Psyringe
Scout
Possible, but that'd mean that their planning was quite incompetent. Civ5 already combined several features that guaranteed _some_ backlash:I think that Greg was wrong because neither he, nor almost anybody else, predicted the huge backlash when the game was released in such an unfinished state.
(1) It was the sequel to a very popular game. (Which means that no matter what you change, there will be people complaining that exactly this change ruined the whole game, and if you don't change anything, there will be people complaining that the sequel contains nothing new)
(2) Its gameplay was a radical departure from previous iterations of the series, in elements of gameplay that weren't seen as "bad" or "problematic" by large parts of the fanbase. (And the more radical the departure, the heavier the backlash).
(3) It was part of a long-standing series that meant a lot to many people (hence reactions become even more emotional than they's usually be)
Even if Civ5 had played great out of the box, these factors would have caused a good deal of backlash. Now, if you also release the game in an unfinished and barely playable state, you create an _additional_ source of backlash in exactly the customer group that would otherwise stand against the usual backlash (i.e., those who appreciate the nature of the changes). That's not rocket science.
Unless they incorporated some revolutionary modularity or fallback mechanisms in their engine (which I don't think they have, but my knowledge about the inner workings of Civ5 is scarce, so I may be wrong here), even small changes have a high likelihood of breaking mods. The difference usually just lies in the amount of work necessary to update the mod.Possibly later, "traditional" patches (aka, minor ones) won't cause so many problems for mods. But right now, they're just rewriting so much of the code that's it's not surprising at all that mod's are getting broken.
Personally, I think that it's much more likely that 2k Greg just wanted to silence an unwanted discussion, and didn't realize how outlandish his claims actually were (I'm not sure whether he has experience with modding engines and their development). I think it was a response in the same vein as 2k Elizabeth's "We're using Steam because the players asked for it" argument, for which she couldn't deliver a single proof when asked for one. In hindsight, I see a pattern of "make some strange claims in response to criticism, hopefully enough people will be stupid enough to actually believe it" in 2k's responses to the fans' concerns, and that's making me angry. A bit.