Firaxis loses Civilization V lead

Fraxis should have fired him for allowing a quote from G.W.Bush to be placed in the game (for the Future Tech leaf of the tech tree).

Maybe Sid Meier needs to follow suit and form a new company and buy back the Civ rights, and do it right next time.

To fatFlat: under advanced setup, you can reduce the number of city-states to 0.

Civ V sukks ... Independent states all they do is start wars ... They should of made a options where u dont need to play with states ...

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@Wwlettsome You're joking, right? Go play Civ V, hell, even do a little bit of research on it and you'll know it's not the same.

Probably got tired of remaking the same game every couple of years...oops don't tell the Civimaniacs that, it's a secret!

Sad new indeed... I'm excited about how will the game change if they make an expansion... aand good luck to Mr. Shafer!

Civ V is a lot of fun and I don't regret buying it. However, it feels more like Civ Light. I still play Civ IV when i want a "brain cell burning" game. However, the more I play V, the more I'm enjoying it. There's a casual/relaxed feeling to V, where as IV is more stressful and tense. The biggest fault I find is the AI. They are way too bi-polar. I don't trust a single AI anymore in V. This game encourages you to win by domination only. Even if you try to play nice, the AI will eventually attack you; which really is a shame. Curious to see who they'll hire to work on Civ 6.

Good riddance. He was far too inexperienced to be the lead designer for such a complex franchise like Civ, and it really shows in all of Civ V's questionable game mechanics. I don't know what Firaxis was thinking when they appointed him to that position.

@metalkid9 Totally agree. Civ 5 fells very stripped and very basic compared to previous versions. Also Civ 5, for me, is very unstable and after numerous e-mails to the support team asking for help with no reply i'm not overly happy with their customer support either.

They probably got rid of the guy who forgot to code in diplomacy options into the core game. I'm playing Civ 5 for hours on end...and haven't the slightest idea how the other cultures feel about me. And then out of the blue, a warband of 6 high powered units shows up with no warning whatsoever. Bill Clinton I ain't, I need a diplomacy page...like yesterday.

Somehow this game felt stripped from the last one. I wonder if I am the only one feeling this way.

@hibi-acer He was the lead designer of Civilization 1 and Civilization Revolution and he co-designed Civilization II, but that's it. Each Civilization game has more or less had a different lead designer and I for one, think that that's actually a good thing, as long as it retains quality and a good reputation. I think that they have Sid Meier's name on there for mostly commercial purposes.

Umm, good riddance?

@MasterTheHero I think you're mixing up definitions. More so in the past than now, by your definition of "streamlined" the Mac was a streamlined version of a PC. The kind of people that Civ always appealed to were the kind of people who would gladly click through a few more menus if it meant having as much control as possible. And I certainly was one of them. I'm not saying Civ V is worse than IV. I'm just saying that it's making concessions to appeal to a wider audience at the expense of it's established audience. And I'd bet that most people would appreciate it. Me? I'll play, I'll just miss some of the features that were "streamlined."

I guess this is good news if he was one of the masterminds behind the changes in Civ V that made it inferior to Civ IV. I mean, there's something wrong when a game totally screws an important aspect of its gameplay (in this case, at least diplomacy) and then the development team has to try to remake it through patches.

who cares?

@MasterTheHero The Civ games have been those of a thinking man. Complexity in such a case is good. "Streamlining" a game usually means one of two things, either you're just tweaking menus and minor bits like that (of which CiV V did little), or you're streamlining game mechanics. The latter process invariably diminishes gameplay complexity and diversity, and is rarely a good thing. Civ V does indeed suffer from such a thing. Well, OK, it does make the game better for... Lesser intellects.

Well, hopefully now users can get some of the improvements they have been wanting since launch. If this guy had anything to do with them being held back that is...

That facebook game actually sounds really fun and somewhat innovative. As far as the dude leaving, it's not so strange. I'm guessing that when you've been with a company for six years and have been heavily involved with a great game like Civ V then you probably don't want to start all over again with Civ 6 :)

@Prometehus I don't understand the logic behind wanting a game NOT to be streamlined. People like having to click through hundreds of menus just to manage your cities and armies? Sorry but that's just plain tedious micromanagement, and I don't understand how anyone would want go through a million menus just to manage an attacking army.

I don't like the way Civ V was streamlined, so imo this is a good sign for the Civilization franchise.

Eh. He did a good job, but his style leans in a direction I'm not a huge fan of. His vision of Civ just doesn't feel right, good, but not quite right. He's got quite the reputation now, so I'm not worried for him.

Civilization Networks even catches my interest as a Facebook Flash game hater!

What a shame. :( And a facebook game? What the hell are they thinking?! :x

Eh? I would have thought the lead designer of Sid Meier's Civ V would have been Sid Meier. Never heard of Jon Shafer before now, but I wish him luck.

Reason ? They created a top class game...