Firaxis and Laptop Owners: Alienation of a Core Demographic

[Meat Wad]

Gamespot.com interview from 15 Jun 05:

"Civilization IV Q&A - Post-E3 Questions
We came out of the E3 demo impressed, but also brimming with questions. Thankfully, senior producer Barry Caudill was happy to indulge us."
PREVIEW - Posted Jun 15, 2005 2:27 pm PT

GS: How big has the jump to 3D been, in practice? It's more than just Civ with 3D graphics, it seems. How did the team incorporate 3D graphics to streamline and improve the interface and the game? And strategy gamers always get nervous about 3D games, because some of them tend to have older systems, so what kind of machines are you looking at to run Civ IV?

BC: We had a couple of things to help out with the transition. We are using the Gamebryo engine so we can be up and running quicker without the investment of time and resources necessary to develop a new engine, and we already shipped Sid Meier's Pirates! using the same engine. That means we had a head start and we were able to start creating right away. The move to 3D allows us to really bring the world to life. Being able to handle lighting, effects, and animations in real time makes tweaking the visuals so much easier than having to prerender. We definitely don't want to alienate anyone, so we are keeping the minimum spec pretty reasonable. It will most likely be the same as for Pirates: a 1 GHz CPU, 256MB RAM, and a 32MB video card with hardware transform and lighting capabilities.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/civilizationiv/news.html?sid=6127544&page=1

After spending the last 5 days on this site, I gather that very few laptops are able to run this puppy.

True or False?: Hardware TnL is not common in recent (last 1-2 years) laptops.

Not only that, many, if not most, of us laptops users have little to no hope of correcting this issue.

True or False?: The vid cards of many (most?) laptops are on the motherboard and, hence, cannot be replaced easily.

True or False?: The success of previous Civ titles lays not in graphic celebration, but in their horrifically addictive gameplay.

True or False?: Civ players are a distinct, unique demographic among gamers.
A. They’re not necessarily the dudes rocking Half-Life 2 on desktops.
B. Might some of them not even own desktops (gasp!)?

If this is the case, has not Firaxis/2K completely written off, “alienated” if you will, a large chunk of their demo?

Yes, yes, I’ve heard that Civ IV is a PC game. Hence, not only should I not expect to play it on my laptop, but I should circumcise myself for having bought a laptop without HARDWARE TnL, and rot in hell for writing about it on this forum. I admit it, I am worse than Hitler.

That being said, why would Firaxis publish a title completely unplayable to a sizeable chunk of their perspective customer base.

NB: Before deconstructing my wild generalizations, if someone has real demographic data on this topic, please provide. Firaxis sales and marketing, I’m talking to you, baby!

 

[grzelakc]

You are absolutely correct on all points. What irritates me the most is that it was dead simple for Firaxis to build an identically looking game that would conume around 100x less resources than the one they released. All they had to do was design the game as a 2.5D as opposed to 3D. What's 2.5D? It's the same technique that Doom and Hexen used. The map is drawn in true 3D while units, trees, buildings etc are 2D sprites designed to blend in with the 3D map.

This technique delivers outstanding visual results while greatly reducing the hardware requirements AND allows the units to be much, much more detailed as the cost of drawing them is negligible.

I'm sorely disappointed with Firaxis' engineering team.

 

[microbe]

Both of the IBM thinkpads I tried (T30 and R52) have problems. The T30 shows black terrain, and the R52 (my parents just bought it 10 days ago) shows blue screen after playing a few turns.

I wonder who can play the game on a laptop?

 

[lightnng]

Fantastic post, meat wad.

I fully agree with you - I think it is an amazingly poor business decision, most likely from a marketing department that does not understand the game's core demographic (which, as one might suspect, includes many business users who only game as a side-hobby but have other, more important feautres in their modern laptops than a power-hungry, easy-to-heat gfx chip).

I for one am still holding hope that the problem really is some poor coding and that it will get fixed. There is enough evidence that this should be possible, most striking of which the fact that many of these laptops are able to successfully run several of the scenarios with no hitch whatsoever. That fact alone completely nullifies the whole T&L claim, since this fact makes it obvious that said machines are fully able to render the terrain properly.

 

[fallofman]

I have an Alienware area 51m...I have more than the recommended stuff, but it still lags like hell on my laptop. I have no clue why. I don't know what is wrong with Fraxis. Sure the game looks great, but so what if I can't play it. I"m not upgrading anything when I can play halflife2 and doom 3 just fine. My friend with a desktop played fine till he got to the 1900s and it started to lag like hell too.

 

[itsmekirill]

Sometimes hardware drives software, and other times, like this time, software drives hardware. This is the "killer app" that will encourage more widespread use of real graphics chips in laptops and cheapo brand name pc's.

 

[lightnng]

This is the "killer app" that will encourage more widespread use of real graphics chips in laptops

Or it could be the killer app that destroys the series. I sure as heck will stay away from Civ in general unless this gets fixed (since I believe its buggy software rather than poor hardware that's causing many of the problems). Thing is, at some point I will just lose interest and forget about the whole thing; I won't even be aware of future patches, or Civ5, or what have you. I'm pretty sure there are a large number of others users who will have to same reaction...

As a sidenote, gfx cards in laptops have many constraints that those in desktops don't, namely power consumption and heating. This becomes a lot more severe in laptops that are not desktop replacements. The problem, of course, is that publishers are forgetting that their core audience are now much, much older than they used to be; 1st and 2nd generation gamers turned professionals. Their needs are very, very different than those of the teenagers; but being a group with a much, much higher level of disposable income, they should really be the focus of many of these publishers, who will need to rethink their go to market strategy. I daresay that those publishers who continue to focus solely on the teenage group while ignoring their mature audience will lose out big in the long run.

 

[nguyenhoang]

I think I just wasted 53 dollars on Civ IV. I've spent the last 4 hours trying to get this damn game to work on my Dell Latitude laptop, only to have it freeze endlessly on me at the "Select a Civilization" screen.

And now I find that it doesn't work properly on laptops. I travel on business 3 weeks out of the friggin month, so I can't haul around my desktop on the road! I was figuring I can kill an hour or 2 each night at the hotel playing Civ IV.

Can anyone confirm for me that I'm sh*t out of luck trying to play Civ IV on my laptop?

Thanks!

 

[itsmekirill]

Technology doesn't stand still. The graphics in Civ 3 would've needed a supercomputer a decade before. This isn't really a new phenomenon.

On the other hand, while you may complain about their choice of graphics engine, isn't it a good idea to check off the system requirements against your hardware before you buy it, and then find out that you don't have T&L/shader support?

 

[阿里巴巴]

No one I know can play CIV4 on laptop

 

[Meat Wad]

Well said, Lightnning.
Now that you mention it, a fully capable Civ IV would not bode well for my impending masters thesis. Nor for my impending offspring. If it were operational, I would be ingoring these diversions and awaiting Civ V while rocking out to a "one more turn" ethos. Time to grow up.
Interestingly, there is a strong corellation of how one falls on this debate and the number of posts and joining date of those on this forum.
Example:

Log-in Name: Aging Gen-X Yuppie holding on to his last Civ-fix
Join Date: Oct 05 (immediately after his Civ IV went bust)
Posts: <50 (all pretty much consisting of vid card questions, rants, hate)

Versus...

Long-in Name: Gen-Y Gamer with Alienware who smokes my a*s on X-Box Live
Join Date: Jan 2000 (to download Lord of the Rings Mods for Civ II)
Post: >1,200 (debating sweet rigs, Diety-level victories, ripping on aforementioned aging Gen-Xer's lame 6-month-old laptop)

No offense to the guy on this thread with the IBM Thinkpads; you're on our side.

 

[阿里巴巴]

What are you saying?
My laptop meets all the minimum system requirements it demanded. And my desktop computer is higher than recommended. but neither of them can play civ4 even normally.
Don't argu that it's my out of luck or something like that, I have seen many peple are in the same situation. what will you about that?

Technology doesn't stand still. The graphics in Civ 3 would've needed a supercomputer a decade before. This isn't really a new phenomenon.

On the other hand, while you may complain about their choice of graphics engine, isn't it a good idea to check off the system requirements against your hardware before you buy it, and then find out that you don't have T&L/shader support?

 

[itsmekirill]

Though I personally haven't had any problems with the game, I can see that the bugs are clearly plentiful. However, the bugs are not the issue being discussed in this thread.

 

[阿里巴巴]

How do you define bugs?

 

[Hozchelaga]

I think I've got some kind of record here.

Dell Inspiron 9200 / P4 1.6G / 512 MB / Radeon 9700 128 MB.

Crash to blue screen upon putting the DVD in the drive.

Oh well.

 

[diamon]

Both of the IBM thinkpads I tried (T30 and R52) have problems. The T30 shows black terrain, and the R52 (my parents just bought it 10 days ago) shows blue screen after playing a few turns.

I wonder who can play the game on a laptop?

My IBM G41 plays Civ4 fine so far. It uses the NVidia GeForce FX Go5200. The video is a touch on the slow side, but it is a laptop after all. I do get a bit spoiled by my desktop system anyway.

 

[onedreamer]

the truth is that they kept the minimum requirements low only on the paper. I highly doubt anyone could play the game decently with the minimum specs. I mean, to load the game is different from playing the game.

 

[agoodfella]

Awesome post. Kudos to the OP.

Agree with it word for word.

I've been an obssessed "Civer" ever since Civ II.

I've bought 6 PC game titles over the last decade:

- Civ II
- Civ II CTP
- Civ III
- Civ III PTW
- Civ III Conquests
- Civ IV

That's it. No Doom. No Half-Life. Nada. Just Civ. All Civ, All the Time.

Now here's an additional article that's some more food for thought:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_PC_game_sales_in_the_US

with an excerpt:

Evidence in sales
US PC Game Software Sales

1998 - $1.8 billion
1999 - $1.9 billion
2000 - $1.78 billion (84.9 million units)
2001 - $1.75 billion (83.6 million units)
2002 - $1.4 billion (61.5 million units)
2003 - $1.2 billion (52.8 million units)
2004 - $1.1 billion (45 million units)

The PC Gaming market is shrinking. Period. Not even growing, not even staying stagnant. It's shrinking. Even with the proliferation of PCs... and I'm not just talking about Console gaming (though it is the main competitor / cannibalizer) - still, there are a multitudes of competing products for the PC gaming dollar:

- DVDs
- PSPs / Handheld
- Mobile phone
- iPod

etc. - i.e. the disposable $$$ aren't growing nearly at the pace of the competition for that $.

Therefore, doesn't it just make good business sense to try and capture - heck, even grow, much less satisfy your potential customer base?

Seems pretty sensible and reasonable to me.

In sum, if Firaxis doesn't put out a T&L patch (or something to address the laptop gaming crowd) - that's it - I'm done.

A message to Firaxis: JUST DO IT.

(you'll be glad you did, and you will make legions of unhappy laptop owners praise "We Love the Developer Day!"

 

[agoodfella]

Let's keep this post going folks - keep it bumped - so that Firaxis gets the message loud and clear.

 

[Titus Pullo]

Bumpitey bumpitey bump.