Why Civ V is a worse game than Civ IV... according to its lead designer.

While the primary focus of this blog will continue to be (or, go back to being) Diablo III, it will surprise nobody to learn that D3 isn't the only game whose design I have issues with. There's another long-running series that I used to love, that released an installment that totally ruined the entire franchise for me. That game? Sid Meier's Civilization V.

This may surprise some of you, since Civ5 got mostly positive reviews when it launched. I can only assume that those reviewers played very little of the game, and/or mostly hadn't played earlier installments of the series.

I really disliked Civ 5:

• I disliked the 1 unit per tile micromanagement of units, which reminded me of nothing so much as an Avalon Hill board game, and added a whole 'nother layer of tedious unit micro which Civ, already a game filled with fiddly micromanagement, truly did not need;
• I disliked that the game's AI just randomly did shit for no apparent reason, making it impossible to predict or plan for their behaviour, and reducing diplomacy to a complete waste of time;
• I liked the idea of the Policies system, but disliked the fact that it gave you no tools to change course if your earlier choices ceased to be relevant; in the world of Civ5, civilizations apparently didn't change or evolve over time at all;
• I disliked the fact that a "normal" paced game on a "standard" sized map took the equivalent of a work week to complete, and felt like longer. In fact, I don't think I ever actually finished a game of Civ5; I kept starting new ones, playing for a few hours, and then wandering away as boredom and frustration gradually mounted. I finally uninstalled the game.

Worse yet, horrible as Civ5 was, it nonetheless introduced changes with made Civ4 feel clunky and horrible as well, so I couldn't even go back to play that game anymore; which means that Civ5 actually ruined Civilizations for me completely. Very much like Diablo III, actually; I haven't been able to go back and play Diablo II again, either.

I don't know why I was thinking about this today, but I found myself Googling Civ 5 for some reason, and discovered that I was not alone in my criticisms of the game; interestingly, Jon Schafer, who was Civ 5's lead designer, agrees with almost all of these criticisms, and posted about it at length in an effort to convince potential Kickstarter backers that his new game won't suck as badly as his last game did.

Delving into Path of Exile's Twitch stats

A few days ago, Grinding Gear Games (GGG) released their latest league/expansion/thing for Path of Exile, Delve. And, I'll admit, I've been enjoying this league a lot more than I enjoyed the previous league, Incursion, which GGG proclaimed to be a resounding success, even as they announced that they weren't adding Incursion's mechanics to the game until December... in some form (details TBA).

Incursion was plagued with rapid player burn-out, basically extending the end-game clear-speed meta into the early game, while adding very little that seemed new or exciting after your third or fourth Temple. That burn-out was evident in the game's Twitch viewership; streamers switched to streaming other games, both to preserve their own sanity, and to hold onto audiences who were just as bored with Incursion as they were. While interest in Incursion was initially high, it dropped off quickly, and left many players disillusioned with GGG who were seeming increasingly out of touch with their player base.

So, how is Delve faring, by comparison?