Pre-Release CIV VI Discussion

[MJW (ya that one)]

Surely it can't be worse than fuckin' Civ5.

I take it you never played MOO 3?

Beyond Earth or GalCiv3 would be better examples because MOO3 was unfinished.

[Bacchus]

I had more fun with Beyond Earth than with Civ V (as in, I actually, finished a game or two)

[Sareln]

Same as Bacchus, the novelty of Beyond Earth's setting kept it going longer than CIV V for me...

[antisocialmunky]

Poor Civ5, you were like the kid in highschool that tried to appeal to everyone so hard that no one liked it.

[picklepikkl]

Except that it was hugely successful with general audiences.

I think if we're going with a highschool metaphor, RB likes to complain at its lunch table about the one massively popular kid that it thinks nobody realizes is a big phony.

[oledavy]

Except that it was hugely successful with general audiences.

I think if we're going with a highschool metaphor, RB likes to complain at its lunch table about the one massively popular kid that it thinks nobody realizes is a big phony.

QFT.

[Lord Parkin]

Civ5 was decent after the BNW expansion, it mainly didn't grab my long-term attention because of the lack of large-scale multiplayer. Hard to take a step back after experiencing Pitboss.

Civ6 on the other hand is looking much more promising from the get-go. I've been really enjoying watching some of the Devs Play videos.

[antisocialmunky]

I guess the metaphor depends on who you include in the audience, whether that includes just hardcore players. Anyway, the point I was trying to get at was that game design was so wildly unfocused and threw everything and the kitchen sink into the feature list without really developing a coherent vision.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

I find Civ5 a bit pared down, if anything. Techs only unlock a single thing, tiles have low yields, the one right choice is to always work food. Kitchen sink status can be applied for those wacky mods like FFH or Caveman to Cosmos.

If anything, what I see of Civ6 is that it's particularly unfocused. Like the great works system and religion/faith points and the district system and the civics cards and the scenic value of tiles, all of which, at this early glance, seems like it's distracting the player from the 4 tenets of the 4X genre.

[Brian Shanahan]

Except that it was hugely successful with general audiences.

I think if we're going with a highschool metaphor, RB likes to complain at its lunch table about the one massively popular kid that it thinks nobody realizes is a big phony.

Well if this site, is right on the hours you've got 28.7m hours played for c. 9m copies (from this site) of the game sold. Therefore you've got an average of three hours played per owner. Now we've probably lost a number of million hours to those who play the game in offline mode, but I wouldn't be surprised if the hours logged on steam are around 70% of total hours played (if not higher), which still gives only 4.2 hours played per copy bought.

So how many people bought the game (or had it bought for them) and either never played the game or quickly shelved it? That's a very large chunk of the 9m purchasers that 2K/Firaxis have little chance of getting back, except maybe at big discount sales.

Edit: to come back to the Football Manager comparison I use a lot when talking about the "success" of Civ 5 the currrent iteration of that game (FM2016) has 1/9 of the ownership base yet has logged just slightly over 2m less hours or recorded game time as Civ 5. If you run the average play time per copy bought you get over 25 hours per copy of the game, which is not too far off how long I take when playing an SP game of Civ 4 to completion, and what I'd generally expect to see as a minimum for if a substantial number of the community is playing regularly.