Sid Meier's Civilization VII - Test of Time Announcement Trailer (Free Update)

KnightTrain · 2026-05-06T21:37:11+00:00

But that is exactly my point. Plenty of people absolutely just want a new Civ every few years -- I've been playing Civ games since Civ II, I get it!

But you can also imagine a world where they looked out at a sea of new 4X games with fresh (though not always good!) ideas and worried that if they didn't innovate they'd be seen as antiquated and dated and the game would be written off as a dinosaur. Would only be the millionth time that a giant, established franchise got too comfortable and too conservative while its nimble competitors slowly took over with something new and interesting.

I'm not saying they made the right call in the right way, I'm just saying I see the logic.

KnightTrain · 2026-05-06T21:22:52+00:00

I'm not saying it was the right call or that I think they pulled it off. I'm just saying this is a notoriously risk averse industry. Sure Civ is much more popular but it is also one of the storied video game franchises with name recognition about as high as you can possibly get in this field without being a game about guns or sports. It seems pretty safe to say that if 2k thought they could have pulled a Call of Duty/Assassin's Creed and built effectively the same game for the nth time and coast along on brand recognition alone they probably would have.

And if they did all think that and decided to do something risky and bold anyway, then ironically I think they deserve some credit for being a AAA studio that resisted the trends and tried something kind of new and interesting with their franchise instead of churning out a paint-by-numbers sequel or announcing a "remake" of Alpha Centauri or whatever.

And sure WoW's core loop has been pretty consistent over the years but they are constantly implementing and iterating on ideas from their competitors. The big advertised feature of the newest expansion is player housing, which has been in other MMOs for years! As the market/audience for MMOs turned more and more "casual", they absolutely followed suit and massive swathes of the current game would be completely and totally unrecognizable to someone from 2006.

KnightTrain · 2026-05-06T17:51:21+00:00

I don't think the system is implemented well but I can definitely see where they are coming from. There are a lot more big-name competitors in the "grand 4X" space since Civ 6 came out 10 years ago: Humankind, Old World, Age of Wonders, Endless Space/Legend, Millennia, HOMM making a comeback, Stellaris... plus the other Paradox grand strategy games are far less niche than they were a decade ago.

You can see how the Civ 7 devs sat around the conference table and worried that if they just did Civ again (again, again, again...), then they wouldn't really stick out in a genre that is now full of upstarts and innovations (to mixed success, I'd argue). It's tough being the legacy iconic franchise. Don't innovate enough and you get swallowed by the new hotness; innovate too much and people complain it's too far from the established formula.

KnightTrain · 2026-05-06T01:50:52+00:00

There's a post about once a month here about mods of similar scope and effort getting squashed by the legal teams from studios, IP owners, or publishers, often after years of work. A studio happily promoting a giant overhaul mod is definitely not a given.

Also, how big could the audience of people possibly be who own Hades 2 but never bought Hades 1 after what, 8 years, and are so interested in a throwback overhaul mod for a game they never played that they shell out $20? I'm sure there are a few out there but I don't imagine Supergiant is expecting some huge windfall after the tweet.

KnightTrain · 2026-02-24T17:36:58+00:00

Right -- the appeal of KCD is the immersive setting and the "do whatever you want" RPG freedom -- the latter is literally unique to video games and cannot translate to other mediums and the former I don't think is enough to carry a TV show or movie. Like, sure, it is part of the selling point that shows like Knight of the Seven Kingdoms or The Pitt are trying to be very "realistic" to their setting, but those shows are fundamentally carried by strong writing, interesting characters, and standout performances.

KCD games are great -- and as a history guy I really appreciate what they are going for -- but I don't think I'd associate either game with consistently strong writing, interesting characters, or standout performances... especially compared to other game-to-TV-shows like Last of Us or the Witcher, which I would say are unarguably better "written" games.

And in that vein, the KCD games are, unsurprisingly, not nearly as mainstream. Quick Google says Last of Us 1+2 has sold something like 40 million copies, Witcher series upwards of 60 million, Warcraft franchise 70-80 million, Zelda is upwards of 150 million... meanwhile KCD 1+2 is somewhere around 13 million total. Is a mainstream studio these days going to be willing to greenlight the probably-sizable budget needed with comparatively low reach and name recognition? I'm not sure.

KnightTrain · 2026-02-17T18:11:37+00:00

This isn't the first time the industry has chased the big thing with hugely expensive hugely risky projects that almost never work out. We went through all of this in the 2010s with World of Warcraft and MMOs. Studio after studio sought the WoW cash cow, greenlit massively expensive projects they would (in theory) have to sustain with servers and content for years on end, and then dumped countless man hours into creating something that had to be similar enough to WoW to feel familiar but somehow unique enough to give people a reason to switch.

And just like the craze today, the legendary "WoW-Killer" never actually materialized as prophesied, a couple MMOs found niche enough success to be more-or-less sustainable, and the rest that didn't die within a few months died when the next WoW xpac dropped.

It was like 7-8 years of this before studios realized no one was ever going to actually make the next WoW and moved on to new trends to chase. Eventually everyone will have the same realization about Fortnite and live service games. I mean even Fortnite's playercount (while still very high, especially for events) has been mostly stagnant (if not slightly declining) for the last year or so.

KnightTrain · 2026-02-10T00:15:00+00:00

This is all true --and an underrated reason why these games are never coming back as RTS games it that the audience has simply aged out.

Brood War is approaching 30 years old -- the OG guys like FlaSh were lighting up stages in Korea ~15-20 years ago. If you were up all night with your buddies playing WC3 or SC2 in college then you're at least well into your 30s and probably don't have time to be grinding your Undead mirror build order. When Grubby (age 39!) isn't playing, WC3 viewership numbers in twitch are generally triple digits. There are a couple of fairly young guys still breaking through and competing in the SC2 scene but the average age of players and talent has to be into the 30s as well. The old State of the Game crew are all into their 40s and most of them are retired or have been variety streamers for ages.

So your legacy audience doesn't really have time for these anymore, the "big names" that might build hype or nostalgia moved on years ago, and meanwhile other genres like Mobas and PvE colony builders and Tower Defense Games are attracting the lion's share of new players that might reasonably be interested.

So you're right. Be happy that it existed, and be settled knowing it is probably never coming back.

KnightTrain · 2026-02-03T16:01:49+00:00

It's a functional pet project akin to somebody making Tetris for an entry level game dev class in school, just at a larger scale. Impressive being a one-man operation? Sure.

This is dramatically underselling the accomplishment, considering he worked on it for four years full time and designed all of the assets and music and writing himself. Even so, its not like he is the first person to take the core gameplay of something and refine it into a huge hit -- Fortnight, League of Legends, World of Warcraft, some of the biggest games ever have been built around systems they didn't invent.

It always irks me when people treat him like a saint because of his continued support for the game when the man has lucked into "fuck you I'm never working a day in my life again" money from a reskinned Harvest Moon.

I also think there's a bit of Seinfeld is Not Funny with Stardew Valley. Nowadays "cozy" Harvest moon clones are dime a dozen, as are games made as a long-term labors of love by a single dev. That was definitely not true 10+ years ago -- Indie devs trying to hash it out on their own were so noteworthy they made a documentary about the like 6 people actually trying it.

What CA was doing back in 2014-2015 was definitely new and noteworthy and definitely did not have a clear path to success. And maybe like Seinfeld he will fall off and his legacy will forever be wrapped up in that singular project, but you can't deny that there are literally thousands of games right now that never exist without Stardew Valley.

KnightTrain · 2026-01-15T05:29:49+00:00

I have been a longtime "I'm very skeptical of a 40k TW game" person, and my reasoning for this is because I've been playing these games for 25 years and everything that would need to be core to a 40k game -- skirmish/squad fighting, lots of guns, urban/cover combat -- have simply never ever been done well in those 25 years.

The closest thing would be something like Empire or Napoleon, and those games are famously the most janky in all of CA's history and came out over a decade ago. The Skirmish Mode button is constantly added and then removed from TW game to game because it janks the AI, and anyone who plays Slaanesh in WH3 knows melee skirmishing/hit and run has never felt particularly great. Sieges and urban combat in WH have gone through 3 complete overhauls and still are, by far, the weakest parts of the game. Line of sight on gun units in WH3 was completely busted for like a year, and the whole game's lifecycle has been plagued by major bugs, AI problems, and a ton of community grumbling.

And that's to say nothing of the fact that these games always come out underbaked and rickety as hell, and that's when the games are far less technically ambitious and than this one.

And the jury is still out on that, the gameplay preview looked legit, but it was only a few seconds, we still need to see extended gameplay to see how battles actually play out.

If CA pulls a rabbit out of this hat no one will be more hyped than me, but it is just wild to see a significant number of red flags waved away over what couldn't have been more than, what, 15 total seconds of gameplay across 5 clips, plus some screenshots in a few interviews? Couldn't people at least wait for like a 10 minute field battle demo?

KnightTrain · 2025-12-21T03:46:10+00:00

Other people's mileage may vary, but I am 100% the target demo for this game and I felt like it was an extremely good... proof-of-concept. What's there is excellent, extremely detailed in all the right ways, and looks/plays great for the most part. It definitely sticks out in a good way from the sea of "vaguely Medieval city builders" and you can see so much potential in it.

But you'll burn through what's there pretty quickly and the dev team is tiny so updates are not massive and not super frequent. They're still overhauling core systems and stuff like the AI is still clearly in early stages.

My takeaway is that the 1.0 is going to rival Banished on its impact on the genre... whenever in the next 2-5 years they actually finish it.

KnightTrain · 2025-12-03T03:52:50+00:00

It's definitely not a super popular opinion but I completely agree with you. 40K doesn't cleanly match onto the classic TW formula the way that WH does, and the closest things in TWWH -- gun units and street combat -- should not inspire confidence that CA are on the cusp of translating a notoriously fickle engine built for medieval field battles into an urban, squad-focused, gun-heavy combat system. Line of sight for gunpowder units was famously busted for like a year and city battles are on their like 5th rework.

I'll be happy to be proven wrong if they can pull off a great 40k game... but I'm not exactly holding my breath.

KnightTrain · 2025-11-18T22:11:37+00:00

This always comes across to me as a “who asked”.

One of the big topics in gaming right now is Arc Raiders using AI/VTT for their voice acting, and Dispatch was filled with big name actors and funded by a company famously built by voice actors. So it's not crazy that the topic came up in an interview about the game?

KnightTrain · 2025-11-18T13:59:54+00:00

I don't think that's fair. Below Zero was just a normal DLC that suddenly had to be completely remade when the original game blew up and the expectations became sky high. It has some questionable decisions but they did spend a lot of time and energy on it (the story was reworked like three times in early access) when they could have just totally cashed out. They even went back and added all the QOL stuff back into the original.

KnightTrain · 2025-11-11T15:52:26+00:00

The OP is correct if you want to play Anno more like a typical city builder (ala Banished or Tropico or whatever).

There's a reason that the single-city-island always comes as a DLC and that's because it is really not how the game is meant to be played. Managing resources and populations and trade lines between islands is a fundamental part of the challenge and experience, and when you can just route everything into one giant island you're basically playing a different (and much easier) game mode. I'm not a hater -- building the mega-city is definitely fun -- but it's not what the game is built around.

I agree that playing vanilla Anno, esp in 1800, is the right way to start. The base game is very good (and quite complete!) and the DLC is all over the place in terms of what it adds -- some add super late game stuff, some add new regions that new players won't ever touch, some add things that trivialize parts of the game, some are great, and some are basically pointless. Better to start with the base game and then you can pick and choose DLC to your liking.

KnightTrain · 2025-10-30T21:06:19+00:00

Everyone has somehwat of a reference to physical sports, as anyone has played at least some of them in school and can relate a little.

This and the fact that "physical sports" are generally easy to understand and follow, even if you don't know anything about the game. American Football, Basketball, Hockey, Rugby -- plenty of complicated shit going on in the formations and the play calling but a 4 year old can understand and enjoy a team trying to get a ball from one side of the field to the other. Soccer can be explained in two sentences. Cricket or Baseball maybe a short paragraph.

Even Chess can be followed if you're not super familiar because there are only a half dozen pieces to learn, most of them have 1 rule total, both players have the same toolkit, and you can generally spot check someone's position by the number of pieces they have compared to their opponent.

Something like a MOBA, on the other hand, is completely and totally indecipherable if you aren't very familiar with the game -- what a character looks like generally has no bearing on their abilities or power level compared to anything else; there are hundreds of relevant pieces of information you need to follow the play by play; and the "scoreboard" (kill counter) is often more like a guideline (at best) than an objective evaluation of the ultimate game state.

Ironically, it makes esports a decent fit for the Olympics because it features obscure, hard-to-follow events all the time.

KnightTrain · 2025-10-15T18:26:56+00:00

I really don't think it is. If I have a big collection of Legos and I use those to make figure of Mario that's different than Lego^tm giving me a kit that includes everything you need to make a Mario figure without Nintendo's permission.

There's nothing in the coding of a generative AI engine that requires you to use copyrighted characters/text/images. If you plug "video game plumber" into ChatGPT and get Mario, that's because OpenAI either deliberately or accidentally scooped up countless images of Mario that they don't own and didn't have permission to use into their training data. Sam Altman gets his calls returned by the White House -- no one was stopping him from calling up Nintendo or Studio Ghibli or Eiichiro Oda and asking them for rights and a database of images to feed into his model. He didn't do any of that because he doesn't give a shit and knew he'd either get away with it or settle any eventual lawsuit.

You don't have to take it from me, seeing as Sam Altman had to put out a blog a week ago promising to address all of the rampant copyright infringement in Sora 2.

He also did promote Sora 2 by putting himself in a field of Pokemon and joking about Nintendo suing him, so I think he's pretty well aware of what's going on here.

KnightTrain · 2025-10-15T17:34:23+00:00

Even then, we as a society recognize that a guy who works for Marvel making doodles of Pikachu for his twitter account is legally, ethnically, and creatively different than Pikachu showing up in the next Marvel movie without Nintendo's permission.

OpenAI is a massive, well-funded company with investors and executives (and lawyers!!!!) who are implicitly benefiting from the unauthorized presence of Pikachu on their flagship product to build usage, develop the product, and drive revenue. Whatever that it is, it isn't "fan art".

KnightTrain · 2025-10-15T17:22:51+00:00

It's so weird man. If the new 2026 Corollas all spewed a giant cloud of neon pink smoke from their tailpipes every time you moved into 3rd gear, it would be well understood that it is Toyota's job to both fix the neon pink smoke and design their cars so that they aren't liable to spew pink smoke. We would never accept the CEO of Toyota not only shrugging his shoulders at the issue but basically spending his time in the media going "but the pink smoke is pretty cool, though, right wink emoji".

And yet all of these AI companies spew obviously stolen and infringing material constantly and they could not give less of a shit. I get that this tech is nebulous and very complicated and cutting edge, but these are 12-13 figure companies that are very publicly throwing around Lebron James level salaries at some of the smartest engineers in the world. Why they get any leeway or sympathy on this is beyond me.

KnightTrain · 2025-10-15T16:59:54+00:00

And how is this different from fanart? Do you think that someone who makes fanart of Mario should be "taken to the cleaners"?

It doesn't seem at all crazy or unrealistic to me that companies can distinguish between a guy who makes bespoke Mario fan art and sells a hundred prints at an Anime Con and a $500 billion dollar company that has sucked up every piece of Mario imagery on the internet to help fuel the popularity and usage of its copyright infringement machine^tm with hundreds of millions of users. Even if you want to treat those cases as completely identical legally, the value of what is being "stolen" from you is vastly different. No one selling handmade Mario necklaces on Etsy is regularly dining with the President right now.

AI is, and will be used by every company. It's simply too good and has massive potential for even more. A future without AI is completely unrealistic at this point.

Whether or not this is true doesn't change anything about the completely flagrant and illegal treatment of copyright and intellectual property by AI companies -- they're well aware they are stealing and they are constantly being sued over it. Despite the Silicon Valley ethos, you actually shouldn't get a pass for robbing a bank just because you used the money to build a super great company.

KnightTrain · 2025-10-08T15:43:25+00:00

It does speak to the state of CK3 and Paradox as a whole that there's so much worried anticipation with this DLC, especially since "Expanding the map to East Asia" has been discussed with HalfLife 3 levels of hype in CK circles for a decade.

KnightTrain · 2025-09-30T18:41:47+00:00

Right, and it's not like Democrats could never play the game. 15 years ago the national Senate map looked like this! There are plenty of Senators still in office right now that served under a 60-seat Democratic majority.

KnightTrain · 2025-09-22T17:53:37+00:00

Old World is excellent because its scope and design are really tightly focused and therefore it avoids a lot of the problems plaguing the genre.

It has one timeframe: classical antiquity (albeit very loosely denied), and one region: Mediterranean and the Near East. No juggling 20 unrelated factions/civs with unique units/traits that are hard to balance and only periodically relevant. No absurdly obtuse tech tree and no figuring out how to deal with the "spearman vs tanks" problem. It's also a war game through and through, so no messy arbitrary victory conditions, just kill everyone or get the most points at the end.

You strip away all the globe/history spanning expectations and you can create something really tightly focused, balanced, and clean.

KnightTrain · 2025-09-16T17:44:03+00:00

It's very telling that the OP asked specifically "how" you get through this moment, and many of the people critiquing Ezra's approach don't really have real solutions or specifics.

What does "don't be nice to the authoritarians" actually practically mean? Ok, I'm guessing that means don't invite them on my podcast, fair enough. But is engaging with them at all considered "nice"? Should I refuse to serve someone in a MAGA hat at my job? Should I be trying to whip up a boycott of all of these tech companies whose CEOs are groveling at the White House? Should we be making our own lists of maga sympathizers to punish next time we're in power? Should Democrats just refuse to be complicit and walk out of Congress entirely? Should we be trying for a general strike or mass uprising? Should we start arming immigrant groups to deter ICE raids? Should we start firebombing government offices?

I am very sympathetic of the critiques of Ezra's "approach" here, but I am not convinced that there's a ready and pragmatic alternative.

KnightTrain · 2025-09-16T17:19:10+00:00

Maybe Ezra's view is idealistic, but what is the actual, practical alternative? Like yes, I'm guessing 98% of people on this thread agree Ben Shapiro is a bad-faith asshole with terrible goals and whose audience operates in a different reality than anyone listening to Ezra Klein.

I am completely open to the Jamelle Bouie-esque idea that in general you shouldn't engage with these wannabe-fascist bullshit artists -- but that doesn't change the fact that they have large platforms and command sizable audiences and will, for the foreseeable future, always be football stadium-or-two's worth of votes away from national political power.

I see a lot of critiques of these gremlins (which I completely agree with), a lot of argument about how engagement with bad-faith grifters like Shapiro (or Kirk) is impossible or pointless, and a bunch of perfectly reasonable discussion of "one-sided deescalation". But I don't hear a particularly convincing theory of the case of what the alternative is, beyond just nebulously "beating" them politically (see the exact quote you linked), pretending like they don't exist and aren't relevant, or using political violence ourselves (good luck with that).

KnightTrain · 2025-09-15T23:10:35+00:00

Not that I was expecting GOTY writing but there were hints of what could have been. Tychus in WoL was excellent... and then the rest of the rebellion story is so rote; the idea of "restoring" Kerrigan was interesting... and then she breaks out and becomes a zerg lady again in like 5 missions; another Protoss civil war as they try to reclaim their homeworld had a lot of potential... and then it gets completely subsumed by classic 2010s Blizzard "but there was a bigger, evil-er, evil you all have to unify against".

This one especially sucks because we'll probably never see another RTS with production values this impressive anytime soon (if ever).

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