Civilization 5 Announced

[joncnunn]

On the rushed out the door list, don't forget the Play the World expansion to Civ 3.

[antisocialmunky]

What was that expansion even?

I have yet to figure out what that specifically did since I have GOLD

[Tyrmith]

It was the first evolution of multiplayer support, but done pretty terribly from what I remember.

[Krill]

It added MP to civ 3, and a couple of civs, and a couple of other tweaks. I don't think it's really that bad, it did get patched at least. It was also the evolution where the final patch of the first XP is the most balanced incarnation of hte game phenomenon IIRC.

[Sullla]

Play the World was a terrible expansion. It was supposed to add MP to Civ3 as others said, but it was horribly buggy and barely worked at all. It only added a couple of other things:

- 8 civs, all of which could have been done by fans using the Civ3 Editor
- the medieval infantry (MDI) and guerilla units
- radio towers, a horrible gameplay idea that made lategame wars much more tedious and micro intensive

It was a very poor expansion, definitely a cash grab pure and simple. While it was worth it to those of us who were playing Civ3 constantly, I never would have recommended it to anyone who wasn't a Civ diehard. Civ3 Conquests was much better, as it actually added real content (even if that content was terribly unbalanced!)

[Krill]

Play the World was a terrible expansion. It was supposed to add MP to Civ3 as others said, but it was horribly buggy and barely worked at all. It only added a couple of other things:

- 8 civs, all of which could have been done by fans using the Civ3 Editor
- the medieval infantry (MDI) and guerilla units
- radio towers, a horrible gameplay idea that made lategame wars much more tedious and micro intensive

It was a very poor expansion, definitely a cash grab pure and simple. While it was worth it to those of us who were playing Civ3 constantly, I never would have recommended it to anyone who wasn't a Civ diehard. Civ3 Conquests was much better, as it actually added real content (even if that content was terribly unbalanced!)

Perhaps I'm a bit weird, but I'd rather have no content than unbalanced content. Remember the huge ics, irrigated farm cities running scientists? That was cool. And court houses increasing corruption?

However, I think I'd have to rate both of those expansions as better than CiV.

[Tatan]

2. Patch cycles - All patches for Civ get submitted to 2K for approval - a process which is somewhat notorious for taking a bit too long sometimes. I don't totally understand the inner workings of the process or how it works exactly, but it's the reason why Firaxis can't make a fix and push it out an hour later... Rather they make a bunch of them, roll it into one patch, submit it to 2K, and a month later it gets pushed out.

Okay, I'm not very familiar with the patching process either; if this is correct, I think you are right that 2k indeed bears the blame for the drawn-out patching. I didn't realize how long it took for Firaxis to get a patch approved.

1. The game being rushed out the door. It's VERY common for game publishers (2K) to come up on a quarterly deadline and realize they are short on their quarterly projections, so they advance a release date for a game so that it can come out on time to boost their sales numbers. It happened to Civ4 and it happened to Civ5 as well if I'm not mistaken. Firaxis can't control it if 2K tells them "release it on this date, and if it's not done then you can fix it later."

This is where I don't agree. Firaxis knew their budget, and knew the approximate date of release. It's their fault for trying to implement so many completely new things without having nearly enough resources to get the job done. 2k aggravated the problem by pushing up the release date, yes, but I simply have trouble believing that, given 3 more months like they originally expected, Firaxis could have eliminated most bugs, gotten Multiplayer in working order [including Pitboss, PBEM, etc.], and significantly improved the AI. You mentioned that the release of Civ4 was rushed as well. But if both games were rushed about the same amount by 2k, then why did Civ4 have much less bugs and a much better game balance? [yes, there were some problems, but they were much less in number and severity than Civ5's]

Firaxis definitely had less to work with than Bungie; but they should have adjusted their plans accordingly, and not committed to the amount of things they committed to.

I still agree with you that 2k is a major problem; I just think that Firaxis itself did the most damage.

[scooter]

Tatan - just to provide some context as to where I'm getting this from, this is two posts from forever ago in this thread:

2. Corporate fiscal years (and government, too) tend to turn over in Aug or Sept. Executives could order a game be out on a certain day, presuming that one or two more months couldn't make that much difference in the product quality anyway, meanwhile making "last years" balance sheet look better.

This is exactly what happened with Civ4. In fact, they moved the release date up two weeks earlier on us in August (turning six weeks left into 4 weeks) to hit a specific fiscal quarter, which was not a lot of fun for the dev team.

This is what I meant by my comments - that 2K is to blame for the "rushed" aspect (in terms of getting it out earlier) rather than Firaxis, however:

I still agree with you that 2k is a major problem; I just think that Firaxis itself did the most damage.

This I completely agree with. 2K did just as much damage to Civ4 as they did Civ5, and yet Civ4 still came out as arguably one of the best strategy games ever made, and Civ5 is a flaming hot mess. Considering slow patches + early release were both 2K inflicted problems for Civ4 AND Civ5, I'd say that yes, Firaxis deserves the weight of the blame for releasing a terrible game in one of the most respected game franchises. The only point I was trying to make is to not blame them for the issues that were outside of their control (release dates and patch cycles), and instead blame them for issues that were inside their control (1UPT, AI, ICS, Diplo, etc etc etc).

[Jowy]

How did Civ5 do commercially? As long as it wasn't a flop in that regard, we'll get another Civ at some point and there's a chance it won't be as horrible as Civ5 was.

[antisocialmunky]

There's Facebook Civ.