macsteve said:
This post isn't going to make me very popular with the true believers who think Firaxis is inherently blameless, but as an attorney, I want to point out that what Firaxis, 2K, Amazon.com, and all the other companies involved with the Civ IV release have done to us, the initial purchasers of Civ IV, is known to lawyers and judges everywhere as fraud, or at the ver least misrepresentation.
According to Firaxis' own minimum system requirements, all of the people posting to this thread should have been able to get the game to work. You shouldn't have to be a software whiz or a systems administrator to get a mass market game like this to operate on a PC that meets the minimum system requirements.
Can you think of another industry where it's acceptable to charge customers full price for a product that only works after several "patches" have been issued, if then? If Civ IV were a car, it would have been recalled by now.
Actually, scratch that, if Civ IV were a car, it never would have made it into production.
You ARE aware as an attorney, that a small group of people have tried to sue video game developers almost every single time a game is released (every MMOG has had these threats) Yet not once have any of those lawsuits gotten past the "threat" stage.
No gamer has ever successfully...or heck, even unsuccessfully sued, a gaming company.
Its impossible.
If you arent perpared for software to possibley not work when you purchase it the day its released, your not only ignorant, but you obviously have never purchased an entertainment product before. Much less even purchased a video game before.
Zork didnt work right when I bought it.
Doom didnt work right when I bought it.
CivI didnt work right when I bought it.
Air Warrior didnt work right when I bought it.
Ultima 7 didnt work right when I bought it.
Ultima Underworld didnt work right when I bought it.
Daggerfall didnt work right when I bought it.
Quake didnt work right for MONTHS after I bought it. Online play was dredful. Then quakeworld was released, and every game after it made use of quakeworlds netcoding and prediction coding.
CivII didnt work right when I bought it.
QuakeII didnt work right when I bought it.
Warbirds didnt work right for ages, one of the first times I had to buy an all new PC to play a game (had to upgrade for quakeII)
Ultima Onlina didnt work right when I bought it.
World war two online had the worst release in the history of mankind. Took years for it to work right...it barely works right now.
The fact that civ IV falls right into the same category as every other classic game ive ever played (other than system shock 1&2...those were brillantly done without any bugs, unlike thief, which still wont play on my PC) is of no surpise to me.
The fact that ALL of these classic games had a major patch shortly after thier release that turned thier near unplayable games into pretty stable ones also means im not surprised at this with Civ4
Do you just not remember quakeworld? Or the quakeII point release? How about the CivII patch? Ultima online taking dozens of patches to work? This is par for the course mate.
If no one every sued the makers of Ultima Online...they wont sue here either. You just dont understand the nature of software, or the legality involved. Instead of acting like a scorned toddler and threating the developers, why dont you do something more constructive...like finding interesting things you can do with 6 feet of rope.
EDIT:
Infact....your lucky that Firaxis doesnt sue YOU.
They can sue you for damages. Liable, or defamatory (or INflammatory) speech, even on an internet forum, not run directly by the company, is still considered public. Hence why its called a "forum". You may have encouraged others to not purchase thier product on the basis of non-truths youve printed here in this forum.
They could sue YOU for that.
Old Man Murray got sued by Epic Mega Games for printing lies about some of thier games. They settled since it was just a comedy site, but the point was proved.