I pledge to not buy Civ 6 until it is released

[m15a]

I dunno, I remember playing The old Police Quests and stuff. I spent so much time playing those games. I can't remember to many problems with them, they sorted out the problems prior to release, there was no need for patches...

maybe I'm just old and remember the good ol' days with rose coloured glasses though.

I never played the Police Quest games, but I remember King's Quest V had a bug that made it unwinnable. I guess there's a fix for it, but since I didn't have the internet then I didn't know and just never finished it.

 

[Aristos]

Civ fans (I've been playing since Civ I) will buy the game immediately and wait for any needed fixes and rebalancing. Any new Civ is better than no new Civ.

He, the beauty of a strong claim like yours is that you only need ONE example in opposition and there goes your claim.

I am that ONE example (or maybe there are more?). I am what would be traditionally known as a civ fan, playing since One, all the way through now... learned my civ lesson with Shafer's disaster, and although I consider Ed Beach the saver of Civ 5 (and have the complete edition myself), he is still under 2K's umbrella... thus, patience.

Patience is the virtue of the visionaries. Remember?

 

[Fairfax]

Fallout 1 and 2 were a mess. The community patch on Fallout 2 couln't fix all the bugs even with many years and a lot of releases. Also Planescape Torment, Vampire: The Masquerade and Arcanum were quite buggy.

When games became more complex, it was harder to fix all the bugs. Point and click adventures typically had less complex scripting, so they were never that buggy.

Also, nearly all DOS games had minimum system req that made the game nearly worthless on said computer, you always had to go at above even the recommended specs.

FO1 was a mess? Give me a break. PS:T wasn't that buggy either.

 

[rastak]

Star Fleet Krallan Commander had a bug which after a few hours ended your game as your password would corrupt. V1.0 was bad.

Buzz Aldrin Race Into Space had an issue where I couldn't even install it. Interplay had to snail mail me a patched floppy.

Either of these cases would make me very sorry I pre-ordered Civ 6. We don't rely on snail mail anymore to get a new floppy with a patch so we should be good.

 

[LDiCesare]

In general console games are far more bug free than PC games, and that's perfectly reasonable. Nintendo is nothing special in that regard.

Yes. Fixed hardware is way easier to thoroughly test than PCs which can run on various breeds of Os's (winXP,7,8,10) or totally different Os's (win, linux, mac), different hardware (amd/intel), most notably graphics card (amd/intel/nvidia, with a lot of variation).
Plus the console hardware sellers usually force game publihsers to go thru them before letting a buggy game out.
Still. Buggy games may be excellent. The above examples (Fallout 2, Arcanum, Vampires: the masquerade) are aboutthe best games I've ever played. It doesn't matter to me that a good game is buggy. It mattes much more that gameplay will be bad. So I don't care much about how robust civ VI will be. I'm much more concerned about gameplay. I thought Civ V was bad and didn't buy expansions/dlc's because I didn't want to give money to Firaxis for making a game that I think is globally inferior to Civ IV.
The point is quality != robustness, and I know a lot of robust titles I won't touch while I happily go back to buggy games because they have other redeeming qualities.

 

[Haggbart]

FO1 was a mess? Give me a break. PS:T wasn't that buggy either.

Maybe I was unlucky with FO1, but to my knowledge there was a bug that prevented you from getting anything else than the bad ending no matter how many quests you did for one settlement (can't remember which).

Also PS:T on release had several crashes, glitches and exploits where you could get unlimited gold and xp. This was later (mostly) patched out, but the discussion here was the state of the game when it was released.

However FO2 was never patched to anywhere near an acceptable state. Still a 10/10 tho

 

[gfeier]

He, the beauty of a strong claim like yours is that you only need ONE example in opposition and there goes your claim.

I am that ONE example (or maybe there are more?). I am what would be traditionally known as a civ fan, playing since One, all the way through now... learned my civ lesson with Shafer's disaster, and although I consider Ed Beach the saver of Civ 5 (and have the complete edition myself), he is still under 2K's umbrella... thus, patience.

Patience is the virtue of the visionaries. Remember?

I was speaking only for myself, same as you are.

 

[ProMeTheus112]

Give a man a post, and you teach him for a day. Teach a man to post, and you troll him for a lifetime.

???

 

[Fromage10x]

I was speaking only for myself, same as you are.

Err...except you went the no true Scotsman route and said that all fans would buy the game, therefor asserting that anyone who would not buy it is not a Civ fan.

Civ fans (I've been playing since Civ I) will buy the game immediately and wait for any needed fixes and rebalancing. Any new Civ is better than no new Civ.

Which is, I admit, ridiculous. I don't begrudge you backing away from it in hindsight.

 

[m15a]

Err...except you went the no true Scotsman route and said that all fans would buy the game, therefor asserting that anyone who would not buy it is not a Civ fan.

Except that the post in question doesn't say "all" anywhere in it. The post is vague, but if the person that made the post clarifies that they did not mean "all", then can't we accept that they did not mean "all"?

 

[gfeier]

Except that the post in question doesn't say "all" anywhere in it. The post is vague, but if the person that made the post clarifies that they did not mean "all", then can't we accept that they did not mean "all"?

OK already! My original post was just my opinion, as are all my posts. What I was really getting at was that even a buggy new Civ game can be fun to play while waiting for the fixes. I played plenty of vanilla Civ V before G&K came out.

 

[Ryika]

That doesn't discount the idea that leaving out a Release in a series to hopefully make them change their habit of releasing buggy games could lead to better games. After all, and that's just a bonus argument, a game that doesn't start buggy and doesn't need months of fixing after release is a game that can start improving immediately is a game that can start building upon the solid foundation that it has earlier.

But I agree, most Civ Players will not wait, people will buy immediately, some because they're willing to accept the risk and the consequences, some who will be "totally surprised" that the game isn't playable as much as they'd like it to be and then spam the forums for months. But again... that only means that it's not going to happen, not that it wouldn't be good if it happened.

But who knows, maybe we get a surprise. They seem to be taking more time with this one at least.

 

[ombak]

So, I understand the idea that if people don't pre-order, this might lead to better games and particular changes in DLC practices. It seems logical when you express it with certain premises as ivens.

But what data does anyone have to back that up? Others have pointed out that pre-sales do factor into projections and are (at least somewhat) important data for major releases. The idea that the industry would change if pre-ordering stopped sounds attractive. It might even be true. I just don't know why people are confident that that change would be in the direction they want.

Myself I'll pre-order because, frankly, even if I were back to playing only one game as I did back when I was on a college budget, this would be that one game. I don't play multiplayer, I have been mostly fortunate when it comes to releases and bugs, not just in Civ, and I find that pre-ordering comes with little to no downside for games I consider known quantities and generally nice to have things I know I would eventually get if I hadn't right away.

 

[LDiCesare]

I'm not preordering not because I think it'll be buggy, and I don't care much that it's buggy. I'm not preordering because I think I won't like the game, and I'd like the game to go another direction (as in stop warping history to make it fit the designer's whims f.e.)

 

[darko82]

Pre-ordering makes sense only if you know everything about the game. Otherwise, I do not see anything wise to pre-order a cat in a poke. And the best solution would be a demos, but no... this is something they got rid of maybe just for the sake of the sales.

 

[Fromage10x]

So, I understand the idea that if people don't pre-order, this might lead to better games and particular changes in DLC practices. It seems logical when you express it with certain premises as ivens.

But what data does anyone have to back that up? Others have pointed out that pre-sales do factor into projections and are (at least somewhat) important data for major releases. The idea that the industry would change if pre-ordering stopped sounds attractive. It might even be true. I just don't know why people are confident that that change would be in the direction they want.

Myself I'll pre-order because, frankly, even if I were back to playing only one game as I did back when I was on a college budget, this would be that one game. I don't play multiplayer, I have been mostly fortunate when it comes to releases and bugs, not just in Civ, and I find that pre-ordering comes with little to no downside for games I consider known quantities and generally nice to have things I know I would eventually get if I hadn't right away.

As I said, we don't have that data. How could we? Who would do any sort of study on the matter and how could such a study actually be executed? It's impractical at best and the people that could benefit from the knowledge of such an experiment would not be the ones that would be able to pay for it.

But the truth is the cost of waiting is essentially nothing but the time spent to wait, and the rewards are potentially very high if we can put a stop to things like day one DLC and bonuses if nothing else.

 

[Big J Money]

I look at it this way: the last 3 Civilization games (not counting BE) were fantastic to me, so I trust the track record and want to preorder. Yes, I even was happy with Civ V on release. There were some balance issues, but I didn't get good at the game fast enough to run into them before it was patched / expanded out. And the issues with Diplomacy didn't come close to ruining the game for me, either (but I'm glad it was improved).

 

[DJ_Tanner]

I never played the Police Quest games, but I remember King's Quest V had a bug that made it unwinnable. I guess there's a fix for it, but since I didn't have the internet then I didn't know and just never finished it.

Kings Quest V didn't have any unwinnable bugs. If you couldn't beat it, you just missed a puzzle item along the way.

 

[Gilgamesch]

Not going to buy any more pre-order games, this also count for CIVI even when iam a big fan of the franchise.

When the game is out i will check it, thanks to the Steam refund policy, after the final release of CiV the game was still buggy and i encountered some ctds in the first week.

Iam just not a fan of the pre-order system, i encountered enough lies from other companies, this doesnt mean i dont trust Firaxis, iam just not willing to support a company before they release there product.

 

[Ryika]

Kings Quest V didn't have any unwinnable bugs. If you couldn't beat it, you just missed a puzzle item along the way.

A quick google search returns dozens of topics where people warn you to "have a lot of save files" because you can end up in unwinnable states after forgetting items, many of them even calling the game out for being a notorious example of games that send you into unwinnable states.

Just a few quick ones (that hopefully don't have any pornography adds circling in and out because yay for ridiculous infractions):

Yes, you're unable to continue if you don't get the rope, and you have to save the mouse in order to get the rope.

While this sort of thing happens in most of the King's Quest games, KQ5 is by far the biggest offender in that regard.

http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/208787/is-the-game-unwinnable-if-you-dont-save-the-mouse

KING'S QUEST 5 - BE CAREFUL
On one of the recent shows you mentioned possibly doing King's Quest 5. If you do, you need to make a *lot* of save points, and you're going to have to monitor the chat, because there are a lot of places where you can make the game unwinnable. And it's in no obvious way, you do something small, and the consequences don't happen until much, much later - and in some cases there's no clue as to what you did wrong. So either Sean or Bill or the chat will have to be on the ball and tell you when you've made a mistake, or you're going to risk having to re-do a lot of gameplay.

http://day9.tv/d/dronon/kings-quest-5-be-careful/

Although some die-hard adventure purists scorned such practices as "dumbing down games for the masses", more game companies adopted the approach over time like Sierra, whose previous games such as King's Quest V and Codename: ICEMAN are rather notorious for the large amount of zombie situations.

http://www.giantbomb.com/unwinnable-state/3015-7607/

#4. King's Quest V Is Full Of No-Win Scenarios
<Too long to copy the whole part of the article>

http://www.cracked.com/article_22716_the-5-most-painfully-difficult-video-game-puzzles.html

While I haven't played the game myself the internet seems to suggest that you're wrong.