The Civilization (Civ) series has a long and storied history, pioneering a genre (4X games) and serving as an introduction to turn-based strategy games for a large number of folks. The most iteration of the franchise (Civ 5) was not particularly well-received by the community, with many singing its praises, but a large number turned off by the changes to venerable mechanics, as well as the DLC model, and general AI jankiness.
Gods and Kings is the recently released expansion to Civ 5, bringing the return of two subsystems from Civ 4- religion and espionage, along with an assortment of new civilizations. Will it bring the Civ 4 holdouts back into the fold, probably some, but I feel like a lot of the old guard are going to keep going their own way. In my mind, there are a lot of similarities between the Civ 4/5 struggles and the D&D edition wars which raged hot during the switch from D&D 3.5 to D&D 4.0. In both cases, you had a group of designers come in and make mostly beneficial changes to a system which was creaky and in need of an update, changes which a significant percentage of the community rejected due to some poor implementation (in D&D, the Monster Manual ) and nebulous "flavor considerations," as well as a general resistance to change. In this piece, I'm going to wrap a review of Gods and Kings in with a larger exploration of the parallelism between the two edition changes. Join me, won't you?
Gods and Kings is the recently released expansion to Civ 5, bringing the return of two subsystems from Civ 4- religion and espionage, along with an assortment of new civilizations. Will it bring the Civ 4 holdouts back into the fold, probably some, but I feel like a lot of the old guard are going to keep going their own way. In my mind, there are a lot of similarities between the Civ 4/5 struggles and the D&D edition wars which raged hot during the switch from D&D 3.5 to D&D 4.0. In both cases, you had a group of designers come in and make mostly beneficial changes to a system which was creaky and in need of an update, changes which a significant percentage of the community rejected due to some poor implementation (in D&D, the Monster Manual ) and nebulous "flavor considerations," as well as a general resistance to change. In this piece, I'm going to wrap a review of Gods and Kings in with a larger exploration of the parallelism between the two edition changes. Join me, won't you?
