Burned by 2K and Firaxis

[Sobsob]

Assuming you have the recommended requirements, this game plays much better than civ 3 out of the box. Remeber the completely corrupt cities and repetitive tree-choppin, ugh

So what your saying is that all their software is bugged so thats ok then?

 

[Marlowe13]

Assuming you have the recommended requirements, this game plays much better than civ 3 out of the box. Remeber the completely corrupt cities and repetitive tree-choppin, ugh

Proving the old adage about what happens when you assume. I am having large problems playing Civ 4 with a system far exceeding the recommended specs. OTOH, I had zero problems playing Civ3 out of the box (on an older PIII 1 ghz system). I realize that people with very different systems are getting very different results. But it is clear that, at mimimum, a large minority with systems meeting and exceeding the stated specs are having large issues with the game, including CTD. I have to laugh at the cliched "caveat emptor" respones. Firaxis should have included a Social Darwinism wonder or civic for the enjoyment of those who blame the consumer for corporate lies and screwups.

 

[MobBoss]

Ladies and Gents,

Sid Meier, Firaxis, and 2K games have beaten me. I give up. They win. They have proven that you can release a product so horribly screwed it isn't funny and still make a profit.

The QA people for Firaxis and 2K (now the same company) should be summarily dismissed. Any product that needs a patch BEFORE it will even perform as advertised should never leave the company. Were I the QA manager and forced to release the product, I would have demanded to have my name removed from the credits if not outright resign. There is no possible way they could have tested and approved this game. These aren't devious minor bugs. These are glaring show stoppers. One of them occurs before the game actually starts. How was this not seen?

I had an ATI X700 video card. I solved the installation issues only to have the game crash to the desktop at frequent intervals. The "unpacking" solution only delays the inevitable. It does NOT cure it. I bought an Nvidia 6800GT card. Now the game crashes less often (but crash it does). It now, however, corrupts the display when I zoom the map out.

All this time and all this money and this is the best they can do? So be it. 2K games and Firaxis you win. I won't start a game I know can't be completed. It has been 2 weeks with NO official word regarding these issues. I still don't have my tech tree in English. Since Fry's won't take back an open box, I'm stuck. I am going to swap it with another to get my tech tree in English. I gave 2K 2 weeks to replace it. That is more than enough time.

Here is how to solve this:
Replace the entire box. I got the wrong items, on mis-labeled discs with software that, frankly, sucks. Where is the value here? Not one thing has gone right with this product! 2K should immediately replace the entire box with a corrected edition and a note of apology for shipping such trash.

Game works for me fine with no crashes or slowdown. Game works for all my friends too. We play multiplayer almost every night with no issues. To say that not one thing has gone right with this product is a flat out lie. True, people will have compatability issues..but that is not any different from any other software release today. I find there is plenty that has gone right, and I find most of the reviews to be spot on with their high recommendations. Am I a fanboi? Probably. I have experienced plenty of new releases that truely WERE pieces of crap, and this release was far from that. My prediction is that Civ 4 will win game of the year running away.

Go SID.

 

[al_thor]

"The Mongolians and the Chinese have signed a Mutual Protection Pact."

 

[vbraun]

I have a 6800GT and have no problems what so ever.

 

[Dida]

Where is the patch??

 

[AsnoT]

Have you played on huge maps with lots of AI civs with the world map revealed and still get 'no lag or anything else'?

If so, what are your computer specs?

i have, and the EOT in later years is probably the longest "wait" - about the same as in civ3 i'd say, 30 secs maybe. sometimes, focusing on a new unit takes a few secs - far from unplayable anyway.
loading a game at that stage is under a minute.

i suspect that XP users have more problems, but that's stating the obvious.

 

[Lorteungen]

On this thread (and elsewhere on the whole forum), some gamers have complained that they bought relatively recent & expensive GeForce videocards to then still experience unacceptable graphical problems and crashes. I take their word for it, and I think that they have a free-speech right to inform us of their technical woes.

What puzzles me is that my system has a two-year old GeForce FX 5200 (128 MB vram), which was a budget-priced card to start with, and I have encountered NONE of the described graphical problems and crashes after 8 days of play. I am not saying that to brag (I would not brag about a GF 5200) : I simply do not understand, from a purely technological point of view.

I have experienced not one single event of video choppiness or distortion and not one single CTD. I sincerely sympathize with those of you who are plagued by major problems with much more recent & powerful GF cards...but if I can run the Civ IV software without any problem on a mediocre GF 5200, it is risky to blame the developers and the producers if the game-program (sometimes) experiences major problems when it runs on much better GF cards than mine!

It is a mystery, to which I do not have an easy answer...but I would be extremely prudent before casting blame, in those ambivalent circumstances (following contradictory reports by GF-card owners).

There are two issues here and they do not necessarily have anything to do with each other. One is the crashing apparently caused by some sort of conflict with certain video cards. The other is the extreme slowdown of the game, the weird minute-long freezes, the long loading times and the general slowness of the UI. The latter are almost certainly not related to the video card but to the CPU or the memory or both. A 5200 should play fine, at least at default resolution and without AA/AF. That's why it's also somewhat meaningless to compare your performance with GPU intensive games like Quake4 and FEAR. Civ is and have always been a CPU intensive, not a GPU intensive game.

 

[Evie]

Thirty second? Even in the late game my EOT wait was along the line of 5-10 seconds in all the games where I reached the late game so far (as opposed to deciding I had done too many mistakes).

And that's with a frelling 512 RAM.

The game DOES bog down once in a while, I'll give you that - but that's nothing that just exiting and restarting won't fix.

 

[Hozchelaga]

Oh gawd here we go again. lol At least one of these types of threads pops up it's ugly head on a daily basis while 80% of all those who bought the game have no issues or very minor issues.

If one of these types of threads pops up on a daily basis, maybe it's not correct to say that 80% of those who bought the game have no issues or very minor ones.

For the record, I obtained a non-working copy here in Australia (would not even install), and returned it for a refund. No problem. But my understanding is that the following types of users have significant problems:

1. Laptop owners. It won't play. You can put that down to "crappy non-T&L graphics cards in laptops", but we all know that's not true. Laptop owners got burned out-of-the-box.

2. ATI Radeon card owners.

3. People with only 512MB RAM, despite the official spec requirements. This is really an issue of misrepresenting the spec requirements. If Civ IV requires 1GB, fine -- but it ought to be advertised that way.

4. A number of others, who might not have the computer savvy to re-install Windows, or clean up their hard-drives, or install brand-new this-and-that to get a game to work. That could be 25% of the gaming community, maybe more. And after all, it is just a game -- who's going to give up a weekend to get a game to work?

So maybe it works for 80% of users, maybe not. However, when you ship 100,000 copies, that's 20,000 unhappy people. In other words, for those of you with a working copy of the game / working specs to play it, we're happy for you. But you're going to have to put up with these complaints because they are legitimate.

And in the long term, it doesn't serve you to complain about the complaints, either. If nothing else, threads like these help break down the "release-now-patch-later" mentality of the PC gaming industry, a mentality that exists in this industry and no other -- simply because it can.

 

[weimingshi]

I have amd athlon xp 2500+, geforce ti4600, 1g ram. I play huge map 18 civ epic speed. loading save files in later period is slow and the first end turn can take anywhere from 30sec to 3 min, but after that it runs mostly smooth.

So in an attempt to reduce loading time, I overcloaked cpu to xp 3200+. well, all the tests shows the system is stable, comp is working fine. The loading did go faster. But I start to have crashs, slowdowns after playing for sometime and all kinds of problem. I then changed back to factory default setting, things were like before again. I guess system stability affects civ4 performance alot.

The thing is there just too many PC configurations out there, you can have virtually thousands of hardware configuration and add to the problem of different drivers people use in their machines, there can be tens of thousands of configuration. And I suspect theres must 10 or 20 million machines playing the game (both legal copy and pirate copies). even if only 1% have problem, there will be 10,000 people cant run the game properly. When you have that many people who can't run the game, you will see the message board with full of posts complaining about it. I guess the blame is on firaxis for selling too many copies, if they only sold 100,000 copy instead a few million, there won't be many people complaining.

The game is not perfect, no pc game is perfect anyways. But saying its majorly flawed is a huge assumption. There is just no way they can make the game work on all configurations.

 

[Mighty Grum]

If one of these types of threads pops up on a daily basis, maybe it's not correct to say that 80% of those who bought the game have no issues or very minor ones.

The problem is that people are more likely to post a thread to a message board to complain about a game, than they are to post a thread to a board to praise a game.

People with strong views about something are more likely to make it known to others. That's why those online polls on CNN/FOX/etc are usually full of crap. Are you more likely to go out of your way to say "Yah, I like how things are going?", or are you more likely to go out of your way to say "I hate how things are going?"

Besides, people who have no problems with the game are probably too busy playing it to post.

 

[Hozchelaga]

All I can say is, caveat emptor. Firaxis and Take2 didn't have a gun to your head when bought Civ IV. If you read the various fansites, you would have had a really good idea that the game was largely unplayable and/or glitchy for some folks. But, lemme guess: you bought it anyway.

Caveat emptor. Right.

You know, the reason we haven't updated that "pearl of wisdom" from the Latin is because is has not had a place in consumer affairs since the fall of the Roman Empire.

Caveat emptor is specifically NOT the way consumer affairs work in the 21st-century market place. Most Western nations have legislative regimes which require manufacturers of a product to accurately disclose that products capabilities. Failure to do so may be a breach of trade practices, depending, of course, on the particular regime in the jurisdiction.

Reversing the onus does no favours to the consumer. It is up to the manufacturer to produce a quality product.

Honestly, if buggy software bothers you so much, don't buy anything until six months post release.

Again, this specifically harms the consumer. Software manufacturers release buggy software because they can. We allow them to, by our collective willingness to accept an inferior product at the first instance.

By way of comparison, there is no "patch" for your Toyota Corolla; if 20% of those crashed the first time out, there's nothing Toyota can do but recall them.

Not that Civ IV is as serious as that, but a (hypothetical) 20% failure rate? Too high. I'm not saying the product should be 100% -- but how about 95%? We know that it's not even that high, because laptop users alone probably make up more than 5% of potential users.

 

[Hozchelaga]

The problem is that people are more likely to post a thread to a message board to complain about a game, than they are to post a thread to a board to praise a game... Besides, people who have no problems with the game are probably too busy playing it to post.

Definitely true, both points. But we ought not to say, "Oh no! Not again!" because, especially pre-patch, the problems are serious and ongoing for a significant (nobody can really know what proportion) number of people.

As for me, I gave up. Now I'm just a sad lurker, living vicariously through others' conquests.

Maybe I'll pick it up again in 18 mths. from the bargain bin.

 

[rtilley]

Stop complaing to civfantics. Half of the people here don't care that this is a buggy release. They are true belivers and nothing you say will convince them that this is a horrible piece of software (which it is).

Do what I did... Sell it on eBay and tell all of your friends how Civ 4 sucks really big time

 

[flub]

Great post BobtheBold. 100% behind you mate.

 

[Hozchelaga]

Stop complaing to civfantics. Half of the people here don't care that this is a buggy release. They are true belivers and nothing you say will convince them that this is a horrible piece of software (which it is).

Do what I did... Sell it on eBay and tell all of your friends how Civ 4 sucks really big time

True. Many are true believers. Some used to be, and are no longer. Some just want to praise or criticise for the sake of it.

However, I would encourage people to make further legitimate complaints (and for that matter, compliments) on this forum. Civfanatics (and one other) contains THE forum for discussing all things Civ, and the 2K/Fxs team regularly visit. It's the virtual marketplace for real concerns. If you have any faith that someone is listening, this is the place to talk.

 

[Mighty Grum]

By way of comparison, there is no "patch" for your Toyota Corolla; if 20% of those crashed the first time out, there's nothing Toyota can do but recall them.

What do you think a "recall" is? It's a technological "patch" for the problem on the vehicle.

The brakes are sticky? The "patch" is to adjust them so they aren't that way.

You take your car into the local dealership, they make the adjustment, and you have your car "updated" and ready to go. Software patches are easier because it's a digital update instead of a physical one, but otherwise it's the same thing. You don't get a whole new car, just your "patched" one in return.

I wouldn't be surprised in the future to find out that vehicle "patches" will be available over the internet (for things like fuel management, display updates and radio/cd/mp3 upgrades).

 

[Hozchelaga]

What do you think a "recall" is? It's a technological "patch" for the problem on the vehicle.

What I was getting at is that automobile manufacturers don't have the luxury of requiring consumers to wait for two weeks before they do something to correct their product. It has to work first time, off-the-lot. Or someone could get killed. Same with a can of Pepsi for that matter. Or a trampoline. Or a u-pipe for a drainage system. Or a parachute.

As I said, software (at least, consumer gaming software) isn't as serious as that. Despite what some of the posts on this forum say, nobody is going to die if they can't play Civ IV. But that doesn't mean that the manfacturer is absolved of their responsibility to produce a working product -- the first time.

So I'm saying, software manufacturers have become lazy. The "patch-download-two-weeks-later" is a get-out-of-jail-free card that is not available to other manufacturers. I realise there is pressure to have the dollars coming in fast, because games are very expensive to develop. But the release product, like all other products, has to work -- out-of-the-box -- just as a car has to work off-the-lot.

And if we don't say something, if we just continue to take it, we will be the ones to lose in the end.

 

[BlueLikeYou]

The game does have serious problems. It runs way too slow and crashes for no apparent reason. I would guess that this is caused by one or more memory-related errors. Just because it fits the symptoms and memory problems are some of the hardest to find & fix in development.

I don't think its a simple matter of not being able to test on every possible configuration, because most of the people having problems are on pretty standard stuff.

For example I have:
WinXP SP2
6800GT PCIe x2
AMD Athlon 64 3500+
1 GB Ram

That's above the recommended requirements, and all top brand equipment. I've pretty much had to give up playing since the game is crashing so often I'm lucky to get through a turn. I was able to play for 2-3 hours in a stretch, but the last couple of times I've tried, it took me like an hour to complete one or two turns due to the game crashing before I could finish.

I'm not sure why people feel the need to try to shout down or silence those that are having problems. I mean, if enough people are posting that you are getting sick of seeing the threads, wouldn't that indicate there are some pretty major problems with the software?