Some thoughts on the release quality of Civ 5

[sourcegasm]

This seems to be such a dead horse issue around these parts, but after buying the game 6 months ago, I have finally become irritated enough to actually go to the trouble of signing up for a forum account just to offer my thoughts on what poor quality the state of the game has been in up to the first year of release. (and yes, I know a patch has been release, and yes, it does a lot to fix the problems)

I'll admit the post is a bit rant-y, but I absolutely detest it when companies release partially complete products, back-pedal, and generally give their customers the run-around while they scramble to release fixes like chickens with their heads cut off. It's sloppy.

So, you've been warned, don't read further if you don't want to read what a lot of people have been thinking but don't want to spend the energy saying:




I've met a very large number of people who ate the cost of the game, and almost every one of them has experienced some of the many irritating or crippling bugs that can be found in the game. The point here of course is that these bugs don't appear to be transient, but very commonplace.

I just wanted to know what kind of drugs the QA department was smoking when they gave final approval to release this marginally functional product to market? Was the release approval tacit, or were these problems well documented and simply swept under the proverbial rug? It sure looks like jumpy management pushed to get this steaming pile out the door.

I think anyone here with their head screwed on even half-straight can agree that this was an enormous premature-ejac....er....premature-release that wasn't really ready for the market.

Speculation of causes aside (and yes, I recognize it's by and large speculation, but with 2Ks very consistent media relations practice of totally dodging the tough questions at the expense of their reputation, what can people be expected to do?)

And yes, yes by and large the developers are in fact in the trenches every day pounding out code - hard at work...huzzah for them! Being a CS major myself, I appreciate the intricacies of the work. I know there are bad development leads, bad technical leads, and so on, but I also know that a "good", "reliable" and "stable" code base is fairly straightforward to achieve with the right balance of planning, thoughtful coding, and intelligent testing, all while tactfully circumventing the do-gooder programmers who couldn't write a for-loop to get out of a paper bag that inevitably infest just about every development-focused company that exists.

So what gives? Why did it take until December to end up with a working product that many people shelled out cash for nearly a year ago?

Fanboys need not reply. I get the fact that there are by no means absolutes in the game industry - fixes take time, patience is often richly rewarded, and things rarely go according to plan. Release a game into the horde, and things break. Not every studio can throw 500 bajillion developers at a problem and fix things overnight. But at the end of the day, studios need to also humbly recognize that they are producing a product which people PAY FOR, and there needs to be a certain standard of quality achieved before release. I don't buy the classic crock of "well, sometimes these problems don't crop up until the public breaks it!" - what sort of QA practices are you employing that qualifies you for such a convenient excuse?

For anyone affiliated with 2k to tell the countless droves of people who have been waiting for 6-12 months for the product to function "as advertised" that they (2k) didn't even anticipate these problems is either totally ignorant of what was really going on, or is indeed completely full of the brown stuff.

Yet again 2k has been caught with their pants down. How much longer do you suppose they can ride on the coat-tails of the bioshock series before people stop falling for the company line?

It's too bad really, because I'm a big fan of the Civilization series (Civ.net anyone?), of the old X-com games, and of Bioshock. Hopefully they've learned a valuable lesson with this product. The market will only tolerate so much mistreatment.

[Janner56]

I agree with all you say, NOW spare a thought for the poor Mac supporters. YES I am one of them, still waiting for it to be made workable for us.........

[sourcegasm]

Janner56,

I feel even worse for you, sort-of. Mac users rarely receive the product support I feel they are rightly entitled to! To be fair, whenever you buy a AAA Game title for Mac it's "buyer beware", but nonetheless shame on 2K for dumping out the product to a platform they are clearly not prepared or able to properly support.

The civilization franchise has catered primarily to the niche hard-core gamer market since the dawn of time, and a sneaky publisher knows you can mess them around with lazy support for quite a while before you see any genuine repercussions because people are so in love with the franchise. Most of the upset experienced is sabre-rattling.

But when the heavy hitters in the departments that write the cheques decide to markedly change the core focus of the game to facilitate attracting the broader market of "casual" & "new to Civ" players, they sure as heck better have their proverbial ducks in a row because you'll reach the tipping point of upsetting the seasoned hardcore players, and you'll alienate them, and believe me, word travels fast.


Hopefully this next round of patches and a pitboss type system (or whatever the heck they decide to release) will placate the screamers, and actually solve some serious issues - because up until you couldn't convince me in a million years to tell a friend to shell out more than 15 bucks for this game.

[Jahren]

The game itself is OK in single player. but is terribly sketchy on MP.
Now making so that the game reloads itself upon a random MP de-sync or crash is not a fix but a microsoft patch :P
Removing diplomacy initiatives from AI in MP was not a good decision IMO

I'm a software programmer / Analyst myself, and I know of the challenges of releasing a quality product on time. But hell, when we failed to release, we told the truth and quickly double timed the rest of the work BEFORE releasing. Firaxis' shareholders decided that money had to be made NOW with an half completed product.

They will lose their hardcore players for the mainstream kids that will ask mom and pops to buy the game. Play 5-10 hours and ditch it to buy an other game.

[Mansurji]

They will lose their hardcore players for the mainstream kids that will ask mom and pops to buy the game. Play 5-10 hours and ditch it to buy an other game.

They already lost a lot of hardcore players, at least from what i know from french community, the best players were disgusted by what has been released, only the newcomers or the average players found it interesting.

I guess it's a marketing plan, you get more money from 1 million casual players than from 10.000 hardcore players. Quantity over quality.

[Rylan]

You assume that hardcore = quality which is a fallacy at best.

I picked this up to play casually with friends. It was unplayable. The fact is, it doesnt matter what type of multiplayer gamer you are, Firaxis decided to screw you over. Can't wait to pirate X-Com when they release it and hand copies out to anyone who wants it at work.

[JBAdams]

For many of us, none of this is a surprise.

[Rylan]

That there should tell you something. I just posted on their forums to say I was going to take their next game and pirate it in retaliation and yet,....no warning, no ban?

Maybe its because nobody from Firaxis actually visits this forum. There's been like 10 posts in the last fortnight too so it's not as if it's too much reading.