Why put out an unfinished game?

[Jharii]

I like me some BioWare. And Black Isle (R.I.P. ) and Arena Net.

Awwwwwwwwwww. Yes, Black Isle. Why did you have to bring them back up?!?!

 

[vandyr]

Awwwwwwwwwww. Yes, Black Isle. Why did you have to bring them back up?!?!

I know

 

[cr0ws]

Even more comical was the fact that many packages contained duplicates of DISK 1 on both disks, even though the second was labeled DISK 2. The latter happened to me as well.

LOL OMG they can't even burn their discs correctly!!! HEHEE! Did they took cocaine?

 

[ohioastronomy]

Cripes. Here are some of the original reviews for WoW on release:

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/worldofwarcraft/review.html

http://pc.ign.com/articles/572/572070p5.html

There is a difference between overloaded servers and a buggy release. By contrast, a lot of other MMOs went belly-up even without overwhelming player pressure.

In fairness, a lot of issues are dependent on machine. Civ 4 always worked fine for me, for instance, but there were a lot of people who simply couldn't run it at all, and I clearly remember that those complaints were common (thus real) on the boards at the time of release. It took awhile to get a stable patch.

But blaming Blizzard because their game was insanely popular is a different beast from blaming them for poorly designed software. I thought that was obvious; I guess not.

 

[Abegweit]

Really? What model? Because the issue spanned a huge gambit of cards, particularly since the issue was a compatibility issue with the chipset itself.

So, either you were one of the rare (unique, perhaps?) few without the issue or you are misremembering. Either scenarios is possible. But if you do just a little bit of searching, you will see that the issue was rampant.

It's tiresome to hear all this crud about "misremembering". You need to get off that kick.

FYI, I had an Xpress 200. Not exactly high-end even at the time but it did the job quite nicely.

 

[Jharii]

It's tiresome to hear all this crud about "misremembering". You need to get off that kick.

FYI, I had an Xpress 200. Not exactly high-end even at the time but it did the job quite nicely.

You need to be less sensitive. I covered both possibilities. You were one of the rare. You happened to have an old chipset. I was incorrect in my assessment that "all" ATI cards had this issue.

This does not change the fact that there were major issues with the release.

 

[vandyr]

Cripes. Here are some of the original reviews for WoW on release:

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/worldofwarcraft/review.html

http://pc.ign.com/articles/572/572070p5.html

There is a difference between overloaded servers and a buggy release. By contrast, a lot of other MMOs went belly-up even without overwhelming player pressure.

In fairness, a lot of issues are dependent on machine. Civ 4 always worked fine for me, for instance, but there were a lot of people who simply couldn't run it at all, and I clearly remember that those complaints were common (thus real) on the boards at the time of release. It took awhile to get a stable patch.

But blaming Blizzard because their game was insanely popular is a different beast from blaming them for poorly designed software. I thought that was obvious; I guess not.

Civ V got some good reviews too, but as I recall, those were "bad" reviews.

I can dig up some links and direct quotes from forums to help jolt your memory if you like. WoW's bugs weren't limited to unstable servers, but also bad code. Not knocking Blizzard though, as they were much faster than many other devs to correct the problems. Some devs are just atrociously slow, such as Mythic and Funcom

 

[RaXz]

Awwwwwwwwwww. Yes, Black Isle. Why did you have to bring them back up?!?!

Bullfrog

 

[Jharii]

Bullfrog

Bah! Magic Carpet and Dungeon Keeper were GREAT!

I see your Bullfrog and raise you Interplay and Bungie.

 

[ohioastronomy]

Civ V got some good reviews too, but as I recall, those were "bad" reviews.

I can dig up some links and direct quotes from forums to help jolt your memory if you like. WoW's bugs weren't limited to unstable servers, but also bad code. Not knocking Blizzard though, as they were much faster than many other devs to correct the problems. Some devs are just atrociously slow, such as Mythic and Funcom

I found it tough to dig up any reviews of the original game, so I'd be interesting in seeing more of them. I do hope that we can agree that the issue was primarily overcrowded servers (which was a big issue); you could wait a long time to login. That's really different from bad coding - as an active MMO player at the time it really was night and day.

Mind you, I quit when I got to the level cap in 60 days, so the game as a whole didn't hold my interest for long. So I'd be sympathetic to other critiques of Blizzard - but not ones which equate Civ 4 - like stability issues with the WoW launch.

The critiques of Civ 5 are different, I think, in a telling way: they focus on design and lack of polish rather than bugs, although the poor performance of the game is an issue on larger maps/slower speeds. But I would view Civ 5 as actually a step up in terms of stability from previous versions.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Hey TMIT. I still use the mouse for many tasks. The problem is that in civ5 using the mouse often requires you to travel a large distance. The one that really irks me is you press the tech notification on the right side of the screen, and the tech box pops up on the far left side of the screen. You have to go all the way across the screen, which is a long way on a high-res widescreen monitor. Same with building selections and their notification icons - moving the mouse across the whole screen again.

When you open a window like diplomacy overview or something, rather than putting the 'close' button nearby the open button (or even making them the same button would have been nice), you have to scroll to some tiny little text at the opposite side of the window to hit 'close'. Basic little issues like this have made civ5 quite a mouse-travel heavy game. Using hotkeys is a big advantage, but it shouldn't be as big as what it is in civ5. Effort has been put into streamlining the interface, but not much thought has been given to making it efficient.

I hope that if you still have influence with the devs, you are advocating for the people who have issues with its UI.

Yes, I agree on the mouse travel thing. Really mapping a key press to an action can't be that hard - certainly not as hard as making an engaging AI, perfectly aligning spawns so that it's less luck-based, or programming strong graphics + myriad gameplay decisions. Compared to issues like that, allowing for UI controls to be efficient should be relatively low-effort.

If I "still" have influence with the devs, you say..... Well, let's put it this way: my complaints about UI date back to early in my time playing civ IV (long before I knew V existed), and you've seen plenty of those complaints first-hand. It's not like I've hidden my complaints along these lines from anyone, ever. That should give you an idea of my influence on this matter .

As astounding as it may be for you to believe, a substantial number of people play this game to look at walls while moving icons. I imagine a similar number of people play Farmville for much the same reasons.

The fact of the matter is, money and development goes into avenues more people care about. I would also like for the UI to actually be better in substantial ways, but I don't expect the game to be that way just because I think it should be that way. The entire world isn't me, and I'm not a better person than other people just because I think my own preferences are superior.

Given the amount of time and effort that went into its design, that civ V drew an analogy to farmville from you should already be giving some pause! Whether or not you intended it, that's a pretty big slap in the face to civ V right there, although it's deserved.

Also, while this is about personal preference to a degree, it is ALSO about basic gameplay design 101. What's the most important thing about a game? Objectively: being able to play it. If you can't play it, there's no point in having it. Bugs that crashed the game or permanently altered it in unplayable ways existed on release, though are more rare now. That's a strike. Control flaws that allow you to lose units despite not giving inputs that should have allowed you to lose units are another strike.

I'm not going to say I'm a better person than people who don't care about these issues, but I AM going to say, definitively, that I am certainly less like a . This game purports itself as a turn-based STRATEGY game. The back of the box tells you about re-writing history etc. Forcing people to stare at walls does *not* fit the self-defined scope of this game at all. It runs objectively counter to it (there is no strategy in spending extra time to perform the same action - you could make a case that this is an active detriment to the execution of said strategy).

Civ V isn't in the "farmville and other clickfest facebook apps" genre. It's in the TBS genre, where inhibitive controls are not part of the defined gameplay, genre, etc. It might sound arrogant to say this, but people who actually want to play a game should be able to play it, especially if the game advertises that what they are playing requires strategy and thought. At least according to their marketing, this is CIVILIZATION V. It is *NOT* "repetitive menial task five". I think more highly of this community than to believe that the majority of it consists of players who have no problem with over half their gameplay being comparable to that of brain-dead actions. I would like to keep thinking that way, although if the majority of people here are really fine with the UI of EITHER IV OR V, it's not possible.

I also feel the need to point out that many much less-well paid, smaller games from years past and today have better controls than V. Heck, even civ IV with its god-awful control issues is slightly better. They couldn't even keep basic useful features from previous games!

 

[Jharii]

Mind you, I quit when I got to the level cap in 60 days, so the game as a whole didn't hold my interest for long. So I'd be sympathetic to other critiques of Blizzard - but not ones which equate Civ 4 - like stability issues with the WoW launch.

It's amazing how time heals all wounds. At the time, there was a large population of players outraged. It's also amazing how we can be selective as to what we classify as "major problems" and how forgiving we can be about other issues when we are trying to prove a point.

Both issues are "major problems" to a large percentage of the population. It's okay to admit both. It doesn't justify either.

 

[grallon]

I got the game this weekend... I don't know about the bugs/missing features many complain about. My main gripe is that beneath the revamped engine and interface, beneath the gorgeous map, beneath all the bells & whistles... it's still the same tired old game of being herded and rushed towards the end of the same old linear tech tree. It's more or less the same Civs, doing more or less the same thing throughout. Too many people confuse tactics with strategy. And of course the entire notion of observing the development of civilizations is entirely marginal. I mean this is the 5th version of the game and it still takes me *centuries* to build a f*cking granary! That was present in the 1st version 20 years ago. *scowls*

In short the game has flavor - all the shinny things - but no depth.




G.

 

[Jharii]

it's still the same tired old game of being herded and rushed towards the end of the same old linear tech tree. It's more or less the same Civs, doing more or less the same thing throughout.

Now this I can understand and can agree with to a point. An original thought, or at least one that I haven't read before.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

It's amazing how time heals all wounds. At the time, there was a large population of players outraged. It's also amazing how we can be selective as to what we classify as "major problems" and how forgiving we can be about other issues when we are trying to prove a point.

Both issues are "major problems" to a large percentage of the population. It's okay to admit both. It doesn't justify either.

WoW (and every other major blizzard release) had way fewer control issues on release than any civ game I've ever played, despite supposedly catering to people with less maturity/strategy preferences.

People aren't going to start blathering here about civ controls being harder than RTS, MMO, or FPS next, are they?

 

[ohioastronomy]

It's amazing how time heals all wounds. At the time, there was a large population of players outraged. It's also amazing how we can be selective as to what we classify as "major problems" and how forgiving we can be about other issues when we are trying to prove a point.

Both issues are "major problems" to a large percentage of the population. It's okay to admit both. It doesn't justify either.

What's puzzling to me is that this doesn't seem to jibe at all with the atmosphere that I remember. WoW introduced some major innovations to the genre, especially dispensing with the game penalty for dying and making progress far less glacial than the norm in other games at the time. It was an enormous commerical success, orders of magnitude more than any previous game in the genre had managed. In short, it would seem a very odd poster child for a buggy release.

Civ 4 had a vocal, but very real, minority of players who had technical troubles running the game. As the stability improved the atmosphere got more positive. Civ 5 has a lot fewer stability complaints and a lot more design/gameplay complaints, and opinion on fan forums, in user reviews, and so on has been getting cooler, not warmer, as time progresses.

There is a limit to the power of analogies, and I simply don't see that these three cases have a lot in common.

What is almost universal is that there will be die-hard defenders, and people passionately hating some feature of a game. regardless of the underlying merit. When you step away from these extremes, however, quality (or the lack thereof) does emerge.

 

[Revoran]

OP, if the patch fixed a majority of the bugs (and I don't even think it did, because Civ 5 does have problems) then what are you complaining about?

so they can sell you the patches.

Was there a charge for the patch? Did I miss something?

Oh, turns out there wasn't. Funny that.

 

[Jharii]

What's puzzling to me is that this doesn't seem to jibe at all with the atmosphere that I remember. WoW introduced some major innovations to the genre, especially dispensing with the game penalty for dying and making progress far less glacial than the norm in other games at the time. It was an enormous commerical success, orders of magnitude more than any previous game in the genre had managed. In short, it would seem a very odd poster child for a buggy release.

Well, certain servers were notorious for being more susceptable to crashing. It's possible that you were on one of the ones that did not experience the issues as much.

I wasn't so lucky. Trying to get onto the less afflicted servers was a trial in patience as well. I've always tended to be more tolerant of the companies than most. I understood Blizzard's woes then just as I understand Firaxis's now. But man, were those servers a cess pool of outrage when they were online.

I'm not saying that you are not justified in your feelings, at all. I just think it's just as important that while we may be upset, it's best to keep things in perspective, and not to take it out on your fellow Civ fans, no matter what the version is.

The game will get better over time. It may or may not reach a stage where it is satisfactory or fun to you. If not, I am sorry that is the case. I would love for everyone to enjoy the game, if not for the sole reason that we could get to some really interesting discussions about the game itself, not it's real and perceived flaws.

 

[evrett37]

I beleive a certain segment of the testing population and internet sales associates (ike 2kgreg) were more interested in getting the game out in order to start selling their DLC & mods for $$ and may have played down the bugs. They sold the idea that the community would accept a less then stellar release which would quickly be cleaned up by the modding community.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Anyway, I see you've said that it's not so much about Valve or Blizzard being good, but 2K bad. I wonder then, what other comparable publishers are there that would be worth mentioning? What is 2K relative to other publishers? Not that I've looked into it much, but I don't get the impression that 2K are atypically bad. Lots of games seem to get released buggy these days.

The only publishers I've had a decent amount of experience besides 2K were Activision and Interplay. Interplay kinda reminds me of 2K. They seem to mean well, but have some internal problems that always seem to affect developers' outputs in wonky ways. Activision is a far more stable company, but it seems very interventionist based on what they think will result in the most profitable game.