budweiser
King of the Beers
So what's the excuse for quoting Saul Alinsky?
Compendium of Fake Tech and Wonder Quotes
- Thread starter CaiusDrewart
- Start date
Patine
Deity
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2011
- Messages
- 11,967
Well, call me an old gronyard, but in Civ2 we don't have celebrity voice-over tech quotes. We don't even have witty text tech quotes. We have a fairly matter-of-fact but to the point academic-sounding blurb (in text) for each tech. And down on the Civ2 forums, we haven't complained about the lack of celebrity-voiced or witty tech quotes at all, or thought we were missing anything, in 20 YEARS of playing the game...
No, instead we had the often cringe-inducing adviser council and a ton of licensed stock footage to cash in on the computer multimedia craze that was all the rage at the time. Civilization II's hands are hardly clean in the matter.
Yes, but how much of an impact does that have on the player playing the game? It being a video game by definition, of course. We know that cities don't have specific hex-shaped areas designated for specific talents and crafts in real life, and so on, and so forth. A bit of a basic comparison, but as it's a video game I'm sure I can find a lot more areas where the game abstracts real-world notions and concepts for reasons that are less necessary for mechanical enjoyment. The concept of time and day? Makes sense most of the time, until you build a Wonder and it for some reason completes an entire cycle in several seconds. Is also completely aesthetic.
Now, you might say "well everyone understands the concept of night and day", and in general terms that's true. But then if we're going to get that precise (or generic, depending on your point of view), how many people are going to take quotes in a video game as a literal gospel?
I'm trying to argue the relative importance of this issue (note: never once have I defined it as "not an issue", in anything other than my opinion considering its importance), and thus it's priority for being addressed. Because as I've said to other posters, inbetween the time between your posts here, that this would currently not even count as a bugfix. A low-priority enhancement request, if that.
I shall also repeat my concern that people are abusing this issue as a method to criticise developer competencies. Certainly, if you truly care about this and want it fixed, insulting the people with the ability to fix it isn't the best way to make your case. I also strongly recommend you don't make assumptions about a discipline that you might not have as much understanding of as you think, because what seems like laziness is easy to call as such when you're not working to an unforgiving deadline.
(and the blame there would not be the developers, or Firaxis as the development company at all)
Nigel_Tufnel2
King
I didn't construct my sentence well. I didn't mean to say it had to sound like Palin - but that was an example of a way to add lightness or mockery. There are times a flat reading can really work, this was not one of them, imo.
Ahh, fair enough. Reception amongst people I know has been mixed to Bean's readings as well. I quite like them for the most part myself - certainly, I don't think he ruins any of the quotes. But that's on me, it's a very subjective thing. I also like The Island, so maybe my taste isn't fantastic 
GhostSalsa
Emperor
Who is "the player"? The only acquaintance from real life I ever met who also plays Civ V was told about it by their history professor.
So what do we seriously imagine this professor likes about Civ? Is it that he is a really bad professor, and thinks real life cities are all shaped like hexagons, and elephants are as big as 9 lighthouses on end? Evangelists for Civ, like this professor, understand that the game is a game, they still expect the tech and social trees to be modeled on real life. These quotes undercut that aspect of story telling in VI.
I can't imagine a professor telling their students a year from now to get VI at whatever price point it is, so they can get nonsense abilities from meaningless ability brackets: STATE WORKFORCE: See students, in Roman times they realized their IT personnel should be happy, that's why you can make workers faster for a few turns. And look, classical republic came along, and the government had an extra slot here now. Easier to imagine them pushing the cheaper V on them. Goodbye sales of future VI xpacs from how many dozens of students.
That's just one player who hates how VI treats the tech tree as a game element with jokes tacked on
"The player" can be literally just one player, and make enough impact on revenue to have funded a new voice actor reading better quotes. Now if we're even talking about 1% of 6+ million… Scrap the Sean Bean garbage.
2.
I don't forgive Firaxis for messing up because of a deadline. This is obviously an issue of not preparing before the scheduled studio date with Bean, and feeding him nonsense, before half of what the techs might even have been thought out. Viola: a $10000 recording of Sean Bean saying "I like pigs" (made up price)
A snafu like that, funnily enough, sounds exactly like the plot point to a comedy about producing a show. You know, where the plucky cast would find some creative solution to keep the garbage recording from ending up in the final product, while still keeping their bosses happy.
Here our plucky cast just said, "Heck it we paid money put the garbage in no one cares."
AmtrakQuebec
King
I thought this thread was going to be people posting humorous fake quotes. You know like, "I like pigs, I like figs... I like pigs with figs"
damn
damn
CaiusDrewart
King
Perhaps the word "lazy" is too strong. You're right that we don't know how Firaxis went about making these quotes. Perhaps things got rushed and some poor intern had a few hours to throw these together. But whether it was laziness or poor planning or whatever, for the sake of their product's quality Firaxis should have dedicated more resources to this. The thing is, finding decent, authentic tech quotes is not very hard. I bet if I devoted a full working day or two to the task, I could come up with a complete set of historically accurate tech and wonder quotes that would be way better than what Firaxis ended up with. I bet a lot of people on this forum could.
I know plenty of people who play Civilisation in real life, and none of them have even mentioned tech and civic quotes to me. This includes people who couldn't stick with the game, or ultimately didn't find it appealing (including Civ 6 here). I have a colleague whose favourite Civilisation game is Call to Power. Your imagination of this professor needs a module in Anecdotes 101, I think
My experience doesn't invalidate the concerns other people have with the tech and civic quotes. Your professor's imagined understanding of what a game is and what is acceptable to sacrifice on the altar of games design doesn't make that argument in your stead by proxy. If you have an argument to make, make it, instead of making a laboured allegory resting on some person that is a historian somewhere (and thus more likely to apply weight to the authenticity of historical quotes).
You have no concrete numbers. You have no evidence. You have your feelings that you're attempting to push on an unknown number of potential players of the game who haven't even bought the game yet at this point in time. You assume what the issue in the recording sessions where despite a complete lack of knowledge of what actually went down. I have no insight either, so uh, I don't assume things I don't know about it.
This could be simply explained by saying "you personally don't like them". At which point I ask; why should I or anyone else care? You are not a financial argument. Just like me saying I like them (I don't like them all) has absolutely zero impact either (in the event they were redone, I could gnash my teeth as much as possible and talk about my former economics professor, explains the basic principles of diminishing returns and the disadvantages in catering to a vocal minority when designing your products, as much as I want. The changes would still have been done).
You've expressed your dislike of the quotes. That's entirely fair. However you're bending yourself into some kind of pretzel shape to justify your bias against the developers, using this particular issue as a vehicle for such bias.
I bet if I dedicated two whole working days of uninterrupted developer time I could get something very specific done, too. But what if it's decided that your time is better spent elsewhere? What if you don't actually ever have two full uninterrupted days because your workload is far more than just sourcing quotes (bearing in mind you won't be responsible for implementing the tech to display these quotes or plugging these quotes into the game; that will be a minimum of one other person's job, if not two peoples' jobs)? What if you keep on getting interrupted by office chat and / or helping out on other aspects of the project (even if it isn't in your job description)?
You could call it poor planning if you want, and heck that might well be true. I don't know. But it could as easily be being held to an excessively-tight deadline (which is commonplace in the games industry). All I do know is that laziness is one type of work ethic virtually no games developer I've ever come across possesses. These situations are more complex than they're ever made out to be (on forums like this), and to be honest I care less where the place is blamed and more that people aren't (ironically) "lazy" in placing it. It's very easy to just say "developers suck" and call it a day. We're just users, end users, consumers. We have no obligation to understand what the developers do to ship the product.
But I hope that people would want to understand. Which is a lot of the reason why I post like I do.
CaiusDrewart
King
Sure--I mean, it doesn't matter much to me why the tech quotes ended up screwy. The purpose of my post is not so much to criticize Firaxis employees. The reason I made the post (beyond my own amusement) is that I do care about historical accuracy. That's important to me. The tech quotes in the game are unambiguously presented as being true, and a lot of them just aren't. I don't like to see a game played by millions of people spreading lies about history.
I think that, in the future, Firaxis should either set aside enough time to provide accurate tech quotes (which, as I've said, I really don't think is very much time at all), or not put them in the game. In my opinion, putting so much misinformation into the game is not an acceptable result.
You're right, though, that I shouldn't rush to call the developers lazy. It's always good to assume the best in people! And perhaps that they'll fix it in the future. If they don't, that's not the end of the world either, but I hope they'll make it right.
Disgustipated
Deity
Don't be dissing the advisor council. I still remember many of their sayings to this day. That's saying something. Very memorable. It seems to me people want their video games to be serious business and not fun.
The holy grail of tech quotes which still has not been surpassed. The wonder movies were easily the best in the series.
But I still stand by some of the quotes on this game. The Vince Lombardi one is appropriate for the tech. I also found all 3 Mark Twain quotes to be humorous (too bad one is fake though). The Chuck Yeager one is great as well. Like I mentioned above, I don't mind having a little bit of fun. People take these games so seriously sometimes. I'd just like them to correct the false quotes, or put unknown for the author. I wouldn't mind getting rid of the Courtney Cox quote for lasers and the Roman Empire air conditioning quote, but the other quotes don't bother me so much.
My biggest problem with the fake quotes is I'm embarrassed for them. It really does make them look lazy which makes the game look lazy.
I do like the idea of males giving the male quotes and female speakers speaking the female quotes. Perhaps they could do this in a Civ7.
budweiser
King of the Beers
The quotes are all passive aggressive, aren't they?
They should be changed immediately.
They should be changed immediately.
The "air conditioning" quote is one of my favorite in the game, and it's a Garrison Keillor quote to boot so extra points there. To each their own, I suppose.
Personally, the fact they chose a lot of light-hearted quotes has grown on me over time, and it admittedly helps set the game apart from earlier entries. The problem with the quotes, though, is that with each new game you're running out of meaningful quotes to put in unless you decide to just give up and repeat yourself. Yes, you can always find new ones, but you're going to run out of ways to make them stand out as the "good" ones get taken. They've only been in the series since IV, so perhaps Civ VII can find some new way to make tech discoveries fell like important milestones.
"Don't reinvent the wheel, just realign it." — That's an absurd quote to use for one of the most important inventions/discoveries in human history. It seems almost like Firaxis is trying to be offensive with some of these choices.
