TheMeInTeam
If A implies B...
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2008
- Messages
- 27,995
If that's their defense, I call BS and bury that argument 999999999999999999999999999999999999 feet underground with a minecraft diamond shovel. HERE are some of those "priorities" they picked over FIXING BASIC CONTROLS:
1. Introducing a bug in whip/chop overflow. An admitted bug by them, that was then never patched out
2. Making barbarian galleys spawn 4x as much
3. Introducing a bug in "spread culture" missions in espionage, in an attempt to "nerf" a strategy that only elite players knew and frankly is impractical in most cases.
4. Nerfing the redcoat/cossack but leaving prats, quechas, war chariots, and immortals untouched.
5. Introducing new tech requirements to block strategies executed only by good players (CS sling is one example)
6. Adding new content to a game that isn't done with its mechanics (this joke is a running theme in civ)
Notice the pattern? You might, because it's the same idiot pattern as in civ V. Rather than fixing basic gameplay, firaxis looks at things that high-level players might do to get an edge (even if the edge is small or arguable that it's even an advantage) that seem "exploitative" or divergent from expected gameplay. They then "patch" those things out while leaving the core issues with interface/balance/etc untouched. This has been their approach to their flagship series at least since civ IV release; well over 5 years this incompetent garbage policy has been in place.
You want to defend their choice of nerfing esoteric things that aren't even used consistently over GAME PERFORMANCE and BASIC CONTROLS? Really? I wouldn't go that route if I were you. That's getting on a sinking ship on purpose. That argument is toast, don't get on the titanic post-iceberg! Come back man!
If firaxis isn't "deaf to users" regarding UI problems across multiple games, the people making decisions on what is a priority are instead ignorant. Flagrantly ignorant. AAA titles that are SUPPOSED candidates for GOTY (what a sorry joke that is) DON'T HAVE THOSE KINDS OF FLAWS.
And no worries, it's not like they're neglecting IV in favor of V. I quit playing/providing input on V somewhere around the 4 month post-release mark, with some familiar and new problems:
1. Ludicrous turn times resulting for massed unnecessary recalculations
2. A completely broken joke multiplayer that essentially forces anybody competent to NEVER end their turn before the timer expires
3. By the way, that timer has only one speed, "molasses"
4. Click on a unit and give it an order. 95% of the time, it will execute that order. Other times, it will move a unit that clearly reads "ranged attack" or move a unit that is actually somewhere else because for SOME reason the game can't handle the user input rate!!!!!!!
5. Large maps have issues to the point of advertising their existence is nigh-fraudulent.
6. The lack of DLC in MP and general state of MP (allowing fewer players than is supposedly possible) is explicitly fraudulent.
7. Balance? What balance?
8. Canned cookie cutter. With star shapes. I hope you like selling luxuries and spamming RAs/maritime. I hope you like doing that a lot.
9. VCs that are actually more borked balance-wise than civ IV. Well, they at least showed me they can do something I thought impossible.
10. Modding trollololololol
11. Fake difficulty. By the metric ton. Tonne.
12. Hidden gameplay rules - the mantra of 1980's nintendo hard returns!
13. The UI in civ IV is inefficient and crappy. Civ V's requires 2-4x the #inputs to do the same thing (not counting moving units individually even!). OUCH.
And people on my youtube channel wonder why I refuse to let's play it. When they refused to patch ANY of these things and instead started putting out more DLC (and charge for it) despite some false advertising about MP, I threw in the towel on the game. It's one thing to play for money; that's standard practice in firms. It's another to deliberately produce a shoddy product and continue to milk + market it when you know it as such...a rush job that will never be finished. They're free to do that, but the reputation hit for the travesty that is civ V and MUCH of their behavior in civ IV is a black mark on the franchise. A >5 year black mark. This series dies at IV unless there are MAJOR changes made in the organization or it gets passed away from the firaxis/2k marriage entirely to someone new. Maybe blizzard? Their controls work.
Civ IV certainly has some of these issues, but it functions a lot better and has way more strategic depth.
I quit when, after the 2nd patch, I still couldn't stand "playing" MP games with polycast because you still couldn't move after pressing "end turn". Assuming you can even get more than 3-4 people into a game, that one rule 100% ruins MP to the point of being a joke...and they WON'T TOUCH or even ATTEMPT to prioritize a UI more on par with 1995 than 2010-2011. Civ V is a spectacular failure until it passes gameplay 101 checks.
One of those checks is extremely relevant to this thread: the resources used. The resources used vs "recommended specs" is a joke. You can't play 1/3 of the content in the game in serviceable fashion under recommended specs...when any of the content should work with "minimum" (IE the minimum required to play the entire game). Civ V took every bad thing with civ IV's coding and flagrantly made it worse. Civ IV is painfully inefficient and stupid with processing cycles...but it can be worse. Oh yes it can.
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