Civilization 7 has been announced, and the whole forum knows (nearly) only 1 topic: Civ switching. In Civ7 you pick a leader, and one civilization from the antiquity to play through the antiquity. When arriving to the age of exploration, you will stay with your leader, but pick another civilization (from a set of exploration age civs), and the same for the modern age. Some of these civs are marked as being the “historical choice”, based on your previous civ.
As expect, a part of the forum is livid, with the main thread racking up 40 pages already, and this is a short summary:
Our member paisley_trees, a history student and civ enthusiast, has been discussing this in-depth (see video and thread here), in a very balanced way, and made alternative suggestions for the wording. The wording of “historical choice” has also caused issues from a Native American point of view, as there are concerns that colonized people might be replaced by colonizers (there is currently no indication that this will happen). The video and its suggestion addresses this.
It seems that roughly 50% of the forum population would prefer if you could keep your civ (and another 25% really don’t want to have this mechanism), but on the other hand, 75% will anyways still buy Civ7, even if they might not like this mechanic.
This has obviously contributed to the civ communities main hobby before a new release, which is guessing for new civilizations. We might (not confirmed) be getting 15 civs per age, in total 45, of which 15 have already been revealed or identified. A separate thread is currently discussing which civ might be following whom. The community manager Sarah has also confirmed that new in-depth reveals will be coming, and we are looking very much forward to hear more about the civ-switching (although we don’t know if the first reveal will be about this).
And that is the “short” summary.