xguild: I agree that game quality has gone down the drains. And to say the least, it is sad that Firaxis goofed in making sure that Civ 4, a 3D civ, is going to run on computers that many civ fans have (a computer that doesn't have a fancy graphics card, nor fast and lots of ram, and fast CPUs)
But the problem is that the gaming industry moved from fearing bad press to being able to shove crap down customer's throats and still get their profits. IMO some of the big game review sites has been bought out by companies that has an interest in having gamers getting bored and buying more and more games, or having gamers keep upgrading their hardware.
Let's assume that I'm not bitter and jaded and will give the developers the benefit of a doubt that they're really passionate for the game and didn't want to be creaters of bad games (either bad game play, or bad implementation - IMO it's a inefficient implementation). The problem is that since the whole industry has gone the way of putting games that should be in beta in public and reap money now and screw the customers, they can't spend all the time they needed to hunt bugs, or profile the game to find out where the heck is the code inefficient; they have to have the game out eventually, or risk having other games of similar genre take the sales . So they end up putting the game on the market before it's truly ready. This is happening a lot more often; it's sad, but apparently when big game companies (looks at EA) cares more about profits, and they're able to crank out games like nothing, smaller companies have to react to it.
I can accept the fact that a strategy game's mechanics may not be balanced when they're released. Often it's hard to do that, but it's not tolerable that an good amount of bugs is in a game and gamers end up waiting for patches.
Doing my Comp Sci assignment recently made me less critical of how these developers can't write bug-free code. I mean I thought my parser (part of a compiler class) was working properly, but I couldn't figure out the bug on time. Thre are plenty of stats on the average number of bugs per lines of code, and they vary a lot. Also, again, I'll be nice (instead of my bitter self), and say that they're just moving to 3D while others in the industry has already been adjusted, so it wasn't that surprising that the engine wasn't efficient - which is apparently one of the many places that they have a problem with.
It's going to be hard to go back to the days where upsetting your fan base is going to upset your income. Unless someone smite the large gaming review sites, or at least give them some balls to be more critical, this isn't really going to happen. I'd say that before condeming Civ 4 as a failure based on the bugs now, we should give them a chance to redeem themselves by looking at how well the patch is going to fix the current set of problems, and see whether the patch introduce new, serious problems. Frankly, I've seen far buggier games that seriously affected game play, instead of having low frame rates and the occasional wrong number of models for combat in Civ 4. But still they should've spent more time making the thing work properly and efficiently.
And frankly people who blast others for not having a "good enough" system should piss off. Their system requirements are out of wack, and the guys who came up with it should be ashamed of it. This gripe is one that I simply cannot tolerate.
