Firaxis pulling a CYA with GOTY?

[builer680]

Since Editors of Game Magazines don't have that much time to test a game (to be frank, they simply don't have enough time and on top of that they get a pre release Version which may be riddled with bugs) its quite easy to explain why some magazines liked Civ5, because if you only ever play it 2-3 times in your entire life, you won't notice 95% of the "problems" the normal Civ 5 game has.

While not everything you say in your post is off base (though I'd disagree with most of it), this part especially catches my attention. "Game of the Year" is not the same as a "Review." As said before, you would think that giving Game of the Year means they spent a bit more time on a game than they would on a standard Review.

I can accept that a Review will miss things because of time constraints, but when a game with this many documented problems (yes PROBLEMS, not just the "taste" stuff) and detractors, that hasn't even announced any major sales milestones that I'm aware of, gets Game of the Year from a portal that it is directly involved with... that raises suspicions.

These suspicions are far from unreasonable, and it's more than fair to speculate that it's more of a way to make sure at least SOMEBODY gives them Game of the Year, because I don't see anyone else doing it. As I've also said before, getting Game of the Year in some incarnation, no matter how blatantly sleazy, matters because it can be used for marketing future games, and for making GOTY versions of this game.

 

[code9]

If you're saying the reviewers didn't play Civ enough to give it a realistic review, then that would be the case with ALL of the previous Civs, would it not? Does that mean, no Civilization game ever had received a realistic score?

Bull! Take2 has loads of money, it's what they do, it's how the game reviewers stay profitable, the score someone will give their games is known in advance.

 

[Fabien]

If you're saying the reviewers didn't play Civ enough to give it a realistic review, then that would be the case with ALL of the previous Civs, would it not? Does that mean, no Civilization game ever had received a realistic score?

Bull! Take2 has loads of money, it's what they do, it's how the game reviewers stay profitable, the score someone will give their games is known in advance.

No, of course not. It's the same when you expect that Reviewers give Starcraft or Starcraft 2 exact reviews when most of the strategy that makes those game really shine and rise above its competition only start to exist months after release. You just can't rate something like that in 2-3 Days, you'd need months (or in the Case of Starcraft I, years). The same is true when it comes to Civ 4/5. Those type of games need time to evolve. So no, they always give out their ratings based upon first, shallow impressions, unless they're playing shooters, because then they can actually play the whole game anyway and there is not much to see if they don't have a MP modus. You wouldn't dare to rate Chess after playing 2-3 games, would you?

 

[Fabien]

While not everything you say in your post is off base (though I'd disagree with most of it), this part especially catches my attention. "Game of the Year" is not the same as a "Review." As said before, you would think that giving Game of the Year means they spent a bit more time on a game than they would on a standard Review.

I can accept that a Review will miss things because of time constraints, but when a game with this many documented problems (yes PROBLEMS, not just the "taste" stuff) and detractors, that hasn't even announced any major sales milestones that I'm aware of, gets Game of the Year from a portal that it is directly involved with... that raises suspicions.

These suspicions are far from unreasonable, and it's more than fair to speculate that it's more of a way to make sure at least SOMEBODY gives them Game of the Year, because I don't see anyone else doing it. As I've also said before, getting Game of the Year in some incarnation, no matter how blatantly sleazy, matters because it can be used for marketing future games, and for making GOTY versions of this game.

What do you not agree with?

I do not think they looked at the games again when they made this award, I mean they gave Oblivion a GOTY and at the time of that Oblivion was barely playable, but anyway. If you really want to take such awards serious you should look at previous years and search for games you played yourself. It will give you an impression how accurate their awards are . They've given out awards to games that were barely technically playable (GTA 4 on PC) and always try to make the awards exclusive (ME and ME2 are strictly Xbox 360 games etc). I myself would probably have chosen Starcraft 2 over Civ 5 but then again, there weren't that many games that were exclusive to the PC.

 

[Ciproflox]

Yea I m gonna wrap this up, actually I replied a lot more, but apparently I only previewed it without submitting

1upt (1 unit/hex) is in no way an "innovative" concept. This has been around since 1984 (at least).

It is a revolution in Civ history. What innovation do you expect from a turn-based strategy game with a history like the Civ franchise?

The way in which you can deal with modifications actually is quite a nice way, no doubt about this. And actually, here they have some merits.

But in which way the design should be overall "userfriendly" is completely beyond me.
Actually, identifying older savegames is a complete hassle. Even worse it get's with autosaves.
The menus are something of the worst what I've seen in the past 10 years. Information is presented in the most difficult to read way, information are put here and there, but never are available in any consistent way.
What you call HUD is another example for poor design, to say the least. Information is found on top of the screen, on the left side, on the right side and then we have the information lines in the upper middle of the screen. The effect is that you have to constantly look from one edge of the screen to the other and all the way back. Worst example for this is the way in which you get new technologies from an Great Scientist.
And don't get me started about the "overall visual feedback". No information about which tiles are worked on the main screen. Units are so unidentifiable that they have to have special icons for this.
Roads are hard to identify in farms and trading posts. Unfinished farms are hard to identify on certain ground. River display is the poorest thing since Civ1.
Even the information bubbles on the right side are very poor, as in some cases not coloured by priority.

For the first time ever, Civ managed to put all game-related aspects into one design. No more windows-explorer-look-a-like savegame-menu, a nice game-setup-launcher, the modding solution.
It's far from being perfect. The actual savegame-management lacks organization tools, a multidelete-function and so forth. This accounts for many gameplay choices made.
Take the city overview. It has never been so neat, so easy to read a city's status. No more Growth-sickness-calculations, a pretty intuitive specialist-system etc.
Of course having a visual concept has its downsides. You're right about its flaws. There's still the clumsy, halfway-buried statistical and informational menus (ressource overview etc) plus the jumping around the screen as you mentioned. What I m thinking about here is all the cuts made. Imo, CiV did a good job cleaning out a lot of the overburdened gameplay-mechanical mess Civ 4 inherited i.e. spying, cultural domination, religions, un-votes, generals. I'm not saying I agree gameplaywise, but for the concept, well Civ 4 didn' really have one. There were certainly many possibilities to play your game, but then again it was quite a mess.
So to sum it up: I like the neat concept of CiV, but it cost too much immersion and fun.

If the above are your "game quality criteria" then sorry, but you completely failed. As did the game.

I wasn't talking about game quality as in fun.

 

[builer680]

What do you not agree with?

Since you ask, I'll answer, though I typically hate seeing multi quote posts. I find them pretentious.

Yes, but that is not the fault of the company in this case.

It is if they "encouraged" it.

I just wanted to voice why in my opinion casual gamers are quite happy with the game.

You can have this opinion, but you don't know it. Silence doesn't always mean approval. I disagree, but to be honest, I don't know either.

Again, I don't think Firaxis has anything to do with this rating mechanism ; it just works that way.

In this specific case, I think it's beyond obvious that they most certainly had a lot to do with it.

You just have to keep in mind that atleast 95% of the playerbase of Civ5 will never even wonder wether local happiness is a superior compared to global happiness because by the time they would start to furmulate such ideas in their minds, they're already playing another title.

Easy to say, not easy to prove. You may be right, but you may not be. I tend to think that you aren't right. Aside from the fact that "95% of the playerbase" is a made-up statistic, I think even casual gamers can understand game mechanics, and can even form comparisons to previous mechanics in their own minds. The fact that they didn't post their conclusions on a forum doesn't indicate approval or disapproval, and their absence from the conversation here doesn't support either of our viewpoints. Hence why, unlike some posters , I don't use their imaginary conclusions to support my arguments. I use my OWN imaginary conclusions for that!

 

[Androrc the Orc]

Yes, but that is not the fault of the company in this case. Most Shooters don't have much replay value; I'm not arguing that Firaxis did this is purpose, I just wanted to voice why in my opinion casual gamers are quite happy with the game. Since Editors of Game Magazines don't have that much time to test a game (to be frank, they simply don't have enough time and on top of that they get a pre release Version which may be riddled with bugs) its quite easy to explain why some magazines liked Civ5, because if you only ever play it 2-3 times in your entire life, you won't notice 95% of the "problems" the normal Civ 5 game has. Again, I don't think Firaxis has anything to do with this rating mechanism ; it just works that way.

Uh, I don't know. Games made for the "casual gamer" usually tend to drive those very same casual gamers away from the game, because it waters down the game and takes away what made that game distinct, recognizable.

 

[Zogar]

Yea I m gonna wrap this up, actually I replied a lot more, but apparently I only previewed it without submitting

It is a revolution in Civ history. What innovation do you expect from a turn-based strategy game with a history like the Civ franchise?

For the first time ever, Civ managed to put all game-related aspects into one design. No more windows-explorer-look-a-like savegame-menu, a nice game-setup-launcher, the modding solution.
It's far from being perfect. The actual savegame-management lacks organization tools, a multidelete-function and so forth. This accounts for many gameplay choices made.
Take the city overview. It has never been so neat, so easy to read a city's status. No more Growth-sickness-calculations, a pretty intuitive specialist-system etc.

Really, I don't know how you can say 1upt is innovative. It may be innovative for Civ, but absolutely not innovative in general. It's as if you re-invented cold water after discovering hot water.

Also cleaning up the UI is hardly innovative at all. That's something that exists since a long time ago, and is called 'cleaning up'. Sure, you could argue that it's something new for Civ : 'Civ deserves the innovative award for going back to year 1984 !'.

 

[Adam7Eight]

the press doesn't actually play games. nobody actually takes GOTY awards seriously

the people who do are usually marketing tools

I agree with this.

 

[Martin Alvito]

Getting a couple of portals? Getting? Are you implying coercion/bribery/whatever? Aside from the whole premise of this thread as using GOTYs to cover their asses in the face of fan uproar, which is speculation into the future on your part seeing as no-one has actually done it, you seem to be implying that the GOTY awards aren't legitimate, which is again, speculation.

Buying advertising confers influence over a publication. It's well known in social science that one of the best ways to acquire influence is to provide a stream of benefits that you can credibly take away at any time.

Any decent parent already knows this. Sometimes you have to control your child's behavior, and the best way to do that is to give your child some privileges that you can later restrict if the child acts undesirably.

It's also well known that the mainstream media does not cover certain stories for financial reasons. Have you seen The Insider? That depicts exactly the sort of story the OP is inferring here. 60 Minutes killed the story on tobacco that ultimately led to the large tobacco settlement. The reason was the potential threat of legal action during a merger that was going to make the news executives very wealthy. It's hard to argue that a whistleblower with evidence that the tobacco industry knew their products were addictive while their CEOs publicly denied this for twenty years (including perjuring themselves before Congress) was not newsworthy.

The OP's claim is hardly a tinfoil hat story. It's very reasonable to infer that gaming reviews are heavily biased today as a result of influence from advertisers, and that GOTY awards are also influenced by financial pressures from game publishers. As TMIT pointed out, you can only explain some of the features of modern reviews with incompetence or advertiser pressure. But the "incompetence" is suspiciously distributed among games that are heavily advertised on gaming websites, and that more or less proves that incompetence isn't the explanation.

Don't believe me? Go to Metacritic and look at the divergence between publication reviews and user reviews on Dragon Age II. You can find many such examples in the last few years.

 

[heliostellar]

Getting a couple of portals? Getting? Are you implying coercion/bribery/whatever?

Yes, yes absolutely bribery or something. How did this game win GOTY? Inquiring minds still want to know.

 

[Bibor]

Members of Civfanatics have obviously a hard time understanding that to many people (who don't usually play CIV or Paradox or whatevergames) Civilization 5 is a refreshing game that adds many new (and old) stuff compared to other games on the market.

"Game of the year" and various other awards are not "civfanatics awards", they are awarded (obviously actual reasons vary) by people who are not civ fanatics. In a world dominated by ******ed RPGs and first person shooters, this game is actually refreshing, even when all its flaws are considered. Wow in its 17th iteration, Warcraft in its 4th iteration, or Black ops in its 13482375987th iteration aren't as refreshing as Civilization 5 is in many aspects.

 

[heliostellar]

As refreshing as a kick in the teeth...

 

[Martin Alvito]

Members of Civfanatics have obviously a hard time understanding that to many people (who don't usually play CIV or Paradox or whatevergames) Civilization 5 is a refreshing game that adds many new (and old) stuff compared to other games on the market.

With the typically excellent Firaxis support, it's become a good game after the .127 patch. It still has a ton of bugs, there are a bunch of exploitative mechanics (eg: pillage & resale) that need to be fixed, and multiplayer is still a mess, but it's reasonably enjoyable as a single-player experience in its present state.

Naming the bug-riddled, psycopathic-AI, ICS-dominated initial release the game of the year for 2010 was quite a reach. Last year was not a good year for PC-only releases at all, but there were several games that were in far, far better release condition.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Why do people even care about the awarding of GOTY awards?

Whenever I see GOTY tacked onto a game title it's literally translated as "this game has been out for a while, gotten a few DLCs*, and now they are packaged with the game and we can try to keep the price of the game up for as long as possible, making people think it's better value now with the DLC added".

*Or expansions

It's not as if I'm ever going to check up on the validity of some GOTY award. For all I care the publisher of the game itself just calls it GOTY and that's that.

Much ado about nothing.

 

[markusbeutel]

Why do people even care about the awarding of GOTY awards?

Whenever I see GOTY tacked onto a game title it's literally translated as "this game has been out for a while, gotten a few DLCs*, and now they are packaged with the game and we can try to keep the price of the game up for as long as possible, making people think it's better value now with the DLC added".

*Or expansions

It's not as if I'm ever going to check up on the validity of some GOTY award. For all I care the publisher of the game itself just calls it GOTY and that's that.

Much ado about nothing.

It might not mean anything to us - but I'm sure seeing GOTY on a shiny new copy of Civ 5 means something to the casual gamer - which is exactly why it's being released. Fans of the series have already bought the game, this is just another attempt at extending the user base, not that there's anything wrong with that.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Exactly. It's just a marketing trick, and an extremely common one at that. It's not as if 2K are taking games marketing to new lows. (though they may be in areas other than marketing ).

 

[Tapewormlondon]

No, I don't think he is. Big online game portals are funded by advertisers. It need not be a smokey backroom where envelopes of cash are passed...could be as simple as "I see you're planning to review $OUR_NEW_GAME...coincidentally, we're discussing whether we want to keep advertising on $YOUR_PORTAL. Well, I'm sure you'll write the right review..."

Seriously, does anyone take Gamespy, et al. seriously? They're shilling for those paying their bills. They're useful in that they get screenshots and such earlier, but consider how many awful games they rated highly. A truly bad review on one of those portals is very rare, though sadly truly bad games are anything but.

You get honest reviews in forums, individual blogs, etc.

I work in the Media advertising business, and have done for the past 10 years. I have worked for two of the largest publishers in Europe, RBI and Haymarket. Now truth be told I have only ever worked on B2B titles rather than consumer titles, however my current company does publish several very high profile consumer titles here in the UK - 442, Autocar,, Stuff, the Manchester UTD magazine etc. And their mantra is the same.

This is absolutely no paid for editorial content, at all in anyway whatsoever (Trust me, It would make my job easier if their was!!), especially in regards to awards. This is a pretty standard Mantra across all major publishers in Europe, and i can only imagine it is in the US. The thing is, content is becoming ever more valuable, more so than advertising in some cases. This is why you are starting to see gated content that you have to pay for on alot of websites.

This value would be destroyed if it turned out that advertisers pay for solid reviews and for awards. Now im not saying that it does not happen in the industry. it most certainly does. but usually with the smaller publishers, and certainly not in a busy multi competitve market........anyway your views are your veiws but i find it unlikely that advertisers pay for editorial in gaming sites/ mags.

The thing with reviews is it is usually one persons opinion......which will vary wildly form person to person. Now I do find it odd that CiV got such high scores.....and a GOTY award, but who picked that? Do we know? If its the eds staff, again its just their opinion nothing more and nothing less.

 

[Martin Alvito]

This value would be destroyed if it turned out that advertisers pay for solid reviews and for awards. Now im not saying that it does not happen in the industry. it most certainly does. but usually with the smaller publishers, and certainly not in a busy multi competitve market........anyway your views are your veiws but i find it unlikely that advertisers pay for editorial in gaming sites/ mags.

You don't need an explicit quid pro quo for advertiser dollars to have influence. It boils down to this: the advertising money from game publishers pays the bills for review websites. The editors can't afford to bite the hand that feeds them.

If you're in an industry with only a few major outlets, or where products other than what you review are advertised, it might be different. But in gaming, publishers can get reasonable exposure at low cost in many different places, and game publishers provide the bulk of the revenue for websites. Publishers need not pay any individual review site for advertising, and that shifts the power balance to the game publishers, rather than the reviewers.

By the way, I just noticed the Gamespy message that pops up every time I start up Civ 5. Curiously, the publication that has a business relationship with Firaxis for multiplayer support just so happens to be the one that picked Civ V for GOTY.