Firaxis please make game playable from day of release!!!

[IronfighterXXX]

I saw many threads where people complain about graphic, terrain requirements for buildings, possibly lack of some civilizations, etc...
but what really bother me are possible imbalances and bugs on release.

And talking about imbalances I think about really big ones like RAs in c5 on release or trade routes and wonders in BE (where was beta testers?).

Possible there are more people caring about those things, so let's show our desire to have at least somewhat balanced and bug free game from day of release.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

What you may consider playable may not be the same as somebody else.

 

[TheMarshmallowBear]

I think they "know" because they make a job to at least let us know they "get" the issues.

But it's never going to be perfect, no game is.

In the IGN video Dennis laughed that Ed has about 3000 systems to balance out xD

 

[TheMeInTeam]

What you may consider playable may not be the same as somebody else.

While true, Civ V MP was not at a "playable" standard to any rational mind in existence on vanilla release.

There's not a lot of grey area when you can't possibly finish a game.

It's also easy to forget some of the junk from Civ V vanilla release. While stuff like "ranged attack" actually moving your vulnerable siege unit towards the enemy doesn't technically prevent you from playing, it's a game-altering bug that persisted quite some time in vanilla. Civ IV never fixed its unit selection issues or moving buttons, not even in BTS 3.19.

We have some valid basis for concern based on track record, and yes I think in a strategy title the game's playability should be prioritized over its appearance.

(where was beta testers?).

I find myself wondering this about many games. However, if you look at observable patterns wrt community bug reports post-release it's pretty obvious that most QA teams can easily identify more problems than developers/programmers can fix in a time allotment, and then they prioritize.

Hopefully Firaxis is better at prioritizing than Paradox, and cares if the UI is lying to the player all over the place this go-around.

 

[Draco84]

But if there were no imbalances how would I have gotten my deity victory trophy with only 2 horsemen?

 

[ldvhl]

It's more up to 2k than Firaxis. I don't think any developer on Firaxis' level wants to release buggy product. Publishers, on the other hand, have no qualms of setting dates and pushing stuff out the door.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Im pretty sure no matter how the game is released people will complain that the game is unplayable whil other people will praise the game as one of the greatest ever made.

Different taste I say.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

It's more up to 2k than Firaxis. I don't think any developer on Firaxis' level wants to release buggy product. Publishers, on the other hand, have no qualms of setting dates and pushing stuff out the door.

From a project management standpoint, you have distributed blame there. Unless the release date is a longstanding secret to the development teams, they're making choices about what they want to do vs what is realistic to do, and will get burned if not staying within the bounds of what is realistic to accomplish given their time and resources.

In other words, the final product is a reflection of priorities, resources, skill, and more with the set date as a constraint. Nobody gets to develop a game forever.

Im pretty sure no matter how the game is released people will complain that the game is unplayable whil other people will praise the game as one of the greatest ever made.

The existence of said complaints is less relevant than if they're valid. Civ V release was unacceptable in an objective sense and that it got praise despite that is obnoxious. It's not reasonable to praise a product that advertises something it doesn't deliver (MP). They eventually somewhat fixed it, though even now it's kind of crummy...not because of balance but because you can lose the ability to finish games outright from de-sync/bad quality rehosting.

 

[RohirrimElf]

Lets hope 2k does not forget about the launch day of civ 5.
It sure was not pretty.

 

[Gorbles]

The existence of said complaints is less relevant than if they're valid. Civ V release was unacceptable in an objective sense and that it got praise despite that is obnoxious. It's not reasonable to praise a product that advertises something it doesn't deliver (MP). They eventually somewhat fixed it, though even now it's kind of crummy...not because of balance but because you can lose the ability to finish games outright from de-sync/bad quality rehosting.

Which is funny because Beyond Earth had stability on a par, if not exceeding, BNW (barring a specific 144Hz monitor issue), and that still got stick for the same kinds of reasons (weirdly).

That's the carry-on from peoples subjective perspectives, which makes it hard to rate anything like this. Well, barring vanilla CiV. That was on a par with Rome II: Total War and other such endeavours.

Like people praise Civ IV purely on the benefits of the modding scene alone. That isn't something that Firaxis generate (beyond providing tools); that's down to the community to engender. Choosing to praise Civ IV purely because you can customise it better is like praising the chess board you designed yourself. Praise in a lot of situations can be construed as obnoxious . . . however it only tends to be construed as obnoxious by those who disagree with it (and logically-so, of course)!

 

[dexters]

I have a feeling civ6 will be mod friendly and it's not just pr talk. on par with a lot of steam workshop.

What I've always wanted is an accessible scenario and units editor. Like what we had in Civ3. I also want to be able to easily run games just watching the AI play against itself .

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Which is funny because Beyond Earth had stability on a par, if not exceeding, BNW (barring a specific 144Hz monitor issue), and that still got stick for the same kinds of reasons (weirdly).

I'm not bringing BE into this. Its problems are more subjective design ones.

I'm referring specifically to the kind of stuff we got in Civ V vanilla that objectively didn't work. That would be the MP experience and several facets of the UI. MP was also really bad in Civ IV release, so there's cause for concern given that Firaxis has not had decently stable MP on release of a main-line civ title in over a decade and hasn't had stable MP even post-patch since Civ IV.

I had people trying to tell me the UI was "not that bad" on vanilla release. Sorry but no, it was that bad. If I can take screen caps showing that the UI is lying to you about what will happen, the UI is bad in the objective sense. You can make a case that vastly increasing #inputs to accomplish the same thing is also bad in the objective sense, and Civ V had a good bit of that, too. They eventually came out ahead in some areas (citizen management is better in V than IV now), but were initially much worse (cities would starve down in size IBT despite showing that they were growing before hitting end turn). Even now, I can order the construction of a building/unit in IV with fewer inputs than V, and if I want to queue a built *much* fewer inputs, to the point where training units out of 12 cities in IV takes markedly fewer inputs than training them in 4 cities in V.

These are the things that VI needs to get right as a baseline. The advertised features need to work, and if the game represents that something will happen, that thing should happen rather than something else.

Other things are more up to preference. Given that it's a strategy title, I expect lots of choices that have an impact on the outcome of the game, large or small, and to optimize gameplay so the players are making those choices. Based on some of the complaints here, other people apparently want an art project and are willing to pay a 2+ hour tax per playthrough to get it. I can't objectively say they're wrong for preferring that, but if we have non-functional MP on release for the 3rd main-line civ installment in a row there's really not a lot of wiggle room for alternative conclusions.

Civ V vanilla was *literally* unplayable in MP (IV being in similar territory), in the sense that the game would quickly block you from playing it in MP due to its issues, and that's a whoooole different standard from "the tall vs wide design sucks" or "balance of RNG pre and post collateral damage in this game makes one facet of the game orders of magnitude more RNG dependent than any other period, to the point of detracting" (an example where I believe Civ V's design beats IV's, irrespective of stack vs 1upt).

 

[rastak]

Yet with Civ V vanilla and all it's issues I played several games and had a fantastic time. It got 100x better with patches and expansions and like most Civ released before it, there were plenty of problems.

 

[Amrunril]

I think the OP is conflating playability with balance. Both are valid concerns and have been issues in the past, but I don't think it makes sense to expect them equally. Playability is absolutely a reasonable expectation for release (I didn't get Civ V until a few months after release, but my understanding is that at least its multiplayer mode didn't meet this standard). However, while balance should be given some attention at release, I don't think it needs be held to the same standard. It's entirely possible to enjoy a game with balance issues, especially if you're experimenting to find those issues yourself rather than looking them up and not trying anything else. It's much more important that the developers revisit balance issues after release, as those issues reveal themselves upon wider play and discussion. This is an area where the civ development team has repeatedly fallen short (the imbalances between Civ V's policy trees are widely known and could be corrected with a relatively simple patch), but it isn't the same issue as playability on release.

To use the most recent release as an example, the Rising Tide expansion was absolutely playable on release. It was also imbalanced beyond anything I ever experienced in Civ V. Nonetheless, I played probably half a dozen games before the imbalances began to seriously interfere with my enjoyment, and if the development team had ultimately returned and released a balance patch that seriously addressed those issues (unfortunately they didn't), I would have been entirely satisfied with my experience.

 

[lietkynes]

It's very difficult to achieve perfect game balance at release. Players always come up with strategies that surprise the developers.

What is important is that the game should be technically very good: no stutter, no crashes, no game-breaking bugs.

 

[Krajzen]

(where was beta testers?).

Let me tell you where they were, as I was very involved beta tester in one of big modern strategy games (can't tell you which exact and when, Non Disclosure Agreement, but it was BIG one, not some indie obscure stuff)

In case of this game, beta testers did a ton of job. We were debugging the game for three months (most guys every day) and I personally reported over 200 bugs and issues, and I was only fourth most accomplished tester the 'leader' had almost 500 and there were over a dozen of us, volunteers + QA. We spent hundreds of hours debugging the game and hunting down really annoying, gamebreaking, but also nitpicky stuff.
However, there are tight release deadlines no tester and usually no developer can impact, and while we did a lot of job there was simply no time to fix everything and devs focused on fixing things that were most gamebreaking and problematic. On average devs were fixing like 1000+ bugs and issues every month, but in big complex strategy games there are always bugs and problems everywhere, and when the game was released, it still had over one thousand already known bugs present on release documented in the database. There was simply no time, men and budget to fix them. And two hundreds bugs on average come every new week.

Fortunately the core game was solid enough and core features were debugged enough to people not riot but merely complain amidst general praises and the game still got very high ratings, with most of these bugs being fixed in the patches of upcoming few months, however on another hand every week after release was bringing another bugs to fix in another future patch It's a bit of Sisiphean Task, except much more satisfying or even fun one.

Oh and despite our months of work, a lot of new bugs not found by us before were found days after release, because of simple math - it is 120 000 "testers" vs 12 testers before, so with 10 000 times more samples it is statistically impossible for them to not find out some ultra rare borderline cases not encountered by us.

I don't want to justify the modern plague completely unfinished games being released too early (like civ5), my points are
1) Sometimes testers are truly barely present when company doesn't care, but sometimes they do hard work and still
2) Modern big strategy games are so sophisticated there is no way for human being to predict each and every interaction and anomaly between its systems and nuances
3) Games are serious companies made to bring profit, which means schedules, which means release windows and limited means of devs themselves to affect them "oh wait reschedule business plans of all corporation, we need to solve all those Dragon Sword stupid glitches"

 

[IronfighterXXX]

I think the OP is conflating playability with balance.

Yes, I know it's not the same, however from strategy game I expect something more then just to be able to play without constant crashes to call it playable.

I know civlization is not tournament game like Starcraft (unfortunatelly ), and doesn't need to be perfectly balanced,
but I also don't want to get some imbalanced monster as c5 on release (monster with great potencial, but still...)

@Krajzen -thx for explanation about beta testers work, I know you can't tell but I guess it was Paradox's game

 

[TheMeInTeam]

However, while balance should be given some attention at release, I don't think it needs be held to the same standard. It's entirely possible to enjoy a game with balance issues, especially if you're experimenting to find those issues yourself rather than looking them up and not trying anything else.

This conceptually needs to be separated out. "Balance between civs" and "balance of things you can do in the game" are two separate concepts. The latter is more important.

Taken to extremes, the latter can make it so one-sided that doing anything other than 4 city tradition is a false choice, or anything other than ICS false choice, or anything other than culture false choice etc to the extent that the game because centralized around a tiny fraction of its possible options, which then overwhelm other considerations.

That kind of stuff hurts the game a lot more than stuff like "Poland's unique stuff is better than France's".

It's very difficult to achieve perfect game balance at release. Players always come up with strategies that surprise the developers.

What is important is that the game should be technically very good: no stutter, no crashes, no game-breaking bugs.

Agreed, and patch updates shouldn't overtune to the point of making a different strategy "obviously optimal".

I don't want to justify the modern plague completely unfinished games being released too early (like civ5), my points are

Project management isn't easy. To do well the lead needs to work both design and fixes within constraints *and* prioritize properly. If you simplify the game from the start you have fewer of those 1000s of reported issues, but if you over-simplify then it won't be a fun game with the same replayability.

But there's a reason accomplished developers come out consistently better in this regard.

@Krajzen -thx for explanation about beta testers work, I know you can't tell but I guess it was Paradox's game

It barely matters which. Go into the bug report forums of most titles and look at reports vs what's actually fixed. Even post-release on games, you're going to see most cases where the patches can't keep up, and some bugs lasting multiple patches.

For the skilled developers, these bugs are the ones that impact gameplay enjoyability the least. For Paradox, removing ships from primitives then fixing workarounds that still let them get ships was more important than the UI lying about what you could take in peace deal or the nature of the war you will declare...the latter being an issue ongoing for nearly a year and 4 major patches despite it being identified during the open beta of the patch that caused it.

If he wasn't talking about Paradox, you'd anticipate THEIR beta testers having several times that number.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

I don't see the point of this thread. Did you really think Firaxis would say, "well we were going to release it unplayable, but since you asked..."

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

 

[AriochIV]

Whenever you set a hard release date 5 months out, you'll inevitably run out of time (as delays always happen in software development) and the game will feel a bit rushed. It's inevitable.

The alternative ("when it's ready") has it's own problems, namely endless delays.