GameSpot E3 First Look...13 Screen Shots...

It's ironic. On the last thread from the other day, I was defending the graphics. Now I am not as sure after seeing this. I am not complaining about the units (I quite like them), or the terrain itself. My complaint has to do with the overall appearance of the cities, terrain, and units together on the map. I find it looks very busy and almost a tad distracting. The unit flags do help a bit but I think they need to brighten the unit colouring a bit maybe and perhaps clean up the terrain.

If it is too busy, I worry it might get choppy very very quickly and that multiplayer is going to experience quite a bit of lag except for those with the best connections.

Other than that, I love almost everything I have heard about this game today. If they do some final graphics tweaking I will be even happier

I'm sure they will spend much of the last half a year cleaning up the graphics. I don't know much about game development but I imagine that it's wise to first develop gameplay and AI, and use mostly placeholder graphics until they're in good shape. I think we will still see an enhancement in the overall clarity and usability of the UI and graphics.

It looks good, but the units should be smaller. However, if you look at the first screenshot (the snow terrain), there the units are perfect size. But in other screenshots they look too big. I wonder if it's just my eyes or if that is really so.

I don't like the demo video either. I am so mad right now it's unbelievable.

Well, look at it this way- I almost puked (xqzmoi) when I first saw the Civ3 gfx (HAIL to Snoopy the great!)

The only problem is that now its all in 3d.... and we can't customize it anymore as the community used to. I will make a prophetic view into the future and say: This is the end of the Civ Modding Community. Another problem is that we have a product oriented company that listens to the wants of the community only insofar, that it implements what the company itself wanted to make anyways. The Civics are nice and should be there, but so far I fear this may turn out be a cool governmental system in a potentialy (very!) crappy and odd looking game.

Civ's greatest success has always derived from its community of modders! Well, lets see what murky soup they are brewing together. The weakness of the series has likewise been graphics- every civ game looks odd- but that didn't matter as long as there were folks that could change everything to something better. Now it seems the Firaxians are too much concerned with delivering a pretty-in-pink looking game with lush, boxy and boring units and terrain noone much will have to (or be able to) change. Great, but why not enhance a game via gameplay first and then worry about the looks? For now there will be people that will look at it and shall like it- or not. First impressions do count.

To me this is not a game people will run to the shops for, once it launces, as happened back with vanilla Civ3. I am sorry, but starting from the engine, over the warcraft look-alike units, to unnessesary things like animated resources- wow, a moving beaver- how could we live without one before- this preview is depressing. Just my 2 cents

I remmeber the time when Civ3 is supposed to be relased and how people complained that it's the end of moding due to animated units and the way way how terrain works.

And it didn't happend.

@Winter: Snoopy and Warpstorm have said it will be even more graphically moddable and I agree. Modders just have to make 3D graphics instead now.

MeteorPunch said:

@Winter: Snoopy and Warpstorm have said it will be even more graphically moddable and I agree. Modders just have to make 3D graphics instead now.

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How many a modder in this forum can do that? I've seen other game forums (rome: TW, silent hunter, etc) and the number ranks below 10 (usualy about half that number). Similarly very few people in this rather large forum will be able to mod. Some have started making low polygon figurines and a mere few have mastered them, but 3d terrain was never successfuly implemented here. I hope Civ4 will feature wrap-around texture file on tga basis- but that is to show.

I know I complain a lot, yet praising one thing doesn't change anything

In other news: Bebro and I are the only randomly successful unit makers/moddes that "survived" the swap from Civ2 to Civ3- now go figure how many modders will make it over the swap to Civ4.

Its actually not that hard. Any of those 3d modeling programs will do it. And if you are a programmer you can do it easily

I'd imagine the actual 3d terrain is generated in code, i could be wrong.

JG99_Korab said:

Its actually not that hard. Any of those 3d modeling programs will do it. And if you are a programmer you can do it easily

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Well I am not- and so is the lot of the 58000 users on this froum: It will be a handful of people that will be able to do this- I believe with five fingers one could cover their number.

Let's be honest, many of the guys who crank out new units (not all of course) do actually use 3D modelling programs.

Many? Many of the very few, you mean?

Honestly- yes, they save the animations and paste them into 2d pcx files which are then converted into flics; but those programs are not compatible with one another, to the extend that some people, like Vingrjoe (Poser) makes units that aren't available as models to Wyrmshadow (Bryce) whose program can for instance use old 3ds and fsds formats, yet fails at gmax, 3dmax, and fsds2 compatible files. Many 3d programs do not feature interchangeable file formats.

Hence the beauty of Civ2 and Civ3: You didn't have to be a 3d-designer, geek, or programer to shift a few pixels around: Everyone could do it- now only a few will. (I remember we had this talk before elsewhere- and I can tell you that Jorde, Wyrmshadow and several other of your 3d artists have mentioned "feeling sick" when they saw and read these previews.)

When people think of a community they usualy think of one guy who takes requests for the stuff they can't make themselves- to me it is no such thing. (I know that this doesn't apply to you, I just mention it to contrast on the discrepancy in terms that is already in place in the existing communities).

Don't get me wrong, I do like 3d units- but by the looks of it this is more like Empire Earth. We'll be stuck with what Firaxis gives us for a long (!) time...

W.i.n.t.e.r said:

We'll be stuck with what Firaxis gives us for a long (!) time...

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No modding possible? I hope you are wrong, but who knows...

Arturus said:

My complaint has to do with the overall appearance of the cities, terrain, and units together on the map. I find it looks very busy and almost a tad distracting.

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I think they said something in the video about having layers that you can select. So you should be able to select what you want to see (units, resources etc.) and fill the map as much as you want (or do just the opposite).

Hmm perhaps not "no" modding, but less to "much" less for sure

You know, W.I.N.T.E.R, I don't see where you are coming from. I have seen more mods, scenarios, units wonders etc, etc in Civ3-in just the 3 years its been out-than I have ever seen in the ENTIRE LIFE of Civ2, and thats even in spite of the fact that we didn't have proper modding tools until PtW. Now it sounds like it will be totally modabble right out of the box. I feel certain that many talented people will rise to the challenge of modding, and we will see more mods for civ4 than we saw in the entire life of civ2.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

i cant get over the shields being changed to "hammers" whats up with that???

@Aussie- I doubt you saw all the Civ2 community had to offer (sorry- haS to offer, even today there are still mods and scenarios being made for Civ2). And at its prime Apolyton and The Spanish Civilization Site, Civilization 2000, Alexander the Great' and Captain Nemo's Civ2 Site, etc were still top notch, with literally hundreds of mods/scenarios being offered- all simple to mod- even without a PhD in informatic science. Civ2 is still being played a lot on certain forums, all people who bought Civ3 and put it back into its box, to return back tho "the roots".

and as you correctly stated: Until PTW we didn't get lots of the things Firaxis had promised us, not even then, with Conquests (though already very solid) did they give us all what was planned for the initial release Civ3 (like scripts, for instance). I am just afraid we will have a dissapointment similar to that following the release of games such as Master of Orion 3. Being a Civ1 veteran, when I first took Civ3 out of the box and played a bit I was very low down. Then I decided, that if they had given us an editor and made so many promises about Civ3's modability that maybe I should start modding straight away... well, what can I say- I tried to make the Germans have the Dark Grey (or Black) Civ colour and wanted to give the French any other one rather than piggy pink (someone must have really had a grudge on them )... and changing the colours already made the game crash- it took them 3 patches to resolve that.

So I took the game out of the CD drive again and put it back into its box, where it stayed until the Patches, and until finally PTW hit the market- that's where I am comming from.

This having been said, I can see that many people have a short memory about how very lacking the games we eventualy assembled patch after patch, (purchased) addon over (purchased) addon, year after year started out. It took the community over a full year to make proper mods of Civ3, and a second to get people to assemble proper units, a third for some particulary gifted ones to convert 3d files into units and stuff.


Just a puny example (just to emphasise- don't get stuck on this one)
They promised us a "straight out of the box" multiplayer in Civ1. It wasn't so
They promised us a "straight out of the box" multiplayer in Civ2. It wasn't so
They promised us a "straight out of the box" multiplayer in Civ3. It wasn't so

So, well, I can only HOPE that what you hope it sounds like will be so, but I know those people's work - and their promises to be somewhat- err- how to say it in a nice way... "sometimes not entirelly down to factual reality"

For Civ3, they lost most of their production team halfway through making the game, so I think they lost stuff they wanted to have. This is probably why the vanilla editor was so poor and they didn't have multiplayer until PTW.

At least for multiplayer, I think Civ4 will be different.

Louis XXIV said:

For Civ3, they lost most of their production team halfway through making the game, so I think they lost stuff they wanted to have. This is probably why the vanilla editor was so poor and they didn't have multiplayer until PTW.

At least for multiplayer, I think Civ4 will be different.

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Very true lots of good ideas- including re-discovered civics and the Alpha Centauri stuff- lets hope for the best, and a good game