Jon Shafer on Civ5- mistakes made, lessons learned

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Smokeybear

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Don't know if this article was posted previously or discussed, but I just stumbled upon it today and thought I'd share in case it was news to anyone. Some interesting sections on Civ5 and some of the stuff we still complain about...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jonshafer/jon-shafers-at-the-gates/posts/404789

My favorite quote, regarding diplomacy (remember, this is the guy who MADE diplomacy in Civ5!):

"In Civ 5, you might have been lifelong allies with a leader, but once you enter the late-game he has no qualms backstabbing you in order to win. With this being the case, what's the point of investing in relationships at all?

By no means should AI leaders be completely predictable. However, they do need a clear rhyme and reason behind their actions. The computer opponents in Civ 5 were completely enslaved to their gameplay situation, and as a result they appeared random and very little of their personalities shone through.

They were all crazy, and in the exact same way." -Jon Shafer
 
It's been discussed here. His comments should be taken with a grain of salt, since he's trying to gin up support for his kickstarter campaign. It's easy to trash the project you're no longer involved with if you think it makes you look better to investors.
 
It just means there was strife at Firaxis. Obviously he would have fixed these issues when he was there if he felt compelled to speak out about them when he left. And was unable to.

Frankly, it's something I struggle with on a daily basis.

Mrdarklight said:
It's been discussed here. His comments should be taken with a grain of salt, since he's trying to gin up support for his kickstarter campaign. It's easy to trash the project you're no longer involved with if you think it makes you look better to investors.
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Don't think so. It's not very frequent that game designers speak out about the company they were at previously. The games industry is pretty close knit - if he is worried about support, he would want to shut his mouth. But I think he's more trying to come off like "look what I've learned about designing games!" It just came off in a kind of pratish manner. "We could have improved upon X feature by doing Y" would have been better.
 
Remember that headlines are written to increase sensationalism. The headline read that Jon "criticized everything," but, clearly, he did not.
 
I'm not so sure if john shaver is the blame here especialy about the diplomacy model because it's still hasn't changed. I thinx he wanted to change it but other didn't want it ..

Not to mention that there hasn't been any info at brave new world about future diplomacy changes.

GOds and king still had the same diplomacy model the AI acting like a human and backstabbing you constantly I didn't see any changed from vanilla maybe a few but its still random and they had competly new developers so the real blame here is their bosses
 
I like the fact that the AI in this game will act just as duplicitously as a "sensible" human player.

I know I'm not the only one that feels this way.
 
ellgieff said:
I like the fact that the AI in this game will act just as duplicitously as a "sensible" human player.

I know I'm not the only one that feels this way.
Click to expand...

Exactly. The AI is only doing what every single human player would do if it were to his advantage.
 
apocalypse105 said:
I'm not so sure if john shaver is the blame here especialy about the diplomacy model because it's still hasn't changed. I thinx he wanted to change it but other didn't want it ..
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I'm thinking he realized that problem too late to have changed. (It would have required ripping out all the AI code and starting over.)

It was overall painfully obvious that it had been rushed to the store shelf; but that pressure would have been coming from the parent company and not the developers.
 
No, that's a lousy excuse. If one hired programmer said that it would be OK, but a lead designer had radical influence on the game and gameplay and should have realised its weak points - like the crazy diplomacy in the first versions.
 
The idea of the AI backstabbing in order to gain an advantage is great in theory, but it is clearly something that is insanely hard to program. The AI sees it has a greater number of soldiers, but it doesn't realize that it has no clue how to use them.
 
guinsoo said:
Don't think so. It's not very frequent that game designers speak out about the company they were at previously. The games industry is pretty close knit - if he is worried about support, he would want to shut his mouth. But I think he's more trying to come off like "look what I've learned about designing games!" It just came off in a kind of pratish manner. "We could have improved upon X feature by doing Y" would have been better.
Click to expand...

The current team game a response to the article in a recent interview. Of course it was a safe answer, but basically along the lines of "I'm not sure why he was so harsh. There have been a lot of changes from Civ4 so some of the systems needed additional work after release and I think we've improved a lot since then, especially with G&K..."

No one knows Jon's actual motivations other than himself. I doubt he is sitting somewhere tapping his fingers together and cackling madly over his convoluted, devious plan to mind-game people into purchasing his new game, although it does make for a good story. The easiest answer is usually correct: The 4X fan-base for these sort of games are fairly small and niche. You don't want to cut-off a portion of that market, because that is likely all you are going to get. It was a simple message of "Hey, Civ5 wasn't executed as how I had planned it in my mind, but I've thought it over and will attempt to not make similar mistakes this time around."
 
Well, as programmer it wouldn't be so hard to take the "AI backstabbing and getting mad because they have interests over YOU" route, wrap it, and add a simple checkbox on the options menu witch would enable/disable such behaviour.

So his comment of "it was too late", maybe it would need some hard work put into it, but I don't consider that "too late". Too late would be changing the system layout back to square, or to suddenly allowing full stacking. Well, everything can be done with insane ammounts of work, but not on an enterprise point of view.
 
There are 1000 possible checkboxes though. I never thought we needed one for backstabbing. Backstabbing is part of life, part of war, and part of Civ.
 
He may have honeyed his words by mentioning how "great" Civ V and the people who work at Faraxis may be, but the undertone to me was direct competitor speak to me was "This is a list of all the things that is critically wrong with Civ V and how my new game will be better."

I mean I don't blame the guy, he's got to make money, but that's just what I took from it.
 
well, im not a programmer, but i think there are generally speaking non-disclosure agreements in every one of the contracts and those NDAs extend to beyond your time with the company. that was indeed a long write-up but i'd guess he'd really like to reveal more about his time there but can't for contractual reasons.

each one of those guys had a desire for what the game 'ought' to be and im sure this is just his opportunity to put his desires to the test. i hope he uses his experience as a corporate underling (and yet lead designer) to understand what it feels like to deny his programmers their desires for changes should it come to that. it is most likely an unavoidable vicious cycle in game design.
 
Hammer Rabbi said:
well, im not a programmer, but i think there are generally speaking non-disclosure agreements in every one of the contracts and those NDAs extend to beyond your time with the company. that was indeed a long write-up but i'd guess he'd really like to reveal more about his time there but can't for contractual reasons.

each one of those guys had a desire for what the game 'ought' to be and im sure this is just his opportunity to put his desires to the test. i hope he uses his experience as a corporate underling (and yet lead designer) to understand what it feels like to deny his programmers their desires for changes should it come to that. it is most likely an unavoidable vicious cycle in game design.
Click to expand...

I'm a programmer by trade; NDAs do indeed extend beyond time with the company. However, they exclude publicly available information.
 
ah. thanks, joncnunn.

while im shooting from the hip i'll also assume that there are several clauses regarding different things. certainly intellectual property and internal communication (memos, emails, etc) but maybe corporate image or public relations kind of stuff (i.e. no bad mouthing or misrepresentation, etc)?

it's all pretty fuzzy to me but i watch a lot of cop/law shows so I must know what im talking about, haha.
 
"Bad mouthing" actually isn't covered by NDAs; its just that any potential future employer upon finding out someone did would assume he'd do the same for them and not hire him.

Yes; IP and internal communication is covered by NDAs.

The standard NDA clause is actually fairly short and broadly written. The exceptions aren't actually typically written into them, but are implied by case law.
 
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