Patch went to 2k for testing

[MarkC1]

CivIV to be released shortly after beta testing for a few months to work out the bugs

Thanks Firaxis

 

[aquavit]

It's a lot worse than not quite perfect. I'm so tired of the constant sugarcouting going on in this forum. You make it sound like there's a minor bug that's little more than a nuisance. There are several major bugs in this game. They'd have saved us thousands of hours collectively of slamming our foreheads against our monitors trying to get this thing to work if they'd have waited until they got it done right.

Exactly, I don't understand the apologists on this board. You can reasonably expect a working game out of the box and this game is not that for too many people. It's not a bug here or there it's been a headache trying to get around MAJOR errors that prevent people from playing the game. We are criticizing Firaxis for having us pay to beta test their game for them not the quality of the game.

 

[King Flevance]

My main concern is in 3 days it will be a month from the release and they havent even 'rounded off a rough date' for us to expect the patch. Its basically telling paying customers having major problems 'Eh.. we will get to it when we get to it'
This is HORRIBLE customer support. Not to mention they didn't even tell us this until 3 weeks AFTER the game was released and we all bought it. I rarely have issues out of the box, you can call me lucky but I don't buy that. Yes, I have had games not work out of the box. We all have. BUT:

1) It wasn't as much as people act like it does happen. Or even close. In 15 years of gaming on PC I have had about 5 games not work out of the box. Minor bugs aside. Those ARE to be expected. I don't boohoo over my unit not having sound when he charges and what not. OR over the fact I had to make a minor adjustment here or there. These are major bugs with CIV 4. We have fellow customers that are programmers that can't figure out why it isn't running on their system. That's what they do for a living! Other programmers have figured out fixes but nothing a normal person that knows computer maintenance would know right where to go. They are talking about updating BIOS and crap like that. Alot of gamers don't even know what a BIOS is. They should, but they dont. Also, they shouldn't neccessarily have to. That's the purpose of 'tech support' which is non-existant to this game. Which brings us to number 2.

2) In the event the game did not work out of the box, tech support was readily available. Online chat to techies, open phone lines, multiple purpose emails, etc. Here you can email Firaxis and 1 phone number. Thats it. I appreciate the ideas some of you fellow civ'ers out there have come up with.

This 'update' from Dennis is not as much 'good news' more so than it is just 'news'. It is simply a statement of 'we are doing something' over 'we are trying to resolve this' and IMO is a lame 'update'.

I have been playing civ since it came out in the early 90's. Every time a new version or expansion pack came out I,ve bought it. If Firaxis had put out a note that due to further testing the release could be put back 3-4 weeks, the majority of players could have waited in order to play a game relatively free of bugs. I have read this forum for quite some time (first time poster though) and find it hard to believe that the producers and developers would not have known about some of the issues. Like I said, a short delay would have saved players a lot of headaches and firaxis its good reputation. Anyway, that's my two cents.

Ditto.