

Addressing an entirely new audience had given us more freedom than we’d had in years to determine what was and was not “supposed” to be in a Civ game.
#Civilization revolution 2 multiplayer Pc
The whole thing was actually developed on the PC, and we could have easily flipped it over to that side of the market-but it wouldn’t have been a success, because the gameplay wasn’t designed for the PC any more than the originals had been designed for consoles. Cities were easier to build and expand, technologies developed sooner, opponents attacked earlier, battles were over quicker. Not everyone has 80 hours to devote to a single game, and there was no reason folks with greater work and family obligations should be left out in the cold. It was, as we described it at the time, Civilization in an evening. This was exactly what we’d been aiming for. It's currently available as a hard cover, an e-book, or an audio book. This feature is excerpted from the book Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games by Sid Meier. “In fact,” admitted one reviewer, “because it caters directly to its platform rather than trying to shoehorn an unwieldy PC port into a console, it succeeds where others have failed.” Advertisement But once it became clear that the console version was just another kind of Civ, and not the only kind of Civ that would ever exist again, everybody settled down. The nature of our game inspires fierce ownership, so when faced with something new, our fans never hesitate to make their voices-and especially their displeasure-heard. They were also used to having their opinions taken into account, from the simplest fan letter to the 600-page “Official Suggestion List” that a diehard group of players printed out and mailed to us in anticipation of Civ III. But mostly, they were just afraid of losing something they loved, which made the whole ruckus seem kind of sweet. According to certain portions of the Internet, we were betraying our fans, dumbing down the series, and/or pandering to the obviously inferior platforms of an obviously unenlightened group of gamers. Civilization II had made it to the PlayStation several years after we left MicroProse, but every Civ title at Firaxis-including Alpha Centauri, Civilization III, Civilization IV, the soon-to-be-released Colonization remake, and the secretly-already-in-development Civilization V-had all been exclusively for the PC. So, in mid-2007, when I made the announcement that I was going to design a console-only game called Civilization Revolution, the horrified outcry from our fans was not exactly surprising. But the whole experience really underscored the fact that the cultural gap between console and PC users was about more than just buttons versus keyboards. If a 30-second wrapper of mysticism made the rest of the game more palatable to this particular audience, then I guess we could live with it.

In the end, we took their word for it-mostly because we had no choice-and sure enough, none of the console reviewers thought the vignette was the least bit out of place.
