Please stop comparing Blizzard to the makers of Civ 5. Blizzard got rich by charging $15 a month to play the most dumbed down and shallow RPG ever made, something that appeals to over 10 million people. When the majority of these people are asked what they dislike about some of the deeper RPGs, such as Final Fantasy 7, their response is that the game is too complicated. I know. I've asked friends.
Furthermore, with the exception of World of Warcraft, balancing has never been something that Blizzard has had to worry about. I can't speak for Starcraft 2, never having played it, but Warcrafts 2 and 3 didn't need to be balanced. All factions behaved exactly the same way and received pretty much the same bonuses and penalties, with the only significant differences being the artwork and names of the buildings and units. The only other example of Blizzard and balancing comes from Diablo II, which was horribly balanced as far as classes go; if you were not a Necromancer, you did not survive multiplayer. As evidenced by the constant patching of World of Warcraft, Blizzard knows nothing about class balancing. To conclude my part about Blizzard, to a previous poster that talked about the Lich King not being available as an encounter with the release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion... These are content patches and are very different from game-fixing patches. Blizzard only releases them when people get bored with current content--a few hundred MB of patch to keep 10 million people paying $15 a month while they finish Cataclysm? Firaxis will not release content patches (largely because of the mod community's existence), because you are not paying $15 a month to play the game, so they have no motivation to add content, other than expansions, which you will pay for. I also think it's ridiculous to imply that they released Civ 5 on schedule to avoid going bankrupt. Any game design company whose survival could be threatened by holding a game back a few months to fix it needs to seriously re-evaluate themselves.
On to Civ 5.
People aren't upset because the game has bugs and needs to be patched. Certainly, every game ever made has been released with bugs, since the days of Super Mario Bros. for NES when you could rack up 1000 lives by bouncing on a single turtle. Programmers simply cannot anticipate everything a player will try, and an attempt to would result in a game that either never gets released or is 10 million GB in size.
That being said about the bugs, that every game has them, is irrelevant, really. This concept of releasing almost-broken games and patching them later is becoming common place, and to be honest, it didn't happen before the days of everyone having a broadband internet connection. I've been playing games since I was 4 years old, so for 20 years, I've enjoyed video games, and 99% of the various games I've played were not broken, and their various components functioned more or less the way the designers intended. Super Mario Bros. was never patched, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was never patched, Final Fantasy 7 was never patched. I could go on with games that released in a near-final state that one could play through without running into ridiculous problems.
Even with that in mind, a few bugs and erroneous entries in the Civilopedia can be forgiven. What I cannot forgive is the insanely stupid A.I., the hideous User Interface, the fact that sometimes I have to drop a nuke on someone because a peace treaty has lasted 2,000 years, and that civilization leaders are notoriously schizophrenic and offer no explanation for their mood swings, nor can I handle being told that I need 8 out of 7 possible votes to win a diplomatic victory (I have a screenshot of this, by the way). I'm not going to continue going into details about the number of bugs and glitches in Civilization 5, there are plenty of threads on that.
My point in all this is that people aren't upset that there are a few bugs. People are upset that there are a LOT of bugs and many of them are major. These aren't little problems (such as sometimes I have to click a different unit at the end of a turn before "A Unit Needs Orders" will go away), a considerable number of them are close to game-breaking and should've been found by beta testers and fixed pre-release.
Furthermore, with the exception of World of Warcraft, balancing has never been something that Blizzard has had to worry about. I can't speak for Starcraft 2, never having played it, but Warcrafts 2 and 3 didn't need to be balanced. All factions behaved exactly the same way and received pretty much the same bonuses and penalties, with the only significant differences being the artwork and names of the buildings and units. The only other example of Blizzard and balancing comes from Diablo II, which was horribly balanced as far as classes go; if you were not a Necromancer, you did not survive multiplayer. As evidenced by the constant patching of World of Warcraft, Blizzard knows nothing about class balancing. To conclude my part about Blizzard, to a previous poster that talked about the Lich King not being available as an encounter with the release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion... These are content patches and are very different from game-fixing patches. Blizzard only releases them when people get bored with current content--a few hundred MB of patch to keep 10 million people paying $15 a month while they finish Cataclysm? Firaxis will not release content patches (largely because of the mod community's existence), because you are not paying $15 a month to play the game, so they have no motivation to add content, other than expansions, which you will pay for. I also think it's ridiculous to imply that they released Civ 5 on schedule to avoid going bankrupt. Any game design company whose survival could be threatened by holding a game back a few months to fix it needs to seriously re-evaluate themselves.
On to Civ 5.
People aren't upset because the game has bugs and needs to be patched. Certainly, every game ever made has been released with bugs, since the days of Super Mario Bros. for NES when you could rack up 1000 lives by bouncing on a single turtle. Programmers simply cannot anticipate everything a player will try, and an attempt to would result in a game that either never gets released or is 10 million GB in size.
That being said about the bugs, that every game has them, is irrelevant, really. This concept of releasing almost-broken games and patching them later is becoming common place, and to be honest, it didn't happen before the days of everyone having a broadband internet connection. I've been playing games since I was 4 years old, so for 20 years, I've enjoyed video games, and 99% of the various games I've played were not broken, and their various components functioned more or less the way the designers intended. Super Mario Bros. was never patched, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was never patched, Final Fantasy 7 was never patched. I could go on with games that released in a near-final state that one could play through without running into ridiculous problems.
Even with that in mind, a few bugs and erroneous entries in the Civilopedia can be forgiven. What I cannot forgive is the insanely stupid A.I., the hideous User Interface, the fact that sometimes I have to drop a nuke on someone because a peace treaty has lasted 2,000 years, and that civilization leaders are notoriously schizophrenic and offer no explanation for their mood swings, nor can I handle being told that I need 8 out of 7 possible votes to win a diplomatic victory (I have a screenshot of this, by the way). I'm not going to continue going into details about the number of bugs and glitches in Civilization 5, there are plenty of threads on that.
My point in all this is that people aren't upset that there are a few bugs. People are upset that there are a LOT of bugs and many of them are major. These aren't little problems (such as sometimes I have to click a different unit at the end of a turn before "A Unit Needs Orders" will go away), a considerable number of them are close to game-breaking and should've been found by beta testers and fixed pre-release.
