Between all these disparate alterations, Civ V is going to be the biggest departure since Alpha Centauri. Is Sid Meier even still personally involved, or is Firaxis' stuff still as much his brainchild as before? Because I wonder what brought on all these new changes after nearly twenty years of the same basic formula.
Actually, Sid Meier has turned a bit more into a brand name lately. I don't think he's been very personally involved in a lot of the stuff that has his name recently. I heard the rest of the Firaxis team took part in a lot of the design decisions in the Civ4 expansions.
It's not so bad, because IMO, he wasn't really that good a designer anyway. He gets some epic ideas, he pulled an idea from scratch to make it work (albeit not as complex as most would make it), but there are some better game designers from all these game design colleges. He's done his bid to start the work off and let someone else do it, and let the grunts fine tune it to perfection.
Reminds me a little of The Sims 3, which was sort of fun for the first two bit (the ones that Will Wright did), but really became a game when Will Wright took his hands off it.
But Sid did put his name and face on this one. And he just loves coming up with new ways to do things, so it's probably mostly his ideas until you get to the expansions.