Starting to feel a lot of sympathy for Civ5 devs

[UKScud]

If computers were as diverse when Civ I came out as they are now, you can bet Civ I would have issues. It's very difficult to release a game that will run perfectly on every computer now because that would entail making a game that will run on the dinosaurs that, judging by the myriad problems, it seems a quarter the board still uses, and bleeding edge computers. Not to mention the amount of components that could causes compatibility issues.

Fair point, and perhaps I should have been more specific...I'm mostly refering to my own issues with the game play. I'm more than willing to accept that often the hardware issue is difficult to deal with, and yes, that is the sort of thing that has to be dealt with after release...no I'm refering to base gameplay issues...

 

[fantsu]

I feel sorry for them too, but they probably don't.
They are at the beach drinking cocktails or waxing their new Lamborghinis right now.

 

[YoHo]

One thing to remember to is that the difference between Civ3 and Civ4 was relatively small.
Yes there were changes, many of them, but a lot of the basics stayed the same. Whereas Civ3 was very much different from Civ2.

You could make the argument, given that Civ3 is generally not well received among the gamut of Civ games that CiV suffers the same problem.
It represents a major shift rather than a minor one and is suffering all the same problems.

Another example everyone will get.
Civ3&Civ5:Civ4::Windows Vista:Windows7.

This is not a defense of what they released, just giving an example of how often this kind of thing happens in the real world.

 

[UKScud]

It represents a major shift rather than a minor one and is suffering all the same problems.

True. I don't recall being quite so ticked off then. Perhaps it was because I was a hopeful 20-something then, and a grumpy 40-something now. I know I'm a lot less tolerant of major shifts now than then...

...but the more I think about it, I'm reminded of that oft-quoted quote about something being perfect when there is nothing left to take away. Now Civ4 was by no means perfect...I don't think there was much to take away though...perhaps adapt and implement in a slightly different way.

On the other hand, Civ5....?

 

[foot0s]

Well, whatever developer has the backbone to wait until a game is ready. I don't know much about Valve to be honest. I at least respect Blizzard for their quality games.

Arenanet perhaps.

 

[afa2000]

I bet they just hold all the good stuff for releasing it at new expansions and earn more money.

 

[Doctor Phibes]

I bet they just hold all the good stuff for releasing it at new expansions and earn more money.

I'd like to think that, because it implies there is good stuff. But it looks like (and this is not my conclusion only) the core engine is broken. You just do not hold that in reserve. If you have got a great spectacular tactical AI system then you want people raving about it from the word go, because you are now the ne plus ultra (which Civ used to be).

But I suspect they are holding back 'good stuff', yeah - this will mostly be extra civs right now, like the Babylon thing (extra money for 1 civ, what is that about?), and I'm sure lots of other groovy stuff. But the core algorithms? Nah.

 

[sgrig]

I played all the versions of Civ and all the expansion packs since Civ1, so I was definitely going to buy Civ5. I only played the demo to make sure my laptop can handle it. When I first played it, I got the impression that it's overall good, but just too rough round the edges - something that can be fixed with patches. However the more I play it, the more I'm convinced that much of the core is broken - the game is just not that much fun any more. In order to fix it they need to re-do much of the game, and that's not going to happen. My only hope is that there is going to be a complete make-over mod that will resolve many of the issues.

 

[Adam7Eight]

I bet they just hold all the good stuff for releasing it at new expansions and earn more money.

They wouldn't be earning any money from me then.

Example: If the resource and never-ending peace bugs aren't fixed before an expansion, I won't be buying it. Promising me those fixes in the expansion also means I won't be buying it.

 

[Davor]

I feel no sympathy. Yes I have no idea how to make a game, and no idea what they go through. But as the saying goes, no sympathy for me, I can't give any sympathy for them.

As to releasing the game early, there is only one company and game that I can overlook for releasing 1/2 a game early to make money. If they didn't do this, then the game would have never been released.

They also manned up on the forums as said they will do everything they can to make a complete product and maybe even more. They are a 2 man or 3 man company with a very small budget. Firaxis is what, a way bigger company with a built up reputation. There is no excuse. Hell they can't even man up.

At least Stardock and the other company I can forgive at least man up. These guys can't even man up to their own product.

I just can't understand why lots of people here make excuses for Firaxis, but will not give these other companies a break and complain about them.

 

[Songkok]

I have heard from several un-named sources that they play tested the game but still released the pre-beta game anyway. Hopefully they will patch it over to the real version slowly but surely.

From an un-named beta tester, he mentioned that the AI works better when he beta-ed it... so clearly what we have here IS a PRE-beta version. Nice work 2K. Good decision.

 

[JanissaryRush]

I feel sorry for them too, but they probably don't.
They are at the beach drinking cocktails or waxing their new Lamborghinis right now.

It is the executives who would be ripping the big rewards.

The developers would have spent a ton of hours frantically trying to get the game as good as possible for a release date that is way too early.

 

[Slimthrull]

The real problem here is that we all bought a copy. If everyone who has serious complaints had NOT picked up the game (myself included) THAT would have sent a far more powerful message to the producers.

But in this day and age, its how things work. Companies ship unfinished product, we buy it up, complain, and it is all eventually (hopefully) fixed with patches. The companies are fine with this as it gets them money. We're obviously fine with it (otherwise we wouldn't buy the games). So until something changes, that's the way things will be. (With the possible exception of Blizzard. They don't tend to ship put unfinished product. Which, among other reasons is why I tend to buy from Blizzard more than any other company. )

 

[jdp29]

Blizzard isn't evil, and they do release finished games for the most part. However, the Real I.D. fiasco (Termed Real Internet Disaster by a Wow poster) convinced me to stop playing WoW for a while. While Blizz isn't evil, Bobby Kotick (The head of Activision) doesn't seem to like gamers very much, nor does he seem to respect them.
Most Wow players Blame Kotick for the fiasco.

 

[Ayt]

From an un-named beta tester, he mentioned that the AI works better when he beta-ed it... so clearly what we have here IS a PRE-beta version. Nice work 2K. Good decision.

2KGreg shot that strange rumor down. There is no reason to think this isn't the best AI they could come up with.

 

[Shakes]

The way things work is you have a deadline and you do your best but ultimately release what you've got. To do otherwise you risk ending up with a Duke Nukem Forever scenario where you just never finish the game.

 

[afa2000]

I'd like to think that, because it implies there is good stuff. But it looks like (and this is not my conclusion only) the core engine is broken. You just do not hold that in reserve. If you have got a great spectacular tactical AI system then you want people raving about it from the word go, because you are now the ne plus ultra (which Civ used to be).

I cant imagine how someone can tell if it's broken or not without taking a look at the source code. I think they just need more time to make AI smarter, because many things have been changed, like 1UPT and hexes.

I was talking about bringing back religions, vassals, the old good concepts from previous versions, and maybe even new cool concepts, like revolutions (actually, not new - see RoM). They know almost everyone likes it. But if vanilla was so good at release, we wont necessarily need to buy an expansion.

Example: If the resource and never-ending peace bugs aren't fixed before an expansion, I won't be buying it. Promising me those fixes in the expansion also means I won't be buying it.

I'm pretty sure it will be. I dont remember any major bugs at Civ IV vanilla when Warlords had been released.

 

[moscaverde]

I agree with the OP. As much as I dislike the new gameplay concepts (boardagamish) I'm sure they made the best game they could for the time available. The game lots of appreciation too. Jon indeed create a new Civ game, but just not the one for me.

The problem clearly are the bugs and issues with performance. Dunno how much these can be fixed, though.

 

[claffert]

I feel sympathy because they probably have to visit this forum every day and get flak from people who think it's still 1988 and PC games are released with no bugs

Wait, what? Did you actually play games around 1988? Games have always been buggy, however with the rise of the internet, patching has become much more common.

I remember buying games that had game breaking bugs where I could not continue without starting over. Where whatever caused the bug would continue to happen even if I backtracked and reloaded saved games. (Elder Scrolls: Arena, I'm glaring at you!) Restarting and reloading your last save was not an uncommon practice of games from that era. That often meant having to get out your manual or code wheel again for those old copy protections.

Though the history of game crashing was nowhere near exclusive to the Civ series, let me stroll down my memories of the former games.

I played the original Civ game. I had many crashes. I always tried to remember to save often. Sometimes I'd get the copy protection question wrong to restart the game... but usually I knew them. It took less time to guess than to find the manual though.

CivNet crashed even more often. The multiplayer was slow, unreliable, and made the game even more unstable than it already was without it. It ran under windows using the new graphics API that was the buggy grandfather of DirectX... WinG. On the plus side, this game taught me about TCP/IP ports, and how you had to have them open for some games... Port 1492.

I mostly skipped Civ 2... but Civ 3 certainly had it's share of bugginess...

Though, Civ 4 was probably the most buggy version of them all upon initial release. I imagine it was because it was the first with a 3D engine. I remember I frequently got video corruption that made all kinds of strange graphical defects appear in the game. Memory leaks would cause the game to become slower and slower over time, forcing you to have to stop and save the game, exit and restart the program.

I've honestly seen VERY few actual bugs in Civ V. I've had the game crash one time (which I don't know if that was the game's fault or not. I've seen a bug where in some occasions where Quick Save and Auto save features become bugged and each causes an unusual delay whenever they occur. Finally, I've seen a strange bug where the cursor becomes out of synch with the screen position that it's drawn, in some rare occasions where my output display was changed or re-detected by windows (as Windows *detects* my HDMI monitor/TV each time I turn it off and back on) when the game is in full screen windowed mode.

However, overall, it's been the least buggy version of Civ I've seen at launch. That's not to say that maybe some people have OS or hardware incompatibilities that might cause them problems, but it's been the smoothest for me.

But I digress heavily... the point is that I think people are really looking at the past with rose colored glasses if they think games were more stable 10 and 20 years ago than they are now, or that Civ 5 is more unstable than previous versions.

 

[Psyringe]

I dunno. I think that Civ5 is pretty botched up, and considering the sorry state of the AI and some very questionable design decisions, I'm skeptical whether it can be fixed. I don't really care whether this mess is the result of incompetence by Firaxis or 2K pushing them into an early release, nor am I even interested in finding out who's to blame. I'm just sad.

I like Civ4 a lot and I understand why they wanted to take a different direction with Civ5. I don't think it would have been possible to top Civ4's gameplay while staying in the same paradigm without confusing the hell out of potential new players. So I was prepared that I probably wouldn't like some of the decisions, and I'm not even angry about that, because I understand the reasons and after all, I knew I'd still have Civ4, I don't really need to depend on Civ5 being great or even halfway enjoyable. Streamlining the franchise now, building a solid redux version of the game to find new customers which could then be taken along toward more complexity in the next installments of the series, would have been perfectly fine with me.

But they streamlined and simplified the game and botched it up, and that's just something that makes me sad, because the result isn't just a game that doesn't cater to my own personal tastes, but a game that doesn't even hold together well in its own right. And for a game that bears "Civilization" in its title, that's just sad.