Rumor about why the UI is the way it is.

[bbbt]

Seeing stories like the linked Glassdoor post makes me hope that a gaming journalist attempts to chronicle all what went on during this game’s development. Jason Schreier did a good story on what happened in Mass Effect: Andromeda’s development and it was extremely helpful in identifying why that game turned out how it did.

I must admit I'm also a little curious.

It was an 8 year gap between 6 and 7, longer than any other Civ. It still uses the Civ 6 engine, they didn't have to create a new engine (though that is sometimes faster than updating a legacy one).

Now Ed Beach talked about how they went to get sign off on the Civ-changing around the same time as Humankind launched/revealed they were also doing Civ-switching.

Which puts actual development start around the NFP launch. So about 4-5 years of development.

It feels like the game was under-resourced in development or something.

 

[AriochIV]

Game "journalism" these days is far too based on access and quid-pro-quo for any kind of expose to be published, except in a case where the development studio has already closed its doors. Nobody who had been granted inside access to a studio would dare publish anything uncomplimentary, lest such access be revoked. You have only to look at the stellar review scores for abysmal games to see this principle in action.

 

[protocol7]

Exactly, and they know to fly YouTubers around and give them all kinds of gifts and early access, but not technically hand them a big check that says "for shilling" in the memo field so that they can say they did not receive payment to advertise the game.

 

[Siptah]

The more trustworthy YouTubers made it quite clear in their early videos that the content was sponsored though, even if it wasn't sponsored by a pay check. Some added a visual disclaimer that said "Ad" or had this in the video title, while others just said it in the introduction to their video. It's hard to not be aware of the circumstances in the videos I've seen.

 

[Gorbles]

Game "journalism" these days is far too based on access and quid-pro-quo for any kind of expose to be published, except in a case where the development studio has already closed its doors. Nobody who had been granted inside access to a studio would dare publish anything uncomplimentary, lest such access be revoked. You have only to look at the stellar review scores for abysmal games to see this principle in action.

Stellar review scores for games you subjectively consider abysmal?

There's often a gap between critic scores and user scores, but this is hardly unique to video games (film is another great example, and the industry there is very different and in some cases a fair bit older than video games). There are also plenty of examples where mainstream gaming outlets have dared to give a less-than-perfect score to various video games, leading to outcries that the journalists simply Don't Appreciate Genius well enough.

It's complicated (and completely off-topic, really). Personal opinions on "games journalism" are often incredibly reductive and hard to argue with, as your opinion demonstrates. The only general truths are a) publishers are risk-averse, and not above being petty, and b) quid-pro-quo exists because humans are inherently flawed. And even this is me being reductive! There is no evidence that can be leveraged against the medium other than to state "it exists", and people that insist the entire medium is flawed are often doing so from positions of bias themselves.

 

[AriochIV]

That film journalists are nearly as corrupt is hardly any defense of game journalists. Fortunately both are becoming increasingly irrelevant, especially as regards reviews.

 

[Gorbles]

That film journalists are nearly as corrupt is hardly any defense of game journalists. Fortunately both are becoming increasingly irrelevant, especially as regards reviews.

Presenting an unevidenced claim as a truism doesn't make it so, nomatter how often it's repeated. See: hard to argue with.

That said, I absolutely support more and different reviewers in general. But I think "the grass is always greener" is a trap many consumers fall into bearing in mind most people who do it for anything approaching a job have to somehow make a living from it, and those that don't are going to be more hobbyist / amateur than the former group.

Good case in point: user reviews in general.

(this isn’t to say that user reviews aren't important, but they serve a different role in general - similar to people doing it from a casual / gamer perspective)

Additional tangent: it's like high-level players vs. games designers. They actually complement each other when it's often framed more antagonistically. And some seek to exploit that perception of antagonism (usually to profit it off of it, ironically).

 

[Mezmorizor]

An middle persian word that when transcribed into english is ten letters long and consists purely of S, H, A and N being misspelt in the code with a single missing H seems like such a minor issue. I don't think it's indicative of any broader issue because what normal person would reasonably be expected to catch that mispelling until it became more hassle to fix than it's worth?

This is an absolutely crazy take and it really worries me that this is apparently prevalent in software based off of this topic. There are 10,000 ways to spell words incorrectly. There is one way to spell words correctly. It absolutely is a big deal to spell things properly because it's not a question of if misspelling words will cause needless bugs. It's a question of when and how nefarious they will be.

Pick a dialect, use spell checker and linters, and don't let things pass code review if there are typos. Anything else isn't excusable. We're not talking about berating people for bad grammar and spelling in slack messages here. You will absolutely not remember "oh yeah when Bob wrote this database entry 30 months ago he spelled Worcestershire 'Wrocestersure' and kept it," when you need to call that entry again for whatever reason after not being touched for a while.

 

[bbbt]

There's often a gap between critic scores and user scores, but this is hardly unique to video games (film is another great example, and the industry there is very different and in some cases a fair bit older than video games).

That film journalists are nearly as corrupt is hardly any defense of game journalists. Fortunately both are becoming increasingly irrelevant, especially as regards reviews.

I'd say film and video game reviews are a pretty apples and oranges tbh. Or at least, I personally am more willing to use movie reviews (ala rotten tomatoes and the like) to make decisions while I lean on user reviews (ie steam) for games.

There's tons of movies that have high user ratings and low critics ratings. That's far more common than the other way around. I mean just look at a list of Michael Bay or Tyler Perry's movies an example.

Meanwhile I'm struggling to think of games that are highly regarded by users but got poor critics reviews. It's almost always the case that a game is more poorly received by the user base than the critics. Granted, that might be because no one is out there reviews "Sex with Hitler" and the like.

For movies, users and critics have essentially the same experience (movies are only a couple of hours). I think they just often value different things. ie moive critics largely hate tonal inconsistency - where a movie veers from wacky to serious and back. Audiences often don't really mind (again, see Bay and Perry).

For games, I think most users play the games far more before reviews than critics, who are giving more of an initial impression. I also think users are often more likely to give negatives based on details - ie there's a ton of negative user reviews for Civ that say "core of a great game and I'm enjoying but I'm giving it negative because the UI is bad and it was released unfinished". I think that would be a positive review with caveats for a game critic.

Other factors:

For anything 'controversial' user movie reviews are basically worthless, as they are easy to review bomb by people who have never seen the film, outside of Cinemascore (which polls people at theaters). You can see the difference in Snow White, which has 1.5 on imdb (bombed by "anti-woke" types), but a B+ from Cinemascore. (It currently sits at 47% from critics). Steam reviews are a lot more reliable as they are at least from purchasers and have a higher barrier to entry (and tell you if the game is returned).

The concept of 'arthouse' movies has been around for decades. The general audience isn't going to go see Moonlight no matter how highly it's reviewed. 'Arthouse' games, so to speak, are a pretty new concept, and the very existence of them seems to have riled up people initially.

Anyway, this ended up being sort of long-winded and off-topic of UI gossip, so I'll digress here.

 

[Gorbles]

I'd say film and video game reviews are a pretty apples and oranges tbh. Or at least, I personally am more willing to use movie reviews (ala rotten tomatoes and the like) to make decisions while I lean on user reviews (ie steam) for games.

I used it as a parallel because of the gap between user and critic scores - not because the difference trended the same way.

(but like I said, lots of examples where reviewers gave a "too low" score)

There are historic reasons for this (imo), but whether the gap is positive or negative to me is aside from my point. My point was the gap indicates that professional and hobbyist / casual reviews look for inherently different things. And that's fine.

For games, I think most users play the games far more before reviews than critics, who are giving more of an initial impression.

The reality would actually surprise you! But agreed on the off-topicness, just wanted to clarify the above bit mainly.

 

[tman2000]

This is an absolutely crazy take and it really worries me that this is apparently prevalent in software based off of this topic. There are 10,000 ways to spell words incorrectly. There is one way to spell words correctly. It absolutely is a big deal to spell things properly because it's not a question of if misspelling words will cause needless bugs. It's a question of when and how nefarious they will be.

Pick a dialect, use spell checker and linters, and don't let things pass code review if there are typos. Anything else isn't excusable. We're not talking about berating people for bad grammar and spelling in slack messages here. You will absolutely not remember "oh yeah when Bob wrote this database entry 30 months ago he spelled Worcestershire 'Wrocestersure' and kept it," when you need to call that entry again for whatever reason after not being touched for a while.

The word was spelled correctly in the same line of code for another tag. What probably happened was someone got an error, and rather than find the line of code calling the tag, they just altered what was being called to match and make the error go away. It's hard to explain otherwise.

 

[protocol7]

This is an absolutely crazy take and it really worries me that this is apparently prevalent in software based off of this topic. There are 10,000 ways to spell words incorrectly. There is one way to spell words correctly. It absolutely is a big deal to spell things properly because it's not a question of if misspelling words will cause needless bugs. It's a question of when and how nefarious they will be.

Pick a dialect, use spell checker and linters, and don't let things pass code review if there are typos. Anything else isn't excusable. We're not talking about berating people for bad grammar and spelling in slack messages here. You will absolutely not remember "oh yeah when Bob wrote this database entry 30 months ago he spelled Worcestershire 'Wrocestersure' and kept it," when you need to call that entry again for whatever reason after not being touched for a while.

Especially in _tags_, which are intended to be read by the program and associate things to each other. You can maybe say misspelling all the user facing text in your app is just good developers focusing on what matters instead (I doubt it, but okay..), but in all of my experience if you spell variable names, function names, and asset tags inconsistently you're going to have a bad time™ and things just aren't going to work.

 

[UWHabs]

Especially in _tags_, which are intended to be read by the program and associate things to each other. You can maybe say misspelling all the user facing text in your app is just good developers focusing on what matters instead (I doubt it, but okay..), but in all of my experience if you spell variable names, function names, and asset tags inconsistently you're going to have a bad time™ and things just aren't going to work.

Yeah, the XML tags are the equivalent of variables in code. The number of variables I've accidentally called teh_name or colunm through the years. And stuff like tags, code, and xml files are not really things you can run through a spell checker just due to the amount of code short-hand. Sure, in code files if you see it you can probably run a search and replace on it all, but you have to realize it first.

There's enough to be legit annoyed with, and cases where the typos in tags actually impacted why a certain ability didn't trigger, that worrying about things that actually work is counter-productive and nit-picking for the sake of being pedantic more than anything.

 

[Gorbles]

This is an absolutely crazy take and it really worries me that this is apparently prevalent in software based off of this topic. There are 10,000 ways to spell words incorrectly. There is one way to spell words correctly. It absolutely is a big deal to spell things properly because it's not a question of if misspelling words will cause needless bugs. It's a question of when and how nefarious they will be.

To be clear, we're discussing that isn't causing a bug and never will . . . unless somebody makes a subsequent change, which always has the potential to cause a bug, because, well . . . all changes do, theoretically.

 

[Elhoim]

Heck, a better example of the weirdness about the UI work is having icons in the game for things like extra policies, settlement cap increase and not using them, no need to dig the code for a misspelling.