Despite Civilization 7 being half the game Civilization 6 is right now, I can’t bring myself to return to the previous title. I’ve tried. Several times now, actually, when I’ve grown frustrated with some element or other of Civ 7.
These are not mechanical things upsetting me – I actually really enjoy the new age shifts and transitions, although I do agree that, after approaching 250 hours of playtime, they still need some work. I’m more frustrated with Civ 7’s half-baked disaster system, the bad UI, and lack of customization options. There’s also a decade less of content than in Civ 6, but then we are just getting started.
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I spoke about this in my Civ 7 review: Civilization is a truly unique series in that its player numbers across various installments stay relatively healthy. There is still a great community of players who only enjoy Civilization 5. Its multiplayer scene is still functional, even though multiplayer in that game is notoriously buggy and long-winded.
Civilization 6 has, for the past few days, battled it out with Civ 7 in terms of total player numbers. It was the same for Civ 5 and Civ 6 at their launch. Civ 4 has less than a thousand concurrent players at the time of writing, but you know what? For a game about to turn 20 years old, that’s not half bad. You can play any game in the series you want. If you don’t want to cough up for the latest deluxe edition with Harriet Tubman dancing like a banana over the corpse of Charlemagne, the famously Spanish emperor, then you don’t have to. Following this logic, I went back to Civ 6.
Old Familiar
I reinstalled Civ 6, loaded it up, basked in that excellent music, and listened to the soothing tones of Sean Bean… and… nope. The game is absolutely hideous. I can’t believe I was happily playing this game just a month ago. All the textures are fuzzy blobs. The terrain, the units, and the cities all look terrible in comparison to Civilization 7. It’s jarring in a way that I didn’t expect, because the fundamentals of Civ 6 are still obviously brilliant — even if it took several years of DLC to reach such a point. I remember people lambasting the art style when Civ 6 launched, and although I’ve never really been a doomer in the same way that many gamers seem to be, I did think Civilization 5 was the prettier game. Even all these years later, it still looks better.
Of course, I had to test this out (here I am reinstalling another Civilization game, god help me, I’m hooked), and while there’s definitely some jank, I still find the muted, more realistic style of 5 to be more pleasing to the eye than the garish and now outdated style of 6.
Civilization 7 is just a gorgeous game. The level of detail in its units, cities, and terrain is one of the finest ever in the 4X genre. Whether it’s stylish or not is another question, and whether it’s actually readable from a gameplay standpoint – how quickly you can tell which buildings are which, for example – is probably something Firaxis needs to slightly adjust over the next few months.
That being said, the art team has absolutely smashed it. I truly believe that in five or six years when the game has received its annual DLC packages, it will go down as one of the best-looking games of its time.
The Old And The Gold
However, retrning to Civ 6 did reinforce a few things I really dislike about Civ 7. The UI in 6 is so snazzy. It tells me all the information I need about everything. Every tile. Every building. What I need to do to improve that tile. What will happen when I build this building, or that wonder. It doesn’t even do it on a grey background with small, mobile-game-tier icons. There’s a harmony between the game’s style and the game’s UI, whereas in Civ 7 the gorgeous graphics are completely failed by the basic and unintuitive UI.
Despite this, I just can’t get back into it. Even though there’s so much I still want from Civ 7, it has such a clear jump in immersiveness that I can’t stop playing it. I’ve played the Antiquity Age with every civilization now just because I wanted to see what their cities looked like. If Firaxis can bring the rest of the game up to scratch with its graphics, we’re on to a sure winner.
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