Jon Shafer leaves Firaxis!

'bout time.
They have to do something to get this trainwreck fixed.
I see this as an great way to pump-up the morality of rest of the developers.
Maybe they now start fixing the game instead of milking the cow for a while.

This is most centairly a good thing for us players, soon we will have more polished game with true civilization feeling around.

One of the best x-mas presents we can really get.
 
If this proves to be entirely true... then, we're in for a hell-of-a-ride in patching terms.
I'd be curious to figure out the Whys though. Anyone could speculate; 2K "political" grasp over Firaxis, Team devs rationalization, product design direction, etc.

I'm willing to gamble the whole stuff is done and over (as of this moment) and that any theoretical supplemental features will require an almost TOTAL rewrite of the code-base while keeping a few things here & there.

We'll have to see if Firaxis remains deadly serious after the huge v1135 (realizing now that it was possibly a farewell call from Shafer, btw) -- we should know within 8 weeks if not much less. Cuz, any lead designer (good or bad) is pretty hard to part with and replace.
 
SammyKhalifa said:
My guess is that we'll never find out.
Click to expand...

Yup, non-disclosure agreement and a generic "We both decided to go in different directions" press release. Which means he was probably fired. If not, then he's bailing instead of working to fix a game that is still largely unplayable, but still has additional Civs available for almost $4.00 each!

Can everyone finally admit that CiV is a colossal failure?
 
Finally, the infamous creator of Shafer Dumbed Down Consolization 0.05 is being punished!!! Yay!!! :woohoo:
 
Either this is when civ5 will turn itself around... or when the patches will stop. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.
 
thbrown81 said:
Can everyone finally admit that CiV is a colossal failure?
Click to expand...

I don't know if it's a failure or a success, but I've been having fun with it since the big patch. I hope this change (whatever it is and for whatever reason it happened) will mean continued improvement, and not that they're going to just abandon it.
 
:eek: Would be cool to get a comment on that. 2kGreg? :mischief:
I'm not sure that this is for real... Gotta wait for Firaxis' (or Jon's?) official statement on this one...
And furthermore I'm not entirely sure whether that's good or bad for CivV... :confused:
 
i hope this can put some fire under some devs seat...perhaps we can receive a good xmas present for CiV...
 
Agree that this is potentially a really important development.

Not sure what it means though. Here's two possibilities:

1) Jon Shafer's version of ciV has been badly received and a view has been taken in that improving the game they'd be better off with someone else doing that job. This has been in the pipeline for a while but they just wanted to get the patch out. (Good)

2) Jon Shafer knows stuff we don't know, reckons the game is doomed to failure, can't be fundamantally improved, so has got out now. (Bad)
 
My guess is that Sid finally played civ5 and noticed the civ:revolution aspects, courtesy of Jan Shafer, so he decided to get rid of him and burn all the stuff that has been in contact with civrev development.
 
Shafer had his successes too; Final Frontier mod for Civ IV and Civ IV BTS. CiV was a major disappointment though.

Still, I think this is just 2K publicly "making heads roll" to please the fanbase. Good for Civ-fans? Probably. Good as a publisher? Probably not.

I'd rather 2K/Firaxis admit that CiV was somewhat of a fluke rather than having them fire Shafer.
 
Hormagaunt said:
Okay, I have GOT to ask. In what way have the developers been immoral? Also, does it involve goats?
Click to expand...

they've been in a drunken haze the last 4 years of development :p

this is the best news i've heard on civ5, well since forever. maybe we can cross our fingers Soren or Sid come and revive it.
 
I think he meant pump up the "morale", though I don't see how firing the boss does that.

If he's really gone it's probably due to poor sales. Too bad, he was one of us before he went to work there.

I think his biggest mistake was not having a playable demo to iron out mistakes. everything that we've seen, or at least much of it, could have been averted with a few months' beta testing. how much of that was shafer and how much of that was 2k? They didn't exactly do him any favors when they fired 1/2 the team over the summer.
 
Adhesive86 said:
Agree that this is potentially a really important development.

Not sure what it means though. Here's two possibilities:

1) Jon Shafer's version of ciV has been badly received and a view has been taken in that improving the game they'd be better off with someone else doing that job. This has been in the pipeline for a while but they just wanted to get the patch out. (Good)

2) Jon Shafer knows stuff we don't know, reckons the game is doomed to failure, can't be fundamantally improved, so has got out now. (Bad)
Click to expand...

I think in this case both statements are probably true. Obviously FitzCiV has been poorly received by the game's core audience, and if Shafer was fired, it's a clear sign that Firaxis wants to move the game back towards its roots. With that said, it seems to me that FitzCiV is so fundamentally departed from the rest of the series that it seems impossible to fix it without starting over from scratch. They could move straight to an expansion that completely alters the economic engine of the game, but that would be a major slap in the face to people who bought the game on its initial release.
 
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