Incomplete problems with CIV5, and its moneygrabbing business model

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Diesel47

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I believe that CIV 6 will ultimately not be a worthwhile game because of the way firaxis/2k handled CIV 5. It is up to the playerbase to let them know we will not be okay with a bad product and will not support it.

Don't get me wrong: I love Civ5, it would be the perfect game for me.

But there are so massive problems with it that I feel are unaddressed or just dishonest. They are primarily the developer/publishers fault.

1. DLCs - DLCs are complete crap. Expansion packs I can live with... But G&K wasn't an expansion pack. You were just paying for something we had in Civ 4 already. DLCs are just there to make a quick buck. I've avoided games that have this kind of business model, but it seems to be infecting every game now (besides indie). Pay 5 bucks JUST to play babylon? Pay more to have my maps be more randomized? Wow really? And guess what, if I want to use babylon in multiplayer... I have to convince my friends to also buy it... just so I can use it against them.

2. Multiplayer, or lack of - The multiplayer of Civ 5 is broken and won't be fixed.
In its current state, There are a million bugs and the gameplay is laggy. MANY key features are missing, and there is no dedicated server support. It is very difficult to play multiplayer, and it is very difficult for me to accept that this is what they consider a "completed product".

3. Optimization - Just because Civ 5 is a turn based game... doesn't mean you can get away with not optimizing. Load screens in the middle of games.. Major lag between turns when there are more units in the late game.. This stuff should not be present in a complete high budget game from a well known studio like 2k/firaxis. Especially when you charge so much for it. The game can run much better than its current state.

4. AI - The AI is stupid, and does dumb things. Sometimes I think the barbarians have better war tactics than the actually AI Civs. After a few games, you learn to be able to predict everything the AI is going to do... Diplomacy is kinda pointless outside of trading... For example: I know that Rome will always try to backstab me... every game... Never changes.

It would be okay if I had a good multiplayer to play.... But not only is the multiplayer crummy, the singleplayer is also the same.. What am I suppose to play then?

The game has been out for ~4 years now, why are these still problems?

Now that the game is announced as "development complete", These problems will never be fixed and I think that we were left with an incomplete game. This game will not last the time test. Is that what I can expect from CIV 6? Another incomplete game that will only exist to sell DLCs and Map packs? If that is true then civilization is dead to me.

10 years ago, if a game company tried to bone its customers this badly... It would go out of business. Now it is accepted. What happened?

These are the problems I see with how they are making our game. I am sure that they will happen with CIV 6 aswell. Because once a developer goes down this path, it never changes... Unless the players do something about it.

I personally don't want CIV 6 to be just another game like something EA or activision makes. Dicuss how we can make the developers know that we wont' accept a broken and unfinished game from them again.

How many other players feel this way?
 
You would have a point if it wasn't for the fact you can get the Complete edition and the like.

This is decided by customers. If people buy the DLCs, obviously they will do it - it adds an easy way to get a standardized list of civs, wonders, buildings, etc in a multiplayer game that is expanded on vanilla without worrying about mods updating, patches screwing them, etc. So I can see the use in it at least, but for the price they charge it's too much for my liking. So I don't buy the DLC. You won't buy it either, so we've made our vote. But if people enjoy the DLC then they SHOULD buy it. Support a company if you enjoy their products.

Personally, I preordered Civ 5 (which I still don't regret :p) and I really enjoy it. I bought the Gold Edition pack for $5, then BNW for $10, haven't got scrambled stuff yet.

So basically ignoring the vanilla game cost I have paid $15 for 2 major expansions (and both G&K and BNW are major expansions, can't deny that) and a bunch of smaller DLC; look back to the late 90s and early 2000s, and it was roughly $20-30 to get a single expansion, at least where I lived (South Africa and Australia).

As to G&K not being an expansion, that's just plain dumb. Gods and Kings was not some small bit of DLC, it added in a fair few new civilizations, added in new units, added in new game mechanics. If that's not an expansion, I don't know what is? That's like saying an expansion pack that adds in mythical units and fantasy stuff and system for them (which I'd hate) isn't an expansion pack because Civ 2 had that.
 
You would have a point if it wasn't for the fact you can get the Complete edition and the like.

This is decided by customers. If people buy the DLCs, obviously they will do it - it adds an easy way to get a standardized list of civs, wonders, buildings, etc in a multiplayer game that is expanded on vanilla without worrying about mods updating, patches screwing them, etc. So I can see the use in it at least, but for the price they charge it's too much for my liking. So I don't buy the DLC. You won't buy it either, so we've made our vote. But if people enjoy the DLC then they SHOULD buy it. Support a company if you enjoy their products.

Personally, I preordered Civ 5 (which I still don't regret :p) and I really enjoy it. I bought the Gold Edition pack for $5, then BNW for $10, haven't got scrambled stuff yet.

So basically ignoring the vanilla game cost I have paid $15 for 2 major expansions (and both G&K and BNW are major expansions, can't deny that) and a bunch of smaller DLC; look back to the late 90s and early 2000s, and it was roughly $20-30 to get a single expansion, at least where I lived (South Africa and Australia).

As to G&K not being an expansion, that's just plain dumb. Gods and Kings was not some small bit of DLC, it added in a fair few new civilizations, added in new units, added in new game mechanics. If that's not an expansion, I don't know what is? That's like saying an expansion pack that adds in mythical units and fantasy stuff and system for them (which I'd hate) isn't an expansion pack because Civ 2 had that.

How does there being a "complete edition" make a difference? It is just all the DLCs bundled ontop of each other and offered to you for more expensive. :lol:

But does the complete edition come with working multiplayer, smarter AI, and better performance? Don't think so!!
 
Civilization 5bnw is kind of similar to civilization 4 bts in the civilizations. However, there have been a few changes. As for the multiplayer, players often complain about shift clicking which is also new. I have no idea what shift clicking is, but I heard that players often do it online all the time.
 
It's not realistic to compare Civ 5 Vanilla to Civ 4 with its two expansion packs.

G&K was a perfectly good expansion pack. Mechanically, it added religion and spying, and IMO did both better than Civ 4. Religion in Civ 4 was tied directly to the Science tree and was seriously lackluster. And Spying wasn't in Civ 4 at all until the second expansion pack. While it would have been great to have a hacky version of both in the Vanilla version, I am much happier with the fleshed out version that came with G&K in the long run. In real life, development takes time and money and it's not remotely realistic for an edition of a new game to match up to the previous title that had 5 years and 2 expansion packs worth of growth.

Relative to Civ 4, Civ 5 added or changed so many features that the two games aren't really comparable.

As for DLC, if I love a game I want as many add-ons for it as possible. I was more than willing to pay extra for the high quality DLC we got for Civ 5. The original game had enough new civs to make it fun. I wanted more so I payed for them.

Why isn't it realistic to compare Civ 4 and 5? There is nothing else to compare them to.

Both games are at "complete development".

And of course religion and spying are better in 5 than they are in 4. Whats the point of buying a new game if things are not improved. But personally I don't think it was worth calling an "expansion pack".
 
How does there being a "complete edition" make a difference? It is just all the DLCs bundled ontop of each other and offered to you for more expensive. :lol:

But does the complete edition come with working multiplayer, smarter AI, and better performance? Don't think so!!

It's not more expensive unless you actually own any of it already. If your complaint about the DLC is the fact that it's 'money grabbing', but you can get the base game, the two large expansions and about 10 decent sized pieces of DLC for the same price as the base game normally costs on release I really wouldn't say it's money grabbing. Money grabbing DLC is something like in Train Simulator - the total cost of all of it is upwards of $1000 US. This isn't money grabbing if they offer it to you for a reasonableish price, and on top of the fact you could get EVERYTHING but the scrambled stuff for $15 a couple of days ago, or maybe even still on Humble Bundle. If they were money grabbing why on earth would they do that?

The performance has always been perfectly fine for me, I can play it on everything from a 5 year old laptop with a crappy Intel dual core 2.1GHz processor, 2GB of RAM and integrated video to my current computer with a GTX 770M, Intel i7-4700MQ and 16GB of RAM. The bad laptop runs it fine on bad settings, the only dips in performance on it is at the end of the turn and frankly I find that fine. I've never had lag in the middle of the game from too many units, even playing on a huge map with the max civs and city states. So I really think the optimization is fine - the reloading only happens during multiplayer due to desynchs, at least for me, so again 0 problems there with optimization, just the MP.

As to the AI, the AI is perfectly fine for the majority of the players. It's a company that must make money, and I would highly doubt that most players play above the King difficulty, which is where the problems with the AI really start shining. I would absolutely love to have an amazing AI, but I find the AI is acceptable for a challenge, and I understand that it would be a bad business move to invest the large amount needed for the better AI. I find the AI is much better than the rest in the series (and I've played since Civ 1, not a newbie to this) in many areas like tech priorities, diplomacy and the like. The only problem area is the combat, and the easiest fix for that is to go back from 1 upt, but I really think that change is better. Makes the game funner, if a little easier against the AI, and much more tactical in MP.

I agree that the multiplayer is completely painful compared to many other games, but I've been LAN-partying Civ with 6 people since Civ 3, and I find it about as reliable and decent as any of the others. And if you want to bring up that offer-modify exploit it's nothing like the infinite-great people use of Civ 4, it was crazily stupid.

Why isn't it realistic to compare Civ 4 and 5? There is nothing else to compare them to.

Both games are at "complete development".

And of course religion and spying are better in 5 than they are in 4. Whats the point of buying a new game if things are not improved. But personally I don't think it was worth calling an "expansion pack".

Do you even read? He said it's not realistic to compare VANILLA Civ 5. It's the same reason no content-based MMO can compete with WoW - WoW has had a decade of content behind it. Civ 4 had 2 major expansion packs and many patches behind it when Civ 5 came out, so of course it'll have more content. Compare the final product and Civ 5 has at least the same amount of content.

And this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_pack

Use any definition you want. An expansion pack is just a sizeable, normally purchased pack that increases the amount of content/adds systems to the game. The fact that those same features were in previous games has nothing to do with it. The expansion for Skyrim that added in the Morrowind-esque land was still and expansion pack although it had already been done (that exact island) in Morrowind. A hypothetical expansion pack that adds dragons is no less of an expansion pack due to Civ 2's dragons. Your definition is just wrong.

EDIT:

After reading the forum rules, theres really nothing that says this thread is not allowed.

As long as you changed it to be a discussion I think it should be allowed.
 
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