How important is it for Firaxis to admit mistakes or acknowledge failure?

[evonannoredars]

I suspect the person who made the very important decision about when the game should be released wasn't someone they can simply fire.

Really weird thing to suggest anyway. What they gonna do, announce in their cheerful weekly recap they have fired someone and that they hope this symbolic sacrifice will placate you guys?

 

[protocol7]

Firing people who make poor decisions wouldn’t be to send an announcement, it would be to start making better decisions going forward. At this point though I regret bringing it up, so feel free to agree or disagree, it’s all good with me.

As far as civ7 goes, I agree I think they can still make a great game out of it. It’s a bit of a blessing that so few people are playing because they can reintroduce it to the larger market again later. But in the meantime hopefully they are listening and making good decisions.

 

[evonannoredars]

Firing decision makers for making poor decisions around shipping early seems like a great way to send a message and make it clear you aren’t the kind of company that makes poor short-term decisions around shipping games early, if you accidentally became one by hiring people who think that way.

You said yourself it would 'send a message'. If however there's no expectation for them to announce what they do internally, then this seems like pointless speculation to discuss

 

[protocol7]

You said yourself it would 'send a message'. If however there's no expectation for them to announce what they do internally, then this seems like pointless speculation to discuss

Ah, I see. I meant it would send a message to the decision makers in the company not to make those kinds of decisions. But agreed, it’s a pointless tangent especially since nobody even said “fire developers” except the person who complained that someone said that.

 

[Gori the Grey]

It should be so good and interesting at playing the game that people will actually just start up all-AI sandbox games to just watch and marvel at.

This strikes me as a fantastic ideal for some 4x developer to set as a goal.

 

[protocol7]

That’s an awesome idea! You could even imagine secondary game modes where you somehow influence the world through events and see how the AI players evolve and what they do, with you overseeing it all.

Maybe one way to get there is to allow for an external API for decision making, so anyone can write code and attach it to an AI player. Old World has a cool action economy idea that could limit how many things an AI (and player) can do on a single turn, which may help so it doesn’t become an APM race.

 

[Gori the Grey]

If we go very far down this path, it will represent a tangent, and maybe need its own thread.

My version of the idea would work very differently @protocol7. At the heart of it would be the ability for an outside observer to clearly take in how much progress each of the civs are making toward one of the victory conditions. "Oh, building that wonder is really going to help Japan toward a culture victory." Kind of the way an observer of a Monopoly game can see how well it is going for each player and make a rough prediction about which one is likely to win. So distinct milestones that each civ would work to reach (on a particular victory path) would be something that would be deeply built in to the game mechanics.

Why?

Because then when you are a player in such a designed game, you too will always have a sense for how you are faring. Now Civ games have always given that to a degree in the past (charts where you can compare how many space-ship parts you have constructed vs how many the AI players have, how many capitols you've conquered (Civ V), etc.). I think it is that, knowing with some precision that you are in the running for a victory, but knowing how close other cultures are to one, that could keep the game exciting late-game.

 

[Nares]

On the thread's original topic, it's less about an apology and more about demonstrating competency. Auto-explore and advisor warnings seem far removed from what players are complaining about en masse.

At the risk of bringing the thread back on topic, I think CDPR handled the Cyberpunk situation with what my mother-in-law would call grace and they certainly won a lot of goodwill back with me. I'm not saying Civ VII is anywhere on the scale of the Cyberpunk launch debacle but for my part, some kind of community outreach from Firaxis would be welcome. I don't even think that needs to be an apology - just a 'we hear you' would give a lot of reassurance.

I think they struck the right balance with how they reacted to the UI hysteria complaints and I hope they apply the same template to the other features/changes that have proven to be controversial.

The difference is that Cyberpunk 2020 was an excellent game which earned a bad reputation due to overly optimistic system requirements, and CDPR's lie about the system requirements required a different response than what Firaxis needs to show with Civ7. Cyberpunk's salvation was allowing players time to upgrade their hardware, alongside a marketing campaign which encouraged them to give it a second chance by claiming the game had been saved; those of us who had sufficient rigs back in 2020 had an enjoyable release experience, and can confirm that the game got worse with patching, not better.

Hell have @sukritact write it! It's like he's under embargo. He could even do a little thing like here's a sneak peak on what I worked on this week. Everybody loves sukritact.

If it's the suits' fault that the game is in this state, as an employee Sukritact isn't going to fix it, he's just going to encounter the same headwinds. He was more effective as a modder than he will be as an employee. Using him to communicate with the players, when he's not the one making the decisions, would make him even more of a prop than he already is.

Civ 5 did.

Numbers weren't as low but the launch was just as bad. Probably even more threads getting closed back in the civ 5 launch days than now.

Some things never change, but one thing which did change was the industry. Thanks to the success of Paradox, there's more competition in the genre now than there was back in the Civ5 days.

 

[Yzman]

Starting to come round to the idea that this game deserves a comeback if only to spite the people whose arguments boil down to "fire developers".

Chill a bit, eh? Making a game you don't like doesn't mean someone deserves unemployment, nor will it fix 2K pushing it out the door in the state it was in.

Yeah reading that is a bit irking. People also forgot how drastically about expansion can change these games. We have seen it before.

 

[Gorbles]

The only person who said anything about developers is you

since nobody even said “fire developers”

Please don't be obtuse, thanks.

Fire a few, and get new people in and start on Civ 8

If you wish to believe that this firing people who don't work at Firaxis, that's your prerogative.

Given this ambiguity, if that's the technicality you wish to disagree with, that's fine. But then do that, instead of accusing me of making things up. The next time, I simply won't respond.

 

[protocol7]

You’re doing the same thing again, it’s neither true that only developers work on the team at Take Two (not sure why you’d fire a developer who isn’t a timeline decision maker anyway) nor did I say about firing people at other companies. Not sure why you have to put words in peoples mouths to make your points.

 

[Gorbles]

You’re doing the same thing again, it’s neither true that only developers work on the team at Take Two nor did I say about firing people at other companies. Not sure why you have to put words in peoples mouths to make your points. But sure, let’s not chat further, sounds good to me.

Firaxis works on the game. 2K does not.

Like I said, if you want to believe that another poster saying "fire a few" means "fire people not actually working on the franchise", that's a valid opinion.

At the same time, so is my take. I'd appreciate it if you respected that.

And Kev doesn't appear to be in any rush to clarify Though he did explicitly mention Firaxis, in his suggestion for what should be done about the franchise (which includes firing people). Not 2K.

 

[protocol7]

Firaxis is owned by Take Two under the 2K label. They were acquired some time ago, and Firaxis does not exist as a separate independent company any more. People from the 2K and Take Two parts of the organisation all collaborate and make decisions to create and especially publish the game.

I understand that your extremely narrow view of who is involved is very important to make everyone else look ridiculous, like they believe insane, illogical things. But the thing is, there’s no way that they believe things like you should fire people at different companies that had nothing to do with anything related to the game. Obviously.

If Kev shows up and explains he meant to fire people at EA or some other company I’ll eat my hat. I certainly didn’t mean anything like that, your continued insistence that I did notwithstanding. You can believe anything you want , but if you put words in my mouth I’ll object.

 

[Gorbles]

Firaxis is owned by Take Two under the 2K label. They were acquired some time ago, and Firaxis does not exist as a separate independent company any more. People from the 2K and Take Two parts of the organisation all collaborate and make decisions to create and especially publish the game.

I understand that your extremely narrow view of who is involved is very important to make everyone else look ridiculous, like they believe insane, illogical things. But the thing is, there’s no way that they believe things like you should fire people at different companies that had nothing to do with anything related to the game. Obviously.

If Kev shows up and explains he meant to fire people at EA or some other company I’ll eat my hat. I certainly didn’t mean anything like that, your continued insistence that I did notwithstanding. You can believe anything you want , but if you put words in my mouth I’ll object.

Maybe there are some wires crossed here. I don't believe Kev meant firing people at different companies.

I think Kev meant firing people at Firaxis. Which is the development studio that works on Civilisation. This is why I said what I said.

Nor have I said once that you believed in X or Y either.

In my mind, you seemed to object to my reading of this, and I'm still not exactly sure why. Other than the specific technicality that Kev didn't literally mention "developers", despite mentioning "Firaxis". Which is why I said if you want to believe that he meant "fire people that don't work at Firaxis" (by which I mean 2K), that's a valid opinion. But at the same time, so is my read of it.

In my mind, correctly or otherwise, despite the publisher-developer relationship having some nuance in it, Firaxis are a traditional "development" studio. In that they develop the game, and 2K does not. 2K may offer QA (I think we've seen Steam depos to that effect), but that's as close as they'll get beyond the usual publisher duties of marketing, legal, and so on. You're free to disagree, of course.

All of which is why it makes no sense to me for Kev to be suggesting firing people anywhere else other than Firaxis. Which means he was calling for developers to be fired. Agree or disagree, does that make sense?

 

[Kwami]

Failure can lead to success, if you learn from it

Firaxis could re-design it thou best IMHO to put this version on the back burner and if keeping it alive do so with a small team .
Fire a few, and get new people in and start on Civ 8

Or, they could just continue to make VII a better game. Maybe you don't like it, but a lot of us do.

 

[Civinator]

Oh, they could just continue to make VII a better game.

Yes, this in my eyes is the way to go. Admitting something brings nothing. I want to see convincing results.

 

[Krikkit1]

They could save the game if they acknowledged the bad reception, and stated they were working on a free "ageless" update, while keeping the current version as a scenario for whoever happens to prefer what it currently is.

The Civs were never balanced anyways in Civ 6 - they shouldn't let that stop them from shifting course now. Just remove the soft resets, make a cohesive tech tree, have all leaders/civs available at the start, and redo the victory requirements.

That's the only way the numbers will go up at this point.

I think that would be terrible. Give players more control over the “identity” of their empire, make the transitions better, and more immersive to more players, fix more UI issues, make the game in the ages more engaging and more unique in each age, those are all good.

They shouldn’t change the basic way the game works. If they want to do that, they can wait for civ8. (to make Civ:the mobile FPS)

 

[Core Imposter]

Firing the coach is standard in sports but always in a public campaign for the future product. So, unless they are going to take my advice and relaunch the game with major changes to the civ structure and an end to the ages I see no reason to offer someone like Ed Beach up as a scapegoat.

I am not sure that the entire chain of command has yet to internalize the scope of the problem. They have managed to launch on all of these varied platforms more less simultaneously and this seems to have been the number one goal of this iteration.

 

[Kenshiro70]

That’s an awesome idea! You could even imagine secondary game modes where you somehow influence the world through events and see how the AI players evolve and what they do, with you overseeing it all.

That sounds a lot like Populous. Where's Peter Molyneux when you need him?

 

[James_Champagne]

Sure. Just redesign the entire game. That's all.