Last year during Humankind's first few months, its reception was pretty poor, an 67% in overall reviews, but overall reviews aren't always accurate, especially if it's been a while since, so it's better to use the recent reviews to determine the current state of the game, Humankind however did worse in recent reviews, a whopping 55% in December. However, a massive Influx of players had appeared in the middle of the month, jumping Humankind's recent reviews up to the low 70's. It seemed as if Humankind was on a resurgence, but as time went on, and weeks passed, the recent reviews began to fall back to pre-influx ratings. Now just a few minutes ago, I saw Humankind's recent reviews at 54% a new record low rating. So, what went wrong now?

HK is a tasteless candy with a bright wrapper. The game has interesting ideas, but the aggressive advertising campaign, unpolished gameplay (production dominance, pollution breaking, culture imbalance, etc.) and very slow bug fixing has put many players off - me included.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the first major expansion - something like Brave New World or Rising Tide - that will build on the feedback from more players. If it fails, then we can confidently say that the game is stillborn, and start developing a new game.

52% recent reviews and falling, this is bad as if it gets below 50%, it would be the first time for the game that the negative reviews would be the majority.

Now that I have had a chance to think about this a little, I'm going to provide a somewhat blunt opinion. I intend for this to be constructive criticism, and I hope it's taken that way.  (Sorry for the wall of text.)

I guess my biggest concern at this point is that Humankind is just losing its focus (or maybe just wasn't focused enough to begin with). During OpenDev and in the months following release, Humankind didn't seem to have a cohesive plan for development and growth. Is all of the development effort going to go into bugfixes? Or is it going to go into refining weak or broken mechanics? Or developing new DLCs? Or creating limited-time events like a live-service game? Or is the plan to just cater to Twitch streamers and hope to ride the wave of Twitch hype? Based on what I have seen since OpenDev, the answer to this series of questions seems to be "all of them at once" which makes it feel like the game's development is adrift without a plan. So I feel like Amplitude is going to have to sit down and get a cohesive plan together from a business perspective that pushes forward in far fewer directions.

After going back to playing Endless Legend a bit more lately, I also worry that Amplitude actually surpassed their original blueprint for their "magnum opus" when they created Endless Legend without realizing it, and the result is that Humankind is a bit of a step backwards from what Amplitude has already done in Endless Legend. From a technical perspective:

• I'm going to have to say that the weakest aspect of Humankind compared to Endless Legend is the culture system. It's basically a modification of Endless Legend's minor faction system, but in order to showcase the culture system Humankind completely throws out the rich gameplay elements offered by the unique factions in Endless Legend.
• The fact that only one player can choose a specific culture at a given time also feels a little silly because it restricts player choice by potentially forcing people to play as a culture that they don't even want to play as. By comparison, Endless Legend allows for all players to choose the same faction if they wanted to.
• Using Fame and Era Stars to merge the varied victory conditions from Endless Legend into a single victory condition feels like a step backward.
• The tedious complexity added to the battle system makes Humankind battles harder to play than Endless Legend and makes me ignore manual battles entirely in favor of auto-resolve.

So I think that Amplitude is going to have to go back to the drawing board on many of Humankind's mechanics if they're going to get things back on track.  Maybe they could be resolved with a single, sweeping paid expansion.

It also feels like Humankind hasn't exactly catered to historical 4X as a genre as much as it should have:

• You want to play as historical leaders? Well, you're going to be mostly out of luck there because there aren't that many. Of course, you can slightly expand your historical leader roster if you participate in limited-time events, but completing the event's tedious chores will only get you some obscure person from history instead of someone that most players have actually heard of. And if you want to try to create a historical leader in the avatar creator, you're going to have a hard time because there's not a lot to work with customization-wise, and you only get one avatar slot so you can't create your own library of historical leaders to choose from. So at a minimum there won't be the archetypical "Gandhi with nukes" scenario that people are used to seeing in Civ. (In general, I also feel like Amplitude severely overestimated the amount of interest in the character creation feature while at the same time not offering enough customization tools to make it worthwhile to the customization power-users who *were* interested.)
• You want to play as a specific civilization? Well, you're out of luck there too. You may have to wait until a later era to play as your culture of choice and then to keep playing as them you have to risk Transcending which could put you at a disadvantage. So people who are like "I want to play as (insert historical figure) who is leading (insert civilization)" are going to be a little disappointed because they either can't play as major world leaders and/or have to jump through hoops to get the culture that they want (provided that someone doesn't snatch the culture up before they can get to it).
• The culture progression feels a bit strange.  One era you can be an east-Asian culture, the next you can shift to a South American one, then you can follow that up with an African one, etc.  So the immersion is broken there because you aren't really paying attention to the actual culture you are choosing and instead just focusing on the culture's perks.

In this sense, I can see why Humankind seemingly isn't capturing the Civ player base that Amplitude was aiming for. Correcting this aspect of things should be simple enough in concept, but it's going to take a bit of planning, effort, and possibly free content updates to add the stuff that Civ fans feel is "missing" from Humankind.

So there are my two cents for now.  Of course, it's up to Amplitude's management to figure out where they want to go, but that's my "outside looking in" opinion on the "what went wrong now?" question in the topic's title.

ilusha100 wrote:

Dayvit78 wrote:

I'll chime in since I was an early fan and still supported the game through many (but slow) updates.

Basically, I was still having fun and the African DLC added some very fun cultures.

Having said that, I am getting less and less excited about their future updates. It does not sound like they are addressing any of the things that are problem areas for me. Regarding affinities - I could care less. Whether one is OP or not, it doesn't matter because I don't use them. Te way they are balancing them still looks like I won't have any need for them. So for them to spend so much of the update on this one minor feature is what's sapping my excitement. In fact, I'm not even sure what else is in the upcoming update.

This has nothing to do with being like Civ or not. I already love this game more than Civ - I've said before Civ 6 is way too annoying to play after playing this. I guess I can't speak for anyone else, but just wanted to share one opinion.

These are my thoughts exactly. I think this game is better than CIV. I hated the last CIV to be honest. It's the slow updates to the important things that is turning me off. I hope that might mean the dev team is working on an expansion and I see incredible possibilities to this game, just nothing in the upcoming patch that has me excited.

I also do understand the complexity of such a game and how even the smallest change can get held up by extensive QA and regression cycles. 

In two years this game will be a solid 100 on reviews.

I actually hope it to be a free update and not a paid expansion, to have people spend more money to fix a game that they had already spent money to play in the first place would only make things worse for said game.

Oh, and SpikedWallMan, you can have more avatars than the game gives you but only through Games2Gether from other players persona's, which limits the games creativity and adds a unnecessary requirement for the complete experience, This sadly also appears to apply to event rewards as well if I remember correctly. Something that other games have done better without the need of having a second account.

So, this begs the question, Can Humankind still be a success. Is it still able to make a resurgence and be as good as other Amplitude games or has 9 months of inactivity and relatively minor updates killed any chance of the game being a major hit? Can the bad mechanics be changed and fixed, or are certain mechanics just too rooted into the game that it would require a major overhaul that simply can't be done?

DragonGaming wrote:

So, this begs the question, Can Humankind still be a success. Is it still able to make a resurgence and be as good as other Amplitude games or has 9 months of inactivity and relatively minor updates killed any chance of the game being a major hit? Can the bad mechanics be changed and fixed, or are certain mechanics just too rooted into the game that it would require a major overhaul that simply can't be done?

The overhaul can be done. Check out the most popular mods right now.

They just need to be more agressive with balancing

Sublustris wrote:

DragonGaming wrote:

52% recent reviews and falling, this is bad as if it gets below 50%, it would be the first time for the game that the negative reviews would be the majority.

You don't own the game. You don't play the game. Why whould you care?

I agree with what Slashman, Dayvit78 and SpikedWallMan (aside of fame and battles) said. Their opinion is based on their own expereince. Their opinion is legit criticism. Yours is just smothering the fire.

I have played the closed Beta and Demo, so yes, I have time invested into this game, I'm just unsure of whether or not the full game is currently worth the 50 dollars it's asking for (which is why I'm asking what other people think about the game/why is it at its current rating). Also, I care because it's made by Amplitude, the sucess or failure of this game will reflect on them and can affect future games, both standalone and Endless.

Anyway, do you have an idea on why Humankind's review score has gotten so low?