The Failure of Civ 4

[Sirian]

The Civilization series has always differed from history in this important aspect. History is cyclical. History shows that anyone has a chance of winning in the end.

"History is cyclical"?

Human behavior has cyclical elements because we do not have a hive memory. Civilization (not the game) depends on the teaching of children, that collectively a society should pass on all its values, wisdom and lessons learned to the next generation. A single failure to do so can threaten to wipe out all the gains that any particular civilization has made.

This is why it is the height of folly to deliberately indoctrinate children with lies just to exploit them as unthinking soldiers in the cause of despots and zealots. Societies who care more about exploiting their children than loving them are not long for this world. Their ideologies are sickly and poorly rooted, and will not long survive when they clash with sturdier, more truthful concepts.

The cyclical aspect of history arises from when the chickens come home to roost. If a greater evil is allowed to take root and deliberately to destroy on a mass scale, then the hard work of countless individuals is wiped out and civilization itself takes a step backward. It then must rebuild and reclaim the lost ground, and the forward-backward tug-of-war often looks rather similar, one instance to the next.

Nevertheless, it is not cyclical in the strict sense. Time does not repeat itself. Time marches on.

All analogies ultimately break down and fail. Comparing something to something else that is similar can make gains, but it can also be a trap.

The Civilization series has always differed from history in this important aspect. History is cyclical. History shows that anyone has a chance of winning in the end.

Life is measured in human beings or humanity as a whole.

Human beings "win" if they live a meaningful life. What constitutes meaningful is up to each individual to interpret, as to whether, by the end of their life, their actions, thoughts, and lessons learned are something over which to be proud, or not.

Humanity as a species wins when it moves toward positive ideals: freedom, justice, cooperation, synergy, compassion, enlightenment.

Civilization (the game franchise) departed the land of reality from the first concept. The game is about a single consciousness controlling a nation for all of history. The game is about that single consciousness. Can that consciousness -- sentient or artificial -- maintain a continuous chain of control over a nation from birth to an arbitrary finish line?

This makes for a compelling game, but I think that you are overanalyzing it.

Civ is just a game, and it should play well as a game. One does not design a great game to render the first 80% of the game's duration as meaningless, that a player or faction who has been a loser all the way should suddenly be put back on even ground in the end game, arbitrarily. If that should be the case, then why play the early part of the game?


- Sirian

 

[apatheist]

Civ is just a game, and it should play well as a game. One does not design a great game to render the first 80% of the game's duration as meaningless, that a player or faction who has been a loser all the way should suddenly be put back on even ground in the end game, arbitrarily. If that should be the case, then why play the early part of the game?

Perhaps, then, the game ought to do a better job of indicating to you how and why your civilization is immune to the normal historical pattern of birth, growth, consolidation, stagnation, and decline. Civil wars and revolutions would be one way of modeling this, in that playing well would avoid them and playing badly would suffer from them.

 

[warpstorm]

You do better selling one unit for $50 than you do selling 4 units for $15 if you have middleman costs eating up $5/unit before you see your money.

Your numbers are way out of whack. I'd be shocked if Firaxis gets $10 a copy. The way the system works is the Publisher gives a major advance (millions of dollars in the case of a game like Civ4) to Firaxis. (This is typically spread out through the duration of the project on completion of milestones). Then the developer has to "earn back" the advance money before they start seeing profit. The publisher gives them nothing till they pay back the advance at the royalty rate (call it 10-15 percent of the sale price). Once they pay it back (90% of games never get this far), then they start earning royalties.

"The way publishers recoup their advances is a long perpetuated industry scam. That’s because advances should not be repaid from the studio's royalty stream. This way of repaying advances severely punishes studios who are working for a lower royalty. Imagine a studio getting just a 1% royalty (unrealistic, but I'm making a point). Let’s say this studio got a $2.5 million advance to make a game. This game would need to sell a GTA-like 8.3 million copies before the studio saw a dime of royalties. (This assumes the publisher makes $30 per game, after COGs.) By the time this studio saw it’s first royalty check, the publisher has gotten gross revenues of $250 million, meaning they’re at least $220 million in the green!

Although this is an extreme case with an unrealistically low royalty percentage, there's an unfair lopsidedness that applies to royalties that are common in the industry, with studios not seeing a royalty check even though the publisher has made millions in pure profits.

The point I’m making is that there’s no connection between a publisher’s profit on a game and the current standard method currently used by publishers to recoup their advances. Publishers have gotten away with installing a recoupment system that on the surface makes sense, but doesn't make sense when you look closer.

This is why most independent studios live from game to game, and milestone paycheck to milestone paycheck. Rarely can a studio accumulate enough in the bank to break free from this deep rut." -- www.GameMatters.com

 

[apatheist]

Bummer. I know nothing of the numbers involved (obviously). That system sounds a lot like the way most record companies work. It makes it sound pretty impossible to get the $5M-$10M it seems like a game like civ would require, at least in the current system. I will make the foolishly bold prediction that systems like this are not long for this world. Maybe they'll be able to do this for civ6.

 

[GoodGame]

@bluemethod,

Have to agree with you about the 'Linearity' issue, but obviously everyone does comprehend it and want to mod improvement.

I think CIV4's success will depend upon the aftermarket moding, like CIV3, but I bet it will do well.

Even re-releasing CIV3 with hyped graphics, a few rules tweaks, and broader advertisingl will at least turn a profit.

On Determinism---that would really just be a culture mod---to come back by city-flipping the weakest, most corrupt cities, without any power to do so. Or just alter the ethnic assimilation of captured cities-----lengthen the time needed for it to occur, and allow the civ whose citizens remain in the city to score points for that civ (kind of a diaspora---which who knows, maybe they get offered a new homeland).


I'm still looking forward to CIV4.

 

[troytheface]

i am suspicious of this post - i do not beleive that the original poster is indeed a "programmer". Although i will have to remember that in future posts- because it is apprently very easy to get people to read ur stuff and beleive u if u just say something like "and i program" - people are alot more trusting
than I.....
He talks about why this game will be a failure and then kind of sneaks in a push for ...Civil War? .....that is the most talked about old idea of all time
- that said - there is one point made - and i agree - that the game is using all these hardcore fans to test-which is a bad idea - Civ needs fresh blood- these ol cantakorous "and the railroad needs ..zzzzz " yes and the formula to create a ....zzzz"
using a homogeneous group for ideas is not - ...a good idea- however-using a group that is in the age/race/income that has been projected to be the ones that will buy the game seems more sound and creative- i would dump all these know it all history book readers types that get all worked up-

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

The only issues on which I agree with the author of this thread are:

1) Linearity/Determinist. Anyone who is familiar with my posts knows how much I hate the dreaded snowball effect. Although I don't think they have completely solved it in Civ4-I think they have come a long way in reducing it. Having a diverse range of unit promotions, a diverse range of terrain improvements, a need to fund your culture, and an ability to specialise your cities much more will all help reduce this phenomenon. Additionally, the change to the corruption system will help a lot in this regard too, IMHO. If Civil war is in too (and we don't know it isn't yet), then I think the 'Snowball Effect' could be all but binned in this iteration.

2) Religion. I really had high hopes for this element-in spite of all of DH_Epics warnings . Having generic, Realworld religions was always going to cause problems-no matter how generic you made them. However, now that Real World religions are in, I feel they truly dropped the ball in ensuring that they couldn't grow beyond their generic nature. Again, though, I am still reasonably hopeful that this element of religion can be improved either prior to release, or on the release of upcoming expansions.

That said, will the game do badly? I highly doubt it. Will these problems stop me from buying the game? Almost certainly not. In fact, I do believe this will be the most fun of all the Civ games to date!!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[warpstorm]

I will make the foolishly bold prediction that systems like this are not long for this world.

We can only hope. More money in the developer's hands means more and better games (and hopefully more variety in them).

 

[Vael]

Maybe I'm dense, but I don't see how a change that is solely at a UI level should require a rewrite of the whole game, especially if you designed it well from the beginning.

Well, that's the trick - it's much more than UI. The graphics engine is such a major part of a project that many games have half their programmers working on that alone. Virtually everything except game 'logic' has to be re-written when you make the switch from 2D to 3D - and that 'everything else' is a pretty huge amount of stuff.

 

[Atrebates]

instead of civ1, civ2, and civ3 released once every 5 years as ground-up rewrites, why can't they release an upgrade every year for like $15 that incrementally goes from civ3 to civ4 over the same period?.

The simple reason is that by only addressing a single issue at a time (a necessity given the short time frame) you tend to lose the coherence of the game over a long period.

Secondly at some point it becomes necessary to do a ground-up reworking to streamline the game, design the whole thing solely with certain aims in mind, to prevent an overly cumbersome goliath being created.

 

[apatheist]

Well, that's the trick - it's much more than UI. The graphics engine is such a major part of a project that many games have half their programmers working on that alone. Virtually everything except game 'logic' has to be re-written when you make the switch from 2D to 3D - and that 'everything else' is a pretty huge amount of stuff.

Many games like Doom 3, where they're pushing the technological envelope. I gather that civ4 is using an already-developed graphical engine. Granted, there need to be new models and art for that, but the game is just as 2-dimensional as it's always been; it's only the display that has changed. I figure that most of the investment in civ4 is in developing AI, creating art, and refining the rules (not expressed as a lot of code, but rather as a lot of play testing and code movement).

The simple reason is that by only addressing a single issue at a time (a necessity given the short time frame) you tend to lose the coherence of the game over a long period.

I think Photoshop is a perfectly coherent application, and it's been continuously and incrementally developed for a very long time. That said....

Secondly at some point it becomes necessary to do a ground-up reworking to streamline the game, design the whole thing solely with certain aims in mind, to prevent an overly cumbersome goliath being created.

I'm not saying they should never release a ground-up rewrite. I'm saying they should move the slider away from the one-off extreme. Expansion packs do that a little bit, but they can do it more.

 

[Sullla]

Civ4 hasn't been released yet (from what I understand, it's not even in a beta stage at this point) but it's already a failure? Gadzooks! This is news to me! Forget about waiting for the game to be finished, we'd better make up our minds about not buying this game right now!

 

[Vael]

Many games like Doom 3, where they're pushing the technological envelope. I gather that civ4 is using an already-developed graphical engine. Granted, there need to be new models and art for that, but the game is just as 2-dimensional as it's always been; it's only the display that has changed. I figure that most of the investment in civ4 is in developing AI, creating art, and refining the rules (not expressed as a lot of code, but rather as a lot of play testing and code movement).

You just hit the nail on the head here - Civ 4 is using an already-developed graphics engine. That means they have to build the rest of the game around that engine in order to make it work. It's not something you can simply swap in and out like parts of a computer. Their home-brewed 2d engine from Civ 3 is likely light years different from the new engine which another company developed- that's just how software works. It varies greatly from one developer to another, especially when the different developers focus on different things (graphics engines vs. games).

 

[apatheist]

You just hit the nail on the head here - Civ 4 is using an already-developed graphics engine. That means they have to build the rest of the game around that engine in order to make it work. It's not something you can simply swap in and out like parts of a computer. Their home-brewed 2d engine from Civ 3 is likely light years different from the new engine which another company developed- that's just how software works. It varies greatly from one developer to another, especially when the different developers focus on different things (graphics engines vs. games).

You're attacking a point I'm not making. I'm not saying they should have made civ4 an incremental upgrade to civ3. They couldn't, because civ3 wasn't designed that way. It may have been developed with the strict dependencies that you describe, but that was almost certainly more for convenience than anything else. Had they adopted this strategy from the beginning, they could have done a lot to isolate the dependency on the graphics engine, quite possibly to the point that the main game code was not aware of the graphics component at all, or was only aware that there was some such component, but with no strict dependency on it. They may have done this with Civ4. Wouldn't it be nice if your favorite custom units, mods, additional civs, maps, etc. for civ4 automatically worked on civ5, or worked with only a bit of tweaking? If the developers do one-offs, everyone who builds on their work must do one-offs as well.

 

[warpstorm]

Hmmm...that flies in the face of the marketing principle of planned obsolesence.

 

[worldbuilder]

Don't know apatheist if the idea of a modular civ game would please you where you can add/remove or enable/disable combinations of plug-ins like for example a crime plug-in where you would have an enhanced and more pronounced feature of (maybe even organised) crime displayed in the civ handling or a more complex religious model with varying characteristics and game effects for religion choices.
The problems with that always is getting the AI to cope with different game rules every time and not keeping a default style that can't adopt to or exploit modules with far reaching changes in game play.
If that can be fixed maybe it would be possible for Firaxis releasing a modular game and afterwards add-ons with new modules or game versions with added or refreshed interfaces in the core code to accept even more (complicated) rules plug-ins.

 

[Carver]

The problems of linearity and determinism that Bluemethod metions are real, but they've been in earlier iterations of Civ as well. Civ3 was a commercial success; thus, there's no reason not to think that Civ4 won't do at least as well. Civ4 should do better because, as others have mentioned, Firaxis is trying to broaden the audience - hence 3D and RTS-like features.

As for political correctness, I don't see very much of it in the game. PC might be the reason terrorism is out, and that is a deficeintcy. But as for the religions, I don't think htey should all be the same for PC reasons, they should all be the same for gameplay reasons. Religion is important vis-a-vis Civ4 because it establishes cultural affinities; different civs with the same religion are more likely to get along. I think people that want to see religious traits are too focused on the real world. Jadaism, Islam, etc. don't need to "look" the way they do in RL, they're just names to represent an overarching culture that transcends nationality.

 

[apatheist]

Hmmm...that flies in the face of the marketing principle of planned obsolesence.

Yes, yes it does. But it flies, um, right out of the face of subscription-based revenue streams. It's not exactly a subscription, but it's pretty close to it. In addition, if they want a mod community to build up around Civilization, they have to start thinking of the game as a platform as well. People don't like to build on platforms where they have to throw their work away with every iteration. They'll do it, sure, but they'll do it a lot more if they're assured of some degree of forward-compatibility, easy migration paths, and so forth. Look at it this way: making the game moddable means giving away a revenue stream already. They're risking that someone else will put together an expansion like C3C but give it away for free. They're taking that risk in order to achieve the potential for an even greater benefit. The same principle applies to incremental updates.

 

[Smash]

You want small/weak civs to be able make a "comeback" then bring back the caravan/freight unit and the spy UNIT of civ2.

Those 2 units were the great balancers of civ2.

 

[Belcarius]

@Bluemethod: Your logic doesn't make any sense. What you are basically doing is blowing three areas that could be better dealt with out of proportion and claiming that they will bring it crashing down.

Wrong.

Firstly, Linearity. What you are saying is that this doesn't model real history and won't appease history buffs. BUT "It's designed to appeal to hardcore fans of the series", and if you've looked at some of the threads on this website you'd know that they are concerned with these kinds of matters. But we're all still gonna buy it. And let's be realistic - Joe Average probably won't even know enough about the Civil War to want to play it. So that area isn't gonna destroy the game.

Secondly, Determinism. I'd like to see it fixed, but then, is Civ really the only game that sports determinism? Pretty much every strategy game out there prohibits people from making a comeback. Has that ever stopped them from being sucesses? What you should be saying is that the determinism will hinder the enjoyment of multiplayer, as few people will be prepared to play a long game which they are clearly losing. But then again, maybe they will. But that won't really see sales plummet.

Thirdly, Political Correctness. You've been using the proof by reverse logic here - since politically incorrect games do so well, Civ should be to if it wants to sell well. Nonsense. GTA isn't the only game that sells well you know. Does Star Wars Episode 3 (the number 2 selling game overall for this month) have political incorrectness? I agree wholeheartedly that they shouldn't shy away from putting things like terrorism into the game, but seriously, how the heck will not having it bring sales down?!! "Oh Waah, there's no ability to build an Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorist State. I'm gonna buy Postal 2 instead." Does that sound likely to you?

Incidentally, you said you were a developer. I get the feeling this is a bit of the tall poppies syndrome coming through here...