Anybody waiting for Civ V patches might want to take a look at BioShock 2

[insaneweasel]

I really have no idea how the BS2 problems relate to what is going on with Civ V and Firaxis. I also have no idea at all of how bad the situation really is with BS2 (I don't buy games where you are supposed to kill children).

Quick off-topic note: BS2 is awesome, and you don't have to kill children-you get much greater rewards for not doing so.

 

[Blitz47]

Civ 5 may or may not be like Bioshock2.

I have been gaming for a long time, some friends went to work for gaming companies, it's been interesting to see the evolution of "gaming" in the past 15 years as my friends worked in various game companies.

No matter it was 15 years ago or now, what matters is $$$. If a game loses to piracy, you'll get less game titles and budget for now and future games.

More and more of my friends are working for console games, console games can be very expensive to develop as you have to pay a high license fee to code for console (unlike PC where you can just purchase MSDN and buy your own hardware, both of which are quite cheap, cost of PC game is those endless hardware configuration and software configuration that you try to debug and test before release, one solution is to use microsoft testing lab, but you can sign away your own code by doing that in order to earn that windows compatible logo but I will stop as not everyone is interested in software industry's tale).

Game piracy is here and I don't see any easy way out. Steam is a step in the right direction. I don't particularly like steam as I don't like extra software running on my machine. I'm more linux/open source guy but I am trusting steam will not abuse its privilige on my computer, in the hope that my purchase of Civ 5 will help company develop and work on titles that I like. Such as Civ5.

Once a game is released and a company collects its revenue, a smaller staff is left to fix/patch the product. A game company makes a good portion, often majority of its sales from the initial period of product launch. Once you miss that golden time, eventually some titles end up at the $10 bargain bin at Fry's and other stores, where the game company collects little to no money.

It's a lot harder to pirate console games so eventhough the upfront cost is high, companies are going towards it.

Game companies are also adopting, gone are the days where PC gaming is king, as console and even social network sites eat into a person's entertainment time & budget. I know myself did not play civ4 until the gold pack was released and I purchased it, several years after civ4 was released because I was simply too busy in real life and had to play just browser based games due to time constraint & machine is not fast enough (I purchased civ5 after downloading the demo from steam, discovered I can run civ5 with below the spec computer, it was great to be able to try the demo first, make sure my computer can handle it, before purchase).

I treasure my civ5 time right now, I may have finally logged 40 hours into civ5 and hopefully I can continue play civ5 for a while (unless real life gets in the way again).

If you are seriously concerned, I suggest you write snail mail to the president, CEO, and other executive officers of 2k and firaxis. Don't rage, be polite, and try to explain you are a customer who loved civ5, you purchased civ5 (or you want to purchase civ5) but you are concerned about potentially lack of support.

Those executives are in charge. They get their bonuses. It's what most, if not close to all executives care about. They happily lay off worker bees, programmers, graphic designers (which compromise bigger and bigger slice of the budget compare with programmers given all the 3d animation, civ5 is cutting that, for performance and most likely budget reasons), and QA. As long as they meet their financial target, they get their stocks, their bonuses, it's what they care about.

Bad publicity does not matter that much, as long as it's not catastrophic (like BP oil spill). Remember, often these executives can ruin a company, with shoddy product, then move on and take another job elsewhere that pays him skyhigh salary + bonuses because he performed in a previous company (who cares if the company subsquently tank afterwards due to lack product support, those executives can always explain the company tanked due to loss of his/her leadership, nice isn't it? You think those recruiters, board of directors will do their due diligence? HA!)

Anyways, just a suggestion if you are really concerned, outline your concern, how you are (or are committed to buy) a customer right now and will boycut all product as well as spread the bad publicity all over the web, etc.

Carrot and stick, gotta offer them both. Mail to the board of directors may help too but lord knows how many board of directors are actually independent, CEO don't get to where they are by not learning how to kiss up, keeping board of directors in their pocket for a long time

 

[The_J]

Moderator Action: General warning: In this thread there is spam in various directions. If this doesn't stop it will get closed.

 

[lynxxyarly]

As for single player, Bioshock 2 is perfectly playable, there's no bug i'm aware of. Can't tell about the MP, though. The main gripe is that the expansions won't be ported to PC.

I have this game as well, and the *only* issues with it that I have that should have been fixed (but never have been) is hardcoded bug where you cant change the control keys in-game for some stuff. Like the activation button is defaulted to "F" and if you change it, the game literally breaks within the first 3 minutes and you can't progress any further. I had to manually edit the .ini files of specific parts of the game itself in order to get the controls to work right. That is my major issue and it still has yet to be fixed, even after 8 months+

The next few issues are minor gripes at best, but still simple fixes that should have been fixed. 16:10 widescreen support is nonexistent (even though they promised it would be fixed). Vending machine sounds don't exist (even though they said they would be fixed). Vsync is constantly being forced on, even if you shut it off in the options (promised fixing and never did). I fixed it myself by over riding the vysnc within nvidia's control panel for the game itself.

Just sad to see a gaming company produce shoddy work and then take your money and run. :/

Edit: there seems to be a lot of issues also stemming from DLC, which I never bought any of, so I can't comment on specifically. However, I can say that a lot of the DLC is for multiplayer and as far as I'm concerned they should have never made any multiplayer and just stuck to the main game. Maybe the quality of work would have went up instead of making 2 mediocre parts of a game. They could have pooled all resources into making as great a game as the original bioshock.

 

[Goldshade]

Very enlightening reading that forum thread for Bioshock 2. The treatment PC gamers got from the publisher in the past 8 months was really bad. I was surprised at the unfinished state of Civ5 (it's really only in early beta status in my opinion) but it just looks like Firaxis was forced to deliver at a certain date without being allowed to take the time to deliver a proper product.

I feel really bad for the Civ5 beta testers, many who are well known on these forums; they must've been pulling their hair out in the beta, submitting bug reports and game play feedback and seeing little to nothing was done about it. And they probably can't even share the frustration because of an NDA. I've been in the limited open beta (invitation only, but no NDA) for World of Warcraft Cataclysm for about 3 months now and there is a lot of activity on the beta forums from beta players giving constructive feedback and it's not unusual to get a reply from say the lead world designer 'we're looking into it' or 'it will be fixed' as result of submitting a bug report and in one of the next beta builds it IS actually fixed. Now THAT is how you approach making a proper game upon release and getting commitment from your community.

In 2005 there was announced a 'long-term, multi-title publishing agreement with FIRAXIS Games®' between Firaxis and the publisher http://www.firaxis.com/news/news_detail.php?id=118 so it might well be that development effort is now going into Civ6 or Civ5 for consoles rather than fixing an already sold product. At least I'm not counting on major patches getting there. It'll have to come from the modding community once the code is released (if that will happen, don't know). I know I certainly won't buy any product anymore from this publisher; I can only hope Firaxis can find another one soon.

 

[cr0ws]

Our next topic of conspiracy.......When trolls finish college and program computer games for money!!!! Consequences are trolled players.

 

[EmpireOfCats]

I know I certainly won't buy any product anymore from this publisher; I can only hope Firaxis can find another one soon.

I think this is going to be part of the problem. I can go back to Civ IV and enjoy myself immensely (though I am now a convert to the hex religion and will miss them). Then, some time next year, we get Portal 2, and most probably Diablo 3. Between these three games, why should I fool around with a half-finished buggy Civ V?

And that brings us to the real problem -- through Steam, 2K and Firaxis can now track how many people are playing. If Civ V fatigue sets in and the number of people playing drops, they can tell immediately. That gives less motivation to patch the game, which in turns gives less reason to play it ... and we have a nice, brutal downward spiral.

I would suggest patching this game very, very quickly, before people move on to other, less buggy things.

 

[Venereus]

Our next topic of conspiracy.......When trolls finish college and program computer games for money!!!! Consequences are trolled players.

Consequences will never be the same for all us trolled players.

 

[lynxxyarly]

And that brings us to the real problem -- through Steam, 2K and Firaxis can now track how many people are playing. If Civ V fatigue sets in and the number of people playing drops, they can tell immediately. That gives less motivation to patch the game, which in turns gives less reason to play it ... and we have a nice, brutal downward spiral./QUOTE]

Or maybe it will give them MORE motivation to get the game fixed. They see the game play dropping and as such they know something is wrong, thusly they will take appropriate action to get things fixed.

 

[Thormodr]

Perhaps people need to do a "Don't play ciV for a week."

Sort of like a silent protest. They'd sit up and take notice.

I'm already doing my part.

 

[Archwizard]

I know for my part how Civ5 is supported will make a huge difference in my future purchasing. If I see patches that address the major, recurring complaints then I'll buy future expansions/DLC/etc. If I don't, I won't. It's that simple. I know that if I see an expansion being sold saying it'll fix the issues in Civ5 then that'll really be a "screw you" from Firaxis/2k/whoever that will make me walk forever.

I like Civ5, and I think if the patches meet expectations it'll be a great game. But I certainly feel burned.

 

[Markstar]

For me it is very simple: Since my ongoing disappointment with Civ3, the Civ3 expansions and Civ4, all of which had and still have MAJOR bugs in them (remember the Great Scientist in Civ3, which was supposed to be a major feature? - It NEVER worked right).

A bad publisher can certainly make things work (just look at Blizzard, where you can already see things deteriorating, but they still are by far the best game maker out there), but Firaxis was never a company full of brilliant programmers in the first place (otherwise people without the source code wouldn't be able to fix bugs in days that they can't even fix in months).

So sadly, no hope for me for Civ5. It may improve down the road, especially when the expansions are on the way and they need some positive publicity, but overall I don't buy anything from either 2k nor Firaxis until I hear recommendations from actual players.

 

[Tamed]

Moderator Action: *snip*

 

[Gunship_Down]

I'm not sure what you are on about, I've played through Bioshock 2 from start to finish and never encountered any bugs, NOT ONCE.

 

[Winkle]

I'm not sure what you are on about, I've played through Bioshock 2 from start to finish and never encountered any bugs, NOT ONCE.

Did you actually read the link in the 1st post? Well recognised bugs that 2k games acknowlegded even before the release of the game they were never patched. Also support for the PC game was particularly dire, i expect as a result of the sales differential between consoles and PC.

 

[Sadan01]

Perhaps people need to do a "Don't play ciV for a week."

Sort of like a silent protest. They'd sit up and take notice.

I'm already doing my part.

I don't think they're going to care (Take Two and Firaxis) . They already have your money. Why are they going to care if 95% of people are not playing Civ V, when it's only been three weeks since it was released? Do you think Firaxis are going to work harder? I don't think so.

Valve won't care as they will have more network bandwidth and server load available for Counterstrike.

Yep, it's true that both Valve and T2/Firaxis could use analytics to work out what features work in Civ V and what doesn't - e.g. who plays multiplayer and what kinds of options do people select in games or how many people have completed the game in Deity etc. Frankly, this kind of information doesn't necessarily matter now - they won't be working on Civ VI for at least another 3-5 years. Sure, they might be able to incorporate some of their "results" into an expansion but frankly, why do we care about expansions right now? That to me says that there is something seriously wrong with the franchise if a majority was happy to skip the vanilla version and wait (patiently) for an (unannounced) expansion.

We want bug fixes and changes to this abomination called Civ V, damnit! That comes first before anything else. A lot of people are waiting for this.

 

[Thoughtful Thug]

Games like Bioshock 2 on PC can be difficult for some players without being able to use their gamepad. It's sad that they said they wouldn't even do it in the future.

Make me wonder what they are going to tell us in the future when some significant fixes are not there for this game.

I am wasd player, and have no problem using the keyboard/mouse for FPS. But when a publisher downright refuse to provide that to customers that prefer to use gamepads, then you can see how disrespectful they are to their customers' needs.

 

[Adam7Eight]

Games like Bioshock 2 on PC can be difficult for some players without being able to use their gamepad. It's sad that they said they wouldn't even do it in the future.

Make me wonder what they are going to tell us in the future when some significant fixes are not there for this game.

I am wasd player, and have no problem using the keyboard/mouse for FPS. But when a publisher downright refuse to provide that to customers that prefer to use gamepads, then you can see how disrespectful they are to their customers' needs.

Playing a shooter with a gamepad just isn't right. I don't know how these console guys do it.

First person shooter + mouse & keyboard = win