates, and we’ll continue to work with the community to improve and add to the game. We’re still working on exact timing, but can share the following items are being prioritized:
- Adding Teams to multiplayer games so you can play cooperatively
- Allowing full player counts in multiplayer in all three Ages through refinements to our Distant Lands system.
- Allowing you to pick your starting and ending Age to allow for single or double Age games
- Providing a wider variety of map types
- Enabling city and religion names to be customized
- Adding in hotseat multiplayer
- Rolling Out Quality-of-Life Updates in Patch 1.1.0 (Deploying in March): Work is already well underway on Patch 1.1.0, which includes fixes and adjustments that were already on our radar. This list includes quality-of-life UI adjustments, ongoing AI balance and improvement, adjustments to diplomacy and crises, plus additional bug fixes.
Civilization 7 is an ambitious new take on what is the go-to historical 4X strategy series. Split each game up into three distinct ages – Antiquity, Exploration and Modern – each civ is now restricted to a particular time period and then has to grow and morph into another through a point of crisis. Rome will eventually fall, but that can provide the historical and gameplay foundations to become any number of medieval empires – the Holy Roman Empire, perhaps? – and from there lead into modern European nations.
Another key change is that this game is fully cross-platform from launch – it’s launched across PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch – where Civilization VI was originally released for PC in 2016 and only ported to consoles and mobile devices after that. One might expect that some of the UI complaints have come from that broader focus.
We’ve only just got our hands on with the game and will be working to deliver our review as soon as we can.
Source: Civilization
