Well, why would people Mod Civ5 with all the terrible basic stuff, when they can mod the better Civ4, especially since Civ4 has better documentation then Civ5?
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Civilization 5 Announced
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I was thinking about this yesterday, and wanted to look at one thing in more detail. I have heard over and over again that those of us who don't like Civ5 are only thinking from the perspective of Civ4, and that we are simply being old farts who can't adjust to change. It's a claim that's bothered me because there certainly were people who acted exactly that way on past releases. Still, I think there's empirical evidence to suggest that Civ5 isn't grabbing the fanbase the way that past games did. I'm going to look at one of the long-running hotbeds of Civ activity, the Succession Games Forum at CivFanatics.
With a new flagship Civilization title released just less than two months ago, this area should be buzzing with activity. Instead it's... strangely quiet? Lots of games have started, but very few have finished, and there are only a handful of active games. Looking at succession games one at a time: Completed Games LOTR28: Spaceship victory 1852AD mm21 Always War: Conquest victory 1822AD RB3 Daring Deity: Conquest victory 1500AD Active Games An Island Race: Going strong, although noteworthy that there are only 3 players on team LOTR29 Odd Aztecs: Going strong AZ07 Not Many Cities: Going strong CFC Training Game 1: Going strong and most active thread in the forum right now Abandoned Games B01 Arrogant Fools: Never managed to get off the ground I06 Civilization V: Discontinued before Turn 100 Sorc01 Hot Desert's Sun: Unable to attract player interest Many Leaders Game 9: Started with much interest, then abandoned UF1 The Deep End: No one interested in playing the save, game stagnated and died Two Japanese Princes: Possibly still ongoing? 2-person SG with very little activity and none in last week Really Furious: Currently in limbo, uncertain if game will be continued RB1 Let's Get Started: Effectively dead, last turnset played over two weeks ago RB2 Crowded Continents: Struggling mightily to attract interest in going on Overall, that adds up to 3 completed games, 4 currently active games, and 9 abandoned or incomplete games. While there will always be games that fall apart for various reasons, it's striking that there are so many more abandoned games than completed ones. Granted, a lot of that is due to the horrendous save game incompatibility problems... but isn't that a legitimate issue with the game as well? Succession games have long been one of the most active corners of the Civ community, a bubbling laboratory for variants and high-level play. If we have a mere 4 games active this soon after release, scattered in the midst of a series of broken games... I don't think it reflects particularly well on Civ5. Oh well, there's your random post for the day. 
Amelia Wrote:Well, why would people Mod Civ5 with all the terrible basic stuff, when they can mod the better Civ4, especially since Civ4 has better documentation then Civ5? If you have the skills, I imagine that the superior Civ5 graphics would be a strong incentive. I'd love to see something like FFH for Civ5- a mod which intentionally incorporates both ICS and a few giant cities as viable strategies, which encourages building up an army of a few incredibly elite super units, and which otherwise isn't phased by the various inherent flaws in the game design, because it has no pretensions to balance to begin with.
Within 2 months of RB1 being started (Oct 27), there were 10 RB succession games (through RB8, and RB2 was split in 3). I don't know how many of those were finished, but my guess is most of them.
That's obviously ignoring any SGs started by other communities. haphazard1 Wrote:Sales for Civ V may have been good (anyone know actual figures?). http://gamrreview.vgchartz.com/sales/435...ization-v/ Around 440.000 copies sold worldwide.
Those numbers seem horrible to me, but I don't play many PC games. For a flagship PC title with excellent reviews, I would've expected far more sales. But perhaps my head is just thrown off by games games like Call of Duty:BO that sold 6.5 million copies in the first week.
I don't understand how they could let threw and not test for ICS in Civ5. It was the best strat in Civ 1-3 and would have been in Civ4 too if the city maintenance system was not in.
November 20th, 2010, 22:47
(This post was last modified: November 20th, 2010, 22:52 by Gaspar.)
 luddite Wrote:Hmm, I wonder how those stats for succession games compare to civ 4 2 months after its release? I can't speak for the specifics, but as someone who was very active at the time of Civ4 release I can tell you the first 2-3 months every time a new SG would open up it would fill up in a couple of hours. The nature of these is that a fair few flamed out, but generally the entire first page at CFC was filled with active SGs. I myself signed up for a couple of relatively lame SGs solely to have the opportunity to play in one, since the most desirable games filled up nearly immediately. In fairness, a lot of that interest was generated by Sullla and Sirians superior RB1 SG, I think. There hasn't been a comparable game for Civ5, given that the most read and interesting SG is RB3, which featured a group of players in various degrees of annoyance/disgust with the game. Still, I think that speaks more for the game than for anything else. It remains to be seen if the new to Civ players who are not disgusted with the game can cobble together a new community without so many of the names of the past, but I just don't see any possible way this game can hold any significant interest long enough to last to the first expansion. I doubt I'll be reading the forums then to find out, to be honest. Gold Ergo Sum Wrote:Those numbers seem horrible to me, but I don't play many PC games. For a flagship PC title with excellent reviews, I would've expected far more sales. But perhaps my head is just thrown off by games games like Call of Duty:BO that sold 6.5 million copies in the first week.You're comparing apples and oranges there. The figure given for Civ5 above is for PC sales only. I don't know where you are getting a 6.5 million figure from but presumably it's for all platforms. If I look at the same site that was used to get the Civ5 sales info, it lists just under 300k sales in the first week for Call of Duty: Black Ops on the PC. Civ 5 managed just under 200k within the first week, so they are within the same ballpark -- and it's understandable that Civ5 would do a bit less since strategy is a less popular genre than shooters. Compare to another popular recent game, Fallout New Vegas, which sold 150k in the first week and a total of around 250k total so far, and you can see that by the standards of PC gaming, Civ 5 is actually selling fairly well. Whether that will continue to hold true for expansions, isn't yet clear... but remembering that the number of non-discriminating customers always outnumber the discriminating customers by a factor of 4:1 or more, I don't expect that the changes they've made will hurt their bottom line very much even once expansions start coming out. It may even help if they are successful at drawing in more of the casual crowd, since casual players often don't bother to visit forums in the first place. |
