Interview with Dennis Shirk on Front Towards Gamer

AncientOne said:

I don't even think of myself as some hardcore civ player and now I have played civ 5 only a little, but already I saw many problems. For example when some AI declares the war, you just have to survive it, don't even have to attack, you don't have to raise your military power, but when you wait enough, then enemy offers a lot of money, resources, etc when signing truce. WTF?

Click to expand...

I think that's the key. "Hardcore" suggests a small reduced group. But their definition of "hardcore" is indeed a much bigger one. I also don't consider myself "hardcore", but feel disapointed with this "streamline" thing in Civ 5.

Quote:
Shirk mentioned how Civ 4 with BtS was considered to be near "perfect balance" by hardcore fans. Making Civ 5, they knew that making a better balanced game would be--"How do you make something over Beyond the Sword?" So they decided to change game concepts and such (1.). And yes, as BtS pleased the hardcore fans, they decided to make 5 appeal more to those who might have loved Rev (2.) and wanted something more--but who may not be ready to leap into Civ 4's complexity(3.).

Social Policies were made permanent because Shafer wanted people to develop a system over time that would be meaningful and not simply switched around. Shafer would be able to answer more fully the question why Social Policies are permanent, Shirk emphasized--but historically the idea is that you put "ideas into your people"--Americans who are democratic would be hard pressed to suddenly switch to Communism, is the *imo pretty good* example Shirk gave.

"Balance is ongoing"--esp. with the Civ series. To quote, Shirk said the testing team was a "fraction of a fraction of a percent of the total number of users"(4.) and that therefore future feedback and current feedback will play a part in later balance patches etc.

"We love the people who make enormous complex mods(5)"--Shirk mentioned he knew forumers would include people who analyze, down to tiles and such--who would deliver constructive criticism--and really angry forumers, and people who were ecstatic--and people somewhere in the middle.
- - - - - - - --

1. I said the developers decided to change everything that made the civ franchise the juggernaut that it is. I was right all along. (are they one President Obama's advisory team?)

2. I said that CIV5 is nothing more than an Xbox game for the PC. I was right. This, in and of itself, is outrageous. The developers have literally defrauded us. The game should have been called Civ Rev for the PC. I wouldn't have bought it then, BTW. Civ Rev was atrocious and didnt even deserve the Civ name.

3. I said this game had only about 10% of CIV4's complexity. I was right. This is the most dumber down version of the entire civ series, including the original civilization. See above about fraud. The devs think people are too stupid to want to play chess over checkers (see there! I didnt mention "go", HAH!) I guess all those people playing CIV4 and made you all rich are an anamoly!

4. I said this game was NEVER beta tested. I was right. I paid 60$ to be a beta tester. Ouch. Maybe I am stupid. Once again, see above concerning fraud.

5. I said the development teams was going to use independant modders original content to make the game better, because they can't. I was right. If you think I am wring, please read your STEAM user agreement and policies. STEAM and FIRAXIS have absolute ownership of anything you use/create/write etc through the STEAM/FIRAXIS connection, including hte mods you MUST play through them. See about for Fraud, also, consider outright theft.........


I so wish I wasnt right.

This was a great interview. Feedback is the key for the expansion of this game. I wonder in what way they can implement espionage later on? I believe there will be some form of spying and gathering information about your neighbors. There actually should be a thread about this if there is not already.

I am playing Civ 5 ... and while I sense the dumbed-down feel, I can also see the potential it has with the right expansions.

I mentioned in a previous post somewhere, comparing Civ 5 to Civ 4: BTS, is unfair. What you need to do is compare Civ 1 -> Civ II -> Civ III -> Civ IV and ignore the expansions, in each generation.

When I started playing Civ III after playing Civ II "Test of Time" and I missed some of the features of that version. Similarly playing Civ 5, I am missing some of the Civ 4:BTS features.

Hardcore Civ gamers, give this new platform some more time. In the meantime go back to playing Civ 4: BTS. I do. Incidently, I believe the user-mods for Civ have taken it beyond what it started with. Just look at FfH, RtW, and many others.

vanilla civ4 is so much better than vanilla civ5. that's the comparison you wanted right?

yes i have played both, but civ4 got... obsolete when warlords and BTS came out.

When Vanilla Civilization IV first came out, the only time I wasn't playing it was when I was at work or out with friends. I'd spend an entire weekend, easily, playing nothing but Vanilla Civ. This continued pretty much until Warlords came out-which boosted the game-play experience even further. By comparison, I purchased Civ5 about 3 weeks ago, & played it solidly for the first 7 days. Since then I haven't been back (I've been enjoying my Civ4 experiences way too much in that time). For a Civ game to have so little hold over me is just plain weird because, even with its flaws, Civ3 held my interest for at least a solid 3 months! So in comparison terms, I'd say that-though there are positives about Civ5 (the Unique Abilities, 1UPT, City-States, ranged units & Strategic Resource Quantities) its not enough to lift the game to "best Civ ever" category. Heck, its not even good enough to lift it to "2nd best Civ ever". If it wasn't for the apparent ease of modding it (haven't got around to it myself) then I doubt I'd even give it a 2nd chance. Luckily, though, there are so many *good* modders out there, they might just be able to lift it into 2nd place!

Aussie.

I had been considering whether to mod for it now, or work on another Civ 4 scenario for RtW. My experience with Civ 5 has left me "cold", and in a way disheartened, and partly for the "whole" franchise.

After loading Civ 4: Colonization and being disappointed (due too much micro-management), I returned to Civ 4: Beyond the Sword with a vengeance. I played some of the mods and got quite addicted to "Afterworld", and having stomping walkers was great.

Hidden in this expansion was "The Road to War". However I struggled to play it on my Athlon XP, even with 3 GB of RAM and 6600 GT card. I discovered you could turn off Winter and Battle effects and it was then playable. Almost a couple years ago I got my new computer a Core i7 and it was a revelation. I could play the game and enjoy it as well. But as some of you know, I found problems with it's historical accuracy, e.g. Italy could win.

For the next two years I worked on improving it, releasing my first updated scenario in August last year. I have since released my latest version last month. Over 2,000 people have also tried it, for which I am quite proud.

What I am trying to say though is, I have a hope that Civ 5 will get better and they really listen to the members of Civfanatics, and make Civ 5 as good if not better than Civ 4 and all other Civ versions before that. Failure for them do do this will kill this franchise, for the hard-cores, yet it may be a successful game, because the audience has widened to include the "console" gamers as well.

Problem only is: console gamers are a ungratefull lot. Throw them some new eye candy, an even more dumbed down version of another game, and they will jump the line.

People that are as dumb or simplistic as Shirk seems to consider to be the important audience ... are too dumb to mod in any meaningful way. There is a reason why games like X3, or the Paradox titles do have a community that follows up year after year after year.

If you design a console game ... you'll have a console community. If you consider history to be linear, you'll have to cope with people that think Adolf Hitler was a german, and Catherina the great a russian, and that they stand for the "typical values of their nations".

PS: for the console players reading this: Hitler was austrian, Catherine a prussian. Talk about "national typicalities...

And yes, as BtS pleased the hardcore fans, they decided to make 5 appeal more to those who might have loved Rev and wanted something more--but who may not be ready to leap into Civ 4's complexity.

Click to expand...

This is an outrage!!! How can your dumb it down really. This looks more like a cheap business trick to appeal to more naive people. Firaxis and 2k obviously don't know what the own.

Could this not be part of a grand strategy ... get a high number of people playing it ... many longing for DLC or expansions to make it better. They buy the expansions, say its better, then they buy the next expansion ... and the woolaa ... a much bigger market ... and millions of potential DLC customers.

I believe they had some grand plans for Civ5, and then they bumped into their schedule and their budget and decided to cut out quite a bit of stuff, leaving us with an overly simplistic game that winds up pleasing pretty much no one who enjoyed Civ4. I'm pretty sure the lead programmer is taking the fall, and it probably wasn't his fault, it was probably some manager somewhere who cut his budget/schedule and forced him to strip down his game. The smart thing to do at that point was to consider it CivRev for PC. They really wasted 3 years developing this thing? And this is all they have to show for it?

But anyway, now you know why I don't even trust Sid Meier any more. His free pass has long since expired. He's gotta prove himself, just like everyone else does. He shouldn't have allowed this debacle to carry and sully his name; I don't know if he stands for anything any more.

If you guys (2K) wanted to make a simpler game, I'm all for that, but you shouldn't sully the reputation of your franchise with such shoddy workmanship. I've got a feeling your business is going to rest on Civ5's patches and expansion pack. If 2K puts back all the glory we were originally promised (or makes a good effort to do so) in the expansion, you may get back some of your reputation, but if not, I think you're going to be out of business soon thereafter.

I'd like to be surprised with some sales numbers.

We're all just happy as clams now! Heaping the criticisms on Civ5 makes us SO superior to the unwashed masses of gamers, crawling over themselves in the filthy streets to play the dumbed-down games falling from our refuse chutes. Thank God we're not like the rest of humanity!

How DARE Sid Meier not hire US as designers?? The nerve!! I know so much better than he does what I wanted in a game. Well, pshaw! If I stop buying his games, he's SURE to notice that he makes $50 less every five years! Mark my words!!

Has there ever been a group MORE elitist with WORSE spelling and grammar skills?

korossyl said:

Has there ever been a group MORE elitist with WORSE spelling and grammar skills?

Click to expand...

Might be just me, but maybe, just maybe, some of those posting here are not native english speakers/writers? Might cut people some slack with the borg of languages as second (third, fourth...) language.

Just for the record, english is my 4th language if you count it chronologicaly ... So if you find errors and mistakes ... you may keep them.

I haven't bought the game, and don't plan on it. At this point I don't see how it can be fixed.
When news of Civ5's development first trickled out, it really sounded like there was a focus to fix issues with Civ4 and release a better game.

90%+ of what AussieLurker says sums up my impressions. Perhaps since I haven't bothered to "play" I'm not allowed to have an opinion as such, or that makes it invalid.

I can say this, I expected with Civ5:

• A streamlined/better Espionage system (klunky klunky in Civ4).
• An overhauled Corporations system (that was awkward in Civ4).
• An improved Religion system, that gave more weight to the money/culture bonuses.
• A game engine that could handle large maps without MAFs, slowdowns and save game corruption.
• Less unit micromanagement for large wars.
• Units that can move more than 1 square at a time.
• Better Naval Warfare.
• Zones of Control, and improved Combat in general.
  • Myself among others mentioned an optional chess-board like strategy layer to combat, where you could move units around in a smaller scale after battle was initiated.
• The ability to enter the vague idea of a given Civilizations "border" without declaring war.
• Better Diplomatic relations.
• Improved AI.

Warlords3 (not Civ:Warlords) is likely one of the all time best Strategic War Games. Units could actually move around in a given turn and how you built your 'stack' (the order) was important, not just spamming SoDs.

Civ5 on the other hand, changes things for the sake of change in many cases --- or for the sake of simplicity. There might be one or 2 things in my list above that has been incorporated into Civ5 (and I'm sure if I put more thought into and/or re-read some of the older posts on Civ4 I'd recall more "wishes" [of the fans] that were just plain ignored). Yet for the most part nothing that I wanted was done at all, and in fact almost everything in my list above was removed instead of improved.

-- The 1UPT feels like a game mechanic: prevents suspension of disbelief. A single tile is a huge area of land, that the game "rules" say only 1 unit there...
-- You can create a barracks, but your units can't stay in the city -- because of a game mechanic, that _feels_ like a game mechanic.
-- Cities that auto-attack like some half-assed "Flash Castle game" -- feels like a game mechanic.

Civ5 is not good enough. And unlike the detractors of Civ4 who complained about the changes from Civ3 to Civ4 --- the naysayers of Civ5 have a point: Civ5 has added game mechanics, watered down the experience and taken away choice from the player. Civ4 made changes from Civ3 - but the goals there were to try and fix what was broken, not streamline the game play down to a bland emotionless experience.

I see a lot of dismay over this game. I agree with most of the complaints. The people that are pushing to give it a chance -- I guess are able to overlook everything that is wrong with this "game" because it's CIV. It's CIVilization in name only at this point.

Hexes aren't an improvement either. An improvement would of been Octogons -- where you can actually move N/S/E/W NE/NW SE and SW. And would of enabled near circular shapes as well as almost square: Giving the best of both worlds (square and hex). As others have noted, hexes actually give you less choice than a square map, the supposed advantage is equidistant from one hex to another... really did anyone care that if you moved on an angle with squares that ONE sqare your unit could move was a little bit further than if the unit went N E S or W?

He just confirmed what I've said, that Civilization V is really Civilization Revolution 2, or CivRev for PC. They should have named it that way, but this way they get more cash... once. I'm not buying anything Civ V related.

The big worry with Civ5 was always that it was going to be Revolutions+ instead of Civ4+. Now we know that that's what was intended from the start. I feel horribly let down. It'll take modders years to take this game to Civ4's level of enjoyment. I'm actually ready to write off Civ5 of until then, or when Civ6 comes along (whichever is sooner).

The most telling aspect is this: when Civ4 first came out - yes there were bugs - but the game was instantly recognisable for it's greatness. I would play and play and play - it was easy to keep playing because the game was so enjoyable. But Civ5 feels like work. I have to force myself to keep playing by telling myself "It'll get better the more you get used to it". Well, so far it hasn't.

After 2 games in Civ4BTS, I miss my stacks. They dramatically reduce unit micromanagement and allow your units to engage all at once. Stack vs. Stack seems a bit strange, but at least you could imagine a historical parallel. In C5, my invaders get knocked off one by one by their all-archer army, unless you use OP horses, which I avoid.
The only way forward I see for conquest oriented fans is to reimplement stacks with actual cut scenes to a battle landscape. Kind of like Total War, but without the need for high-end graphic machines. We also need to re-balance build-times. Why is it that a swordsman takes about as many turns to build as a city construction project?
Plus, we need more resources and diversity among city-states to make diplomacy interesting.
I would go back to Napoleon TW, but I love the Sandbox and diplomatic potential here.