Firaxis; who do you actually make a Civilization games for?

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darko82 said:
You do not listen what I'm saying. They did not fix the AI! It is the CP that tries to achieve that.

I could find a lot of grievances because they are so easy to find, but I consider it a waste of time. I am not here to prove something to you. Check out yourself if you do not believe.

There is no such a thing as unfinished song. It is a different branch where technology and bugs do not exist. The concept/outcome you are trying to achieve is not interrupted by bugs or technology. Also, a band is small enough to make things work together easier.
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What's wrong with the AI? Seriously, I want to know what YOU think is wrong with the AI. You are here to prove something to me, because that's how discussions work. If you are unable to provide facts for your point of view, you lose the discussion. You cannot convince someone of your argument without facts.

And you know what else, I want to know what YOU think are the issues with the game. Do you know why? Because YOU haven't played the game. YOU are claiming that the game is BROKEN AND UNFINISHED and YOU HAVEN'T PLAYED IT. YOU DON'T HAVE ANY ACTUAL COMPLAINTS BECAUSE YOU HAVE AN OPINION THAT ISN'T FOUNDED IN YOUR OWN EXPERIENCES. You're like a kid at dinner who is pretty sure he doesn't like broccoli but has never tried it and refuses to eat it because it's yucky.

You could find a list of grievances if you wanted to, sure. But I think the point that has now been made is that you don't actually have any. You're trolling this entire community. If you actually had the opinion you claim to have, you would be able to list all the broken and unfinished things in the game that are aggravating you so much and we could have a discussion about them. Community patch doesn't "FIX" anything. It changes things. If you remove the radio from your car and put in a different one, that's not necessarily fixing it. It might have worked just fine before, you just may not have liked the features it had and wanted a different one. That's not a fix, that's just swapping parts. That's what any mod is doing - swapping parts.

And you are about as ignorant about music as you are about this game apparently. I have hundreds upon hundreds of examples of songs that have changed from the moment they were recorded until present day because the artist wasn't happy with their work at the time, but they had to record it at some point. Your argument about technology doesn't matter. Games are an art form, just like music is. Games are the work of people who can only put in so much work into a game before a deadline must be reached, be it a date or a lack of funds. It is EXACTLY how music works. You think that all that great music that has enhanced your lives throughout the years wasn't done the exact same way? Things may not have been perfect, and the artist may not have liked a specific passage, but he ran out of time or money to work on it and needed to get it done so it could be released.

In short, I am 100% convinced that you don't actually have anything of value to bring to the conversation anymore. You're not here to have a discussion, you're here to shill Paradox, or you're just here to troll Civ 5 players under the guise of caring about Civ 6, when you haven't even played Civ 5. You think that mods are unilaterally "fixes" for the game, when the logic that follows that means that Firaxis just somehow "forgot" over 1500 different civilizations to include in their game (per the steam workshop), including Donald Trump's America which did not exist when the game came out, nor is it an actual civilization in any sense of the word. But, someone made it so they must be trying to "fix" the game, right?

Right. I'm done discussing this with you.

Moderator Action: Do not accuse others of trolling.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
 
Chum said:
What's wrong with the AI? Seriously, I want to know what YOU think is wrong with the AI. You are here to prove something to me, because that's how discussions work. If you are unable to provide facts for your point of view, you lose the discussion. You cannot convince someone of your argument without facts.

And you know what else, I want to know what YOU think are the issues with the game. Do you know why? Because YOU haven't played the game. YOU are claiming that the game is BROKEN AND UNFINISHED and YOU HAVEN'T PLAYED IT. YOU DON'T HAVE ANY ACTUAL COMPLAINTS BECAUSE YOU HAVE AN OPINION THAT ISN'T FOUNDED IN YOUR OWN EXPERIENCES. You're like a kid at dinner who is pretty sure he doesn't like broccoli but has never tried it and refuses to eat it because it's yucky.

You could find a list of grievances if you wanted to, sure. But I think the point that has now been made is that you don't actually have any. You're trolling this entire community. If you actually had the opinion you claim to have, you would be able to list all the broken and unfinished things in the game that are aggravating you so much and we could have a discussion about them. Community patch doesn't "FIX" anything. It changes things. If you remove the radio from your car and put in a different one, that's not necessarily fixing it. It might have worked just fine before, you just may not have liked the features it had and wanted a different one. That's not a fix, that's just swapping parts. That's what any mod is doing - swapping parts.

And you are about as ignorant about music as you are about this game apparently. I have hundreds upon hundreds of examples of songs that have changed from the moment they were recorded until present day because the artist wasn't happy with their work at the time, but they had to record it at some point. Your argument about technology doesn't matter. Games are an art form, just like music is. Games are the work of people who can only put in so much work into a game before a deadline must be reached, be it a date or a lack of funds. It is EXACTLY how music works. You think that all that great music that has enhanced your lives throughout the years wasn't done the exact same way? Things may not have been perfect, and the artist may not have liked a specific passage, but he ran out of time or money to work on it and needed to get it done so it could be released.

In short, I am 100% convinced that you don't actually have anything of value to bring to the conversation anymore. You're not here to have a discussion, you're here to shill Paradox, or you're just here to troll Civ 5 players under the guise of caring about Civ 6, when you haven't even played Civ 5. You think that mods are unilaterally "fixes" for the game, when the logic that follows that means that Firaxis just somehow "forgot" over 1500 different civilizations to include in their game (per the steam workshop), including Donald Trump's America which did not exist when the game came out, nor is it an actual civilization in any sense of the word. But, someone made it so they must be trying to "fix" the game, right?

Right. I'm done discussing this with you.
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I have played the game including vanilla; that is why I am describing what was my experience. You do not listen. I am a lot more demanding than you, apparently.

Changing music has nothing to do with its completeness. Two different issues.

End.

And as for the AI, there are many threads about how bad the AI is/was (especially after the release). I am not going to re-write the same thing over here. Google it.
 
> the roll of the community in finding bugs

"Hey, Firaxis, it's been four years, can we please run mods in multiplayer now?"

"Here's a new building for Germany."

"...cheers"
 
I don't really agree with OP. CiV was indeed my first Civ game, and I've played from vanilla to mods. I'm pretty satisfied with the product. But I do think Firaxis could've supported the game a little bit better with patches and fixes. The game, its DLC and expansions have sold a ton. They've made a pretty penny off this game. I can see how one would expect better support for such a hugely popular title.
 
Quite. I've had indie and freeware games with a stronger consumer ethic than this bestselling AAA franchise. Complaints about the neutered multiplayer AI, 'leave it to the modders' approach without multiplayer & multiformat mod support, lack of pathfinding, etc, cannot be dismissed with 'four years of customer support is plenty' and 'but no work of design can ever truly be said to be finished'. And if the appallingly low professional standards of the Civ Rev side franchise - initially produced as a fast-paced console game but now amongst the worst of buggy mobile games - start to creep into the main series, the patience of even the most casual newer players will be tested. (Look at most people's 'hours played' on BE to see how much patience there was for the last big release.)

Has there even been any news about that MMO Civ game for two years? Or have Firaxis decided to vapourware it?
 
Chum said:
And yet, unless you're cheesing it (duel maps, etc), it does actually live up to that criteria.

Just because the best players in the world congregate on these forums doesn't make that statement untrue.
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I completely agree. Take a look at the Steam stats. I think only 0.5% of all players have beaten the game on Deity. From that, I'd say it does live up to the billing.

People often complain about the AI and make it seem as though it's a simple task to improve it. If it was easy, it would have been done.
 
darko82 said:
No, the point is religion and espionage was already introduced in Civ 4 expansions, which they already did exactly the same in Civ 5. Thus, these are NOT new ideas. You are mistaken or ignorant of what I'm saying. Forgive you, though. I mean, this game has a lot more potential. It is so "unlimited".

.
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There are likely several reasons for features to be "missing".

Certainly, 2K had given a deadline for the game to be completed. I'm sure the team looked at all the features they could think to include and had to pick the ones they found most interesting and doable in the time given. They then locked in those they chose to keep and went about finishing the game. There is only so much time. Would you have preferred they try to include everything from IV but then run out of time and had to postpone the game 1-2 years? Or release it and it be a terrible buggy mess that sells poorly and never gets any expansions and maybe ruins the franchise?

Another reason is perhaps they were considering an expansion. Why is that so terrible? I'd much rather Firaxis release several expansions, make more money and then be able to keep making great games rather than have them go under in a few years.
 
Breezin said:
There are likely several reasons for features to be "missing".

Certainly, 2K had given a deadline for the game to be completed. I'm sure the team looked at all the features they could think to include and had to pick the ones they found most interesting and doable in the time given. They then locked in those they chose to keep and went about finishing the game. There is only so much time. Would you have preferred they try to include everything from IV but then run out of time and had to postpone the game 1-2 years? Or release it and it be a terrible buggy mess that sells poorly and never gets any expansions and maybe ruins the franchise?

Another reason is perhaps they were considering an expansion. Why is that so terrible? I'd much rather Firaxis release several expansions, make more money and then be able to keep making great games rather than have them go under in a few years.
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Well, that's how Firaxis makes games. It is OK, say. What I am concerned about is they always stop after the second expansion, and they move to the next project, even though there could be a lot more work to do. If the game sold well enough, it should get more support, dlcs and expansions. I prefer one "perfect" product than a few games that always tend to miss this or that or could be a lot better, even more expanded, but they are not. So I take it that it might not pay off to release more expansions, at least in the long-term.

Also, my concern is that they include the same features in the expansion. They have been quite predictable so far. And the vanilla game does feel like it is missing those features after Civ 4 etc.
 
Breezin said:
There is only so much time. Would you have preferred they try to include everything from IV but then run out of time and had to postpone the game 1-2 years?
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So here you assume that Civ V had to be a completely new game, don't you? Because otherwise it certainly would not take longer than five years to get Civ IV with 1UPT on a hex map with trade routes.
 
jekke said:
So here you assume that Civ V had to be a completely new game, don't you? Because otherwise it certainly would not take longer than five years to get Civ IV with 1UPT on a hex map with trade routes.
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Right, because no one works on other projects right?

How many games have you designed?
 
I have logged close to 500hrs in Civ 5. By far the most I've ever played in any game. Civ 5 is an excellent game & one of my favorites. However, I dabbled in World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2 and Diablo. I'm not an expert but Blizzard does seem to patch and update more.
 
lindsay40k said:
> the roll of the community in finding bugs

"Hey, Firaxis, it's been four years, can we please run mods in multiplayer now?"

"Here's a new building for Germany."

"...cheers"
Click to expand...
Okay so you've been making a lot of points about industry comparisons, you being an artist, "consumer ethics", and so on.

Running modifications in Multiplayer was, as far as I'm aware, a consequence of design decisions that made mods in MP very likely to cause desyncs. This by itself is not a bug. This is not even something that is easily fixable. It's an inherent design flaw in the foundations of the engine work done because, like all software development projects, they're done on a budget. Nomatter how large that budget is, there is still a budget. Functionality is implemented in iterations against milestones to be achieved (well, that's one way of managing workload at least, anyhow).

Yet you're going on like this is something that is both critical to the game itself as a finished product (wrong, mods are secondary. Nice to have, good for the community and thus the game, but secondary. You don't need a modification in order for the game to run. Modifications may improve your experience, that is all) and easy to do.

The same goes for that other guy talking repeatedly about AI. AI is not a quick fix. AI in games development in general is, most of the time, a giant hack. AI is not a quick fix. AI is not something that the developers can "fix".

He's holding the game to a standard of AI (which is very exploitable and I hope they improve on it for Civ 6) while assuming that just because modders have made improvements to it, that it still isn't conceptually-flawed.

Furthermore, the people that actually care about AI will, simply, use the available modifications. The people that actually care about the AI and are purists r.e. achievements are unfortunately going to be such a small cross-section of the playerbase (warning: I made an assumption, but you're free to provide stats that contradict it if any such stats even exist) that said cross-section holds no relevant purchasing power for a game that is however many years old.

Do I hope the AI is better in future titles? Absolutely.

Is it reasonable to expect Firaxis completely redo most of the game logic to support an improved AI for CiV? No, of course not. Bear in mind AI logic and processing time also impacts MP synchronisation and turn orders. Something else that would be impacted.

There's a lot of bluster about how companies should act in this thread, but not a lot of actual software-level talk. Try me, I'm pretty familiar with it. It's very easy to criticise. It's harder to suggest realistic solutions.
 
@Gorbles, I don't doubt that AI is a tricky thing to tweak. My remarks are in context of those defending Firaxis by pointing out that (1) there's mods that fix it and (2) the game has sold a lot therefore passes muster for many.

Not only is there a load of money for funding a little more tweaking, the community has already come up with solutions, which Firaxis were perfectly happy to tap as a source of content for Civ IV BTS.

As it is, they haven't even bothered to update the achievements and old scenarios to be forwards-compatible, making newcomers who enter with BNW have a go at Korea or Wonders to find a load of free commerce on river tiles and no way to remotely feed a city. And sit there filling out their Ideology and wondering why they've not ticked the box.
 
The game selling a lot is not automatic financial reserves for improving that selfsame product. Otherwise nothing new would ever be made. You'd always be feeding sales back into the previous product.

Sales fuel development for the next product, that's simply how capitalistic business works (as supposed to zero-sum, or outright charity work). You can't fund a new piece of software without having money in the bank first. Would it be nice if this were different? Absolutely. But continued sales are necessarily a guarantee of being able to support an aging product (especially given employee turnover in the games industry. Getting a new hire, or even a veteran, to work on five-year old code? Even with coding standards, comments, blah, etc, it isn't always a straightforward thing. See back to things being implemented on a deadline and not always perfectly so).

To debate that requires going into arguments that require knowledge of 2K's financials (as the holding company), which none of us have.

There being mods to fix problems is, in large part, a decent business case to include mods in the first place. There are some games, long-dead, whose multiplayer scenes only exist due to mods. Would you ask support for those games to be resurrected, too?
 
Gorbles said:
To debate that requires going into arguments that require knowledge of 2K's financials (as the holding company), which none of us have.
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They have enough money; they keep developing and releasing games, don't they? So I just think it is about their policies; how they want to make those games and money. Paradox games have a different strategy to make games and money, which I think is good enough - they keep developing the same games for years; yet they are capable of releasing some new games - they keep on working on CK2, EU4; yet they release new games like Stellaris or the next installment of Hearts of Iron etc.

I hope Civilization VI gets more support, more DLCs, more expansions, more than just two expansions. This franchise deserves a lot more than just two expansions.

What Firaxis games would have been without Civilization? Sid knows the answer.

The business is business but we need a lot of passion, love, first of all. We love the game; we support it because we have got the money. That kind of approach is nice but rather not real. Maybe in fairy tales.
 
Having enough money to work on future projects is not the same as having more money to spend on extra side-projects like improving CiV.

I mean, everyone always wants more. That's a traditional consumer outlook. The desire to have more without actually concerning yourself with the reality of what is required. Which is entirely the point of being a consumer - it's not our job.

It's their job to get it right. But that means especially when it comes to budget and time constraints, you as a consumer can't really tell them how to work. Design? Sure, communities are good at debating design. Balance? Absolutely. Art fidelity? Yup again.

But simply handwaving issues of project management aside because you presume "they have enough money"? Nope, that's not an argument. That's the subset of people that I hope Firaxis do not make Civilisation for, because they won't ever stop asking for new stuff to the detriment of the franchise.
 
Gorbles said:
But simply handwaving issues of project management aside because you presume "they have enough money"? Nope, that's not an argument. That's the subset of people that I hope Firaxis do not make Civilisation for, because they won't ever stop asking for new stuff to the detriment of the franchise.
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Firaxis Games, like any other big company nowdays, makes games for masses. The more people buy their games, the more successful they feel/are etc.

Firaxis Games always follows the same pattern whether people ask for anything or not because they always follow their policies.
 
I've been playing these games since Railroad Tycoon, and I've immediately bought every Civ when it came out. There have been many changes and I haven't liked every one of them. But I've never been tempted to go back to an earlier incarnation of the game after any release -- Civ II, III, IV, or V -- the positives have always outweighed any negatives for me!
 
The game selling a lot is not automatic financial reserves for improving that selfsame product. Otherwise nothing new would ever be made. You'd always be feeding sales back into the previous product.

This is predicated on absurd absolutes and does not come across as a good faith argument. To return to my artist analogy, I am perfectly capable of returning to tweak a past work without spending my entire life redrawing. Publishers can balance correcting typos and factual errors and producing new articles. Game developers can and do fix balance and technical problems, because they know that part of their business depends on customer confidence.

you as a consumer can't really tell them how to work

Is anyone here telling them anything? No. We're taking amongst ourselves about them.

If there's anything that Firaxis do need to be told, it's that there's no way am I paying full price for Civ 6.

That's the subset of people that I hope Firaxis do not make Civilisation for, because they won't ever stop asking for new stuff to the detriment of the franchise.

So people who want Civ V to match Civ IV's standard of pathfinding and tactical acumen and multiplayer AI and naval patrolling should be ignored because they don't know how solvent Firaxis is?

If you really want to see the detriment of the franchise, go and get Civ Rev II. You can get a refund off of Apple when you give up on trying to bulb without the game freezing.
 
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