Brian Shanahan
Permanoob
Hiring a bunch of yes-men does not count as beta testers, whether you're a game company releasing a new game or a deranged lunatic trying to take over the world with the German army.
I'm sorry but I'm going with Sullla et al over at Realms Beyond here. They are an independant voice vis-a-vis Civ 5 and its development team (being neither too big for 2K to try to subvert, nor too brown nosed to willingly roll over), and when the massive general consensus from there is that most of those picked for beta-testing Civ 5 were picked for their ability to talk what 2K/Firaxis wanted to hear, and not for their ability to play the game, give independant in-depth critiques or willingness to break the game to improve it I generally go with the consensus (especially when there is lots of evidence shown to back up that consensus).
Oh, and the fact that any competent beta-testing would have resulted in 1UPT being removed from the game, seeing as it (and this is objective fact here, not "ranting" nor personal opinion) kills every other facet of the game, and turns what was a strong indepth long-term empire building strategy game into a very bad, insipid and uninspired tactical war map helps show my point as well.
And I'm not getting into the myriad game-breaking bugs, the total lack of MP testing or coding, the fact that the game was built for a graphics code which was itself untested, leaving it extremely badly optimised graphically, the fact that it was not optimised in most any other form, &c., all of which would have been dealt with by barely adeqate (not good, not even adequate, just simple clock-watching pen-pushing level) beta-testing.
Moderator Action: If you want to insult people who are actually doing something contributive instead of only ranting, then please go elsewhere.
to all you devs over at Firaxis who made the decision to mandate steam in Civ 5 as some sort of DRM protection crap. Well, you won't see another cent from me.
