Turning A Big Dial Taht Says "Civilization" On It And Constantly Looking Back At The Audience For Approval Like A Contestant On The Price Is Right

In a recent interview with Game File, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick spoke a little about the struggles that Civilization VII--an immensely disappointing video game--has experienced since launching over a year ago.

Admitting that the game has been off to a slow start in terms of sales, and taking personal responsibility for the game's wild swings by saying he "got it wrong", Zelnick says that Firaxis' attempt at distancing itself from the core Civilization formula was a "bridge too far":

Every time there’s a new Civ, the team at Firaxis thinks about: ‘How do we push the envelope far enough that it makes sense to buy this new game? And how do we preserve what people love enough so that they’re not disaffected?’ And we got it wrong with Civ VII, but it wasn’t for want of trying. And again, I take responsibility for it.

So we’ve made a bunch of fixes. We’ll continue to make fixes. The game is a really good game. And it’s certainly a profitable enterprise for us. But this is one where I think what we tried to do was a bridge too far, from the consumer’s perspective.

Not to pick on a guy who's already admitting here that he's got something wrong, but he's got this wrong as well. As have Firaxis, the studio ultimately responsible for the game with the "fixes" he mentions. Ever since Civ VII's launch, the team have announced a ton of changes and updates to the game, some of the most important aimed at allowing the player to toggle (or bypass entirely) many of those wild swings, in essence reverting Civilization VII to a newer, slightly different-looking version of Civilization VI.

It's easy to understand why. I'm sure their most consistent and vocal feedback has been a dislike of new systems introduced to try to differentiate Civ VII from its predecessors, like Civ-swapping and distinct ages, so on one level you can't really blame them for addressing those. But the problem here--and this is across AAA game dev, not just Firaxis--is that your loudest and most online fans aren't always the most representative of your entire playerbase.

Just like online shooters that spend years catering to the meta, wondering why their audience slowly drops off as normal players zone out, I think Firaxis have spent the last decade listening to the kind of Civ players who spend too much time on Reddit and in forums, and not enough time just playing the game and finding out why millions of less online fans might enjoy it.

Civ VII's problems are many, and go well beyond new stuff that can be walked back in an update. I mean yes, the new stuff has proven to suck; swapping Civs robs your game of any consistency across eras, and the ages system, while sounding cool on paper, creates weird bottlenecks in your game that are at odds with the rest of its flowing representation of history.

But so many of Civ VII's deeper issues can't be fixed with updates like the one that is coming (which will let you play as the same Civ throughout), because it was catering to the hardest core of fans that got Firaxis in this mess in the first place. Civ VII, like Civ VI, is far too obsessed with its city-building meta, a number-juggling foundation of the entire experience that is huge fun for a percentage of sickos, but is also off-putting to sections of Civ's casual audience. For many, the most fun you can have in Civ is exploring an unknown world, building cool stuff and moving guys around the map, not endlessly crunching adjacency bonuses. This is something that will never be addressed in an update.

iv written a lot about the failures of recent 4X games lately, but playing old world right after them (civ 7, endless legend 2) really shows how it's done. those games have lost sight of the feeling of being alone and small in a vast, unknown world. old world absolutely nails it.

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— Luke Plunkett (@lukeplunkett.com) October 3, 2025 at 10:26 PM

Civ VII also shares a failing with Endless Legend 2, in that in pursuit of combos and numbers and optimisation, it has lost sight of some of the purest joys to be had in a 4X game. Civ VII's game world looks like a board game, not a world, and it's staggering to look back as recently as Civ IV--or modern competitor Old World, which has strong links to Civ IV's development team--and see how much more work went into making the world feel alive. This will never be addressed in an update either.

Civ VII's diplomacy is also the worst it's been for the series in a very long time. From the heights of Civ V's iconic villains/best friends, who were dripping with emotion and would constantly pop in to simply compliment or harass you, the latest game's diplomacy has been reduced to a bland bartering system. This kneecaps the entire experience; Civ games are built on emergent story-telling, it's the rivalries you develop with the AI more than anything else that keep you coming back to play fresh games. Without them, Civ VII feels dull and lifeless. I highly doubt anything can be done about this in an update.

I'm not saying "just remake Civ V" here. I admire the intent to take some big swings with Civ VII, even if they didn't land; I wish more big, legacy series were that bold. But the fact remains they didn't land, and the team's attempt to recover from that by dialling everything back probably isn't going to work either, because I don't think that can fix what's wrong with Civ VII. Civ VII's biggest problems are fundamental, they formed a core part of the game's design, and most of them carried over from Civ VI because Firaxis thought they were the bedrock of the game.

I think the only way things are going to improve is if Civ VIII takes its own big swings while remembering what it is people really love about Civ, not what its most hardcore fans tell you they love.