Measuring the success of BE

[Westwall]

Beyond Earth has actually managed to turn me off of the company's games for the foreseeable future.

The reason is simple: I don't feel they've sufficiently patched and balanced Vanilla, and now it seems like they're ignoring it.

With previous titles in the series, you'd usually get one last patch before the expansion launched with whatever they could put in the Vanilla game. But BE Vanilla seems to have been abandoned a lot sooner and a lot more quickly.

Had they had the good faith to put out another Vanilla patch, I'd likely have bought Rising Tide. As it is . . . I lost interest.

You're not missing much, trust me.

Firaxis is officially the company of XCOM.

Seems like everything else is just filler for them now.

 

[PhilBowles]

First off, I'm not saying Endless Legend AI is good. If that's your impression then let's make that clear. I don't even play that game. I'm talking about the tech system and how the way the AI works in civ5 would react to it. Whether or not Amplitude failed to make the AI competent in unit building or chosing the right tech is 100% irrelevant to me.

It's not whether they made the AI capable I'm taking issue with, I'm raising it as an example of a mistargeted design aim - taking the philosophy of designing for the player rather than designing within the constraints set by the AI's abilities generally. AI programming is probably comparable to that in most 4x games, but the results are worse because the game design is actively hostile to the AI.

Civ V falls into the same trap in some areas - the combat and diplomacy systems are more nuanced and better for the player than anything in older Civ games, but the AI notoriously can't handle them. In teching, however, Civ V is an advance over Civ IV in terms of giving the AI access to tech paths that make it easier to win non-military victory. AI coding hasn't improved, but the tech system is more AI-friendly.

I don't know why you're going on a tangent about quest and how you get heroes. Really I don't care about that. I'm not defending EL as a game, or its AI, I'm defending the idea of a removal of tech prerequisites as a mean of increasing choices rather than relying on beelines which is good for the player experience.

I'm giving examples of a general problem with designs that aim to 'improve the player experience' without reference to whether the AI can handle them. This makes no sense in a single-player game, as the AI is a fundamental part of the play experience.

Take Beyond Earth itself: I had a discussion on another thread with Roxlinn, who was insistent that there were multiple, varied routes to victory in BERT. That may be the case, but the reason I didn't stick with the game long enough to find out is that you don't need to use any of them to win. The AI is so incapable of presenting a challenge that I could just apply basic Civ rules ('expand ASAP, maximise health, maximise science') and completely steamroll the AI on the second-highest difficulty the first time I played a full game.

"Varying the player experience" by boosting the available tech or other play options is irrelevant if the AI isn't an engaging or varied enough opponent to keep the game interesting. It's one reason I struggle to go back to Civ IV after Civ V despite the greatly superior variety in viable early tech options in Civ IV - "rush the AI before it rushes you" or "build giant stacks to defend against AI stacks of doom" is a very repetitive play experience, and results in every AI opponent acting more or less identically, very much moreso than in Civ V where different AIs may pursue different strategies.

On that subject, you keep repeating having access to all techs of an era would make it more difficult for the AI to pick its key techs. I don't think it makes any sense and strongly disagree based on my modding knowledge of the Civ5 AI. When the AI has access to a tech it is geared for, it will chose it assuming the AI is correctly programmed to recognize the techs it needs. I'm sorry if Amplitude can't do something like that. Civ5 do this well. If it has access to a tech it considers key it will go for it. The problem is that the AI will ignore prerequisites to a tech it wants because it doesn't need the prerequisites (up to a point because of a propagation algorithm). A good example is Acoustics+Architecture being culture flavored but leading to a science flavored tech (ST) or Biology bein a warmonger tech hidden behind a culture tech.

I'm taking a 'user-end' perspective since I don't know the details of the coding, but the situation you describe seems an issue with the specific tech paths available, not the linear structure of the tree.

 

[Acken]

But I do agree with you that if the AI is incapable of using a system it's no good. My point is that I don't see why it cannot tech efficiently with EL tech system.
In civ5 the AI multiplies its current flavor (affected by stategies and triggers) with those of the techs, discounts for research time, and then pick one of the top 2 scores. If the strategies and triggers are correctly made then the AI should recognize a tech it needs. That's how it works in civ5 but sometimes some of them are hidden behind other techs and the AI will add a bonus to the prerequisite. I don't see how giving access right away to the tech it wants would hinder performance.

 

[WaffleWaffe]

I understand perfectly well why the developers do it -- the incentives are obvious. What I find crazy is the consumers who just accept (and even defend) this practice. As long as people accept it and continue to pay for unfinished products and "expansions" that are really just fixes, the developers will never have any reason to change.

We can't change the world today, but it would be a nice first step if people would stop defending Beyond Earth's shortcomings with the "it's only the first expansion, what do you expect?" argument.

Thank you. I thought I was alone in thinking like this. I try to research my games before I buy them, and I try to avoid pre-ordering (pre-ordering a digital product...) but in the case of BE I simply trusted in Firaxis' pedigree. Well, the base game is fairly bad, in my opinion, and I'm not going to be buying any more expansions or dlc for this game. It just seems, and this is as mildly as I can put it, pretty dumb, to invest even more money to possibly get a somewhat acceptable game. Firaxis can polish the turd but it will still be a turd.

 

[Gorbles]

Given that the launch of CiV was even worse, I'm surprised at consumers continuing to blame Firaxis for the trust they, as consumers, put in Firaxis.

If BE was the first shoddy Civilisation launch, sure. But it's at least the second, so honestly the "dumb" doesn't seem to fall on Firaxis, here. Make informed decisions before you purchase. Don't blame the company for your decision to trust the company. That's on you. In this day and age, everyone has the ability to read reviews on any game before they buy it.

 

[Gort]

Given that the launch of CiV was even worse

Nope. The playerbase of Civ 5 stayed pretty stable. Beyond Earth's nosedived to less than a tenth of its initial value.

 

[Gorbles]

Player retention does not reflect the quality of the product at launch. Unsure why you'd say so.

(also, CiV will have lost players over its lifespan. Initial launch and Sales peaks withstanding)

 

[Gort]

Player retention does not reflect the quality of the product at launch. Unsure why you'd say so.

(also, CiV will have lost players over its lifespan. Initial launch and Sales peaks withstanding)

No, Civ 5 has gained players over its lifespan - it's the fifth most played game on Steam right now, after all. BE's the game that's lost 90% of its playerbase across its lifespan.

 

[Gorbles]

CiV has lost and gained players over its lifespan, yes. One does not preclude the other.

Do you have a point, or are you just attempting to trip me up somehow? Your original point about player retention still has nothing to do with the initial launch of CiV.

 

[Gort]

I'm just correcting your misleading statements one after the other.

Civ 5 had a good launch - people bought it, played it, played it some more, then more people bought it, played it, and continued playing it in large numbers to this day.

BE had good initial sales since people trusted Firaxis to put out a good product due to their good experiences with Civ 5. They were let down by the bad quality of BE, so 90% of people stopped playing it.



(Civ 5 in green, BE in blue)

 

[Camikaze]

I think Gorbles was referring to the state of the game at launch, or the problems faced by the game at launch. There is no doubt that Civ5 retained more players, because more people liked Civ5 than liked BE. But there should also be no doubt that BE was by far a smoother launch, with far fewer game-breaking bugs and tech support issues than Civ5 at its launch. This was, of course, to be expected, given BE was building on a lot of Civ5 development.

 

[Gort]

Then perhaps he should have said he was specifically talking about technical issues as opposed to general game quality? The guy he was replying to wasn't talking about bugs or technical issues, and it's clear from the numbers that people continued playing Civ 5 throughout the launch period despite any technical issues they were experiencing, which indicates they found it to have value as a game.

BE - on the other hand - lost 90% of its player base through the launch period. It's laughably misleading to say that BE had a better launch than Civ 5.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

There is no question that civ5 vanilla launched in an incomplete state and with some game breaking issues. In that regards, it was released in a similar state to BE. So the real question is: since both games were released with big issues, why did only BE suffer? I think the answer that some give that "civ5 is great and BE sucks", is overly simplistic. I think a better explanation for why civ5 has maintained a strong player base while BE has lost most of its player base is this: BE disappointed civ5 players. If you think about it, BE attracted some new players but the majority of BE players at launch would have been veteran civ5 players. I am sure many of those civ5 players were excited for BE before the game was released. They were looking forward to a new civ game, one that uses their beloved civ5 engine, and promised a cool scifi setting. But when they played BE at launch, they found a game that did not meet their expectations and did not give them the same level of challenge, depth and strategy that they were accustomed to with civ5. So they got disappointed and turned back to playing civ5 that they love so much.

So, my conclusion is that BE specifically disappointed the civ5 player base that gave it a try but then went back to playing civ5.

 

[Bandobras Took]

Question: Civ 5 released in 2010. Why doesn't that chart show Civ 5's release, since that's the question here?

 

[Gort]

Question: Civ 5 released in 2010. Why doesn't that chart show Civ 5's release, since that's the question here?

Ah. My mistake - I hit "all data" and got that graph out of it. Must be a limitation of SteamCharts. Here's one from SteamGraph with the Civ 5 launch in it.

 

[Sonereal]

-Deleted-

 

[Gorbles]

I think Gorbles was referring to the state of the game at launch, or the problems faced by the game at launch. There is no doubt that Civ5 retained more players, because more people liked Civ5 than liked BE. But there should also be no doubt that BE was by far a smoother launch, with far fewer game-breaking bugs and tech support issues than Civ5 at its launch. This was, of course, to be expected, given BE was building on a lot of Civ5 development.

Thankyou, appreciated.

@Gort:

Technical or otherwise, the state of the product is the state of the product. BE was lambasted for numerous technical issues which people claimed were affecting overall perception of the game (source: threads on this forum and the official forums which I frequent - anecdotal - but in particular the 144Hz monitor issue). Yet here we are, defending CiV for reasons I don't understand.

CiV was a worse quality product on launch. There are reasons for this, of course, but there are reasons for BE having the issues it does (that don't come down solely to developer proficiency) . . . which repeatedly get ignored, of course.

As you can see from the graph you posted, there was still a 71% decrease (20,000 being 28.5% of 70,000 as per the second graph you provided) in active players within the first two years of CiV's lifetime. In other words, prior to the first expansion pack that had a longer development time (and therefore, greater budget) compared to Rising Tide.

At this point unfortunately I'm not sure what you're correcting. You selectively quoted a part of a sentence from one of my posts and tried to correct it in absence of context, citing statements that I have in fact, never made.

Your core statement is, and I quote:

"Nope. The playerbase of Civ 5 stayed pretty stable."

(which you later revised to gaining players throughout its active lifespan)

This core statement is incorrect, given the understandable dip following initial launch sales which actually affects most products on sale in the digital market. CiV is not unique in this regard, nor is BE. I'm not hating on CiV here, of all the Civilisation games I put the most hours into CiV before BE came along (well, possibly barring SMAC, semantics of naming aside). It is understandable that the activity around CiV dipped to 28.5% of its initial value, because this happens to a lot of games. BE dipped more, but that's due to reasons that we're currently not debating (and in fact have been debating in the past, to varying degrees of success).

I made a post expressing surprise at people trusting in Firaxis after the reception of vanilla CiV that you kindly backed up with concrete statistics (showing an initial crash that stayed level until the first expansion), and you attempted to correct me on this. I think, honestly, that you have some kind of agenda here because this pedantry is both incorrect and meaningless.

 

[Acken]

Nobody is debating that Civ5 dipped after its peak. Every game does this regardless of quality.
Retention is what comes in the months/years after.

Civ5 is/was pretty stable as far as active players go (it's obviously not the exact same people over time). And over 5 years even got an increase which is quite remarkable. You'll be hard pressed to find many games achieving thism

 

[Gorbles]

Agreed on all counts, but if I were to put my trust in a working product, CiV would not be the launch product I would put money on for subsequent releases.

 

[Gort]

CiV was a worse quality product on launch.

No, it wasn't. As evidenced by it retaining its playerbase to a far greater degree than BE.