A few weeks ago (or I guess more than a month ago, at this point -- geez I'm slow at writing these), Firaxis released it's "Test of Time" update for Civilization VII. Civ VII players can now finally play as the same civilization throughout the entire game, which addresses one of the player base's biggest criticisms with the game. The internet is now abuzz with the question of whether or not this patch "fixes" or "saves" Civilization VII. From what I've seen so far, it seems to be very well-received, with many internet pundits saying (or implying with their YouTube thumbnails) that Civ VII is "fixed".
Test of Time certainly is a good update. The biggest change is that players now have the choice to play as any civilization in any age, and can choose to play as the same civilization for the entire game, if you choose. To accomplish this, Firaxis gave every civilization an "apex age" in which they are the most powerful. During the apex age, their abilities are the strongest, and they have access to all of their unique units. During non-apex ages, each civ has less powerful versions of their ability, and they are stuck with stock units.
Players can now choose to keep the same civilization when transitioning into a new age.
This approach is similar to Humankind, which also gave players the option to stay as the same culture when progressing to a new era. The big difference is that in Humankind, staying with the same culture would give that culture the same generic bonus every time; whereas in Civ VII, each civ still has a unique ability, it's just a weaker version of their apex unique ability. So Civ VII's approach is a little bit more flavorful in that regard. Basically, Humankind's version of this feature was (as far as I can tell) just a fall-back option if all the good cultures have already been selected by other players. If you don't want any of the available cultures, you can just stay as the same culture, and continue to field their unique units and build their unique infrastructure, and get some small buff. In Civ VII, by contrast, sticking with the same civ is framed as a more assertive decision. You choose that civ because you want their abilities, not simply because you don't want the other civs.
Personally, I still prefer Humankind's method of culture-switching over Civ VII's. I prefer how it is tied to the individual civilization's progress through the eras, and doesn't stop the game at arbitrary points to force everyone to switch. I also like how there's a competitive, first-come-first-serve aspect to switching cultures in Humankind, which lights a fire under the player's butt to make sure to advance fast enough to get a prime pick of the upcoming era's cultures. Humankind's approach feels like a much more organic and natural part of the game that doesn't interrupt the game's pacing at all (but in fact, adds to the pacing). This is in stark contrast to Civ VII's design, which feels forced, arbitrary, and exceedingly "game-ified".
But perhaps a full analysis of Humankind's culture-switching compared to Civ VII should be the subject of another essay, similar to what I did with Civ VII and Ara: History Untold... For now, I want to talk about Civ VII specifically.
In addition to being able to play civs outside of their apex age, Test of Time completely replaces the Legacy paths with new, more granular and more varied "Triumphs". These are smaller goals and milestones that unlock dedication bonuses for the next age. This is intended to add more variety to each age, and make it so that players don't feel like they're following the same rote steps to achieve the same 4 goals every time they play.
Legacy paths were replaced with more varied and granular Triumphs.
Again, this is a good change.
Civ VII is "fixed" now?
This update fixes a very specific complaint that was coming from a very loud subset of the player base. If you were one of the people who refused to play Civilization VII because you didn't like that the game forces you to change civilizations every age, then now is probably a good time to go back and try the game again (or for the first time, if you skipped it entirely at launch).
This was never one of my complaints though. I, personally liked switching civilizations over the course of the game. This is the sort of feature that I've been asking for for a long time. Maybe I'm completely out of touch with the Civilization player base. Maybe I'm an old man yelling at clouds and complaining about the young kids being on my lawn. But I never thought that switching civs was a problem.
Civ VII players can now take a single civilization from antiquity to the modern age.
That being said, the people who resisted this change pointed out that one of the core ideas of Civilization as a game franchise -- one of the core promises that the game makes to players -- is the ability to take a civilization all the way from the stone age to the space age. Not being able to do that with the same, single, civilization is, according to these critics, a betrayal of what Civilization is supposed to be. I understand that complaint. They aren't wrong! I just think it's being a bit over-dramatic, and that it shouldn't have been a reason for not playing the game at all. But then again, we all play for different reasons, and who am I to tell you how to enjoy the game. I don't want to be a gatekeeper, but I also don't think that the critics should have been gatekeepers demanding that Civ VII be just like past games, either.
I don't consider civ-switching to be a "betrayal" of the concept. Especially considering how the choice of civilizations in a new era is limited by geographical and cultural similarity to the previous age's civilization, or to the leader who is chosen. There is generally a greater sense of relation between the civ in one age to the next. Personally, I see this as being just as much the same "civilization", in the same way that the history of modern-day United Kingdom can be traced back to Imperial Great Britain, medieval England, and maybe even all the way back to the ancient Celts and Druids. To me, that is one contiguous civilization, and I like that Civilization VII tries to model the changing and dynamic nature of human societies.
I like how civ-switching choices are limited by
historic, geographical, and cultural relations.
I will concede though, that I do think that it's a good thing for the game that players have the option to play the same civilization over multiple ages. I also think that making the choice to stay the same civ or to change civs be a game-time decision, rather than a dedicated game mode that you have to lock in before starting the game, was a very good decision. This is a good feature, that I agree should have been in the game from the start.
No, it isn't "fixed"
But here's the thing, having to change civs each age was never my biggest complaint with Civ VII, and Test of Time doesn't really do anything to fix my actual core criticism of the game. My biggest complaint, which I alluded to already, is the way that the ages fragment the game in ways that feel artificial, and that forces abrupt, hard age transitions that force the game to skip over large chunks of its own in-game "history". Regardless of whether you are playing as the same civilization throughout all the ages, the way that the ages are structured does not let the player play the full Civilization game.
For me, not letting the player play the entire civilization's history is far more of a "betrayal" of the series' principles than demanding that the player change civilizations throughout the game.
This is in stark contrast to Civ VII's main contemporary competitors, Humankind and Ara: History Untold. Both of those games do similar things compared to Civ VII. Humankind has the culture-switching each era, and Ara breaks the game up into 3 distinct "Acts". By the way, I made a video late last year comparing and contrasting the 3-act structure of Ara: History Untold against Civilization VII, and I encourage you to check that video out. Both Humankind and Ara manage to have their big ideas while still maintaining a seamless gameplay experience. Those games do not feel like they are broken up into 3 distinct mini-games the way that Civilization VII does.
Both Humankind and Ara: History Untold feel like more seamless games, compared to Civ VII.
The way that the crisis and age transitions were designed, the crisis would often start at the worst possible time. I would spend the entire age building up my infrastructure and military, and as soon as I would be ready to launch an all-out invasion of a neighboring rival, a crisis would start. Often, it wouldn't be that big of a deal, and I would be able to power through it. Other times, I would feel like there was nothing I could do to address the crisis, because they game didn't really give me mechanics to do so, and it would throw a wrench in everything. For example, since Civilization VII doesn't have citizens working tiles or assignable specialists the way that past games did, you can't change which tiles or buildings are being worked mid-game in order to shift your economy towards producing different yields. If I wasn't generating enough happiness to shield myself from a potential revolt crisis, there was no way for me change which tiles and buildings are being worked in order to generate more happiness. The best I could do is maybe change policies, move some resources around, or see if any other leaders will do a Festival Endeavor with me. But those options could only go so far.
Worse yet, the age would just end, kick me out to a loading screen, make me choose a new civ, and then load back into the next age at a pre-determined year. On the default settings, it was common for the Antiquity Age to end around 1600 BCE, and for the Exploration Age to start up at 400 CE. That's 2 thousand years of in-game history that Civilization VII just completely skips over! 2 thousand years in which I can't build up my infrastructure, settle new towns, build wonders, befriend or conquer nearby city states, or fight wars with neighboring civilizations. If I was in the middle of doing something that takes many turns, like building a wonder, sieging a rival city, or attempting to annex a suzerain city state, the age might just end, and I wouldn't be able to finish that thing I was doing. When the age progress would get up to 90% or higher, I felt like it wasn't even worth bothering to play anymore, because the age could end at literally any moment, and any efforts I had made in the meantime would be for naught.
There is a countdown till the end of an age.
Firaxis did mitigate this problem somewhat with post-release updates. They added a setting for an extended age, which increases the threshold for triggering an age transition, and an option to include a 10 or 20-turn countdown before the end of the age. These changes gave me more time to do the things I wanted in an age, and the explicit countdown meant that I knew whether I would have time to do a specific action late in the age, and wouldn't waste my time and energy trying to do something that I couldn't possibly finish in time.
But these changes didn't do anything to fix the core problem of the age feeling like it would end prematurely and then skip over large chunks of the game. With extended age lengths, and the 20-turn countdown, maybe Antiquity would end in 600 BCE instead of 1600 BCE. But that's still an entire millennia of the game that I just don't get to play. Historically, in Civ games, these transitional periods between eras are often some of the most interesting parts of the game. They were often times in which new resources would be discovered, and civs would be pitted into a rat race to find and claim those resources. In Civ VII, when a new age starts up, all the new resources (like coal or oil) are already revealed on the map and improved. So that entire process of trying to beat the other players to that newly-revealed iron, saltpeter, coal, oil, or uranium, or fielding that first steam-powered ironclad while the opponents are still using wooden sailing vessels, is just not a part of Civ VII at all, because that's all stuff that happens in the non-playable periods between ages.
That is my biggest frustration with Civ VII. I'll be playing the antiquity age, and largely having a good time, then the notification would pop up that the crisis has started, and I would get a sinking feeling that I'm suddenly playing against a clock, and have to rush to do all the things I had planned on doing, or else I won't be able to do them at all. And in many cases, I just wouldn't want to play any more.
And that's something that Test of Time doesn't do anything to directly address. The age transition and civ-switching U.I. is changed, such that it's presented as an overlay over the game map instead of booting us out to a menu. Maybe the new triumphs will make the ages take a little bit longer, but the bottom line is that Antiquity is still going to end before 1 BCE, and centuries of in-game history are going to be entirely skipped over.
Test of Time did not change the fact that age transitions hard stop the game,
and skip over hundreds or thousands of years' worth of game turns.
These are the problems that make me turn off Civ VII and not want to go back to it. It's the abrupt hard stops and skips between ages, and its the completely lackluster, meaningless, and arbitrary crises. And I have a suspicion that if being able to play the same civ the entire game brings some players back to Civ VII, those players are going to start running up against the same frustrations. After all, maybe if the ages lasted long enough for players to have enough turns to actually utilize all of a civ's unique features, they wouldn't feel like they need to have that same civ for the whole game. Without the civ-switching being the easy scapegoat and target of everyone's frustrations, more players might start experience these same frustration with the age transitions and crises that have turned me off of Civ VII. And maybe some of them might come to realize that the problem was never with the civ-switching at all.
In my next post, I want to talk about some more ideas that I have for possibly addressing this issue (post "Test of Time") and making the game feel more seamless. I hope to see you back for that. In the meantime, feel free to check out my previous suggestions for improving age transitions in Civ VII.