CIV 5 the worst letdown in PC gaming, ever.

[Thormodr]

Final Fantasy XIII and XIV may be quite similar to Shafer 5. Straying away from your roots, trying to awe with beautiful graphics but not giving your target audience what they really want.

Final Fantasy XIV players aren’t impressed, with disappointing user scores emerging

Square Enix has really annoyed Final Fantasy fans with their latest MMO iteration of the series. The PC version of the game launched in late September, with the PS3 version set to arrive in March 2011.

The later PS3 release date was attributed to having to adapt the game to system memory limitations on the PS3, an adaptation that took longer than planned.

One of the main controversies was the experience gain limiting system. The whole system is rather complicated, with experience earning thresholds in place that will gradually see players earning less experience over time, eventually reaching zero. This is reset once per week, counted from the moment the first experience points of the week are earned. This only applies to each character class at a time, so swapping out classes frequently is a work-around.

Square Enix explains that this is a balancing mechanic that should help keep the playing field level among players with varying degrees of free time. The problem is that telling gamers who are paying a monthly fee to play a game that they cannot earn the maximum amount of experience possible for lengthy periods of play time does not go down well.

Then there was another set of debacles, along the lines of ‘the game was made in China,’ ‘catering to casual players’ and ‘renaming Chocobo’s to Horsebirds.’ Square Enix has had a bad run leading up to release.

http://mygaming.co.za/news/news/7898-Final-Fantasy-XIV-receives-terrible-user-reviews.html

What part of "final" do they not understand?
How lucky is number 13?

Arriving in stores this week, Final Fantasy XIII (PS3: 82; 360: 83) is neither the final nor the 13th game in Square Enix’s venerable franchise. In fact, dating back to the original Japanese release of Final Fantasy (for the Nintendo Entertainment System) in 1987, there have been over three dozen FF-related titles, and over 70 individual product releases, amounting to over 80 million units sold.

The new game is considered the 13th installment in the main series, and it actually follows a game widely considered one of the best (if not the best) in the series: Final Fantasy XII. FF13 also marks the arrival of the main series on the modern-generation consoles, which means that not only does it have impossibly big shoes to fill, it needs to impress visually like never before.

And how is the new game performing with critics? Well, while it is earning generally positive reviews, Final Fantasy XIII is the lowest-scoring title in the main series since at least Final Fantasy VII (the earliest installment for which we have a score). While the new game does shake up the tried-and-true RPG formula quite a bit — and while reviewers are indeed loving the graphics — some critics seem a bit bored with the release.

http://features.metacritic.com/features/2010/how-does-final-fantasy-13-compare/

 

[Licinia Eudoxia]

I still have fond memories about Everquest, since it was my first largescale graphical online multiplayer game. I play newer MMOs and sometimes I enjoy them, but often they fall short of what I had with Everquest.

Which is ridiculous because Everquest was, in many ways, a TERRIBLE game. I mean, the game designers were often deliberately adversarial on the grounds that aggravating the players would make them really have more fun. Or on the grounds that the project lead had a Vision (which he actually called 'The Vision') and wouldn't make certain changes because it didn't fit The Vision, even if the changes made sense to everyone.

I mean, Everquest was really dreadful in so many ways. Ridiculous downtime, camping creatures on 2-18 hour spawn timers for a chance at token piece of loot, so on, and so forth. It had glaring flaws, and many games now are just about better in every conceivable way.

Not every MMO after Everquest was better, a lot of MMOs failed, but eventually the genre moved on to a later generation, and the lessons learned from Everquest are still valid. The team that created World of Warcraft literally started brainstorming because they were playing Everquest together, and kept noticing things they could do better.

And yet, I still fondly recall my wizard from Everquest, even though I was 12, and even though though the game was awful in so many ways.

I still remember playing Civilization in the computer lab at school, and in some ways, no version of Civilization will ever be able to give me back what I had then.

So my point is, that yeah, change is scary and weird, and if you really aren't happy with Civ5, then you can keep playing your older game until Civ5 is improved or until Civ6 comes out, and so on. But geez, move on. If Civ 5 is the greatest tragedy of 2010 for you, if it even ranks in the top ten of bad things that happened to you this year, then you are living a blessed life.

 

[fifteenkeys]

Ok, I must jump in to defend Master of Magic from those that say it wasn't great, because it gave me many hours of enjoyment..... and that was just to learn all about autoexec.bat and config.sys in the many forms of boot disks I had to make!

Wow, the hours I spent online trying to figure that one out (and this is in the early days of the web)....

I might also want to add Lionheart to the list of letdowns, but I did get to sell it soon after I bought it and actually made a couple of buck profit (not that you can sell games anymore....). The real letdown for me was Pool of Radiance Ruins of Myth Drannor.... oh god it was horrible....

 

[Neomega]

Ok, I must jump in to defend Master of Magic from those that say it wasn't great, because it gave me many hours of enjoyment..... and that was just to learn all about autoexec.bat and config.sys in the many forms of boot disks I had to make!

Wow, the hours I spent online trying to figure that one out (and this is in the early days of the web)....

Hah! I remember paying $20 in long distance fees to download a patch from Jollyville, TX via a dial up modem.

even so, MoM was a great game, the AI sucked, for sure, but I still played the hell out of it.

 

[AlpsStranger]

Thanks for the link to Forbidden Forest. the music for this game kicked ass! This game scared the crap out of me as a kid, even with it's poor graphics.

You're quite welcome. I was merely trying to express the absurdity of the OP's biggest disappointment ever claim, but it is nice to shout out to fellow gamers that don't think gaming started when FF7 and Baldur's Gate were released.

I'll be frank here for a moment and say that I am quite tired of people crapping up the Civ5 discussion forum. I'll post a quote from the great Sulla that sums it up nicely

So... where do we go from here? I feel like I've already figured this game out, and there's not much more to see. I'm going to look to start a succession game with the goal of beating Deity, just for the purposes of accomplishing the feat once (and get some help in playing through long turns of killing the AI's giant swarms of units). Then that's probably it for me and Civ5. I'm not the sort of troll who sticks around a game they don't like just to complain endlessly; I'll move on to other things that provide me with more entertainment.

So I'm not saying you have to like Civ5. I'm asking that you cede the Civilization 5 discussion forum to people who are, more or less, optimistic about the game. I feel entitled to a reasonable expectation that at least half of the top threads will be productive discussion. I have no earthly idea why the moderators allow the forum to be such a cesspool. I'm not saying squelch *all* criticism, but look at the visible threads at the top of Civ5 discussion on a given day and tell me that it really qualifies as constructive discussion.

I have *plenty* of criticisms of Civ5, but I don't bother posting them because the forum is already so out of whack. If I dare post any serious critique of Civ5 then I will be forced to look as if I am on the same bandwagon.

Can we please have the Civ5 discussion forum for... I know this is crazy... actual Civ5 discussion?

 

[HiroHito]

OMG. MOO2 is so great but Moo3 is such a disaster. I don't have stragic game fans in my friends, but Now I realized I am not alone in the MOO3 shock.

Oh you're not alone, I used to go on Atari forums too...oh the flame wars I've witnessed there LOL !

 

[Thormodr]

Ok, I must jump in to defend Master of Magic from those that say it wasn't great, because it gave me many hours of enjoyment..... and that was just to learn all about autoexec.bat and config.sys in the many forms of boot disks I had to make!

Wow, the hours I spent online trying to figure that one out (and this is in the early days of the web)....

I might also want to add Lionheart to the list of letdowns, but I did get to sell it soon after I bought it and actually made a couple of buck profit (not that you can sell games anymore....). The real letdown for me was Pool of Radiance Ruins of Myth Drannor.... oh god it was horrible....

Indeed. Master of Magic was a truly awesome game. For years I have been hoping there would be a Master of Magic II. I am hoping Elemental:WOM will come somewhat close to that eventually in it's game play. If not, then in a mod.

I also agree on Pool of Radiance Ruins of Myth Drannor. What a total disaster that was.

 

[Psyringe]

a MoM2 handled by someone like Soren Johnson could be great.

Absolutely!

Master of Magic was very, very ambitious and they clearly bit off more than they could chew. A lot of the spells show a glimmer of creative genius, as well as the more practical wisdom they employed in essentially shoplifting Magic: The Gathering's core concept of the Color Pie. Elemental:War of Magic failed largely because it failed to do these exact things.

Fully agree with all points (though with regard to Elemental, this was not its only problem, and not the worst either).

On the other hand, a shocking number of bugs writhe just under the surface. I forget the details, but something like 20% of the more "subtle" effects don't work whatsoever. As a rule of thumb any effect in Master of Magic that you can't see working isn't working.

With patch 1.31, most things are working (though the AI still has the intelligence of a three year old ... rock). But I remember how buggy and crash-prone MoM was on release - worse than Civ5, I think. However, with MoM, I could immediately see the gem in the rubble, I immediately thought "If they fix this game, it will be great". Whereas Civ5, for me, currently feels like "If they fix this game, it might be okay." Modders may make it good though.

And as we're talking about Master of Magic and modding, do you know about kyrub's unofficial patch 1.40? It fixes many bugs and AI issues. Also, a certain *cough* Psyringe *cough* just released a rather big help file update that might be worth checking out.

 

[Pantastic]

Well, the only thing really needed to "hold up this kind of statement" is to play a game of SMAC and have fun, and check out Civ5 and be bored.

Nope, that doesn't cut it, if you're going to say that Civ5's gameplay doesn't hold up, you've got to compare the game play, not just say 'ohh, I kind of like one better'. Your comparisons make it clear that you're just heavily biased and not comparing the games objectively. It's fine if you like old games, I play them from time to time, but you're not making any kind of objective comparison, you're just glossing over the huge issues that those games have while treating more minor issues in Civ5 as gargantuan faults. I simply don't buy that a game with complicated mechanics that don't actually work is automatically better than a game with simpler mechanics that actually function.

 

[Pratputajao]

No. The worst let downs were- MOO 3 and Ultima IX

 

[Vordeo]

I'll be frank here for a moment and say that I am quite tired of people crapping up the Civ5 discussion forum. I'll post a quote from the great Sulla that sums it up nicely


So I'm not saying you have to like Civ5. I'm asking that you cede the Civilization 5 discussion forum to people who are, more or less, optimistic about the game. I feel entitled to a reasonable expectation that at least half of the top threads will be productive discussion. I have no earthly idea why the moderators allow the forum to be such a cesspool. I'm not saying squelch *all* criticism, but look at the visible threads at the top of Civ5 discussion on a given day and tell me that it really qualifies as constructive discussion.

I have *plenty* of criticisms of Civ5, but I don't bother posting them because the forum is already so out of whack. If I dare post any serious critique of Civ5 then I will be forced to look as if I am on the same bandwagon.

Can we please have the Civ5 discussion forum for... I know this is crazy... actual Civ5 discussion?

This.

A hundred times this.

A million times this.

This might be my favourite post on this forum in forever.

 

[Psyringe]

Nope, that doesn't cut it, if you're going to say that Civ5's gameplay doesn't hold up, you've got to compare the game play, not just say 'ohh, I kind of like one better'. Your comparisons make it clear that you're just heavily biased and not comparing the games objectively. It's fine if you like old games, I play them from time to time, but you're not making any kind of objective comparison, you're just glossing over the huge issues that those games have while treating more minor issues in Civ5 as gargantuan faults.

Well. You said Civ5 does hold up well against all the games I mentioned because they had "all kinds of glaring flaws", which is a pretty general statement in my book. You then listed some and focused on AI problems, which I still think is a bit ironic considering that Civ5's AI is currently the biggest problem of the game. I then laid out reasons for why these old games, despite their flaws (which I don't even deny) are more enjoyable than Civ5 in its current state. I explicitly acknowledged some of the AI problems you mentioned, and I don't see how I'm "glossing over" things. I do see that your reply is glossing over just about anything I said with a generalized "you're biased" statement, without even addressing a single factual argument.

I simply don't buy that a game with complicated mechanics that don't actually work is automatically better than a game with simpler mechanics that actually function.

Oh, I agree with that statement. The point I'm making is that I don't see a game with "simpler mechanics that actually function", I see a game that has simpler mechanics as the ones I listed and still has the same problems (e.g. utterly incapable AI).

I also added MoO to my list especially because it had some very simple, yet elegant rules (colony management), it's a good example that strategy games don't need to be excessively complicated to be enjoyable.

My point was (and still is): If I take a game from series whose hallmark is complexity, and simplify the mechanics, then they need to work to make this game better than the older ones. If it has the same problems, and a similarly incapable AI, then it has less to offer the players than the older games had. "Simplify the design to make it work better" is a very valid design strategy, and imho it's the only viable route that Firaxis could go after Civ4:BtS, I fully expected that and I don't even blame them for that. However, if the result is "Simplify the design and have it work as good/bad as older ones, while reintroducing problems that had been solved in the meantime", then it simply doesn't hold up very well imho.

 

[AlpsStranger]

And as we're talking about Master of Magic and modding, do you know about kyrub's unofficial patch 1.40? It fixes many bugs and AI issues. Also, a certain *cough* Psyringe *cough* just released a rather big help file update that might be worth checking out.

That's quite nice and you should be proud

Incidentally, I used XVI32 to dick around in the original Help.LBX and noticed the same thing you did about the repeating data. I agree with your theory about its origin as well

What did you use to edit the file? Did you slap together a custom app or use something like XVI32?

 

[Baleur]

You clearly did not play Spore. Civ5 is a thousand times better in every way.

 

[AlpsStranger]

"Simplify the design to make it work better" is a very valid design strategy, and imho it's the only viable route that Firaxis could go after Civ4:BtS, I fully expected that and I don't even blame them for that. However, if the result is "Simplify the design and have it work as good/bad as older ones, while reintroducing problems that had been solved in the meantime", then it simply doesn't hold up very well imho.

A thousand times QFT. This *was* the direction that Civ5 was going to take. They bungled it to a certain extent and I am not denying this. My difference with many, including Sulla himself, has a lot more to do with the state I suspect the game will be in after a few patches and an expansion. Frankly the current state of the game is indefensible and trying to do so will only make you look like a jackass.

I can think of a thousand relatively easy and workable solutions to many of the problems in Sulla's walkthrough. There are three possibilities I suppose. One is that I am a better game designer than Jon Shafer. Obviously this is the one that I would find the most gratifying Two is that I overestimate my fixes and that Sulla would instantly find a way to exploit them. Three is that Jon is at least as sharp as I am and will be implementing many of the things I am thinking as soon as he can.

As a shameless self-plug I'd like to point out that I feel I have more or less solved the "ignore happiness" strategies in a fairly elegant manner (on paper, I don't think the game can be modded on this level yet) with this thread:http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=384473&highlight=anarchy+bucket.

Please stop by and necro that thread by the way. I am fully serious about this suggestion and I feel it should be in the core game in some form.

 

[Psyringe]

That's quite nice and you should be proud

Yay, feedback!

Incidentally, I used XVI32 to dick around in the original Help.LBX and noticed the same thing you did about the repeating data. I agree with your theory about its origin as well

What did you use to edit the file? Did you slap together a custom app or use something like XVI32?

Actually I'm just using just the free version of Hex Edit 3.0F. It allows me to copy/paste and to switch between "Insert" and "Overwrite" mode. That (and, obviously, the ability to enter both hex code and ascii text) was all the project required. And a bit of spare time of course.

 

[hussar]

Moderator Action: *snip* no trolling here.

worst let down in PC gaming history- ok yes you have all aptly named some terribad games, but meh, I wasn't hanging out for any of them. I'm sure none of you could say that when you heard a new civ was coming out, and when you had the hot little game pack in your hands after handing over your money you didn't squirt a little. I certainly was squirting all the way home. I'm talking here about expectation versus delivery. Perhaps George W Bush pre election to post election, that kind of let down. Civ 5 is a servicable game, and yes mostly you are right that it can be fixed and had I not played Civ 4 I would probably been into it. Imagine if you will if they had actually been a bit lateral and completely redid the tech tree, or a myriad of other things they could have done to make the game more challenging. The watered down slops we got was so far from my expectations that I stand by the statement 'the worst letdown in PC gaming history'.

No, not the worst game ever, I'd give it a 4/10 but my expectation was an easy 10/10. so we have a disparrity of 6/10. Sure empire total war was crap, like a 3/10 but I was only expecting a 6-7 tops, a disparity of say 3-4 only. etc.

 

[Psyringe]

Moderator Action: *snip*

ok yes you have all aptly named some terribad games, but meh, I wasn't hanging out for any of them.
(...)
The watered down slops we got was so far from my expectations that I stand by the statement 'the worst letdown in PC gaming history'.

First, all games that have been mentioned so far had very high expectations. For example, the expectations for MoO3 were probably higher than for Civ5 (the buildup was different; it was the sequel to a great game in a genre that had dried out for years, and the devs and beta-testers made lots of mouth-watering claims about the game while concealing the shortfalls).

Second, you're switching reference frames. Yes, Civ5 may be the worst letdown in YOUR PC gaming experience. You laid that argument out graphically enough, and you don't need to bother with MoO3 or Outpost or any other games you don't know to make that statement, because, well, it's a statement about your personal experience and nothing else. However, if you claim that Civ5 was the worst letdown in PC gaming history in general, then you have to take these other games into account. They are not part of your personal gaming experience, but they are definitely a part of PC gaming history. But you didn't (and don't, and actually can't) do that.

In short, your line of thought only holds up if you define that "your personal gaming experience" is the same as "the whole of PC gaming history", and at that point the argument becomes ... well ... I guess I don't have to spell it out.

 

[eoc]

Erm, Firaxis did not hire Kael; Stardock did.

Stardock released a game ---- elemental: war of magic, does it written/design by him? It is really a good game, just need more stuff to fill in it.

 

[AlpsStranger]

'Lefties' had no more to do with the removal of religion than they had to do with the removal of unit stacking or leader traits. You keep trying to bring that into the conversation and I don't really get it. I'm sitting here stroking my beard and eating lima beans trying to figure it out.