Let's just look for our own solutions....

[Mikesla]

I just have to get my two cents in worth, and I placed it here because this is where I think it might be usefull....if not sorry to have bother your one good eye.

Well, after reading the problems I have to admit something here. We are a very lazy society where gaming is concerned.

Back in the old days of gaming before the internet was a public ordeal, and when the bbsing community was small, companies who wrote games made sure that there product worked before they sent it off to the market place.

PATCHES???? What the heck were they? Never came across a patch for a game until the modem made it's appearence above 300 baud.

Gaming software companies have become so shoddy in the past ten years. They think that all they have to do is send out a patch, and cry a small tear when someone complains, and we forgive them, thats sounds too much like the way our Governments behave, and I send them at the bottom of the barrel to the Scumbag department.

Companies are to blame, and so are we, we let these people get away with when we purchase their next product, but with that in mind, when a company, and that is any company that has such strong roots on the gaming community such as this company, people look at what they produced in the past, and think that their past track record is top of the line so they buy something like Civ 4, and BOOM....

I have a great system, top of the line card, it's a great ATI so when I started this game up, ummmm okay it didn't start...so I even went as far as to re-install Windows XP (another poorly written piece of poo), and I didn't have the internet (just got it installed less than one week ago), so I had to wait, and wait...you know the deal.

So, I looked at the game cd's, and if you look at them, they are wrong. The play disk is not the play disk but only has a CAB file on it. The manuals are on a third disk for what reason I have no Idea why...If you take a look at the product, it was RUSHED out for the Christmas rush. It's those little things that just can be very annoying, such as RADEON is a big boy in the gaming hardware industry, so how can a company send out a game that doesn't work on ATI???? Very poor programming at it's best.

Perhaps The people who programmed this game should be working for Bill Gates not in the gaming industry.

As far as programming is concerned, I have done very little if none, but that does not allow the programmers to send out garbage.....REAL Programmers take their work seriously, and please save me from snickering at you folks for hiding behind that defense of telling me how hard it is to program, that is a cop-out of cop-outs....

Anyway...that is my say of this matter!

Oh, and Sid was one of those programmers back in the old days...so if this game is to his legacy...oh well....

Happy gaming folks.

 

[Krupo]

One of the weak points in your argument is that people bought Civ 4 based on the company's track record.

Um, did you won Civ 3? Yeah, that had bugs too. Horrible ones for some people. Alpha Centauri? Great game, but it needed patching as well.

It's been a tradition for me now to just wait a few months before the "stable" copy of the game is available, unless it's something I desperately want to play (or am lucky enough to get as a gift ).

Secondly, since the 300-baud era, game's have become progressively more complex. Yeah, with tighter coding practices and more QA resources and time these complexity issues could be nipped in the bud, but unfortunately that's not how things have been working out - I've had enough fun programming basic little beginner programs. I can only imagine the craziness that emerges in big huge sophisticated programs.

Also, you can't just rag on the programmers. Given enough time, they'll clean up mistakes and make things run how they should. Do you think it's *their* choice to rush a game out? Of course not; it's the publisher. Assign blame where it's due rather than resorting to juvenile insults.

 

[Mikesla]

Hi...

I agree with on that the programs are more complicated, but even so quailty is based on patience. Today the reason for the things that have gone wrong is that you can get patches, so this has allowed many gaming companies to not care so much about qulity for first release.

The reason why I mentioned about the old days in programming is that it's all about programming diciplines, and pratices. Todays programmers, and companies are looking to the money, and the attitude is 'we'll fix it later with a patch'.

Back in those days the programming was far harder because they only had 640k (at best 256k), but sid, and others really shined because they could produce something incrediable with very little.

You are so right about nipping the QA question is the bud....

Anyway...Later!

 

[Civslacker]

Yeah games have got more advanced, but then so have profits. I'm with Mikesla on this one. It's utterly shoddy to be letting out something with this many faults just to cash in on Christmas. And I don't see the problem with blaming publishers AND programmers - IMO they're both responsible.

I bought Civ IV not for the companies track record, but because I enjoyed Civ II. Don't think I could name you another Firaxis game

Oh and i'm all for patches. But they should act as an enhancement rather than a band-aid. No game should need a patch to run.

I wouldn't blame this debacle on the modem era - remember it's given us online gaming and excellent modding communities for many games.

 

[Philips]

The problem is that releasing a beta version and fixing it later with patches (or not) works financially. Software makers have convinced people that implied warranty of merchantability shouldn't apply. Commercial software shouldn't be sold "as is" but should be held to the same standards as other consumer products.

 

[EricTred]

The problem is that releasing a beta version and fixing it later with patches (or not) works financially. Software makers have convinced people that implied warranty of merchantability shouldn't apply. Commercial software shouldn't be sold "as is" but should be held to the same standards as other consumer products.

I couldn't have said this better myself . well put Phil...

 

[Fatty]

I couldn't agree more with the general sentiment of this post (companies rushing out games without proper testing and depending on patches after the original sales count).

The only way to stop this unnerving trend is to stop buying video games from companies who engage in this practise. Patches to make the game run a little better... great. Patches that fix typos or add scenarios... fantastic. Patches that are required for a game to run, period... utterly unforgivable.

Like i've said in other posts. This is the last game that i will purchase for the PC.

Fatty

 

[baasacJak]

I'm sorry guys, but the vast majority do not need the patches for the game to run. So all this stuff about they release on the premise that they can patch it is just nonsense.

The problems are cause by it not being possible to test the program on every single hardware/software/driver permutation. If they tried to exhaustively test every possible pc configuration, you'd find the game would never be released because they can't test as fast as manufacturers can churn out products.

Please don't swear at me Eric, I'm just trying to make a point based on fact.

 

[Akhenaton]

The problems are cause by it not being possible to test the program on every single hardware/software/driver permutation. If they tried to exhaustively test every possible pc configuration, you'd find the game would never be released because they can't test as fast as manufacturers can churn out products.

This is based on the assumption that the problems faced by all of the users are hardware problems, caused by faulty HW or something which is not designed to industry standards and specifications.

This is highly unlikely, because it would necessarily mean that the machines which have CivIV crashing also crash other games which are all coded to the same assumptions about HW, their drivers and the OS components.

The fact that the exact same instability problems are occurring accross wide range of HW which is in significant similar gaming use, in addition to that patches have indeed affected the situation and in addition to Firaxis (according to 3rd hand information in forum posts) has acknowledged bugs, mean that user's HW is to blame in a small minority of problems.

Also, the whole system is built so that each party is responsible for design to a conforming criteria. HW is desinged to meet Intel and standards organization specs (such as bus interfaces), drivers to meet OS certification (WHQL, DirectX compatibility) and finally games to interface the OS layers (DirectX mainly). If a game crashes (and not a driver/whole OS), then the primary assumption is that there is a bug in the game. Only if the game is able to tell directly (in an error message) or the coder through debugging it, that the OS didn't complete a system call as specified in the relevant SDK (mainly DirectX again), then they can say that it's not their problem. The assumption after standard troubleshooting bad HW/OS is always that the bug is in the app, not the other way around.

Sure, it is difficult to code a game to be fault tolerant, so that it will gracefully handle all relatively likely error conditions occurring from the OS side, but it is possible, because it is done with high security software. It's basically a cost+speed/stability tradeoff, which is different in games and mission critical software. This is however not relevant to this discussion, because there are bugs in the game that crash it even on good HW which meets the specs and runs other things to their satisfaction.

 

[Fatty]

I'm sorry guys, but the vast majority do not need the patches for the game to run. So all this stuff about they release on the premise that they can patch it is just nonsense.

The problems are cause by it not being possible to test the program on every single hardware/software/driver permutation. If they tried to exhaustively test every possible pc configuration, you'd find the game would never be released because they can't test as fast as manufacturers can churn out products.

Please don't swear at me Eric, I'm just trying to make a point based on fact.

There's a poll in the general discussion where 15% of people said that the game runs but requires major patching still and another 4% said they can't get the game to run at all. This implies that almost 20% of the people who bought this game didn't get what they wanted (from a technical standpoint). Now the numbers might not be a perfect representation of what's going, but even if the number is 15% or even 10% of people can't get the game to work probably... it's way too high.

I'm sure there are a million permutations and combinations of hardware configurations. No one said making a video game is easy. But if you can't produce a game that works properly, out of the box, for more than 98% of the people... maybe you shouldn't be making video games.

Fatty

 

[Mikesla]

The blame game gets so many no where. My original post is to maybe bring back to the gamer the sense that the purchase they have made is a quality that at least meets the minimum requirements of the game itself, and runs correctly right out of the box.

My system meets, and exceeds the minimum in hardware, and software.

Now with that being said, a persons system depends on what else they may have installed such as firewalls, virus software, and even theme packs that change the shell32.dll / shellstyle.dll of the system appearence (btw is a pain in the rear end so be carefull of this)..

But if a person has the minimum, or even matches or exceeds the requirements should be able to play the game right out of the box period.

I have read the FAQ for soulutions, and it requires me to mess around with my Bios settings...I know enough about my bios so I can tinker with it, but most people don't, and some other solutions are to go into your Registry, and mess with that....please, we shouldn't have to screw with these things.

If I bought a piece of software that wiped my HD every 1 in 100 times of use...do you think I would even run this software ever again? I would never buy any software from that company again or even buy anything that had the same programmers names listed.

Who's to blame for this? It's almost like there should be a recall done on the game, pull the entire lot from all the stores until they can get a workable, out of the box copy that instead only works for 20 out of 100 people.

Funny thing is that the 20 people it did work for out of the box can't run it now because of the patch, so what does that actually tell you?

Crazy thing is that Firaxis new full well that we the Civ fans would snap this up in an instant. We know the in's, and the out's of looking at the game box for system requirements, we have met them to the letter....

I did my part, they didn't fullfill their end of the bargain. I got my copy before Christmas, I just got the internet less than a week ago so what does that tell you? My game cost over 70 dollars (after taxes...remember it was christmas, and I was hot for this next Civ game).

I got it working after the patch, love the game, visuals are nice, animation is fine. There are still glitches in the game but I can live with them, but what happens when I apply the next patch? Will the game run? I'd be smart to see what happens to you guys first before I would apply anything that they put out.

Thing is, there track record todate is 0 out of 0 in my books.


If I was one of the programmers of this title, and walked into a room full of Civ fans I would never let them know I had a part in this title, and I would personally be ashamed of it.....

Up to you folks to decide but I would be very, very careful in the future about buying anything from any company that does such a foolish thing which Firaxis has done. Better yet, wait for a couple of years, go to the bin box at your local gaming store get it for $9.95, and have full cofidence it will work right out of the box.

Either way, I still love the Game...Question is what will you do next time?

See you later....