My Civ 4 review is still forthcoming. I got to spend about three hours playing the game yesterday and got some decent first impressions, but as with Age III, I don’t want to pass judgement without some more time figuring out the nuances. A real brief summation of my first impression (completely subject to change) - it’s a lot like Civ 3. Go figure! The general feel of the game is quite similar. The techs are different, the city improvements have gone through some changes, but the idea is the same. (Thank goodness, or we’d all be up in arms, wouldn’t we?) I did feel like there was a more drastic change between Civ 2 and Civ 3 (which I know not everyone liked, but it is nice to see change and experimentation). But like I said, I haven’t spent enough time to really get into the fine details.
Just a little negative thing here. One of the big new features is that you play on a globe, but it’s really not a feature. There’s no gameplay there. Most of the time, the world is still completely flat. When you zoom out enough, the terrain detail pops to a lower level of detail (LOD) and a globe weather texture gets hazed over everything. At this point, it appears that the flat map you normally see is mapped to a sphere (though the map isn’t mapped all the way around the sphere, which is noticable despite what the developers might claim in Game Developer magazine. Basically, instead of taking the flat map and bending it the full 360 degrees so that the two ends of the flat world meet, they only bend it about 150 degrees and duplicate part of the world. You can never see the same thing on both sides since the curve is big enough, but it helps solve the problem that you cannot accurately map a rectangle onto a sphere - the less you bend it, the less artifacting you get). But though it’s cool that there’s this concept that you really are playing on a whole world, it doesn’t add anything. In my time playing I never needed to zoom out at all. BUT - maybe there’s some late epoch stuff where you build satellites or something and you actually see them zipping around in orbit? Then having the globe would be awesome. Anyway, I only got about 1/3 of the way through the timeline (by my completely arbitrary and baseless estimates, at least), so I’ll be back with more info when I have more.
Oh, and btw, I did play for over three hours and had trouble stopping. So some of the magic is definitely still there. I think I’m just something of a grump this week and maybe my love and fascination with the entire Civilization franchise will soon resurface and I will spout words of adoration and admiration on this site in days to come. But no promises either way.
2 Responses to “Civ 4 Impressions”
Not to sway you in any way, but I picked up my copy and I am really pleased. The main grip I have about it is that it feels like it plays way to fast, even on epic. But I really liked the soundtrack, especially the “Lion King” song at the begining. The graphics are well done too. I am even trying to think up ideas for some mods.
You think it plays too fast! Haha. That’s funny. I’ve been playing on the standard speed and still haven’t managed to finish a game all the way through. I don’t have enough hours in my life for it to be slower! I know, that’s Civ for ya, I just was thinking I was gonna try my next one at the fast paced speed so I’d have more time for all the other games on my pile!