I will not buy Civ VI, if it is based on 1UPT and its horrid traffic jams and lame AIs.
It isn't 1upt that really ruined civ V though, it was the implementation of it. Shafer touched on that in his article a bit actually. If you're going to use 1upt, you need more hexes. A lot more hexes, like 3-4x as many with the same levels of production. You'd have to completely redo the scaling of the maps.
But because they insisted on 3d rendering everything, and couldn't even do THAT efficiently, machines couldn't handle something like that. Heck, playing on "minimum" specs in civ V is a complete joke; half the game's content is nigh unplayable. There is major performance difficulty on a significant portion of the game's content even with "recommended" specs or better across the board. Now, if you combined their joke engine with 3-5 times as many hexes? They wouldn't even be able to sell it to most players, who wouldn't have the hardware to play the game.
Firaxis' trouble in civ IV and V when it comes to engine, UI, and performance are all
*project management* failures, and bad ones. Civ V dropped its UI team before/around release IIRC, and even today it takes more inputs to do the same things in V as it did in IV, and IV is often inefficient! On top of that, you'd see job postings for people who could program the game's multiplayer...
after the game was released. These things point to profound project management failure, which trumps design failure and of course contributes to it (it's hard to design a well thought-out game balanced around each aspect of play when you can't even get some of it working and are pathetically engine-limited).
I won't buy civ VI unless I see evidence of a profound turnaround or a new company making it. 1UPT won't bother me if I can youtube the game and see that it's working properly and can actually *fit* those units.
it would be totally unexpected to see THEM making CIV VI based on the philosophy shift that Jon Shafer already did... I just can't see this happen
No matter what design philosophy you choose or where you go with a title, it is still important to make it a technically sound title with a solid engine and balanced play. Civ V has less depth than IV, but it still had potential for great depth and play experience. Too bad that potential got undermined before the game even went into its alpha versions. It's the current market trend of "sell shoddy products on consumers who don't realize it or don't care" that's causing far more damage than "market to casual players" in the strict sense. Civ V could have been the exact same game, except with much better release balance, better performance, more hexes to move in, and a strong/balanced MP experience and it would have been a significantly better-received title even than it was.
Instead, they paid Game Informer to lie to us.
Instead, it was a buggy pile of crap with an awful engine. Many of the bugs are gone, but the engine limitations will hold it back forever.
My only hope for civ VI is that failaxis picks up some legendary project manager to lead its design. Otherwise, the trend of technically bad games released won't end. In their culture, they don't even care that the game will log a "time played" of 1 hours and 30 minutes when the player was actually sitting there for over 3 hours (IE more time spent waiting than playing).
victory. Ideally the difficulty in "challenger" is the difficulty of either winning or competing with other contestants...not difficulty based in "tedium" lol.
