Civilization 5 Announced

[luddite]

Eh. Civ5 was a RESOUNDING critical success. Looking at metacritic, there are two English language reviews out of 50 odd that rate it at any less than 8/10 good. Most critics absolutely loved civ5 and I would not be terribly surprised seen GOTY nominations for Civ soon. http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/sid-me...lization-v

Civ5 has had excellent sales and great critical reviews by appealing to casual players, who ate the game up. It did piss off most of the existing civ fan base, but I'm pretty sure Jon's going to claim success and walk off with his money, unless he personally directs the next expansion that tanks or something.

I feel like "critical success" should mean something different in the context of games than it does with movies or books. Sure, most of the reviewers gave it a great score- they do the same for any game with decent graphics and non-obvious bugs. Also it's a shooter, so that helps it stand out. However, if you actually read what they say about it, it's painfully obvious that they didn't play it for more than a couple of hours, at most.

The real critics are the hardcore fans, like us, who will play it for 20+ hours, and can compare it to all the other games in the series.

[MJW (ya that one)]

I think the changes are not enough on inmortal. The player is stronger then the AIS when its "second wave" of expansion hits. The changes might make Diety very hard. At least it would be hard to beat. =)

The changes do not touch MP at all so the ladder is now offically dead until an expansion pack comes out to make MPers try the game again.

[MJW (ya that one)]

We should start a sweepstake. How long until Jon admits he fucked up in public.

NEVER!!! He would have done it already.

[Gaspar]

I feel like "critical success" should mean something different in the context of games than it does with movies or books. Sure, most of the reviewers gave it a great score- they do the same for any game with decent graphics and non-obvious bugs. Also it's a shooter, so that helps it stand out. However, if you actually read what they say about it, it's painfully obvious that they didn't play it for more than a couple of hours, at most.

The real critics are the hardcore fans, like us, who will play it for 20+ hours, and can compare it to all the other games in the series.

A bit off-topic, but does ANYONE actually buy Video Games based on reviews? I mean even really casual gamers? I can't imagine what would possess someone to make that sort of decision. Its not like a movie, where 2 hours gets you the whole product. Realistically, if the 8 hours or so of play that a reviewer puts in lets them get a valid review of the game, why would you ever drop 50-60 bucks on it?

I think Civ5 is a classic example of why that process is flawed anyway. I loved Civ5 for about 10 hours too, until I played enough to see the warts. And its been said before, but the sales are really far more a referendum on the quality of Civ4 than on the quality of Civ5. Sales for the first expansion will tell us a whole lot more. I'll be shocked if they're good.

To get back on topic, I agree with the majority. There's heavy nerfage here but I'm not seeing what they're doing to make other strategies any more viable. Still looks like the same lousy game to me, just with a design team that's pissed off at how much smarter the players are than they are. I'm a bad judge though, I care so little about Civ5 at this point that not only have I not touched it in 2 months, I saw the patch notes in this thread first, as I've stopped visiting CFC.

[Krill]

Eh. Civ5 was a RESOUNDING critical success. Looking at metacritic, there are two English language reviews out of 50 odd that rate it at any less than 8/10 good. Most critics absolutely loved civ5 and I would not be terribly surprised seen GOTY nominations for Civ soon. http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/sid-me...lization-v

Civ5 has had excellent sales and great critical reviews by appealing to casual players, who ate the game up. It did piss off most of the existing civ fan base, but I'm pretty sure Jon's going to claim success and walk off with his money, unless he personally directs the next expansion that tanks or something.

I hereby refute your argument:

http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/162/162062p1.html

And we all know how that turned out.

[Tatan]

A bit off-topic, but does ANYONE actually buy Video Games based on reviews? I mean even really casual gamers? I can't imagine what would possess someone to make that sort of decision. Its not like a movie, where 2 hours gets you the whole product. Realistically, if the 8 hours or so of play that a reviewer puts in lets them get a valid review of the game, why would you ever drop 50-60 bucks on it? [...]

Actually, when I've heard about a cool game that I might be interested in buying, here's the process I use:

-Snoop around on Wikipedia to see what kind of game it is in the broad sense.
-Go to a couple of reviewers, see what everyone thought the selling points were.
-Go to places such as Amazon and Metacritic and read the user reviews.
-Go back to Wikipedia and read the "critical reception" part.
-Most importantly: Ask around with people I know.

If the title still interests me, and no one really had any issues, I go out and buy it. As a system, it usually works pretty well.

The key thing with reviews, IMO, is to treat them as if they were informational advertisements put out by the company. A review won't really tell you how good or bad a game is, but it will at least tell you what the strong points of the game are supposed to be [from which you can usually infer the weak points, and confirm through other sources]. Just whatever you do, don't actually listen to the reviewer's opinion of the game.

[Sullla]

I don't even look at official reviews anymore for games. As far as I'm concerned, they're completely corrupt and not worth the electronic servers they're posted on. Civ5 is one good example, but I'm also reminded of Empire Total War from last year. Empire Total War received universal praise from the official reviewers, and this despite many game-breaking bugs, including an AI that never built ships and never launched naval invasions in a game that HEAVILY advertised its new naval battles. Broken, much? Somehow every reviewer failed to mention this little detail in their "9.5/10!" writeups. Sadly, user reviews are the only way to get unbiased opinions anymore, and at least half of them will be useless due to ignorance or outright trolling. Gaming "journalism" is a real embarassment still...

On the Civ5 patch changes, I think they will make some improvements to the current game makeup, but that makeup remains flawed by inherent design problems that can't really be addressed. The global happiness system clearly doesn't work, and Civ5 is already backing off of it by introducing "global unhappiness/local happiness", which is going to be extremely confusing. Sometimes growing your cities will add unhappiness, sometimes it won't add unhappiness. Also, have fun building that theatre which costs maintenance but does nothing until the city in question grows further! I also think that removing all Scientist specialist slots from the Library was a mistake - don't get me wrong, it will slow down research and the out of control Great Scientist slingshots. But it also will pretty much remove specialist use entirely from the first 1/3 to 1/2 of the game, because all of the other early specialist buildings (temple, garden, workshop) really suck and aren't worth building. I guess you could maybe run a Merchant or two from a market, although that's also a very weak option without Freedom social policies. So... now there's basically no specialist play in Civ5 until you reach universities, and they have only a single Scientist slot. Ummm, fun stuff? (Notice how there's no attempt to solve the real issues: that all Great People other than Scientists suck, and the Great Scientist is too strong, and the non-science buildings collectively aren't worth building in Civ5. But no! Let's just nerf the Library! Great fix, guys.)

The whole patch is so reactionary in nature. I'm not one to cry just because some kind of strategy that I was using got the nerf hammer. I'm fine with that so long as there's a rationale behind it; for example, horsemen were too strong and needed a strength reduction (although the penalty on city capture seems a bit much). The problem with this patch is that nerfing current popular strategies is all that it does - there's very little in the way of introducing alternate paths to victory. Here are the buildings actually worth having in Civ5 right now:

Library
Colosseum
University

Everything else is superfluous. What does the patch do? Hard nerf to libraries, hard nerf to colosseums. Great - now the few buildings worth having are even less useful. Fun. Similarly, one of the only areas of the game I thought was working right was the social policies, since there was some genuine choice between Liberty (expansion), Honor (warfare), and saving policies for use later in Freedom/Rationalism. Now there's no choice: Liberty has been heavily nerfed, and you can't save policies for the later eras. Looks like it's Honor all the way now... but hey, Civ5 is all about warfare, right? Similarly, heavily nerfing horses while leaving swords untouched is just going to turn every game from a horseman rush into a swordsman -> longsword rush. Are the designers really so blind that they can't see that? (Wait, don't answer that one.)

At least now they're fixing research overflow, diplomacy will be slightly more transparent, and the asinine scoring system (which enormously overvalued wonders) has been corrected. Still doesn't look like a game I want to play though.

[fluffyflyingpig]

I hereby refute your argument:

http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/162/162062p1.html

And we all know how that turned out.

Funny that you bring it up, Civ III has the exact same metacritic score as Civ5! 90/100 averaged over dozens of reviewers can't be bad, right!? And Empire TW got a 90/100, for that matter Sulla!*

As much as 'video game journalism' is an inherent contradiction of terms, their reaction defines a critical success. And Civ 5 IS a clear critical success. Unless luddite can magically filter out the real hardcore fans with valid opinion from the mob at CFC or gaming public at large, that's what we've got. If you find that hard to swallow Krill, start your own magazine/website and write your own reviews! :neenernee



*God, that was a bad game. Still is, they didn't bother to fix it and just rolled out Napoleon TW as a stand-alone. And they added special editions and DLC for that too! And didn't give out enough sourcecode for total conversion mods to get anywhere last time I checked. And patches were slow and ineffectual, and multiplayer was broken. Stop me if you've heard this one before....

[TheArchduke]

*God, that was a bad game. Still is, they didn't bother to fix it and just rolled out Napoleon TW as a stand-alone. And they added special editions and DLC for that too! And didn't give out enough sourcecode for total conversion mods to get anywhere last time I checked. And patches were slow and ineffectual, and multiplayer was broken. Stop me if you've heard this one before....

Countless times. Anno 1404 for example is a disgrace. The only patch since one year came out with the Special Christmas Edition.

Although the new DLC wave is a disgrace. How stupid do they think the customers are?

[Krill]

Funny that you bring it up, Civ III has the exact same metacritic score as Civ5! 90/100 averaged over dozens of reviewers can't be bad, right!? And Empire TW got a 90/100, for that matter Sulla!*

As much as 'video game journalism' is an inherent contradiction of terms, their reaction defines a critical success. And Civ 5 IS a clear critical success. Unless luddite can magically filter out the real hardcore fans with valid opinion from the mob at CFC or gaming public at large, that's what we've got. If you find that hard to swallow Krill, start your own magazine/website and write your own reviews! :neenernee



*God, that was a bad game. Still is, they didn't bother to fix it and just rolled out Napoleon TW as a stand-alone. And they added special editions and DLC for that too! And didn't give out enough sourcecode for total conversion mods to get anywhere last time I checked. And patches were slow and ineffectual, and multiplayer was broken. Stop me if you've heard this one before....

Er what? A critic, one who determines what is and is not a critical success, is anyone that expresses a value based judgement, not just those that are journalists and hold value judgements. Ergo, if the majority of critics, which because of sheer numbers means the players, this the game is bad, it is not a critical success.