Burned by 2K and Firaxis

Hmm... Provoke an argument? Me? Never...

My point is that just because a game doesn't work on your machine, does not mean it's the games fault. Maybe it is, but that remains to be seen. It seems to me that you are saying that any software that doesn't run on your system for any reason must be broken/bugged/untested.

Why is it 'obvious' that they rushed through QA to get this released before Christmas? If I'm not mistaken, the release date has been set for a while so it was really their plan all along to release before Christmas. If you mean it's obvious to you because it doesn't work, I see your point, but keep in mind there are plenty of people playing with no (or at least minor) issues. If they tested on all hardware/software combos, the game would never be released.

So the game does run for you? What exactly is the problem? Just late in the game it crashes? Does it do this on all maps? Have you checked out the ATI card fix (not sure if it's applicable)?

If it is indeed a issue with civ4 conflicting with some type of hardware, then I hope too they fix it (along with my other grievances, ESPECIALLY MOUNTAINS!). If not, I hope you find out what is causing it.

 

To those who think they are GREAT persons because they are LUCKY not to witness any crashes on their systems. I feel I should explain something. If someone tells me:"You get a car, fully functioning and everything is ok for 2000Euro" and afterwards I find out the brakes are loose, there is 2mm gap in the cooling system, it looses 1Liter Oil every 100km, then this is definitly a Flaw! and according to European Law, you MUST sell what you PROMISE. You can't say:"give me 500Eur for a Bike" and then sell them a cheap Thailand made Swiss imitation watch. That's illegal, you go to court, you prosecute, and if the company does not comply with the European Law they face alot of trouble. If this is not a single case, but a case of tousends of people, even if this company sells good to 100.000 other people, if they screw up tousands of others, this company will be forced to Act, solve issues, or face not only to shut down their businesses, the managers will face Jail!!! this is A FACT!!!

now I come to the Circle of Idiots and Violent programmers to the 4 th grade. If those people tell everyone you need these and these Specs as recommended, not minimal, but really recommended!! If I recommend someone to use 15W40 Oil of Total, where actually this Oil is the reason my car's Piston is scratching my Cilinder, this is not only a Lie, it's not only treason, it's not only stupidity, it's not only foolness, it's not only betreyal, it's everything bad combined which we call in the christian world like:"demonish, devil, draconian". If you tell people:"If you bought this and that, then I offer you this also for the price of xxx Euro, and you'll experience exitement and bla bla" now, all people who have bought the recommended and above should face NO PROBLEMS! It is very nice for some people it actually does work, although I don't believe they played up to the maximum maps with max ages and max civs, mostly such people saying they did are just talking kiddies of 12years old who tested maybe such a map for 1 hour, well hello, it's working for one hour on nearly everybodies system.. but that is not THE ISSUE! The ISSUE is, if they promise something, and not keeping their promises, they are CHEATERS, Thefts, Criminals, and they must be brought to court! I hereby ask people living in the country where take 2 resides to start a trial against them. We all must send money for the trail cost, force them to refund our trail cost and take back the game and refund us the money! we must make an example in software industry that you are not allowed to lie and brake the law! everyone must live by the LAW!!! it's the highest freedom we, our ancestors, achieved in the past wars, most lately in WWII...all our grandparents fought for rights and democracy and not getting sc*#*$& by some criminal organization! They didn't told us the truth, they told us:"use these specs" and it's a lie for many people! so this is not the thuth, the specs are not the only things needed, they didn't told us what else we need. so they lied! and liers and their genes must be abandoned from this planet. so someone, start a courttrail and lets all support him/her!

 

I'm another one that hasn't had a problem...

Machine 1 : Athlon 3500, GeForce 6800GT, 1Gb RAM

Plays at 1280x1024 (TFT monitor set-up) 4xAA quite beautifully.

Machine 2: Dell Latitude with an Intel 915 Graphics. Again Runs at 1024 x 768 at max graphic settings.

The wife and I run the 2 PCs for LAN games, one runs WinXP, the other Win 2K and we haven't encountered a single problem yet.

I'm quite staggered by the number of people having problems; IMO it's one of the very few games I've ever been able to buy that's been rock solid stable for network gaming. It was a breeze to set-up (even adding itself to the WinXP Firewall exceptions list); all kudos to development teams.

Those with branded PCs, you must make sure your drivers are up to date; Dell et al are notorious for supplying old drivers from their support web site.

For those that are genuinely having problems I feel sorry for you. It's a quality game. You'll just have to be patient.

 

Its not JUST that it crashes on MY system, but that it crashes on so many other's systems, many of whom have very powerful computers, which lead me to conclude that it wasnt tested nearly enough. If it was JUST me I would never come to that conclusion.

I do have an ATI Radeon 9800 pro, But the "fix" is for people who cant run the game at all do to an initialization problem or somesuch. I suspect they will work on optimizing it for radeon cards, since that seems to be a very big issue, one of the few they have addmitted to in fact.

I agree about mountains, they are pretty much useless, and have become progressively more so throughout the civ series. in 2 you could found cities on them, in 3 you couldnt found, but you could move on them and mine them. Now in civ4 they are worthless, cant mine, move or found. There arnt even kewl volcanos like they had in civ3 conquests. Maybe in the expansion,...

 

The vast majority of people are playing this game with little to no problems, myself included. I have minor bugs which I would expect to be corrected such as the choppy wonder music and it sometimes freezes after loading a saved game, however mainly not bad for a newly released product. I have seen much worst such as Sims 2.

It is understandable if you cannot play the game and you have above the minimum specs for you to be upset however this is far from a unique occurance during the launch of a new PC game.

 

Ok, so sue Firaxis? What's the big deal? After all, you've got all the FACTS on your side...

Whoa... You need a serious reality check if you think that releasing Civ4 in it's current state is 'treason', 'demonish' or 'draconian.'

That's hysterical!!!! Oh, wait... You're serious...

 

We could go around in circles all night with you saying "it doesn't work on x number of systems" and me countering with "well it does work on y number of systems", but that seems silly. The bottom line is that if there was a fundamental problem with the code, no one would be playing. So are there issues? Probably, but without more evidence, there is no reason to say so.

I have a 9700 pro. The game does get a bit laggy in the late stages on large maps, but other than that, I haven't had a single crash. Does your game just CTD in the later stages or what? Does windows write a dump file?

Tell me about it. See my rant in the thread called 'Mountains?'

 

I think experience has taught that this is not a very logical step due to the complex interactions between system configuration and software. One system may tolerate a bug in a piece of software while another system crashes. To the people who own the "tolerant" system, the software appears bug-free, when in fact, it's purely a matter of luck. After all, for nearly every game nowadays, patches are released to fix bugs that appear only on specific system configurations. If it's not an issue that can be fixed by updating the drivers on your system (assuming you didn't mess around with your system e.g. by overclocking the graphics card), then it's a game issue, and that implies that the game is broken. The fact that the game works on many systems doesn't change that fact.

If you buy a car that can only go up to 50mph due to some defect, it's broken. That's not changed by the fact that you may not actually notice it, because you never use the highway, so you never try to go above 50mph. The fact that you don't notice a defect doesn't imply that the product isn't broken - it only means that at this point in time, you are not noticing the defect. At the latest when you try to sell your 50mph-limited car, you'll notice how serious the defect is, just like you may notice how broken a specific game is when you actually change your system configuration to a system that is not compatible with the game.

So yes, I think the word "broken" is very much applicable to a piece of software that needs to be patched to work on a fairly significant number of systems.

 

While I see where you are going (sort of), I can't agree. A broken product has a show-stopper that occurs on all systems. A bug is a more accurate word for what you are describing. As for the 'tolerant' system, I have no idea what you are talking about. My machine does not compile the game any differently than yours. No amount of luck is going to make my machine keep running the game after an stop error/exception/stack overflow. Although I concede that I simply may not have run into the issue yet. I find it very unlikely that all the beta-testers were 'lucky'. BTW, device drivers are not the only reason a game might have problems.

Well then tell me how fast I must go in order to see the defect? Also, if you change to a system configuration that does not support the game (and is documented in the specs), how does this make the game broken? Again, folks are jumping to the conclusion that because it doesn't run on a particular machine, that it's 'broken'.

How many systems are affected? Oh, you don't know? Then why is the word 'broken' applicable? If only 1 machine in the world (that met the specs) couldn't run the game, would it be broken?

 

It's getting to be rather silly. The Take2 UK website doesn't have a single word about the whole Civilization IV game. As far as Take2 UK is concerned, it does not exist. Guess that means they don't have to worry about customer service either or releasing a patch for the myrad of bugs.

http://www.take2games.co.uk

 

Well, then it's a matter of definition, but to me, a software with a serious bug is broken, even if I don't notice the bug right now, because I may buy a new graphics card or other components soon, and who knows - the bug may appear then.

I'll give you an example: Let's say you develop software for an operating system that automatically initializes all data with zero when a program starts. While developing, you forget to initialize some variables with zero, but it's no problem, because the operating system does it for you. However, when you port the software to another operating system, it may not work, because uninitialized variables may contain any random value on such an OS, so the software that works perfectly fine on one OS won't work at all on another OS. One OS was simply more "tolerant" than the other, but the bug was still there, and it's 100% the developers fault for not following the rules of the programming language. If the whole point of the software was that you can run it on different operating systems, then ultimately, you can say that it's broken.

Running software on different system configurations is similar in that regard to porting it to different operating systems. One graphics card may do certain initializations by default, as a kind of "undocumented feature", so if the developers forget to do these initializations, it works fine, even though in theory it's not supposed to. If you use that software on another system with a different graphics card, you may get a garbled screen or even a crash. Again, one system was more "tolerant" than the other. So it is indeed quite possible for a piece of software to be buggy, but to work perfectly on some systems and not at all on others, but it's still a problem with the software, not the system.

That scenario happens all the time. For practically every game that is released nowadays, patches are released that fix issues which occur only on some systems. Based on your argument, that shouldn't ever happen. But it does.

So there are two possibilities: The less likely one that yes, indeed, the beta testers were just lucky, or the more likely one that the game was simply released as-is, because a release deadline had to be met.

I was talking about changing to another system configuration that meets the game's system requirements, but the game doesn't work on them.

No, you are jumping to the conclusion that because it runs on yours, it's unlikely to be broken. It's like my car analogy: You just haven't crossed the 50mph threshold yet. You just don't have the system configuration that causes the bug to appear.

My apologies for not having done a complete survey of all people who have bought the game.

If you want to know which systems are affected, just wait for the patch and look in the release notes for something like "Fixes crash-to-desktop issues on systems with ..." or "Fixes problems with the wonder movies on systems with..." Then you'll know.

I think we can safely say that there is more than one machine that meets the specs and can't run the game or has a lot of trouble running the game.

Heck, a new diplomacy bug has just been reported in the bug reports forum which - if true - ultimately makes multiplayer games pointless until a patch is released which fixes that problem, so from a multiplayer perspective the game is most definitely broken. At this point, you can not play a multiplayer game (unless you're willing to accept that your opponents may be exploiting this bug). I would guess that most players never play multiplayer games, so perhaps they should say "No, the game is not broken, it works perfectly for that vast majority! There's no need for a patch!"

 

Much as I dislike the vast number of threads of this type I will add my 2 cents to try and give a balanced view. Civ 4 worked straight out of the box for me, as have all the previous Civ games. I'm running it on a far from new laptop with a Geforce FX 5200 and 512Mb of RAM and I haven't had a single CTD or even a noticeable graphics glitch. The wonder movies play flawlessly. It'll run a standard map up to the late game with very little lag and even at the end it'll only take 20 seconds or so to end the turn. Civ 3 used to take anything up to five minutes at that stage so I'm certainly not complaining about Civ 4 being laggy. A huge map is rather laggy especially in the late game, but is still perfectly playable, and given I've only just got the recommended spec I'm quite pleased with it's performance.

I know it's irritating when a game doesn't work, but unless you don't play many games I find it hard to believe they've worked out of the box every time. I can think of half a dozen that wouldn't work to any satisfactory extent when I got them. Ranting on the forum isn't going to achieve anything except annoy people, especially when the arguements get silly. "Demonish, devil, draconian"? It is hardly a capital offence to make a game that doesn't work for some people, if it was there wouldn't be any game developers. Keep it in perspective and if it doesn't work, take it back and get a different game. Rants about treason and eradicating the genes of the people who made it from the planet do not create a lot of sympathy.

This place definitely needs a rants forum.

 

That's because the Take-two subsidiary, 2k Games handles Civ 4. http://www.2kgames.com/

That's why you see 2k Games at start-up and not Take-Two.

*clap*

Guess what I found:

I found it funny that the ATI problem wasn't nescessarily because of poor testing, but a conflict arising due to the drivers.

http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/support.htm ~This is kind of helpful.

 

the original post reminds me of the backlash Creative Assembly got after Rome: total war was released. They had to patch-in multiplayer for god's sake.
Compared to Rome, CIV seems like a walk in the clouds. All of the complaints I've heard so far seem to be about hardward problems that can be ironed out. The game itself, once it runs, runs fine (and i'm talking about gameplay here, not late-game drag or wonder-movie slow-down).

 

You must me joking the game works fine for me.

 

I'm playing on a very old laptop (Panasonic CF-51) with 1.7 Centrino, Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro 64MB video card, and 1 GB RAM. The game never crashed yet, and is never too slow (well, I wait ~2-3 seconds for AI civs to make their move). I played for about 80 hours now.

I didn't even have to reinstall any drivers for my card.

I only played on a standard map with default (6) AI civs.

The sad thing is, two of my friends can't play the game at all because they have the Intel junk instead of a video card (on-board graphics). So damn stupid. Civ4 should have an option to play the game at lower graphics settings for people with on-board graphics. Come on, it's not an FPS, why the #*%&#$ do you have to kill the game for so many people with Centrino laptops?!

Actually, they can *almost* play the game; only the terrain is all black and all leaders are Cheshire cats.

 

You're in it

 

I suggested a rants forum before, I still suggest it. If you will notice there's yet another locked thread and it's always the threads ranting and complaining about their issues with the game (because of their hardware).

If they'd make a rants forum, then there wouldn't be any closed threads most likely, cause those that are enjoying the game would have no reason to go there. But, these I HATE SID and I HATE FRAXIS and I HATE CIV IV threads popup everytime they close one again and again and again.

Now, if only I were king, there would either be a rants section or I would just immediately delete the thread the first sign of I HATE..... was in a topic title or HOW I GOT SCREWED......, etc. etc.

It's basically really the same people over and over jumping into those threads and starting flame wars and calling others that don't agree with them "ignorant", "Idiots", "arrogant", etc. etc. oh "brain dead", etc. etc.

We all know by now some people have issues with CIV IV, what's the use of trolling this well known topic over and over and over on a daily basis, it should be treated like any other thread, it's "old news" so let it just roll off the main page and stay that way.....OR.....create a RANTS forum so those that just like to rant about it can continue to do so without disrutpting the regular flow of information, good reviews, hidden findings, etc. etc. that are much more enjoyable to be on the front page instead of negativism, it might keep people from buying the game if they keep seeing such rantings. And no one wants to do that now do you?

 

So, you're saying you'd show only positive reviews of a product rather than something that resmbles reality. Gotcha.


Later!

--The Clown to the Left

 

Now, I didn't say that, I just said there should be a forum for that, so all the negative people can all have their own place and all the positive people can have theirs.

Thing is most people tend to lean and flow toward the good instead of the bad/negative, so there would probably be a very small population of negative people/posts anyways.