The second of the two big March updates Civilization 7 developer Firaxis revealed would be coming last month has dropped today, March 25. It adds some new features and continues the effort to fix and change elements of the game folks didn’t like, such as the UI.
As you might expect, the studio’s put out a developer video going through the changes alongside the proper patch notes, and it’s a good watch, though there is one bit that fans have picked up on for a pretty awkward reason given the whole UI gripes context. Basically, it features some little text spacing mistakes, which aren’t end of the world, but are technically UI things Firaxis hasn’t executed that well.
Yep, towards the end of Civ 7 creative director Ed Beach giving us all the lowdown on this new update, there’s a text box about some changes to the Railroad Tycoon legacy path, and as players on the Civ subreddit spotted, it features a few instances of words not being spaced out as they should. There are two bits that read ‘increasedfrom’ and also a ‘givesa’. Nothing too bad, but yeah, not ideal given the game’s situation.
This bulleted list being centrally aligned is also drawing some criticism from civvers, whose confidence in Firaxis’ ability to rectify the in-game UI issues that’ve been a part of the game’s mixed reception so far hasn’t exactly been boosted by this. “In the grand scheme of things, this graphic should be a very minor thing,” one wrote, “but it speaks to the greater point of Firaxis not knowing literally anything about design.”
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That aside, when it comes to what Update 1.1.1 includes, the previously announced stuff like more UI improvements and refinements, Mount Everest, improvements to how the AI scouts and settles, and the ability to give your cities and commanders custom names like ‘Minecraftmovieland’ and ‘Jack Black dressed as Steve’ are all there. There’s also the Quick Move setting, which lets you disable unit movement animations to speed up gameplay, and a restart button you can press from the pause menu if you want to start over “within the first few turns of a new game”.
As for what the future of the game looks like update-wise from here, Firaxis added that it’s “still hard at work on Update 1.2.0, currently planned to deploy in April (subject to change)”, and said that “you can expect plenty more major updates in the months to come”.
If you’re still on the fence about trying Civ 7, make sure to check out our review of it, which dissects all the stuff it does differently to its predecessors.