Initial civfan reactions to Civ 4

[MooFreaky]

This thread shows that Firaxis haven't learned anything from previous releases and still makes rushed, imbalanced and unpolished games (why they need to relearn the same lessons with each new game?)

You say it's rushed, but you totally ignore how a video game is made. It is very expensive with low-middling return on investment (thus high risk), and so needs to be treated carefully. They are never going to be able to know how the players will treat a game. It always gets dissected, used and abused in ways that the developers didn't consider. That is a good and important process. They can now make patches and alterations to redirect the game as needed. If you have too many features initially this can actually cause big problems, as the more features you have the harder it is to get them working together and then if you do need to make changes to one it can indirectly throw out everything else. So by releasing a vanilla that is "incomplete" you can spend time letting people get completely to grips with the game, then add content that works with and for the players.

Plus, economically, you cannot afford to just put everything in off the bat. Most small-mid sized developers put the company on the line with every major release (and we have seen MANY of them fold when they have poor releases, many for the reasons i just described). You paid the same price for Civ6 that you probably did for Civ3 (even Civ2), yet the cost of developing 6 was astronomically higher, but you demand more of everything and have it be perfection off the bat.
Paid expansions and DLC are vital to developing a big game these days, to help cover the crazy costs and help nullify the risk (and to provide the money needed to actually develop the game).

Perhaps if you see the same process repeated there is a method that you just haven't stopped to consider?

While Civ4 might get a bit too much praise by some I'd like to point out that there's a few differences between the type of criticism the different games have gotten. Civ4 mainly got these types:

- Techincal issues. Civ4s official system requirements was too low. That caused a lot of anger, but these complaints went away as they got patched out or people got better hardware.
- "Cartoony Graphics". Lots of players want realistic graphics. These complaints remained for Civ4s lifespan.
- It's a vanilla game. Part of the playerbase belongs in the "more is more" camp. Those players will of course not enjoy the stripped down experience of the normal vanilla releases.

Notice that Civ4 didn't get that many gameplay complaints. The complaints about suicide siege and no ranged attack stayed, but core mechanics didn't receive the same criticism. Civ4 never needed the major game design rework. And players where not smashing deity on day 1. Civ4 vanilla deity remained a proper challenge for a long time.

Civ4 had lots of gameplay compaints. People didn't like the stacks of doom, or the fact to be super competitive you had to understand the mechanics exploits (chop pop-rushing, micromanaging the science bar, etc etc)

Lets hope 2K games keeps updating Civ VI, instead of just asking for more money right away with expansions and DLC.

I mentioned it above, but expansions and DLC are so important to modern games. People are so upset about it, but if we didn't have them most developers like Firaxis wouldn't be able to continue providing expanded content.

 

[Roald Amundsen]

Civ4 was for me, also, an instant big love, and I remember questioning my friends loathing of the game. (He came around though : ) actually i also loved civ3 from the get go but that's another story.

People like to compare the release of civ4 with civ6. In civ6 i've encountered more Bugs, and really game breaking Bugs. Cant honestly remember encountering a single one upon the release of 4!

 

[TruthfulCake]

Civ4 was for me, also, an instant big love, and I remember questioning my friends loathing of the game. (He came around though : ) actually i also loved civ3 from the get go but that's another story.

People like to compare the release of civ4 with civ6. In civ6 i've encountered more Bugs, and really game breaking Bugs. Cant honestly remember encountering a single one upon the release of 4!

Other than one game where I couldn't go to next turn no matter what, I would say none of the bugs we have found have been gamebreaking, only inconvenient at worst. To break the game, the bug should crash your game or make it unplayable or impossible to finish as the game is intended to be finished. If you have bugs that fit this criteria, I'd be interested to learn about them, but so far I had been able to finish all (sans one) of my games. And I couldn't reproduce that bug I encountered, either.

You should also consider that you might have grown as a gamer that you notice bugs more readily. I don't buy the claim that Civ 4 released without bugs - the black tile fiasco seems to be one gamebreaking bug.

Point is, all games released, bar none, will have bugs. In the old days, the devs just had to develop their games painstakingly, often at their own expense, while trying fruitlessly to eliminate all bugs. Internet-administered patches weren't a thing, and if a bug was found post-release the game would be panned and all the devs' efforts would pretty much futile. Today, by releasing the game earlier, the devs can get early monetary support to pay their staff for the many months they need to get the game as close to perfection as possible. If they had followed the old model and waited until they iron out most bugs (again, impossible), they would have bankrupted themselves while the buzz for the announced game died and they still had employees to feed. MooFreaky summed it up well in the previous post.

If Civ IV is the golden standard, then it should be known that Firaxis follows up well with every release. This was true for Civ V as well. I have no doubts that Civ VI will eventually be much more polished than it is now, and therefore slamming the devs for bugs at this point (exactly one week after release) is the least constructive thing to do. The community in general could use much less vitriol and the notes of the bugs they encountered would still reach the devs all the same.

 

[Roald Amundsen]

Other than one game where I couldn't go to next turn no matter what, I would say none of the bugs we have found have been gamebreaking, only inconvenient at worst. To break the game, the bug should crash your game or make it unplayable or impossible to finish as the game is intended to be finished. If you have bugs that fit this criteria, I'd be interested to learn about them, but so far I had been able to finish all (sans one) of my games. And I couldn't reproduce that bug I encountered, either.

You should also consider that you might have grown as a gamer that you notice bugs more readily. I don't buy the claim that Civ 4 released without bugs - the black tile fiasco seems to be one gamebreaking bug.

Point is, all games released, bar none, will have bugs. In the old days, the devs just had to develop their games painstakingly, often at their own expense, while trying fruitlessly to eliminate all bugs. Internet-administered patches weren't a thing, and if a bug was found post-release the game would be panned and all the devs' efforts would pretty much futile. Today, by releasing the game earlier, the devs can get early monetary support to pay their staff for the many months they need to get the game as close to perfection as possible. If they had followed the old model and waited until they iron out most bugs (again, impossible), they would have bankrupted themselves while the buzz for the announced game died and they still had employees to feed. MooFreaky summed it up well in the previous post.

If Civ IV is the golden standard, then it should be known that Firaxis follows up well with every release. This was true for Civ V as well. I have no doubts that Civ VI will eventually be much more polished than it is now, and therefore slamming the devs for bugs at this point (exactly one week after release) is the least constructive thing to do. The community in general could use much less vitriol and the notes of the bugs they encountered would still reach the devs all the same.

Ok sorry I wasn't really accurate, and should rather be saying issues rather than Bugs. Sorry for the confusion. I've discussed my problems with 6 on other threads.

 

[Staal]

awesome stuff

Wish I could like your post more than once!

 

[Evs]

They have learned

1. make incomplete game
2. sell many copies of incomplete game
3. complete the game
4. sell the completion of the game (expansions)
5. make new incomplete game, which people will buy because the previous Complete game was so good

6. Profit

(if you don't like that model, you don't have to have it... instead don't buy the game until ~6 mos.-1 year after the second expansion is released...basically buy Civ6 when Civ7 is announced)

You get a complete game for a decent price (~50$ when I bought CivV when BE was announced) all you had to do was be patient and give them time to finish the game.

Number 3 should be "have the community complete the game with mods"

 

[MyOtherName]

there may not always be enough time to iron out the little non-gamebreaking issues when they have to experiment with new ideas and figure a way to balance them out.
...
They couldn't have enough time to imagine all the creative exploits people are finding out now if they were to focus on the macro aspects of the game.
...
Point is, we players are way more numerous than the staff members at Firaxis are. We take much less time to discover stupid things about the game because there are so many of us, and because none of us are actually burdened with developing the game.

This would be more convincing if it weren't for the fact many of the design problems infuriating people were discovered a decade ago.

 

[TruthfulCake]

This would be more convincing if it weren't for the fact many of the design problems infuriating people were discovered a decade ago.

The very vocal, "infuriated" minority of the past, who complain about Civ IV's cartoony graphics you mean? Right now it seems that those voices have all but been drowned out.

There is no denying that some design problems have repeated themselves. However, I don't see how that contradicts the "not enough time" argument. A new game has to be built from the ground up, and sometimes little features like how certain graphs behave take the backseat when compared to the core elements of the game. The developers can't go "OK let's determine how the graphs will look and behave like and implement it right now!" before starting to create the main game systems. As time has shown that they will eventually add these features in the end anyway -and for free-, it is not a problem of "devs want to repeat mistakes to infuriate people" as much as it is "the developers lack enough time to re-implement some quality-of-life features before release."

It goes without saying that stuff like the AI needs to be coded differently when the game system is inherently different, and the UI needs to be presented differently when the game requires different sorts of interaction. Some problems may end up repeating themselves, inadvertently. How about we focus on "infuriating problems" that do not repeat themselves this time? Like how the game is actually not bare bones and has features on par with CiV vanilla plus two expansions?

 

[Nefelia]

Thank you, OP, for this hilarious submission.

I admit, I do get rather annoyed by the negativity directed at Civ V and now Civ VI. I understand that some people did not like the shift towards 1UPT, but it has been years and the issue has been beaten to death. At this point, I can only suggest that these people start trying out some different strategy game franchises.

But CiVI already offers a lot and it is simply a fresh breeze after so many hours with the old games. I am pretty positive CiVI will be seen as a worthy part of the series (imho it already is) very soon and many issues will be addressed.

Indeed. It seems some people are happy to play Civ IV for their entire lives. Many of us, however, have pretty much dried up the well of deployability Civ IV (and even Civ V) had to offer, and are more than ready to embrace some refreshing new mechanics.

Fortunately, Civ IV has many great mods to satisfy that vocal minority.

This thread shows that Firaxis haven't learned anything from previous releases and still makes rushed, imbalanced and unpolished games (why they need to relearn the same lessons with each new game?)

I welcome you to the second decade of the 21st century. Games have increased in complexity, and the industry has moved towards the practice of releasing functional games and adding polish in response to the feedback of the user base. This is not going to change any time soon.

You have the option of (a) adapting to the new reality by delaying your purchase until the first few patches or (b) buying the game upon release and engaging in futile rants against the industry in the forums.

You chose option (b).

 

[MyOtherName]

The very vocal, "infuriated" minority of the past, who complain about Civ IV's cartoony graphics you mean? Right now it seems that those voices have all but been drowned out.

I had in mind things more like, say, overflow handling.

 

[TruthfulCake]

I had in mind things more like, say, overflow handling.

Right. I bet it's one of those things that change depending on the game mechanics. I think they fixed the science overflow exploit this time around. But overflow is a hard thing to debug because it is an exploit to a system that is supposed to be working properly. I bet the developers wouldn't have noticed this kind of bug as fast as the players did. Anyhow, this will be one of the first things they patch, I bet. No reason to worry.

 

[Sera Otoro]

While I'm optimistic that civ6 will get better, it's carrying a lot of baggage from civ5 that I simply don't think I'll ever get along with(1upt & city states), so I don't anticipate ever being as satisfied with it as I was civ4.

Well, hopefully if the modding community were given suitable freedoms to mod the game the way they want, then hopefully we can completely eradicate the 1UPT... or better yet, they make a patch to have it as an option, but that's just me thinking in a "perfect world" ideology XD

i personally like the city states, but why they removed the option to set how many there are is something i dont understand. a lot of the game setup options were removed, pretty bad move of them, so i hope they patch it to re-add those missing options again.

 

[Trias]

i personally like the city states, but why they removed the option to set how many there are is something i dont understand. a lot of the game setup options were removed, pretty bad move of them, so i hope they patch it to re-add those missing options again.

Since this is a new game, the game setup was probably coded from scratch. Hence the "missing" options were not removed, but simply never implemented. It is not like somebody went around removing setup options that were already there in the code. Game setup customization was literally one of the last things the devs were working on. (In one of the last video's prior to release you can here them talking about still being in the process of adding some of these. That was with less than a week to release.)

Most of the setup options we had in the past will probably be added in the future in patches (or along with expansions).

 

[IronfighterXXX]

Anyhow, this will be one of the first things they patch, I bet. No reason to worry.

Let's hope they will patch it, although they haven't really fixed overflow in Civ5 until today (just limited it to five turns)

The current state of game is one issue, how fast and smart they will react to fix it is another, now much more important.

Final BNW version is great improvement over Civ5 vanilla, but came after three years and is still not completely bugs and exploits free.

BTW some guy using variety of current exploits just achieved 118T science victory on deity!

 

[StittsvileJamie]

Right. I bet it's one of those things that change depending on the game mechanics. I think they fixed the science overflow exploit this time around. But overflow is a hard thing to debug because it is an exploit to a system that is supposed to be working properly. I bet the developers wouldn't have noticed this kind of bug as fast as the players did. Anyhow, this will be one of the first things they patch, I bet. No reason to worry.

You're my new favourite Internet person.
Great posts - ariculate, reasoned, grammatically correct; poetic almost.

 

[Victoria]

pmsl