Ah, Civilization VII, you complex beast of a game, with your societies and ages and your bold understandings of your systems. It’s safe to say that you haven’t hit the ground running. People have very mixed reviews about the game, though the most common one is the idea that it hasn’t done very well in capturing the soul of the game and showing it to the players, in the same way that it’s previous generations more or less, have. That begs the question, though.. Can it be salvaged? Let’s take a look at the upcoming April 22 update and find out.
For The People
Update 1.2.0 in Civilization VII has a lot of good going for it, with the dev team aiming for patches mostly around balance, such as updating the ways resources appear, and even adding ten more kinds, each with their own new narrative event behind it. This is added with the hope it’ll make things feel more interesting age to age. Another interesting note, they added an idea called “Hemisphere Identity,” where certain resources will only appear in certain locations on the map, mostly treasure resources. They also changed how food functions in-game to make it a viable source.
There’s More!
The biggest thing the update has done gameplay-wise, aside from all those home-based improvements making the main game more enjoyable, is, as expected but much appreciated and needed, Civilization VII finally added an endless mode. Now you don’t have to worry about the game being forced to stop when you reach a victory, you can just hit that one more turn option, and you can go back to fighting- do all the steps needed for other victories, experiment, grab the legacy paths.. whatever you chose to do! The sun never sets on the Roman Empire, after all.
At the End of it All
These are really nice updates, and it’s good to see Civilization VII listening at least a little to the fanbase and making some real effort to solve the problems people are having with the game. It doesn’t change the fundamentals that are off-key with the game itself; those are core issues that can really only be fixed in the 8th game, but lots of games, like No Man’s Sky, started at launch roughly, and updates were able to make the game really hit its stride. Time will tell if that’ll be the same fate here.
