So really where is this?

[Takfloyd]

Yeah, pretty much Civ 4.

Though that wasn't completely bug free and balanced at launch either.

The real issue is that we'd expect these things to be better this time, after Civ V brought in so much money that basic testing and bugfixing should have been done before launch. How hard would it have been to do a beta test like other companies?

When Starcraft 2 launched, it was in near immaculate condition. Extremely sophisticated AI, no bugs, balance was solid right out of the box. I daresay we should be able to expect the same quality from the genre-leading turn based strategy game.

 

[Gorbles]

Starcraft 2 also had a development cycle and budget that pretty much no other game on the planet had.

It was also criticised for being incredibly barebones and being a literal graphical upgrade of SC1, but those are more arguable (and RTS-fanbase specific) points

 

[isau]

Civ 4 is pretty good but also is +2 expansion packs up on Civ 6. For a first release, this game is incredible. I'm hopeful the DLL tools come available soon and we can really dive into making the experience amazing.

I will admit one thing. It seems clear to me at this point that whoever is balancing Civ 6 doesn't have the same eye for game balance as the Civ 4 designers. But I play the game with mods to correct those things (tile yields in particular).

I will add that if you aren't enjoying 1 UPT, try it with my mod "Rocketboots" that gives every unit +1 Movement. I can't not play the game without that mod now. It doesn't fix everything but it does reduce a lot of the tedium and traffic jams.

 

[Takfloyd]

Starcraft 2 also had a development cycle and budget that pretty much no other game on the planet had.

It was also criticised for being incredibly barebones and being a literal graphical upgrade of SC1, but those are more arguable (and RTS-fanbase specific) points

Much of that budget went into ridiculous amounts of marketing, state-of-the-art cinematics and the massive single player campaign.

Civ VI has none of that. It has a single game mode and a single cinematic and that's it.

It should not have been hard to at least launch the game relatively bug-free and without extremely obvious balance exploits. How the heck did horsemen being better than swordsmen in every single way and costing less make it into the game? Did NO ONE at FIraxis take even 5 minutes to consider basic unit balance? And that's not even getting into the "horseman economy" part of it...

 

[Gorbles]

Much of that budget went into ridiculous amounts of marketing, state-of-the-art cinematics and the massive single player campaign.

Civ VI has none of that. It has a single game mode and a single cinematic and that's it.

It should not have been hard to at least launch the game relatively bug-free and without extremely obvious balance exploits. How the heck did horsemen being better than swordsmen in every single way and costing less make it into the game? Did NO ONE at FIraxis take even 5 minutes to consider basic unit balance? And that's not even getting into the "horseman economy" part of it...

I don't think you have the evidence to support your assumptions on what budget was spent where.

 

[Ryika]

When Starcraft 2 launched, it was in near immaculate condition. Extremely sophisticated AI, no bugs, balance was solid right out of the box. I daresay we should be able to expect the same quality from the genre-leading turn based strategy game.

Completely inaccurate.

The AI in SC2 was and still is a joke. Especially with how easy SC2 is to understand in terms of mechanics the AI in that game was and is ridiculously useless, it follows pre-defined build orders and cannot deal with being harassed by the player, it cannot react to being interrupted, it's ridiculously bad. The original highest level SC2 AI ("Insane") required Yield Bonuses (it gained 7 Minerals instead of 5 for example) and was still easily outmatched by players who understood some basic build orders and had learned to play the game on a mechanical level. Even compared to Civ VI the AI looks completely pathetic - which is fine, because the game is really not designed to be played against the AI in an "equal vs. equal"-setting, and the SP-Campaign avoids these problems by just creating scenarios where you stand against overwhelming numbers. The only reason why the AI isn't as obviously bad to new players is the fact that you need to get to a certain level of mastering the base mechanics to see how terrible the AI actually plays in comparison. A luxury that TBS don't have.

Balance was TERRIBLE when the game was released. Steppes of War must literally be the silliest map any RTS has ever had in its map pool, and most other maps were not balanced either, instead heavily favored one race over the other two races. Overall, Terran was dominating the professional scene (winning ~50% of the professional tournaments in 2011) because with proper micromanagement they were insanely strong, while at the same time Protoss dominated lower leagues because of how ridiculously easy it was to play.

No bugs? One of the three races consists of only bugs. 8) ...but joking aside... just read through the patch logs and you'll see tons and tons of bugfixes. Not that many gameplay-related bugs, I'll give you that one, but the game still had tons and tons of bugs in its systems, many of which were the same type of obvious problems that we see in Civ.

 

[ExpiredReign]

Taken in isolation, sure, Civ VI is just like any other 4X game released, full of quirks and bugs and annoyances.
However it shouldn't be taken in isolation. Firaxis has the entire history of Civilization games to fall back on, including all the DLC and modded creations that "fixed" all the previous faults that we are now still seeing.

For the life of me I can not understand why they chose to release this game with a poor AI when Vox Populi (formerly Community Patch) has already made an awesome AI that knows how to do things properly. If a handful of part-time coders can create a working AI that challenges you, why can't Firaxis? My personal opinion is that are making this for the lowest denominator and hoping no one notices.

Add on to this the infuriating UI oddities and stupid balance decisions and this is a game waiting to be fixed. Probably by us, again.

 

[need my speed]

Civ IV launched with nearly the same complaints we see today (there is a nostalgia thread here somewhere).

That isn't true, and that thread actually 'proves' it in a roundabout way; the thread lists examples of complaints about Civilization IV's graphics and Civilization IV's combat AI.

It lists no complaints of fundamental game mechanics, of diplomatic AI's, of the UI, of the Civilopedia, and ever so on.

 

[kornelm1978]

So no more new versions of Civ should be released then?
Personally I didn't like Civ IV (unlimited stacking is such a broken mechanic these days) but I appreciate that a lot of people think it is the best Civ. That said if they went back to unlimited stacking I would pass on that game without feeling the need to go to the forums and bang on about it every time a new version was released

Really funny - one upt is broken these days - give me another popular title with one upt. Apart form the other Firaxis work of art - Beyond Earth. I can give you numerous titles without one upt - all Galactic Civilizations, Stellaris, Europa Universalis (obviously, this is not 4x, but the war is the same kind), Endless Space, Endles Legend (on strategic map to 8 unist per tile - and you have got tactical figth between armies of 8), Total War (again, this is not 4x - but the rules of war are the same - you move whole armies on strategic map and then just tactical battle). Give me one succesful title. This is not obviously argument against 1upt (I know what will people saying, not undersatanding my post), but argument that these days 1upt is not popular and nobody caught that "great" idea after few years after after civ 5. To digress - one upt is not good idea

 

[Francis Xavier]

Civ IV didn't also change the game as drastically as V and VI had relative to predecessors..

 

[Nefelia]

Civ 4.

The only severe problem I had with it was graphics related, and it's fair to give Civ 4 a pass on that because graphics standards... weren't back in the day.

I loved Civ IV as much as I loved any other Civ game, but yeesh to Stacks of Doom and The Slider. The genre has since evolved for the better.

Looking back, the only thing I miss about Civ IV is Fall From Heaven.

 

[kornelm1978]

And one more thing - many of you are saying that CIV had always bad starts before VI. Not really - I don't know if you remember the times without interent and patches - that was civ 1 and 2 surelly times. Pretty sure about the the same in civ3, patching whole game not a civ trend then . So even if you believe that 4 and 5 were not working at start - it is saying that only recent civilizations do not work, just 2 out of 5. And why you (many of you) say that Civ must be always bad at launch. Can that be excuse? It cannot, especially that we were assured that the game will be good at start

 

[TruthfulCake]

Starcraft II is the perfect example as to why games shouldn't stay in development hell forever. For a game that took 3 years to release after announcement, the launch was not less exploit-ridden than Civ VI, nor did it release with an intuitive UI. In fact, I think the main menu alone has undergone 3 overhauls since release due to user feedback.

Firaxis released Civ VI within a year of announcing it, so compared to Starcraft II it will have more than 2 years to gather user feedback and refine it before it reaches that 3-year-post-announcement landmark. It might be the case that this discrepancy was caused by Blizzard announcing Starcraft II too early, but regardless, Starcraft II stayed in the pre-released state for way longer than it should. And the point is that, delaying its launch did not fix the problems or make the games "finished".

With patches pretty much guaranteed, and with bugs and exploits being a constant on release, I support the release model of Civ VI, because players will always outpace the developers in finding exploits due to our sheer number. Besides, there are definitely many players that do not mind the early little bugs - what matters to them is getting to try out the new installment in the franchise they love. Ultimately this is a model that benefits many players and the game developers - a symbiotic relationship that is enabled by releasing a game as soon as it is largely functional.

For the very vocal minority who wants the game they purchase to be "finished", nothing forces them to buy the "unfinished" games on at launch. They can wait as they claim they wouldn't mind to for the game to be "finished, like say for 3 years. Then they can buy a "finished" game which, thanks to the early release, will be much cheaper by then. I don't see how the current release model harms this group of people either.

 

[kornelm1978]

No

We all came into the release knowing the game wasn't "finished," in the sense that, we know there are going to be DLC and we know there are most likely going to be two expansions to the game. So this is the foundation. And I think the foundation is very strong. When it reaches its final form, this will be an amazing game.

For me, I don't have any problem with the release, even knowing that the first version will have issues and will be patched. I like this game. I can spend many, many hours playing it. I have been waiting for it to come out for years. Since I was going to buy it, I'd rather be able to just get it now, and play along as the game develops.

Finished - means playable with all functions working, that is what I expected. Expansions - the word says for itself - should add new features. Should extend the life of the game and keep you wanting play, by adding new aspects. But the role of expansions is not to make game playable. Enhancing AI is not the role of DLC!!!

 

[TruthfulCake]

No


Finished - means playable with all functions working, that is what I expected. Expansions - the word says for itself - should add new features. Should extend the life of the game and keep you wanting play, by adding new aspects. But the role of expansions is not to make game playable. Enhancing AI is not the role of DLC!!!

The game is playable with all functions working, though. Do those functions behave erratically sometimes? Yes. Do those functions cause exploitable side-effects when interacting with each other? Absolutely. It is undeniably functional and playable though. To insinuate otherwise means to take on the burden to prove that the game cannot be finished the way it is right now. And players including myself have beaten the game time and again without suffering more than a couple of minor annoyances.

If anything, johnnybaseball's definition of "finished" is way less generous than yours, since he acknowledges the inevitability of DLCs and patches.

 

[kornelm1978]

The game is playable with all functions working, though. Do those functions behave erratically sometimes? Yes. Do those functions cause exploitable side-effects when interacting with each other? Absolutely. It is undeniably functional and playable though. To insinuate otherwise means to take on the burden to prove that the game cannot be finished the way it is right now. And players including myself have beaten the game time and again without suffering more than a couple of minor annoyances.

If anything, johnnybaseball's definition of "finished" is way less generous than yours, since he acknowledges the inevitability of DLCs and patches.

You cannot deny that almost all, even those loving game, expect patches and DLCs. And on that one thing there is consesnus (uff, all agree) - the game needs extensive patching. Not minor issues, but major update. Almost all, just after realese expect imporvements and DLCs. That should not be the state just after release, people should really fully enjoy game, and wait for DLCs when they are liitle bit bored, after let's say year.

 

[TruthfulCake]

You cannot deny that almost all, even those loving game, expect patches and DLCs. And on that one thing there is consesnus (uff, all agree) - the game needs extensive patching. Not minor issues, but major update. Almost all, just after realese expect imporvements and DLCs. That should not be the state just after release, people should really fully enjoy game, and wait for DLCs when they are liitle bit bored, after let's say year.

Oh, it's not my intention to deny that at all. People who truly love the game will always expect ways to improve it. I am one of those posters actively giving detailed feedback on ways to improve the certain aspects of game. But just because it can be improved doesn't mean it is not playable or functional, which is what you suggested in the first place. In fact, give any game that you think is already "finished" at launch - I bet people can still think of ways that the game can be improved.

Classic games like the first Starcraft? Still getting patches and improvements 11 years after its release.

 

[Nefelia]

You cannot deny that almost all, even those loving game, expect patches and DLCs. And on that one thing there is consesnus (uff, all agree) - the game needs extensive patching. Not minor issues, but major update. Almost all, just after realese expect imporvements and DLCs. That should not be the state just after release, people should really fully enjoy game, and wait for DLCs when they are liitle bit bored, after let's say year.

The reality of PC gaming is that complex games are not released as a flawless product. You can accept this reality, or you can rail against it, but it is not going to change any time soon.

The fact is that the product needs to be shipped at some point, and once the producers have ironed out the game-breaking defects (crashes, stalls, mal-functioning features and graphics) further in-house testing and fine-tuning becomes the least efficient option. As it stands, the game works. Many are having a good time exploring the different mechanics and familiarising themselves with the minutae of the policy cards, tech/civic trees, and testing strats and starts regardless of the AI flaws and (completely avoidable) exploits... all the while providing useful feedback to Firaxis.

I see nothing wrong with that.

 

[Francis Xavier]

There's really nothing broken in the game as it is now. The game is polished and is fairly-much bug free. It's almost literally saying the wrong thing to say it has so many bugs. There's no key or minor feature advertised missing.

Diplomacy AI, AI difficulty / intuitiveness - these are all adjustments, not game-broken bugs.

Exploits happen in literally every game. These are patched out. They're created from things working as intended independently then when combined together with other elements getting an unintended result.

 

[Francis Xavier]

I'll give a good example of what's going on here, me and a good friend of mine both bought the game. He had the game first and talked to my other friend about it before I got it. From someone whose played since Civ II:

He told my friend "The game is basically impossible past King difficulty, the AI is ridiculously overpowered, they cheat so bad that you just can't overcome them and player traits don't affect the game at all. The games pretty broken."

Then I got the game, and only ever started on Immortal / Deity. We played a game together multiplayer and he sees the way I start the game and he goes "oh, I never thought of approaching the game like that." and changed his "broken" idea.